Paul Berman and Islam ‘A Bridge Too Far?’

Chromatism.net
May 15 2010

Paul Berman and Islam ‘ A Bridge Too Far?

By Andrew Bostom
May 15, 2010

Paul Berman’s Investigative Project on Terrorism interview published
May 5, 2010, promotes his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals.
Berman is to be lauded for drawing attention to the current plight of
freethinkers of Muslim descent, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn
Warraq, while decrying their rejection, and even vilification, by many
of his fellow contemporary liberal intellectuals. Unfortunately, his
attempt to elaborate upon the very real contrast between these former
Muslims, and the pious, mainstream Muslim cultural jihadist, Tariq
Ramadan, devolves into profoundly uninformed muddle, fraught with the
same cultural relativism Berman’s polemic excoriates in other
liberals.

Pathognomonic extracts, below, from the interview ‘ frank howlers ‘
articulate the crux of Berman’s thesis:
¦the Nazis needed to demonstrate `that European and Christian
superstitions ought to be regarded as authentically Middle Eastern and
Islamic’¦ What the Mufti [Hajj Amin el-Husseini] did was `the creating
of something monstrous: an infernal blurring of Islam and Nazism,’
Berman writes. `A victory of Himmler’s Islam¦A victory for the Islam
of fanaticism and hatred over its arch-rival, the Islam of generosity
and civilization.’
As I will demonstrate, these statements are the `conclusions’ of a
doctrinally bowdlerized, ahistorical narrative. Berman entirely
ignores Islam’s virulent, conspiratorial Antisemitic doctrine ‘
present since the advent of the creed, melded permanently to jihad,
and expressed continuously over nearly 14 centuries, through the
present. He compounds this intellectually slothful `analysis’ with a
transparently selective, well-nigh dishonest 20th century
historiography ‘ omitting critically relevant events that transpired a
decade before Hitler’s Mein Kampf first appeared in 1925/26, or the
Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, while ignoring the inspiration
prominent Nazis, including Hitler, derived from normative Islam
before, during, and after World War Two. Even Berman’s righteous
attack on the hypocritical liberal pseudo-academics Ian Buruma and
Timothy Garton Ash ‘ exposing their intellectual and moral cretinism
in praising Tariq Ramadan, while denouncing Ayaan Hirsi Ali ‘ is
undermined by his own hagiographic assessment of Islam. This final
bitter irony becomes readily apparent when one compares Berman’s empty
pontifications on Islam to the thoughtful, if brutally frank insights
of the same Muslim `apostate’ freethinkers Berman nobly supports.

Berman is Oblivious to the Islam in Islamic Antisemitism, and its
Ugly, Living Historical Legacy

The late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi was Sunni Islam’s – moderate – Papal
equivalent, Grand Imam of the Muslim Vatican, Al-Azhar University,
from 1996, until his recent death on March 10, 2010. Lengthy extracts
translated into English from Tantawi’s 700 page magnum opus Banu
Israil fi al-Quran wa-al-Sunnah (Jews in the Koran and the
Traditions), his 1966 doctoral dissertation, first published in
1968-69, and re-published in 1986 are provided in my compendium, The
Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. This brief excerpt summarizes, in
Tantawi’s own words, the salient features of the Koran’s normative
Muslim Jew hatred:
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate
characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61 /
3:112 ], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places,
consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance
themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics
caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness¦only a minority of the Jews
keep their word Koranic citations {text9|here ]¦[A]ll Jews are not the
same. The good ones become Muslims {Koran {text10|3:113} ], the bad
ones do not.
These were the expressed, `carefully researched’ views on Jews held by
the Muslim Pope ‘ the former head of the most prestigious center of
Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents some 90% of the
world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi never mollified such hatemongering
beliefs while serving as the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements
on – dialogue – (January 1998) with Jews, the Jews as – enemies of
Allah, descendants of apes and pigs – (April 2002), and the legitimacy
of homicide bombing of Jews (April 2002) made clear.

The statements on dialogue Tantawi issued shortly after he met with
the Israel’s Chief Rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, in Cairo, on December 15,
1997, provided the late Grand Imam another opportunity to re-affirm
his commitment to the views expressed about Jews in his Ph.D. thesis:
¦anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their
dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My
stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of
which deals with the Jews¦[I] wrote a dissertation dealing with them
[the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I
still believe in everything written in that dissertation. [i.e., Jews
in the Koran and the Traditions, cited above]
Contra Paul Berman’s ludicrous thesis, Tantawi’s antisemitic
formulations merely reiterated (as meticulously documented in the
latter’s 700 pp. treatise, Jews in the Koran and the Traditions) over
a millennium of classical, mainstream Islamic theology. The Koranic
depiction of the Jews ‘ their traits as thus characterized being
deemed both infallible and timeless ‘ highlights, in verse 2:61
(repeated in verses 2:90 / 91, and 3:112 ), the centrality of the Jews
`abasement and humiliation’, and being `laden with God’s anger,’ as
elaborated in the corpus of classical Muslim exegetic literature on
Koran 2:61, including the hadith and Koranic commentaries. The
terrifying rage decreed upon the Jews forever is connected in the
hadith and exegeses to Koran 1:7, where Muslims ask Allah to guide
them rightly, not in the path of those who provoke and must bear His
wrath. This verse is in turn linked to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78,
which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine ( 5:60 ),
or apes alone ( 2:65 / 7:166 ), having been `¦cursed by the tongue of
David, and Jesus, Mary’s son’ ( 5:78 ). Muhammad himself repeats this
Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (words and deeds of the Muslim
prophet as recorded by his pious early Muslim companions; Sunan Abu
Dawoud, Book 37, Number 4322), `He [Muhammad] then recited the verse
[5:78]: `¦curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel
who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of
Mary’ `. The related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews of being `spreaders
of war and corruption,’ ‘ a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion ‘ invoked, for example, by `moderate’
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who cited Koran 5:64
during a January 2007 speech urging Palestinian Muslims to end their
internecine strife, and `aim their rifles at Israel.’ Classical and
modern Koranic commentators, when discussing Koran 5:82, which
includes the statement (`Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men
to the believers are the Jews..’, also concur on the unique animus of
the Jews towards the Muslims, which is repeatedly linked to the curse
of Koran 2:61/3:112. Moreover, forcing Jews, in particular, to pay the
Koranic poll tax `tribute,’ (as per verse 9:29 ) `readily,’ while
`being brought low,’ is consistent with their overall humiliation and
abasement in accord with Koran 2:61, and its directly related verses.

An additional much larger array of anti-Jewish Koranic motifs build to
a denouement (as if part of a theological indictment, conviction, and
sentencing process) concluding with an elaboration of the `ultimate
sin’ committed by the Jews (they are among the devil’s minions [Koran
4:60 ], accursed by God [Koran 4:47 ]), and their appropriate
punishment: If they do not accept the true faith (i.e., Islam), on the
day of judgment, they will burn in the hellfire (Koran 4:55 ). As per,
Koran 98:6: `The unbelievers among the People of the Book and the
pagans shall burn forever in the fire of Hell. They are the vilest of
all creatures’

The Koranic curse upon the Jews for (primarily) rejecting, even
slaying Allah’s prophets (verses 2:61/3:112), including Isa/Jesus (or
at least his `body double’ 4:157-4:158), is updated with perfect
archetypal logic in the canonical hadith: following the Muslims’
initial conquest of the Jewish farming oasis of Khaybar, one of the
vanquished Jewesses reportedly served Muhammad poisoned mutton (or
goat), which resulted, ultimately, in his protracted, agonizing death.
And Ibn Saad’s sira account maintains that Muhammad’s poisoning
resulted from a well-coordinated Jewish conspiracy.

It is worth recounting ‘ as depicted in the Muslim sources ‘ the
events that antedated Muhammad’s reputed poisoning at Khaybar.

Muhammad’s failures or incomplete successes were consistently
recompensed by murderous attacks on the Jews. The Muslim
prophet-warrior developed a penchant for assassinating individual
Jews, and destroying Jewish communities ‘ by expropriation and
expulsion (Banu Quaynuqa and B. Nadir), or massacring their men, and
enslaving their women and children (Banu Qurayza). Just before
subduing the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza and orchestrating the
mass execution of their adult males, Muhammad invoked perhaps the most
striking Koranic motif for the Jews debasement ‘ he addressed these
Jews, with hateful disparagement, as `You brothers of apes.’
Subsequently, in the case of the Khaybar Jews, Muhammad had the male
leadership killed, and plundered their riches. The terrorized Khaybar
survivors ‘ industrious Jewish farmers ‘ became prototype subjugated
dhimmis whose productivity was extracted by the Muslims as a form of
permanent booty. (And according to the Muslim sources, even this
tenuous vassalage was arbitrarily terminated within a decade of
Muhammad’s death when Caliph Umar expelled the Jews of Khaybar.)

Thus Maimonides (d. 1203), the renowned Talmudist, philosopher,
astronomer, and physician, as noted by historian Salo Baron [from
Baron’s essay entitled, `The Historical Outlook of Maimonides,’ in
Proc of the Amer Acad for Jewish Res, vol. 6, 1934-35, p. 82],
emphasizes the bellicose `madness’ of Muhammad, and his quest for
political control. Muhammad’s mindset, and the actions it engendered,
had immediate, and long term tragic consequences for Jews ‘ from his
massacring up to 24,000 Jews, to their chronic oppression ‘ as
described in the Islamic sources, by Muslims themselves:
Following an apparently prevalent usage [Maimonides] calls the founder
of Islam a `madman,’ [meshugga] with both religious and political
aspirations, who failed to formulate any new religious ideas, but
merely re-stated well-known concepts. Nevertheless, he attracted a
large following and inflicted many wrongs upon the Jews, being himself
responsible for the massacre of 24,000. Following his example the
Muslims of the subsequent generations oppressed the Jews and debased
them even more harshly than any other nation.
Muhammad’s brutal conquest and subjugation of the Medinan and Khaybar
Jews, and their subsequent expulsion by one of his companions, the
(second) `Rightly Guided’ Caliph Umar, epitomize permanent, archetypal
behavior patterns Islamic Law deemed appropriate to Muslim
interactions with Jews. George Vajda’s seminal analysis of the
anti-Jewish motifs in the hadith remains the definitive work on this
subject. Vajda concluded that according to the hadith stubborn
malevolence is the Jews defining worldly characteristic: rejecting
Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy and
even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of treachery, in
keeping with their inveterate nature: `¦sorcery, poisoning,
assassination held no scruples for them.’ These archetypes sanction
Muslim hatred towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best,
`subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,’ as dhimmis, treated `with
contempt,’ under certain `humiliating arrangements.’

Annihilationist sentiments regarding Jews are rooted in Islamic
eschatology, as also characterized in the canonical hadith. These
motifs highlight the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are
described as adherents of the Dajjâl ‘ the Muslim equivalent of the
Anti-Christ ‘ or according to another tradition, the Dajjâl is himself
Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions maintain that the Dajjâl
will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their
robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort
of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be
slaughtered ‘ everything will deliver them up except for the so-called
gharkad tree, as per the canonical hadith included in both Sahih
Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177, and Sahih Muslim (Book 041,
Number 6985):
Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as
saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight
against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would
hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would
say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come
and kill him; but the tree Gharkad would not say, for it is the tree
of the Jews.
Another hadith variant, which takes place in Jerusalem, has Isa (the
Muslim Jesus) leading the Arabs in a rout of the Dajjâl and his
company of 70,000 armed Jews. And the notion of jihad `ransom’ extends
even into Islamic eschatology ‘ on the day of resurrection the
vanquished Jews will be consigned to Hellfire, and this will expiate
Muslims who have sinned, sparing them from this fate.

Two particularly humiliating `vocations’ that were imposed upon Jews
by their Muslim overlords in Yemen, and Morocco ‘ where Jews formed
the only substantive non-Muslim dhimmi populations ‘ merit
elaboration, as they represent the apotheosis of Islam’s theological
Jew hatred.

Moroccan Jews were confined to ghettos in the major cities, such as
Fez (since the 13th century) called mellah(s) (salty earth) which
derives from the fact it was here that they were forced to salt the
decapitated heads of executed rebels for public exposition. This
brutally imposed humiliating practice ‘ which could be enforced even
on the Jewish Sabbath ‘ persisted through the late 19th century, as
described by Eliezer Bashan:
In the 1870’s, Jews were forced to salt the decapitated heads of
rebels on the Sabbath. For example, Berber tribes frequently revolted
against Sultan Muhammad XVIII. In order to force them to accept his
authority, he would engage in punitive military campaigns. Among the
tribes were the Musa, located south of Marrakesh. In 1872, the Sultan
succeeded in quelling their revolt and forty-eight of their captives
were condemned to death. In October 1872, on the order of the Sultan,
they were dispatched to Rabat for beheading. Their decapitated heads
were to be exposed on the gates of the town for three days. Since the
heads were to be sent to Fez, Jewish ritual slaughterers [of
livestock] were forced to salt them and hang them for exposure on the
Sabbath. Despite threats by the governor of Rabat, the Jews refused to
do so. He then ordered soldiers to enter the homes of those who
refused and drag them outside. After they were flogged, the Jews
complied and performed the task and the heads of the rebels were
exposed in public.
Yemenite Jews had to remove human feces and other waste matter (urine
which failed to evaporate, etc.) from Muslim areas, initially in
Sanaa, and later in other communities such as Shibam, Yarim, and
Dhamar. Decrees requiring this obligation were issued in the late 18th
or early 19th century, and re-introduced in 1913. Yehuda Nini
reproduces an 1874 letter written by a Yemenite Jew to the Alliance
Israelite in Paris, lamenting the practice:
¦it is 86 years since our forefathers suffered the cruel decree and
great shame to the nation of Israel from the east to sundown¦for in
the days of our fathers, 86 years ago, there arose a judge known as
Qadi, and said unto the king and his ministers who lived in that time
that the Lord, Blessed be He, had only created the Jews out of love of
the other nations, to do their work and be enslaved by them at their
will, and to do the most contemptible and lowly of tasks. And of them
all¦the greatest contamination of all, to clear their privies and
streets and pathways of the filthy dung and the great filth in that
place and to collect all that is left of the dung, may your Honor
pardon the expression.
And when the Jews were perceived as having exceeded the rightful
bounds of this subjected relationship, as in mythically `tolerant’
Muslim Spain, the results were predictably tragic. The Granadan Jewish
viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela, and his son Joseph, who protected the
Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, and in
the aftermath, the Jewish population was annihilated by the local
Muslims. It is estimated that up to four thousand Jews perished in the
pogrom by Muslims that accompanied the 1066 assassination. This figure
equals or exceeds the number of Jews reportedly killed by the
Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some thirty years
later, at the outset of the First Crusade. The inciting `rationale’
for this Granadan pogrom is made clear in the bitter anti-Jewish ode
of Abu Ishaq, a well-known Muslim jurist and poet of the times, who
wrote:
Bring them down to their place and return them to the most abject
station. They used to roam around us in tatters covered with contempt,
humiliation, and scorn. They used to rummage amongst the dung heaps
for a bit of a filthy rag to serve as a shroud for a man to be buried
in¦Do not consider that killing them is treachery. Nay, it would be
treachery to leave them scoffing.
Abu Ishaq’s rhetorical incitement to violence also included the line,

Many a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape
Moshe Perlmann, in his analysis of the Muslim anti-Jewish polemic of
11th century Granada, notes,
[Abu Ishaq] Elbiri used the epithet `ape’ (qird) profusely when
referring to Jews. Such indeed was the parlance.
The Moroccan cleric al-Maghili (d. 1505), referring to the Jews as
`brothers of apes’ (just as Muhammad, the sacralized prototype, had
addressed the Banu Qurayza), who repeatedly blasphemed the Muslim
prophet, and whose overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims,
fomented, and then personally lead, a Muslim pogrom (in ~ 1490)
against the Jews of the southern Moroccan oasis of Touat, plundering
and killing them en masse, and destroying their synagogue in
neighboring Tamantit. An important Muslim theologian whose writings
influenced Moroccan religious attitudes towards Jews into the 20th
century, al-Maghili also declared in verse, `Love of the Prophet,
requires hatred of the Jews.’

Anti-Jewish riots and massacres by Muslims accompanied the 1291 death
of Jewish physician-vizier Sa’d ad-Daula in Baghdad, the plundering
and killing of Jews extending throughout Iraq (and possibly into
Persia). These events marked the collapse of a transient Jewish
ascendancy (afforded by the ruling pagan Mongols abrogation of the
Muslim system of dhimmitude), and were fomented by classical Islamic
motifs of conspiratorial Jew hatred ‘ nearly 650 years before the
advent of Nazism.

Despite being a successful and responsible administrator (which even
the Muslim sources confirm), the appointment of a Jew as the Vizier of
a heathen ruler over a predominantly Muslim region, aroused the wrath,
predictably, of the Muslim masses. This reaction was expressed through
and exacerbated by `¦all kinds of [Muslim] diatribes, satirical poems,
and libels.’ Ibn al-Fuwati (d. 1323), a contemporary Muslim historian
from Baghdad, recorded this particularly revealing example which
emphasized traditional anti-Jewish motifs from the Qur’an:
In the year 689/1291 a document was prepared which contained libels
against Sa’d ad-Daula, together with verses from the Qur’an and the
history of the prophets, that stated the Jews to be a people whom
Allah hath debased¦
Another contemporary Muslim source, the chronicler and poet Wassaf,
according to historian Walter Fischel, `¦empties the vials of hatred
on the Jew Sa’d ad-Daula and brings the most implausible accusations
against him.’ These accusations included the claims that Sa’d had
advised Arghun to cut down trees in Baghdad (dating from the days of
the conquered Muslim Abbasid dynasty), and build a fleet to attack
Mecca and convert the cuboidal Ka’ba (i.e., the holiest place and
structure in Islam) to a heathen temple. Wassaf’s account also quotes
satirical verses to demonstrate the extent of public dissatisfaction
with what he terms `Jewish Domination’, adding to the existing line,
`Turn Jews, for heaven itself hath turned a Jew’, his own, `Yet wait
and ye shall hear their torments cry/And see them fall and perish
presently.’

When Arghun took ill, influential Mongol dukes inimical to Sa’d
ad-Daula for purely political reasons, shifted the `blame’ for
Arghun’s terminal illness to the Jewish physician-Vizier. Sa’d and his
supporters were arrested and a large number of them executed

(1291). Sa’d ad-Daula’s murder precipitated a broad attack on Jewry
throughout the Il-Khan Empire, beginning in the Baghdad Jewish ghetto,
where according to the Bar Hebraeus and Wassaf, despite Jewish
resistance,
¦when the report of the murder of the Jew was heard, the Arabs armed
themselves and went to the quarter of the Jews, because the Jews were
all living together in quarter¦in Baghdad more than a hundred of the
noble and wealthy Jews were slain, and their property plundered
Wassaf and Ibn al-Fuwati further reveal that such attacks spread well
beyond Baghdad:
Throughout the lands of Islam, the Jewish people were oppressed and
their goods plundered¦there was no town left in Iraq in which the Jews
were not served with that which had happened to them in Baghdad, until
a part of them embraced Islam, although they later turned back again
Bar Hebraeus (a contemporary 13th century Christian chronicler) was
moved to depict the calamity for the Jews in these poignant words:
The trials and wrath which were stirred up against the Jews at this
time neither tongue can utter nor the pen write down
Walter Fischel concludes that `a tremendous wave of suffering and
persecution must have overwhelmed the entire Jewry of Iraq and
Persia’, while noting `The Muslims, however, gave expression to their
joy at the end of Jewish domination in many verses filled with enmity
against the Jews’. One such celebratory verse by the poet Zaynu’d-Din
Ali b. Sa’id reiterated a range of antisemitic Qur’anic motifs,
including a debasing reference to the Jews as apes (`apish Jews’),
`wretched dupes of error and despair’, `foulest race’, `hatefulest’,
dispatched to `hell’ in `molten torments’, doomed `without reprieve’,
and leaving behind `How many did they leave!’ ‘ gardens and fountains.
(Qur’an 44:25)

Walter Fischel has also described the severe hardships imposed upon
the Jews of 17th century Shi’ite Muslim Iran because of their image as
sorcerers and practitioners of black magic, which was `as deeply
embedded in the minds of the [Muslim] masses as it had been in
medieval Europe.’ The consequences of these bigoted superstitions were
predictable:
It was therefore easy to arouse their [the Muslim masses] fears and
suspicions at the slightest provocation, and to accuse them [the Jews]
of possessing cabalistic Hebrew writings, amulets, talismans, segulot,
goralot, and refu’ot, which they [the Jews] were using against the
Islamic authorities. Encouraged by another Jewish renegade, Siman Tob
Mumin from Isfahan, who denounced his co-religionists to the
authorities, the Grand Vizier was quick in ordering the confiscation
of all Hebrew cabalistic writings and having them thrown into the
river.
Paul Berman is oblivious to this entire doctrinal and historical
context. Instead, Berman ascribes `Islamic’ Antisemitism, en bloc, to
a collaborative `perversion of Islam’ by Hajj Amin el-Husseini, the
ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, and Nazi ideologues. Worse still, Berman
completely ignores el-Husseini’s direct connection to the Antisemitic
legacy of mainstream Islam, including Islamic eschatology, as espoused
in the Mufti’s own writings and speeches.

Hajj Amin el-Husseini, was a Muslim jihadist, who became,
additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator in his genocidal
endeavors to abort the aspirations of Zionist ‘ a Jewish State
liberated from the Shari’a, and welcoming Jews to return to a portion
of their ancestral homeland. He composed a 1943 recruitment pamphlet
(see the full translation in Jennie Lebel’s 2007 biography of the
Mufti, pp. 311-319) for Balkan Muslims entitled, – Islam and the
Jews.’ This incendiary document hinged upon antisemitic motifs from
the Koran (for example, 5:82), and the hadith (including Muhammad’s
alleged poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess), and concluded with the
apocalyptic canonical hadith describing the Jews’ annihilation. And
during a speech before the Imams of the Bosnian SS division, on
October 4, 1944 (translated from `Mufti Papers: Amin al-Husaini’s
Letters, Memoranda, Speeches, and Appeals from the Exile Period,
1940-45′ No. 104), el-Husseini declared:
Nearly one-third of the Koran concerns the Jews. The Koran calls upon
all Muslims to protect themselves against the Jews and to fight them
wherever they may meet them. The Jews in Khaybar attempted to poison
Muhammad, the messenger of God; they also carried out themselves or
supported various attacks on the person of the Prophet, all of which
failed. Muhammad’s many attempts to bring the Jews to their senses
were unsuccessful, with the result that he saw himself as simply
forced to dispose of the Jews and to run them out of Arabia.
Berman Ignores Relevant History From the World War One Era, and Its Aftermath

Modern genocide historians who have been wont to re-examine the
disintegrating Ottoman Empire’s World War I jihad genocide against its
Armenian minority through the prism of The Holocaust, often cite a
comment by Hitler that the mass killings of the Armenians served the
Nazi leaders as an `inspirational’ precedent for predictable impunity.
During August of 1939, Hitler gave speeches in preparation for the
looming invasion of Poland which admonished his military commanders to
wage a brutal, merciless campaign, and assure rapid victory. Hitler
portrayed the impending invasion as the initial step of a vision to
`secure the living space we need,’ and ultimately, `redistribute the
world.’ In an explicit reference to the Armenians, `Who after all is
today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?,’ Hitler justified
their annihilation (and the world’s consignment of this genocide to
oblivion) as an accepted new world order because, `The world believes
only in success.’

Grigoris Balakian’s eyewitness account of events from 1915-1918 ‘
recorded in his diaries during World War I, and already published by
1922 ‘ provide a unique, independent confirmation of this ideological,
and genocidal nexus, and antedate The Holocaust by two decades.
Specifically, Balakian’s striking observations (on pp. 280-281) from a
chapter entitled, `The Treatment of the Armenians by the German
Soldiers’ captures attitudes of German military officers towards the
Armenians that foreshadow, chillingly, the genocidal depredations they
would inflict upon European Jewry during World War II.
The German officers on their way to Palestine and the Mesopotamian
front had no choice but to pass before the Bagche [Asia Minor] station
[train]. All of them used offensive language with regard to the
Armenians. They considered us to be engaging in intrigue, ready to
strike the Turkish army from the rear, and thus traitors to the
fatherland¦deserving of all manner of punishment.

Although most of the Armenians living in Turkey had been deported,
scattered, and martyred in the spring of 1915, a few hundred thousand
survivors still perishing in the deserts to the south ‘ wasting away
to nothing. Nevertheless the German officers’ Armenophobic fury
continued, and not a word of compassion was heard from their lips. On
the contrary, they justified the Ittihad government, saying, `You
Armenians deserve your punishment. Any state would have punished
rebellious subjects who took up arms to realize national hopes by the
destruction of the country.’

When we objected, asking if other states would dare to massacre women
and children, along with men, and annihilate an entire race on account
of a few guilty people, they replied: `Yes, it’s true that the
punishment was a bit severe, but you must realize that during such
chaotic and frightful days of war as these, it was difficult to find
the time and means to separate the guilty from the innocent.’ This was
also the merciless answer of the chief executioners ‘ Talaat, Enver,
Behaeddin Shakir, Nazim ‘ and their Ittihad camarilla.

The German officers pretended ignorance of the widespread slaughter of
more than a million innocent Armenians, irrespective of sex and age,
and referred only to deaths by starvation and the adversities of
travel during the deportations. Thus they exonerated the Turkish
government, saying that its inability to provide for hundreds of
thousands of deportees in a disorganized land like Asia Minor was not
surprising. Meanwhile Turkish government officials prevented the
starving refugees from receiving bread distributed by the Austrians
and Swiss, stating, `Orders have come from Constantinople not to give
any assistance. We cannot allow either bread or medicine to be given.
The supreme order is to annihilate this evil race. How dare you rescue
them from death?’ The German officers would often speak of us as
Christian Jews and as blood sucking usurers of the Turkish people.

What a falsification of the wretched realities prevailing in Asia
Minor, and what a reversal of roles! Yes indeed, there was an
oppressor. Either the Germans were consciously distorting the facts
and roles, or the Turks had really convinced them that the Turks were
the victims and the Armenians were criminals. How appropriate it is to
recall here this pair of Turkish sayings: `The clever thief has the
master of the house hanged’ and `The one who steals the minaret
prepares its sheath in advance, of course.’

Many German officers had no qualms about turning over to the Turkish
authorities Armenian youths who had sought refuge with them; they knew
full well that they were delivering them to their executioners. If an
Armenian merely spoke negatively about a German ‘ be he the emperor or
[Baron] von der Goltz Pasha [a German military aide to the Ottoman
Empire], or the average German ‘ or dared to criticize German
indifference toward the Armenian massacres, he was immediately
arrested and turned over to the nearest Turkish military or police
authority. And if the Germans found a certain Armenian particularly
irritating, they pinned the label of spy on him.

Mistaking me for an Austrian, a few German officers boasted of having
turned over several Armenians to the Turkish police, adding with a
laugh, `Only the Turks know how to talk to the Armenians.’
Historian Bat Ye’or places the continuum of Armenian massacres from
the 1890s through the end of World War I, in the appropriate context
of more than a millennium of jihad:
The genocide of the Armenians was the natural outcome of a policy
inherent in the politico ‘ religious structure of dhimmitude. This
process of physically eliminating a rebel nation had already been used
against the rebel Slav and Greek Christians, rescued from collective
extermination by European intervention, although sometimes
reluctantly.

The genocide of the Armenians was a jihad. No rayas took part in it.
Despite the disapproval of many Muslim Turks and Arabs, and their
refusal to collaborate in the crime, these massacres were perpetrated
solely by Muslims and they alone profited from the booty: the victims’
property, houses, and lands granted to the muhajirun, and the
allocation to them of women and child slaves. The elimination of male
children over the age of twelve was in accordance with the
commandments of the jihad and conformed to the age fixed for the
payment of the jizya. The four stages of the liquidation ‘
deportation, enslavement, forced conversion, and massacre ‘ reproduced
the historic conditions of the jihad carried out in the dar-al-harb
from the seventh century on. Chronicles from a variety of sources, by
Muslim authors in particular, give detailed descriptions of the
organized massacres or deportation of captives, whose sufferings in
forced marches behind the armies paralleled the Armenian experience in
the twentieth century.
Balakian’s eyewitness narrative in Armenian Golgotha confirms her
assessment in theory and genocidal practice (Armenian Golgotha, pp.
79-80: 144-146) Sukri Bey, captain of the Yozgat [a province in
central Turkey, whose town of the same name is 100 miles east of
Ankara] police soldiers, candidly admitted to Grigoris Balakian about
participating in massacres, while confirming the jihad imperative
which sanctioned and motivated these mass killings by local Muslims.
[Balakian]¦the jihad [the Ottoman Sheikh-ul-Islam had] declared
against the Entente powers was carried out only against the unarmed
and defenseless Armenian population by the most savage of means¦Thus
Talaat [of the ruling Ittihad (Young Turk) ruling triumvirate], after
having Behaeddin Shakir’s Armenian extermination plan approved by the
Ottoman Parliament, had the Sheikh-ul-Islam issue a fatwa declaring
the Armenians to be enemies of Islam and of the fatherland. Then the
Sultan as well [officially] ordered the execution of the plan to
exterminate the Armenians.

[Sukri Bey] During the time we were searching the women, the
government officials of Yozgat sent police soldiers to all the
surrounding Turkish villages and in the name of holy jihad invited the
Muslim population to participate in this sacred religious
obligation¦Thus, when we arrived at the designated site, this mass of
people was waiting. The government order was clear: all were to be
massacred, and nobody was to be spared. Therefore, in order to prevent
any escape attempt, and to thwart any secret attempts of sympathizers
intent on freeing them, I had the eighty police soldiers encircle the
hill, and I stationed guards at every probable site of escape or
hiding. Then I had the police soldiers announce to the people that
whoever wished to select a virgin girl or young bride could do so
immediately, on the condition of taking them as wives and not with
attention of rescuing them. Making a selection during the massacre was
forbidden. Thus about two hundred-fifty girls and young brides were
selected by the people and the police officers.
Balakian then completes the grisly narrative, interspersed with
queries and responses from Sukri Bey:
`Did you shoot them dead or bayonet them to death?’ I [Balakian]
asked. [Sukri Bey responded] `It’s wartime, and bullets are expensive.
So people grabbed whatever they could from their villages ‘ axes,
hatchets, scythes, sickles, clubs, hoes, pickaxes, shovels ‘ and they
did the killing accordingly.’ It is impossible for me [Balakian] to
convey what happened to those 6,400 defenseless women, virgins, and
brides, as well as children and suckling infants. Their heartrending
cries and doleful pleas brought down the deaf canopies of heaven. The
police soldiers in Yozgat and Boghazliyan who accompanied us would
even boast to some of us about how they had committed tortures and
decapitations, cut off and chopped up body parts with axes, and how
they dismembered suckling infants and children by pulling apart their
legs, or dashing them on rocks.

As we rode our horses side by side, our conversation about the
deportations and massacres finally reached a point where I was no
longer able to restrain myself. Stiffened by this unfathomable and
crushing story, I turned to Shukri, who was relating all this as if it
were a children’s fairy tale, and said, `But bey, you are an elderly
Muslim. How did you have this many thousands of innocent women, girls,
and children massacred without feeling any remorse or guilt, when they
were neither conspirators nor rebels? Wont you remain accountable for
this innocent blood spilled, before God, the Prophet [Muhammad], and
your conscience?’

`Not al all,’ he replied. `On the contrary, I carried out my sacred
and holy obligation before God, my Prophet, and my caliph¦A jihad was
proclaimed¦The Sheikh-ul-Islam had issued a fatwa to annihilate the
Armenians as traitors to our state, and the caliph, in turn, ratifying
this fatwa, had ordered its execution¦’
The career trajectory and personal attitudes of Wilhelm Hintersatz (
born 1886; died 1963 ) epitomize these genocidal connections.
Hintersatz achieved the rank of colonel serving the Kaiser’s Austrian
armed forces in Turkey, during World War I, where he became an
assistant to Enver Pasha ‘ one of the ruling Ittihad (Young Turk)
triumvirate architects of the Armenian Genocide ‘ and converted to
Islam, assuming the name Harun-el-Raschid Bey. During World War II, he
joined the Waffen SS as Standartenfuhrer (Colonel) of a unit that
merged Waffen groups operating in the Ural Mountains, and Central
Asia, from 1944-1945. As described by Professor Kurt Tauber in his
meticulously documented two volume tome (published in 1967) on the
post World War II era phenomenon of residual anti-democratic German
nationalism, Beyond Eagle and Swastika, Wilhelm Harun-el-Raschid Bey
wrote Aus Orient und Occident; ein Mosaik aus buntem Erleben [From the
Orient and the Occident: A Mosaic of Varicolored Experiences],
ostensibly `¦about his personal experiences and travels, interlarded
with his reflections,’ which was published in 1954. However, as Tauber
observes, cleverly avoiding strict German laws against the publication
of overtly Antisemitic writings which were stringently applied during
the early post World War II period, Harun-el-Raschid Bey concealed his
Jew-hatred behind a `folkish’ façade.
Yet, in doing so he presented a clear and penetrant racist
orientation, masquerading as lighthearted story telling and simple
good fun. Some of the descriptions of people and events have an almost
Stürmer-like quality, including even the attempted seduction by a
Russian Jewess!
Wilhelm Harun-el-Raschid Bey represents the apotheosis of two
conjoined genocidal 20th century ideologies ‘ jihadism, and
ethno-nationalism. And as a true believer in both, he remained
seemingly unrepentant even in the aftermath of the genocidal killings
these hatemongering ideologies provoked.

The tragic mass killings for `breaching’ the dhimma which afflicted
the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire (Serbs, Greeks,
Bulgarians, and Armenians) throughout the 19th century, culminating in
the jihad genocide of the Armenians during World War I (and
documented, by historian Vahakn Dadrian [pp. 403ff] to have inspired
Hitler to express the notion of predictable impunity with regard to
future genocides), were nearly replicated in historical Palestine, but
for the advance of the British army.

During World War I in Palestine, between 1915 and 1917, the New York
Times published a series of reports on Ottoman-inspired and local Arab
Muslim assisted antisemitic persecution which affected Jerusalem, and
the other major Jewish population centers. For example, by the end of
January, 1915, 7000 Palestinian Jewish refugees ‘ men, women, and
children ‘ had fled to British-controlled Alexandria, Egypt. Three New
York Times accounts from January/ February, 1915 provide details of
the earlier period. By April of 1917, conditions deteriorated further
for Palestinian Jewry, which faced threats of annihilation from the
Ottoman government. Many Jews were in fact deported, expropriated, and
starved, in an ominous parallel to the genocidal deportations of the
Armenian dhimmi communities throughout Anatolia. Indeed, as related by
historian Yair Auron,
Fear of the Turkish actions was bound up with alarm that the Turks
might do to the Jewish community in Palestine, or at least to the
Zionist elements within it, what they had done to the Armenians. This
concern was expressed in additional evidence from the early days of
the war, from which we can conclude that the Armenian tragedy was
known in the Yishuv [Jewish community in Palestine]
A mass expulsion of the Jews of Jerusalem, although ordered twice by
Djemal Pasha, was averted only through the efforts of [the Ottoman
Turks World War I allies] the German government which sought to avoid
international condemnation. The 8000 Jews of Jaffa, however, were
expelled quite brutally, a cruel fate the Arab Muslims and the
Christians of the city did not share. Moreover, these deportations
took place months before the small pro-British Nili spy ring of
Zionist Jews was discovered by the Turks in October, 1917, and its
leading figures killed. A report by United States Consul Garrels (in
Alexandria, Egypt) describing the Jaffa deportation of early April
1917 (published in the June 3, 1917 New York Times ), included details
of the Jews plight, and noted:
The same fate awaits all Jews in Palestine. Djemal Pasha is too
cunning to order cold-blooded massacres. His method is to drive the
population to starvation and to death by thirst, epidemics, etc, which
according to himself, are merely calamities sent by God.
Auron cites a very tenable hypothesis put forth at that time in a
journal of the British Zionist movement as to why the looming
slaughter of the Jews of Palestine did not occur ‘ the advance of the
British army (from immediately adjacent Egypt) and its potential
willingness `..to hold the military and Turkish authorities directly
responsible for a policy of slaughter and destruction of the Jews’ ‘
may have averted this disaster.

On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress of the
United States unanimously endorsed the `Mandate for Palestine,’
confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of
Palestine ‘ anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean
Sea. The Congressional Record contains a statement of support from New
York Rep. Walter Chandler which includes an observation, about
`Turkish and Arab agitators¦ preaching a kind of holy war [jihad]
against¦the Jews’ of Palestine. Earlier, in 1921, leaders of the
Indian Khilafat (Caliphate) movement made clear at conferences held in
India that Islamic suzerainty must prevail over all of historical
Palestine. And in 1920, at the local level, within British controlled
Palestine, Musa Kazem el-Husseini, former governor of Jaffa during the
final years of Ottoman rule, and president of the Arab (primarily
Muslim) Palestinian Congress, in a letter to the British High
Commissioner, Herbert Samuels, demanded restoration of the Shari’a ‘
which had only been fully abrogated two years earlier when Britain
ended four centuries of Ottoman Muslim rule of Palestine ‘ stating
that this Religious Law, was `¦ engraved in the very hearts of the
Arabs and has been assimilated in their customs and that has been
applied ¦in the modern [Arab] states¦’ During this same era within
Palestine, a strong Arab Muslim irredentist current ‘epitomized by
Hajj Amin el-Husseini ‘ promulgated the forcible restoration of
Shari’a-mandated dhimmitude via jihad. Indeed, two years before he
orchestrated the murderous anti-Jewish riots of 1920, i.e., in 1918,
el-Husseini stated plainly to a Jewish co-worker (at the Jerusalem
Governorate), I.A. Abbady, `This was and will remain an Arab land¦the
Zionists will be massacred to the last man¦Nothing but the sword will
decide the future of this country.’

Thus Berman and his ilk must be compelled to answer the following
simple query: `What would have happened, say in late 1922 ‘ the Muslim
Brothers were not formed until 1928; the Nazis do not come to power
until 1933 ‘ with regard to Islamic jihad and Islamic Jew hatred,
specifically, if the British had created some rump state Jewish
homeland, actually governed by Jews, and rapidly departed, bearing in
mind both the fate of other dhimmi nationalisms in the 19th and early
20th centuries (Serb, Greek, Bulgarian, Armenian), and the special
place occupied by dhimmi Jews in Islamic eschatology?’). Indeed, even
an historian sympathetic to their Nazi-centric views provided this
honest answer: `[Yes.] They would have been slaughtered, possibly to
the last man, woman and child.’

Berman Ignores the Inspiration Prominent Nazis, Including Hitler,
Derived from Normative Islam Before, During, and After World War Two

Concordance between Nazism and Islamic jihadism reflects an historical
continuum evident since the advent of the Nazi movement. This nexus
was already apparent in Hitler’s own observations from 1926,
elaborated upon over the following decades by both the Nazi leader,
and other key Nazi officials, and ideologues. Not surprisingly, there
are two predominant, recurring themes in this discourse: jihad as
total war, and the annihilationist jihad against the Jews.

Perhaps the earliest recorded evidence of Hitler’s serious interest in
the jihad was provided by Muhammad `Inayat Allah Khan [who adopted the
pen name `al-Mashriqi’ ‘ `the Orientalist’ or `the Sage of the East’].
Born in the Punjab in 1888, al-Mashriqi was a Muslim polymath who
attended Cambridge on a government scholarship, and excelled in the
study of oriental languages, mathematics, engineering, and the
sciences.

Not only did Mashriqi translate the standard abridged version of Mein
Kampf (then commonly available) from English into Urdu, during one of
his sojourns in Europe, which included time spent in Berlin, he met
Hitler in the early years of the Fuehrer’s leadership of the National
Socialist [Nazi] Party. Their meeting took place in 1926 at the
National Library. Here is the gist of Mashriqi’s report on his
interaction with Hitler as described in a letter to the renowned
scholar of Indian Islam, J.M.S. Baljon:
I was astounded when he [Hitler] told me that he knew about my
Tazkirah. The news flabbergasted me¦ I found him very congenial and
piercing. He discussed Islamic Jihad with me in details. In 1930 I
sent him my Isharat concerning the Khaksar movement with a picture of
a spade-bearer Khaksar at the end of that book. In 1933 he started his
Spade Movement.
Mashriqi also wrote this independent summary of his 1926 encounter
with Hitler on May 31, 1935:
If I had known that this was the very man who was to become Germany’s
savior I would have fallen around Hitler’s neck, but on the occasion I
was engaged in small talk and tried to find out what he understood
about Germany’s weakness at the time. Professor [Weil, the host] said,
introducing Hitler to me: `This is also a very important man, an
activist from the Worker’s Party.’ We shook hands and Hitler said,
pointing to a book that was lying on the table: `I had a chance to
read your al-Tazkirah.’ Little did I understand at that time, what
should have been clear to me when he said these words!

The astonishing similarities ‘ or shall we say the unintentional
similarity between two great minds ‘ between Hitler’s great book and
the teachings of my Tazkirah and Isharat embolden me, because the
fifteen years of `struggle’ of the author [Hitler] of `My Struggle’
[Mein Kampf] have now actually led his nation back to success. But
only after leading his nation to the intended goal, has he disclosed
his movement’s rules and obligations to the world; only after fifteen
years has he made the means of success widely known. It is possible
that he has arrived at those means and doctrines by trial and error,
but it should be absolutely clear that Mashriqi [referring to himself
in the third person] has identified those means and doctrines in
al-Tazkirah a full nine years and in the Isharat a full three years
before the success of the Nazi movement, simply by following the
shining guidance of the Holy Koran.
Mashriqi founded the Khaksar Movement, an Indian Muslim separatist
(i.e., promoting the Pakistan `idea’), and global jihad supremacist
organization. Its ethos is revealed in Mashriqi’s writings (for
example, his Qaul-i-Faysel): `¦we [Muslims] have again to dominate the
whole world. We have to become its conqueror and its rulers.’ His
widely circulated pamphlet Islam ki Askari Zindagi further declared:
`The Koran has proclaimed in unequivocal words to the world that the
Prophet was sent with the true religion and definite instruction that
he should make all other religions subservient to this religion
[Islam]¦’

Mashriqi emphasized repeatedly in his pamphlets and published articles
that the verity of Islam could be gauged by the rate of the earliest
Muslim conquests in the glorious first decades after the Muslim
prophet Muhammad’s death (Mashriqi’s estimate is `36,000 castles in 9
years, or 12 per day’). He asserted `Nearly three-quarters’ of the
Koran concerns conquest, jihad (holy war), and related themes. And
Mashriqi reminded that the Koran promises hellfire to all those who do
not participate in Jihad bi-l-saif (`jihad with the sword’), or object
to it. Mashriqi also believed the Koran’s jihad verses confirmed that
if a Muslim fought for the cause of Islam, this action alone was
sufficient for his salvation, requiring no other good deeds. According
to Mashriqi, Islam’s `five pillars’ ‘ the confession of the oneness of
Allah and Muhammad’s prophetic mission, the ritual prayer five times
daily, the pilgrimage (haj) to Mecca, the giving of alms, and the fast
in the month of Ramadan ‘ were all aspects of military exercise: the
confession of faith actually meant that the true Muslim had to forsake
all worldly gains in the interest of military revival, prayer (to be
performed in uniform and in a regimented way) was a kind of military
drill, the haj was something like a grand counsel of Muslim soldiers
where plans against enemies could be formulated, the fast was a
preparation for the deprivations of siege warfare, the giving of alms,
lastly, was a means of raising funds for Muslim re-armament. In short,
he stated, `To leave the martial way of life is tantamount to leaving
Islam.’

But it was the `Ten Principles’ Mashriqi elucidated in the Tazkirah ‘
the work Hitler discussed with him in 1926 ‘ which produced a
quintessential message of Islam enshrining the ideals of militaristic
nation-building. This vision sounded almost identical to sections of
Hitler’s Mein Kampf (compare to Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 169-179,
Reynal and Hitchcock trans, 1941) ‘ certainly in the following
paraphrase from al-Tazkirah prepared by some of Mashriqi’s colleagues
for foreign consumption:
A persistent application of, and action on these Ten Principles is the
true significance of’ fitness’ in the Darwinian [sic] principle of
`Survival of the Fittest’, and a community of people which carries
action on these lines to the very extremist limits has every right to
remain a predominant race on this Earth forever, has claim to be the
ruler of the world for all time. As soon as any or all of these
qualities deteriorate in a nation, she begins to lose her right to
remain and Fitter people may take her place automatically under the
Law of Natural Selection.
Albert Speer, who was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War
Production, wrote a contrite memoir of his World War II experiences
while serving a 20-year prison sentence imposed by the Nuremberg
tribunal. Speer’s narrative includes a discussion which captures
Hitler’s effusive praise for Islam, `¦a religion that believed in
spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that
faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.’
Hitler, according to Speer’s account, repeatedly expressed the
conviction that, `The Mohammedan religion¦would have been much more
compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity
with its meekness and flabbiness?’ These sentiments were also
expressed by Hitler to Dr. Herman Neubacher, the first Nazi Mayor of
Vienna, and subsequently, a special delegate of the Nazi regime in
southeastern Europe. Neubacher wrote that Hitler had told him Islam
was a `male religion,’ and reiterated the belief that the Germans
would have been far more successful conquerors had they adopted Islam
in the Middle Ages. Additional confirmation of Hitler’s very favorable
inclination towards Islam is provided by General Alexander Loehr, a
Luftwaffe commander (executed in 1947 for the mass-murders of Yugoslav
civilians). Loehr maintained a smiling Hitler had told him that Islam
was such a desirable creed the Fuehrer longed for it to become the
official SS religion.

Hitler appears to have viewed the uniquely Islamic institution of
jihad as an appropriate model for waging genocidal, total war. During
the mid to late 19th century, jihad total war campaigns – adapted to
the conditions of modern warfare – were waged by the Ottoman Empire
against its Bulgarian and Armenian Christian minorities. The Ottoman
tactics included innumerable atrocities, mass slaughter, and
extensive, murderous deportations. Official Ottoman jihad declarations
during World War I assured that the genocidal aspects of Islamic
doctrine were `updated’ by the application of modern total war
offensive doctrines, and directed at the Armenians, in particular.
This jihad-inspired policy begot razzias (raids), massacres of
villagers, massacres of Armenian conscripts in work battalions, and
mass deportations – all representative of an overall total-war
strategy implemented by the Ottoman state, and military high command.

And, as noted earlier, the disintegrating Ottoman Empire’s World War I
jihad genocide against its Armenian minority, specifically, served as
an `inspirational’ precedent to Hitler.

Vahakn Dadrian – the foremost scholar of the Armenian genocide ‘
observes that although Hitler’s motives in seeking to destroy the Jews
were not identical with those of the Ottoman Turks’ in their attempts
to eliminate the Armenians, `¦the two victim nations share one common
element in Hitler’s scheme of things: their extreme vulnerability.’
Moreover, Hitler emphasized the urgent task, `¦of protecting the
German blood from contamination, not only of the Jewish but also of
the Armenian blood.’ Predictable impunity – the ease with which the
Armenian genocide was committed and how the perpetrators escaped
retributive justice – clearly impressed Hitler and his henchmen,
considering a similar action against the Jews. Indeed, the German Jew,
Richard Lictheim who as a young Zionist leader had negotiated with
Ottoman leaders in Turkey during World War I, characterized the
`¦cold-bloodedly planned extermination of over one million
Armenians¦[as] akin to Hitler’s crusade of destruction against the
Jews¦’ And as historian Abram Sachar noted, `¦the genocide was cited
approvingly twenty-five years later by the Fuehrer¦who found the
Armenian `solution’ an attractive precedent.’

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS (Nazi Secret Service), and eventually
all German police forces, was another champion of Islam’s singular
bellicosity. Accordingly, Himmler foresaw that within the framework of
the Waffen-SS, several Muslim divisions would be created to wage jihad
`shoulder to shoulder’ with Nazi and Axis power soldiers. Himmler was
the guiding force behind the establishment of a Waffen-SS 13th (later
dubbed Handzar) Division – comprised exclusively of Muslims from
Bosnia and Herzegovina. He argued in support of the creation of this
Muslim division that the global Islamic community (umma) was very
sympathetic to Nazism, and that the targeted Balkan Muslims had a
special consciousness of their Muslim Bosnian-Herzegovinian identity.
Indeed, Himmler and his collaborators believed that these Balkan
Muslims were ideally suited to forge a nexus between the Nazi Germanic
`racial north,’ and the Islamic east. SS General Gottlob Berger
described how Himmler’s creation of the Handzar division was the
apotheosis of this vision:
For the first time a connection is being established between Islam and
National Socialism on an open, honest base, since it will be ruled
from the North where blood and race are concerned, and from the East
ideologically and spiritually.
As the ultimate fulfillment of his vision, Himmler also strove to
re-create a contemporary version of the Ottoman Muslim devshirme levy,
and form a modern janissary corps, not only in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but
the Sanjak (regions in Serbia and Montenegro), most of Croatia, and
the major part of Srem (which includes provinces in Serbia and Croatia
between the Danube and Sava rivers). Historian Jennie Lebel describes
this effort:
In order to supply the Reich on time with a `loyal population’ for
this planned SS border area [i.e., as outlined above in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia], Himmler gave orders to
collect children, male and female, who had been left without one or
both parents and send them to Germany in order `to create a kind of
Janissaries’ and the `future soldiers and soldiers’ women of the old
military border of the Reich.’ The collection of the children was to
be taken care of by the commanders of the Waffen-SS divisions. They
had to report once monthly to Himmler personally on the number of
children collected. This was stated in two letters by Himmler, one
addressed to General Arthur Phleps on May 20, 1944, and the other to
General Gottlob Berger on July 14 of the same year. Copies were sent
to General Kammerhofer, SS representative for the NDH [Croatia], to
General Erwin Rosener in Slovenia, General Hermann Behrends in Serbia
and General Herman Foegellein, liason officer of the Waffen-SS with
Hitler.
Hajj Amin el-Husseini – the pre-eminent Arab Muslim leader of the
World War II era – was viewed by Hitler (and also the Waffen-SS) – as
a `Muslim Pope.’ For example, the Nazi regime promoted this former
Mufti of Jerusalem in an illustrated biographical booklet (printed in
Berlin in 1943) which declared him Muhammad’s direct descendant, an
Arab national hero, and the `incarnation of all ideals and hopes of
the Arab nation.’

Despite his role in fomenting the1920 pogroms against Palestinian
Jews, el-Husseini was pardoned, and subsequently appointed Mufti of
Jerusalem by the British High Commissioner, in May 1921, a title he
retained, following the Ottoman practice, for the remainder of his
life. Throughout his public career, the Mufti relied upon traditional
Koranic anti-Jewish motifs to arouse the Arab street. For example,
during the incitement which led to the 1929 Arab revolt in Palestine,
he called for combating and slaughtering `the Jews’, not merely
Zionists. In fact, most of the Jewish victims of the 1929 Arab revolt
were Jews from the centuries old dhimmi communities (for eg., in
Hebron), as opposed to recent settlers identified with the Zionist
movement. With the ascent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, the
Mufti and his coterie intensified their anti-Semitic activities to
secure support from Hitler’s Germany (and later Bosnian Muslims, as
well as the overall Arab Muslim world), for a jihad to annihilate the
Jews of Palestine. Following his expulsion from Palestine by the
British, the Mufti fomented a brutal anti-Jewish pogrom in Baghdad
(1941), concurrent with his failed effort to install a pro-Nazi Iraqi
government. Escaping to Europe after this unsuccessful coup attempt,
the Mufti spent the remainder of World War II in Germany and Italy.
>From this sanctuary, he provided active support for the Germans by
recruiting Bosnian Muslims, in addition to Muslim minorities from the
Caucasus, for dedicated Nazi SS units. The Mufti’s objectives for
these recruits, and Muslims in general, were made explicit during his
multiple wartime radio broadcasts from Berlin, heard throughout the
Arab world: an international campaign of genocide against the Jews.
For example, during his March 1, 1944 broadcast he stated: `Kill the
Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion.’

Hajj Amin made an especially important contribution to the German war
effort in Yugoslovia where the Bosnian Muslim SS units he recruited
(in particular the Handzar Division) brutally suppressed local Nazi
resistance movements. The Mufti’s pamphlet entitled, – Islam and the
Jews `, as described earlier, was published by the Nazis in Croatian
and German for distribution during the war to these Bosnian Muslim SS
units. This incendiary document hinged upon antisemitic motifs from
the Koran (for example, 5:82), and the hadith (including Muhammad’s
alleged poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess), and concluded with the
apocalyptic canonical hadith describing the Jews’ annihilation. And
historian Jan Wanner has observed that,
His [the Mufti’s] appeals¦addressed to the Bosnian Muslims were¦close
in many respects to the argumentation used by contemporary Islamic
fundamentalists¦the Mufti viewed only as a new interpretation of the
traditional concept of the Islamic community (umma), sharing with
Nazism common enemies.
Wanner further characterized The Mufti’s nefarious wartime campaign to
prevent Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine, and its horrific
toll:
¦the darkest aspect of the Mufti’s activities in the final stage of
the war was undoubtedly his personal share in the extermination of
Europe’s Jewish population. On May 17, 1943, he wrote a personal
letter to Ribbentrop, asking him to prevent the transfer of 4500
Bulgarian Jews, 4000 of them children, to Palestine. In May and June
of the same year, he sent a number of letters to the governments of
Bulgaria, Italy, Rumania, and Hungary, with the request not to permit
even individual Jewish emigration and to allow the transfer of Jews to
Poland where, he claimed they would be `under active supervision’. The
trials of Eichmann’s henchmen, including Dieter Wislicency who was
executed in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, confirmed that this was not an
isolated act by the Mufti.
Invoking the personal support of such prominent Nazis as Himmler and
Eichmann, the Mufti’s relentless hectoring of German, Rumanian, and
Hungarian government officials caused the cancellation of an estimated
480,000 exit visas which had been granted to Jews (80,000 from
Rumania, and 400,000 from Hungary). As a result, these hapless
individuals were deported to Polish concentration camps. A United
Nations Assembly document presented in 1947 which contained the
Mufti’s June 28, 1943 letter to the Hungarian Foreign Minister
requesting the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Poland, includes this
stark, telling annotation: `As a Sequel to This Request 400,000 Jews
Were Subsequently Killed.’ Moreover, in the Mufti’s memoirs (Memoirs
of the Grand Mufti, edited by Abd al-Karim al-Umar, Damascus, 1999) he
describes what Himmler revealed to him during the summer of 1943
regarding the genocide of the Jews. Following pro forma tirades on
`Jewish war guilt,’ Himmler told the Mufti that `up to now we have
liquidated [abadna] around three million of them.’

According to historian Howard M. Sachar, meetings the Mufti held with
Hitler in 1941 and 1942 lead to an understanding whereby Hitler’s
forces would invade Palestine with the goal being `..not the
occupation of the Arab lands, but solely the destruction of
Palestin(ian) Jewry¦’ And in April, 2006, the director of the Nazi
research center in Ludwigsburg, Klaus-Michael Mallman, and Berlin
historian Martin Cueppers, revealed that a murderous Einsatzgruppe
Egypt, connected to Rommel’s Africa Korps, was stationed in Athens
awaiting British expulsion from the Levant, prior to beginning their
planned slaughter of the roughly 500,000 Jews in Palestine. This plan
was only aborted after Rommel’s defeat by Montgomery at El Alamein,
Egypt, in October/November 1942.

The Mufti remained unrelenting in his espousal of a virulent
Judeophobic hatred as the focal tenet of his ideology in the aftermath
of World War II, and the creation of the State of Israel. And the
Mufti was also a committed supporter of global jihad movements, urging
a `full struggle’ against the Hindus of India (as well as the Jews of
Israel) before delegates at the February 1951 World Muslim Congress:
`We shall meet next with sword in hand on the soil of either Kashmir
or Palestine.’ Declassified intelligence documents from 1942, 1947,
1952, and 1954 confirm the Mufti’s own Caliphate desires in repeated
references from contexts as diverse as Turkey, Egypt, Jerusalem, and
Pakistan, and also include discussions of major Islamic Conferences
dominated by the Mufti, which were attended by a broad spectrum of
Muslim leaders literally representing the entire Islamic world
(including Shia leaders from Iran), i, e., in Karachi from February
16-19, 1952, and Jordanian occupied Jerusalem, December 3-9, 1953.
Finally during a 1962 `Great Muslim Congress’ held in Mecca
el-Husseini harshly criticized the `Arab nationalism’ of Egyptian
despot Gamal Abd el-Nasser. According to Jennie Lebel, the ex-Mufti
openly rejected both Communism and Socialism, and `¦urged all the
[Muslim] faithful to unite against the bitterest enemies of the Arabs,
those who disavow Islam and distort its call under the guise of
nationalism Viewed in their totality these data do not support the
current standard assessment of the Mufti as merely a `Palestinian Arab
nationalist, rife with Jew hatred.’

During an interview conducted in the late 1930s (published in 1939),
Karl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical
psychiatry, was asked `¦had he any views on what was likely to be the
next step in religious development?’ Jung replied, in reference to the
Nazi fervor that had gripped Germany,
We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is
already on the way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is
Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That
can be the historic future.
Paul Berman also ignored in their entirety, writings produced for 100
years between the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, by important
scholars and intellectuals, in addition to Carl Jung – for example,
the historians Jacob Burckhardt and Waldemar Gurian, Protestant
theologian Karl Barth, and most notably, the renowned 20th century
scholar of Islamic Law, G.H. Bousquet – referred to Islam as a
despotic, or in 20th century parlance, totalitarian ideology.

Being imbued with fanaticism was the ultimate source of Muhammad’s
great strength, and lead to his triumph as a despot, according to the
19th century Swiss historian Burckhardt:
Muhammad is personally very fanatical; that is his basic strength. His
fanaticism is that of a radical simplifier and to that extent is quite
genuine. It is of the toughest variety, namely doctrinaire passion,
and his victory is one of the greatest victories of fanaticism and
triviality. All idolatry, everything mythical, everything free in
religion, all the multifarious ramifications of the hitherto existing
faith, transport him into a real rage, and he hits upon a moment when
large strata of his nation were highly receptive to an extreme
simplification of the religious.
The Arabs, Burckhardt emphasizes, Muhammad’s henchmen, were not
barbarians and had their own ingenuities, and spiritual traditions.
Muhammad’s successful preaching among them capitalized upon an
apparent longing for supra-tribal unification, `an extreme
simplification.’ Muhammad’s genius, `lies in divining this.’ Utilizing
portions of the most varied existing traditions, and taking advantage
of the fact that `the peoples who were now attacked may also have been
somewhat tired of their existing theology and mythology,’ Muhammad
¦with the aid of at least ten people, looks over the faiths of the
Jews, Christians, and Parsis [Zoroastrians], and steals from them any
scraps that he can use, shaping these elements according to his
imagination. Thus everyone found in Muhammad’s sermons some echo of
his accustomed faith. The very extraordinary thing is that with all
this Muhammad achieved not merely lifetime success, the homage of
Arabia, but founded a world religion that is viable to this day and
has a tremendously high opinion of itself.
Burckhardt concludes that despite this achievement, Muhammad was not a
great man, although he accepts the understandable inclination,
¦to deduce great causes from great effects, thus, from Muhammad’s
achievement, greatness of the originator. At the very least, one wants
to concede in Muhammad’s case that he was no fraud, was serious about
things, etc. However, it is possible to be in error sometime with this
deduction regarding greatness and to mistake mere might for greatness.
In this instance it is rather the low qualities of human nature that
have received a powerful presentation. Islam is a triumph of
triviality, and the great majority of mankind is trivial¦But
triviality likes to be tyrannical and is fond of imposing its yoke
upon nobler spirits. Islam wanted to deprive distinguished old nations
of their myths, the Persians of their Book of Kings, and for 1200
years it has actually prohibited sculpture and painting to
tremendously large populations.
University of Notre Dame historian Waldemar Gurian, a refugee, who
witnessed first hand the Communist and Fascist totalitarian movements
in Europe, concluded (circa 1945) that Hitler, in a manner analogous
to the 7th century precedent of Muhammad, had been the simplifier of
German nationalism.
A fanatical simplifier who appeared as the unifier of various German
traditions in the service of simple national aims and who was seen by
many differing German groups – even by some people outside Germany ‘
as the fulfiller of their wishes and sharer of their beliefs, with
some distortions and exaggerations – such, as long as he had success,
was Adolf Hitler.
Based upon the same clear understandings, and devoid of our era’s
dulling, politically correct constraints, Karl Barth, like Carl Jung
(cited earlier), offered this warning, also published in 1939:
[Karl Barth] Participation in this life, according to it the only
worthy and blessed life, is what National Socialism, as a political
experiment, promises to those who will of their own accord share in
this experiment. And now it becomes understandable why, at the point
where it meets with resistance, it can only crush and kill – with the
might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know
proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National
Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam [emphasis in
original], its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s
Prophet.
Investigative journalist John Roy Carlson’s 1948-1950 interviews of
Arab Muslim religious and political leaders provide consummate
independent validation of these Western assessments. Perhaps most
revealing were the candid observations of Aboul Saud, whom Carlson
described as a `pleasant English-speaking member of the Arab League
Office.’ Aboul Saud explained to Carlson that Islam was an
authoritarian religio-political creed which encompassed all of a
Muslim’s spiritual and temporal existence. He stated plainly,
You might describe Mohammedanism as a religious form of State
Socialism¦The Koran give the State the right to nationalize industry,
distribute land, or expropriate the right to nationalize industry,
distribute land, or expropriate property. It grants the ruler of the
State unlimited powers, so long as he does not go against the Koran.
The Koran is our personal as well as our political constitution.
And after interviewing Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna
himself, who `preached the doctrine of the Koran in one hand and the
sword in the other,’ Carlson observed:
It became clear to me why the average Egyptian worshipped the use of
force. Terror was synonymous with power! This was one reason why most
Egyptians, regardless of class or calling had admired Nazi Germany. It
helped explain the sensational growth of the Ikhwan el Muslimin
[Muslim Brotherhood]
Thirty-fours years ago (1973/74) Bat Ye’or published a remarkably
foresighted analysis of the Islamic antisemitism and resurgent
jihadism in her native Egypt, being packaged for dissemination
throughout the Muslim world. The primary, core Antisemitic and
jihadist motifs were Islamic, derived from Islam’s foundational texts,
on to which European, especially Nazi elements were grafted. Nazi
academic and propagandist of extermination Johannes von Leers’
writings and personal career trajectory – as a favored contributor in
Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, to his eventual adoption of Islam (as
Omar Amin von Leers) while working as an anti-Western, and
antisemitic/anti-Zionist propagandist under Nasser’s regime from the
mid-1950s, until his death in 1965 – epitomizes this convergence of
jihad, Islamic antisemitism, and racist, Nazi antisemitism, as
described by Bat Ye’or. Upon his arrival in Egypt in 1956, it was Hajj
Amin el-Husseini who welcomed von Leers, stating, `We are grateful to
you for having come here to resume the struggle against the powers of
darkness incarnated by international Judaism.’ The ex-Mufti oversaw
von Leers’ formal conversion to Islam, and remained one of his
confidants. And von Leers described the origins of the Muslim
`forename,’ Omar Amin, that he adopted as part of his conversion to
Islam in a November, 1957 letter to American Nazi H. Keith Thompson,
I myself have embraced Islam and accepted the new forename Omar Amin,
Omar according to the great Caliph Omar who was a grim enemy of the
Jews, Amin in honor of my friend Hajj Amin el Husseini, the Grand
Mufti.
Already in essays published during 1938 and 1942, the first dating
back almost two decades before his conversion to Islam while in Egypt,
von Leers produced analyses focused primarily on Muhammad’s
interactions with the Jews of Medina. These essays reveal his pious
reverence for Islam and its prophet, and a thorough understanding of
the sacralized Islamic sources for this narrative, i.e., the Koran,
hadith, and sira. which is entirely consistent with standard Muslim
apologetics.

Von Leers’ 1942 essay, for example, concludes by simultaneously
extolling the `model’ of oppression the Jews experienced under Islamic
suzerainty, and the nobility of Muhammad, Islam, and the contemporary
Muslims of the World War II era, foreshadowing his own conversion to
Islam just over a decade later. And even earlier, in a 1938 essay, von
Leers further sympathized with, `the leading role of the Grand Mufti
of Jerusalem in the Arabians’ battles against the Jewish invasion in
Palestine.’ Von Leers observes that to the pious Muslim, `¦the Jew is
an enemy, not simply an `unbeliever’ who might perhaps be converted
or, despite the fact that he does not belong to Islam, might still be
a person of some estimation. Rather, the Jew is the predestined
opponent of the Muslim, one who desired to bring down the work of the
Prophet.’

Until his death in 1965, von Leers remained unrepentant about the
annihilationist policies towards the Jews he helped advance serving
Hitler’s Reich. Indeed he was convinced of the righteousness of the
Nazi war against the Jews, and as a pious Muslim convert, von Leers
viewed the Middle East as the succeeding battleground to seal the fate
of world Jewry. His public evolution over the course of three decades
illustrates starkly the shared centrality to these totalitarianisms ‘
both modern and ancient – of the Jews as `first and last enemy’ motif.
Finally, an October 1957 US intelligence report on von Leers’ writings
and activities for Egypt and the Arab League confirmed his complete
adoption of the triumphalist Muslim worldview, desirous of nothing
less than the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization by jihad:
He [Dr. Omar Amin von Leers] is becoming more and more a religious
zealot, even to the extent of advocating an expansion of Islam in
Europe in order to bring about stronger unity through a common
religion. This expansion he believes can come not only from contact
with the Arabs in the Near East and Africa but with Islamic elements
in the USSR. The results he envisions as the formation of a political
bloc against which neither East nor West could prevail.
Fifty years later ignorance, denial, and delusion have engendered the
sorry state of public understanding of this most ominous conversion of
hatreds, by all its potential victims, not only Jews. This lack of
understanding is little advanced by the current spate of analyses ‘
such as Paul Berman’s – which seek `Nazi roots’ of the cataclysmic
September 11, 2001 acts of jihad terrorism, and see Nazism as having
`introduced’ antisemitism to an otherwise `tolerant’, even
philosemitic Islamic world beginning in the 1930s. Awkwardly forced,
and ahistorical, these analyses realign the Nazi cart in front of the
Islamic steed which has driven both jihad and Islamic antisemitism,
since the 7th century advent of the Muslim creed, particularly during
the last decade of Muhammad’s life.

Berman’s Islamic Apologetics Are Debunked by the Brutally Frank
Insights of the Very Same Muslim `Apostate’ Freethinkers Berman Nobly
Supports

In a brilliant, dispassionate contemporary analysis, Ibn Warraq
described 14 characteristics of `Ur Fascism’ as enumerated by Umberto
Eco, analyzing their potential relationship to the major determinants
of Islamic governance and aspirations, through the present. He adduces
salient examples which reflect the key attributes discussed by Eco:
the unique institution of jihad war; the establishment of a Caliphate
under `Allah’s vicegerent on earth,’ the Caliph – ruled by Islamic
Law, i.e., Shari’a, a rigid system of subservience and sacralized
discrimination against non-Muslims and Muslim women, devoid of basic
freedoms of conscience, and expression. Warraq’s assessment confirms
what G.H. Bousquet concluded (in 1950) from his career studying the
historical development and implementation of Islamic Law:
Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It
claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by
the divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of fiqh
[jurisprudence], to regulate down to the smallest details the whole
life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer¦ the
study of Muhammadan Law (dry and forbidding though it may appear)¦ is
of great importance to the world of today.
Hirsi Ali’s response to the standard non-sequitur apologetic about the
putative existence of `different Islams,’ is unequivocal:
No that is an erroneous idea. If one defines Islam as the religion
founded by Muhammad and explained by the Koran and later by hadiths,
there is only one Islam that dictates the moral framework.
She concludes that true reform of Islam, to render it compatible with
modern human rights standards, must include criticism of both its core
sacred text, and founder:
You cannot liberalize Islam without criticizing the Prophet and the
Koran¦You cannot redecorate a house without entering inside.
Hirsi Ali’s conceptions mirror the ideas outlined by Ibn Warraq in a
thoughtful essay about reform (somewhat ironically) of Middle Eastern
Muslim societies. She clearly shares the unapologetic views about the
obstacles to such reform presented by Islam itself, which Warraq
characterized as follows:
There are some (I believe, misguided) liberal Muslims who deny any
such transformation is necessary, that Islam need not be marginalized
for liberty to flourish. These liberals often argue that the real
Islam is compatible with liberal democracy, that the real Islam is
feminist, that the real Islam is egalitarian, that the real Islam
tolerates other religions and beliefs, and so on. They then proceed to
some truly creative re – interpretation of the embarrassing,
intolerant and misogynist verses of the Koran. But intellectual
honesty demands that we reject just such dishonest tinkering with the
Koran’s text, which, while it may be open to some re – interpretation,
is not infinitely elastic. The truth is there is no real difference
between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism – at most there is a
difference of degree, but not of kind. There are moderate Muslims, but
Islam itself is not moderate. All the tenets of so – called Islamic
fundamentalism are derived from the Koran, the Sunna, and the Hadith ‘
the defining texts of Islam – and elaborated in intimate detail by the
classical Muslim jurists from all four schools of Sunni Islamic
jurisprudence, as well as by Shi’ite jurists. The only solution is to
bring the questions of human rights out of the religious sphere and
into the sphere of the civil state, in other words to separate
religion from the state and promote a secular state where Islam is
relegated to the personal.
And these pellucid, experience-based assessments by the same former
Muslims Berman wishes to champion, explode his sham castle narrative
of a `monstrous,’ Nazified Islam, somehow transmogrified from Berman’s
`Islam of generosity’ – a purely fanciful, dangerously delusional
notion.

The rise of Jewish nationalism – Zionism – posed a predictable, if
completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order – jihad-imposed
chronic dhimmitude for Jews – of apocalyptic magnitude. As Bat Ye’or
has explained,
¦because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish
state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against
Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad.
Historian Saul S. Friedman, also citing the emergence of Zionism (as
an ideology anathema to the Islamic system of dhimmitude for Jews),
concluded that this modern movement, and the creation of the Jewish
State of Israel has, not surprisingly, unleashed a torrent of
annihilationist Islamic antisemitism, `the brew of thirteen centuries
of intolerance’:
Since 1896, the development of modern, political Zionism has placed
new tension on, and even destroyed, the traditional master-serf
relationship that existed between Arab and Jew in the Middle East. An
Arab world that could not tolerate the presence of a single,
`arrogant’ Jewish vizier in its history was now confronted by a modern
state staffed with self-confident Jewish ministers.
Contra Paul Berman, even if all vestiges of Nazi militarism and racist
antisemitism were to disappear miraculously overnight from the Islamic
world, the living legacy of jihad war against non-Muslim infidels, and
anti-Jewish hatred and violence rooted in Islam’s sacred texts ‘
Koran, hadith, and sira – would remain intact. The assessment and
understanding of the uniquely Muslim institution of jihad, and Islamic
antisemitism, begins with an unapologetic exposure of both the
injunctions sanctioning jihad war, and the anti-Jewish motifs
contained in these foundational texts of Islam. Yet while the West has
engaged in self-critical mea culpa, acknowledging its own
imperialistic past, shameful role in the slave trade, and antisemitic
persecution – taking steps to make amends where possible – the Islamic
nations remain in perpetual denial. Until Muslims acknowledge the ugly
realities of jihad imperialism, and anti-Jewish persecution in their
history, the past will continue to poison the present, and there will
be no hope of combating resurgent jihadism, and Islam’s unreformed
theological hatred of Jews in modern times, from Morocco to Indonesia,
and within Muslim communities living in Western, and other non-Muslim
societies across the globe.

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