The Nazi-Arab Nexus

Nazi doctrines exerted considerable fascination on the Arab world
during these years. Both pan-Arabism and pan-Islamic ideologies in
the Middle East looked to Hitler's Germany as a model for national
unification, a counterweight to Western imperialism and a source of
revolutionary dynamism. Anti-Semitic and anti-British feelings (which
anticipated some of the anti-Americanism rampant today) created a
powerful sense of affinity between German Nazis and Arab nationalists
in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. A former Syrian Ba'athi leader, recalling
the atmosphere of the late 1930s, wrote:

"We were fascinated by Nazism, reading its books and the sources of
its thinking, particularly Nietzsche, Fichte and Chamberlain. And we
were the first who thought about translating Mein Kampf. We, who
lived in Damascus, could appreciate the tendency of the Arab people
to Nazism which was the power which appealed to it. By nature, the
vanquished admires the victorious."

Arab nationalists, radicals and Islamic militants were clearly
influenced by the anti-liberal and anti-Western spirit of fascism,
its emphasis on youth, its pattern of organization and, above all,
its cult of power. In Iraq, the Director-General of Education, Dr.
Sami Shawkat, told students in Baghdad in the autumn of 1933:

"There is something more important than money and learning for
preserving the honor of a nation and for keeping humiliation at bay.
That is strength. . . . Strength, as I use the word here, means to
excel in the Profession of Death."

Seventy years later, Saddam's Iraq provided a sinister confirmation
of this outlook in its determination to develop weapons of mass
destruction and its readiness to use them against internal as well as
external enemies.

The idolization of power, together with the totalitarian mystique of
the nation, was already developed by many Arab radicals in the 1930s
and 1940s. Their visions of grandeur were exacerbated by a feeling of
deep malaise, and even trauma, which the encounter with Western
civilization had inflicted upon Arab society. The Muslim Brotherhood,
founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna in Egypt, represented the pristine
anti-Western and fundamentalist version of this backlash. From the
outset, the jihadists around al-Banna developed the cult of the
leader and preached fascist doctrines of "unity and discipline" and
"martial strength and military preparedness." Like Ahmad Hussein's
Young Egypt movement of the late 1930s, they were militantly
anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, supporting the boycott and harassment
of the Jewish community in Egypt.

The Muslim Brothers, with their vision of a judenfrei Palestine as a
rallying-point for removing all Western influences from the Middle
East, belonged to the first wave of Islamic fascism. The second wave,
which swelled after the Six Day War, had as its leading ideologue one
Sayyid Qutb, a revolutionary Egyptian intellectual executed by Nasser
only a year before the Arab defeat. For Qutb and his followers, the
invasion of Western culture had thrown Muslims back into a state of
pre-Islamic barbarism (jahiliyya) dominated by social chaos, sexual
permissiveness, polytheism, apostasy and idolatry. His notorious text
of the early 1950s, Our Struggle with the Jews, portrayed the Jews as
the "eternal enemies" of Muhammad and the Islamic community who used
Christianity, capitalism and communism as weapons in their war to
subvert the Muslim religion. The Islamists of today have faithfully
followed Qutb in attributing Marxism, psychoanalysis, sociology,
materialism, sexual depravity, and the destruction of morals and the
family to "Jewish" influence. In this cultural war, they see Zionism
and Americanism as kindred expressions of an existential threat to
Muslim identity.

Anti-Semitism Today

Today, the identity crisis affecting millions of Muslims is spawning
its own brand of Islamic neo-fascism. That crisis is accentuated by
accelerating urbanization, overpopulation and endemic poverty, as
well as the prevalence of suffocating dictatorships throughout the
Arab world. Without the bogeymen of America and Israel, however, Arab
despots would be hard put to explain to their own peoples why the
modern world is passing them by. Why is Cairo infinitely poorer than
Tel Aviv? Why is heart surgery so much better in London than in
Damascus? Why do Arab immigrants prefer Los Angeles or Detroit to
Baghdad or Beirut?

The crushing of dissent, the repression of women, the scale of mass
illiteracy and underdevelopment and the oil riches of corrupt ruling
elites provide part of the answer. For decades, authoritarian Arab
regimes turned the bitter feelings of humiliation and rage among the
masses against the "colonialist" West. The Islamists have continued
in this vein, adding their own paranoid suspicions of modern secular
civilization. Fear of apostasy fuses with hatred of America, Jews and
non-Muslims in general. Rank homophobia and a fiercely puritanical,
repressive vision of veiled and enslaved womanhood are added to the
mix. Indeed, European fascism, for all its male-oriented warrior
barbarism, was almost liberating in its attitudes toward women
compared with the Taliban or Saudi Wahhabism.

Militarism, the glorification of force and a nihilistic cult of death
are, however, traits that Nazis, fascists and Islamists share
completely in common. The morbid addiction to destruction and revenge
drives them to paint the world red with blood in their mad rush to
introduce utopia in the here-and-now. Added to this is the
totalitarian belief, very much shared by Stalinists, in the
all-encompassing power of propaganda, party organization and
terror--a mystique reinforced by the seemingly limitless manipulative
possibilities of modern technology joined to ideological dogma. The
individual is considered totally malleable and subordinate to the
revolutionary cause, whether it be "living space", "racial purity",
the "Arab Renaissance", the "classless society" or the jihad.
Promethean doctrines, to which human life is so eagerly sacrificed,
can only be vindicated by the success of a global revolution that
grants political hegemony to true believers in the cause. Whether
millions die in the attempt is irrelevant in the light of either the
eternal laws of nature and history or the will of God.

Totalitarian anti-Semitism reached its genocidal extreme with
Hitler's ideology and a political praxis that, though it grew up on
Christian soil, was ultimately determined to replace and supplant
Christianity. National Socialism was racial politics carried out
under the sign of the Apocalypse, in which the global struggle
between the "Aryan" world and Jewry stood at the center of a closed
system of thought. Anti-Semitism was transformed into a crucial lever
in the restructuring not only of Nazi Germany but of the entire
international order--initially as a weapon for undermining Hitler's
domestic adversaries and then for subverting or neutralizing
opposition to his policies abroad. Hitler emphasized that the
destruction of world Jewry was a precondition for restoring the
natural hierarchy within the nation and between the races. The
Darwinian racism that he espoused was not the root of his
anti-Semitism; it was simply the "scientific" language he employed to
give more credibility to his eschatological political agenda. Its
deeper sources lay in a pseudo-religious, Manichean vision of a world
in which "the Jew" was the negative wellspring and dark side of
history driving mankind relentlessly toward the abyss.

Nazi ideology led to acts of murderous race-cleansing of varying
kinds during World War II, but only the Jews were singled out for
total extermination. The war against them was conceived as an
apocalyptic Vernichtungskrieg for global hegemony. What Hitler did
was to transform the demonological fantasies of both Christian and
anti-Christian anti-Semitism into a practical political program on a
universal scale. The choice of the target grew out of centuries of
Christian teaching that had singled out the Jews as a deicidal
people. But the Shoah was a modernized high-tech version of "Holy
War" carried out by totalitarian atheists. These atheists consciously
sought to eradicate both the Enlightenment legacy of reason and the
entire Judeo-Christian tradition of ethics.

The topography and lexicography of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism
changed dramatically after 1945, yet the essential elements of
ideological continuity have been remarkably tenacious. Today, the
geographical center of gravity is neither Germany nor the European
continent (despite the alarming revival of old prejudices) but the
Arab-Muslim world and its diasporic offshoots. Anti-Jewish rhetoric
in the new millennium tends to be Islamic, anti-globalist and
neo-Marxist far more than it is Christian, conservative or
neo-fascist. Whether the assault comes from the far Left or Right,
from liberals or fundamentalists, its focus now is above all the
collective Jew embodied in the State of Israel. Despite the incessant
hair-splitting over the need to separate anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism, this has in recent decades become a distinction
without a meaningful difference. Whatever theoretical contortions one
may indulge in, the State of Israel is a Jewish state. Whoever wants
to defame or destroy it, openly or through policies that entail
nothing else but such destruction, is in effect practicing the
Jew-hatred of yesteryear, whatever their self-proclaimed intentions.

The Soviet Legacy

The case of Soviet communism is particularly interesting in this
regard. In 1931, Josef Stalin officially denounced anti-Semitism as
"zoological", a form of cannibalism. This was formally consistent
with the original internationalist policy of Marxist-Leninism and the
older communist view of anti-Semitism as a reactionary tool of the
ruling classes to divert attention away from the class struggle. By
1949, however, Stalin was beginning to sound like Adolf Hitler when
it came to "the Jewish question." He adopted the classic Nazi
mythology of "rootless cosmopolitanism" and applied it to Soviet
Jews. Stalinist accusations which developed out of this slogan
followed the pattern of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This had
an obvious propaganda value in Soviet Russia, as it did in all of the
East European satellite countries that fell under communist control
in the late 1940s, where anti-Semitism already enjoyed great
popularity. The fictitious "world conspiracy" invented by the
Stalinists offered a suitable backdrop for totalitarian claims to
world rule alongside the crusade against Wall Street, capitalism and
imperialism.