Islam, Naziism and Liberals

Jeffrey Herf authored "Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World", and is professor of modern European history at the University of Maryland in College Park.:

“liberals should be willing to devote more efforts to the moral and political delegitimation of radical Islamism. It is a form of totalitarian ideology. It is profoundly reactionary and deeply anti-Semitic and, in this sense, racist. It draws on a radicalization and selective reading of the religion of Islam. During both World War II and the cold war, the United States derived great strategic value from naming its adversaries and publicly discussing and denouncing their ideologies. It fought wars of ideas that accompanied the force of arms. We need to understand the importance of doing that today as well.”

and this, to explain why and its historical roots:

During World War II, American diplomats in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo documented the fusion of Nazism and political Islam, as expressed in Arabic-language shortwave radio broadcasts aimed at the Middle East. The broadcasts were the product of collaboration between officials in the German foreign ministry and the pro-Nazi Arab and Muslim collaborators, including Haj Amin El Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Three elements of these Nazi appeals are of particular importance. First, they offered a secular form of anti-imperialism aimed against British presence in the region and against Zionist goals in Palestine. Second, German foreign ministry officials concluded that the most effective way to fan anti-Americanism in the region was to associate the United States and President Roosevelt in particular, with the Jews and with Zionism. Third, the Arabic-language propaganda made explicit appeals to Muslims as Muslims, that is, as believers in the religion of Islam. The Nazi officials and their Arab and Islamist collaborators agreed that a particular reading of passages from the Koran offered the key point of entry to a very hard-to-ascertain number of Muslim hearts and minds.

The alliance between the Nazis and the Arab and Islamist collaborators in wartime Berlin was not simply one of convenience based on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Rather, collaboration rested just as much on shared values, namely rejection of liberal democracy and, above all, hatred of the Jews and of Zionist aspirations. Though the meeting of hearts and minds in wartime Berlin was relatively short, it was an important chapter in the much longer history of political Islamism. It was there that a cultural fusion of Nazism and political Islamism took place. Husseini’s ideological contribution was to offer a religious foundation for hatred of the Jews as Jews, and for a rejection of Zionism.