Ian Johnson...pursues the development of radical Islam in Europe. Mostly by accident, the veteran journalist stumbled upon one of the largest untold stories of the last fifty years: how, with help from Nazis and the CIA, radical Islam first established its foothold in the West, and planted its roots firmly in Germany...This was a program, Johnson writes, which Hitler “explicitly blessed,” saying, “I consider only the Mohammedans to be safe. All the others, I consider unsafe.”
In the eastern regions of the Soviet empire, where the Nazis were more interested in oil than ethnic cleansing, the Third Reich mobilized Muslims and other ethnic minorities to fight for the liberation of their homelands. The Nazis plucked Muslims from German prisoner-of-war camps: some Muslims became German soldiers; some, members of the SS; some, professional propagandists...
[After WW II] In order to reach the thirty million Muslims living within the Soviet Union, the Americans turned to many of these former Nazi sympathizers. The idea, from the 1940s onwards, was to use Islam to undermine the Soviet system...
...Islamism, a word we often encounter but rarely hear properly explained. Who are all these “Islamists,” really? This is one of the helpful moments at which Johnson breaks his narrative to tell us clearly: “Islamists differ from traditional Muslims because they use their religion in pursuit of a political agenda, via either democracy, or violence...Implicit in Islamism is a rejection of Western society and its values.”...Appeasing Islamists is ill-advised policy. But America continues to support groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood anyway. There are two Muslim Brotherhoods, he argues, one in the West and another in the rest of the world. The former is much more perilous to American interests. Still, out of ignorance and laziness in part, many American bureaucrats and foreign policy-makers turn to the best-looking business-suited Islamist leaders as allies...
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