Recommended Reading: Jihadi Jew-Hatred

Jeffrey Goldberg reviews Matthias Küntzel’s new book, Islamis, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, in today’s New York Times. It’s not PC these days to charge Muslims with anti-Semitism (specifically, anti-Jewism, because Arab spokesmen are quick to respond, “We can't be anti-Semitic; we’re also Semites.”). But both Goldberg and Kuntzel bravely swim against the stream.

Writes Goldberg: The anti-Semitic worldview, generally speaking, is fantastically stupid. … Anti-Semitic conspiracy literature not only posits crude and senseless ideas, but also tends to be riddled with typos, repetitions and gross errors of grammar, and for this and other reasons I occasionally have trouble taking it seriously.

The German scholar Matthias Küntzel tells us this is a mistake. He takes anti-Semitism, and in particular its most potent current strain, Muslim anti-Semitism, very seriously indeed. His bracing, even startling, book, “Jihad and Jew-Hatred” reminds us that it is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed. And across the Muslim world, the very worst ideas about Jews — intricate, outlandish conspiracy theories about their malevolent and absolute power over world affairs — have become scandalously ubiquitous….

Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem (pictured), and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood….

Goldberg concludes: The former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi once told me that “the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” The Jews, he said, deserved their punishment. Küntzel argues that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

I recently wrote an article called Hamas Jungen (pending publication) that argues that not since the Nazis formed the Hitler Jungen have masses of children been brainwashed to worship death as they are in Palestinian schools, camps and TV. De-nazification was required then for Germany’s children. De-hamasification is the order of the day in the Middle East today.

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