Hitler's Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East

This paper was first presented at the international seminar series “Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective” under the auspices of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, New Haven, November 30, 2006. The video of this presentation and the discussion afterwards is here available.

Nobody here will have forgotten the horrors of the most recent Middle East war, which took place this summer. But who still remembers the hopes of the previous summer, in 2005, when Israel, despite massive internal resistance, pulled all its troops and settlers out of Gaza? Back then many people hoped that the Gaza strip would develop into a model Palestinian region that could form the nucleus of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

But what happened was the opposite. Almost immediately this territory was transformed into an outpost in a war against Israel, as new weapons dumps and arms factories sprang up everywhere. From Gaza, Islamists bombarded the Jewish state with hundreds of Qassam missiles. Why?

It was the same story in southern Lebanon. Following the withdrawal of the Israeli army in 2000, it was turned into a deployment area: Hizbollah installed over twelve thousand rockets, supplied by Iran via Syria, near the Israeli border.[1] The area was turned into a base for aggression, with a well-planned system of fortified positions and network of tunnels, from which on 12 July 2006 an attack was launched on Israeli troops. Why?

In both Gaza and Lebanon the possibility existed of a normalisation of relations with Israel, leading in all probability to an economic upturn. So why do Hizbollah and Hamas prioritise weapons and war rather than peace and welfare? Why are they spurred on in doing so by Iran, a country that has neither a territorial dispute with Israel nor a Palestinian refugee problem? This is the answer given by Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah: “Israel is a cancer in the region and when a tumour is discovered, it must be cut out.”[2] And here is what Khaled Mash’al, leader of Hamas, said: “Before Israel dies, it must be humilitated and degraded. … We will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.”[3] While Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, promises that, “Very soon this stain of disgrace will be purged from the centre of the Islamic world – and this is attainable.”[4]

My final example of this kind of statement comes from Mohammad Hassan Rahimian, the representative of the Iranian Supreme Leader, who stands even higher in the Iranian hierarchy than Ahmadinejad. On 16 November 2006 Rahimian declared that, “the Jew is the most stubborn enemy of the believers. And the decisive war will decide the fate of humanity… The reappearance of the twelfth Imam will usher in a war between Israel and the Shia.” [5]

Many Western commentators ignore such pronouncements, because they are so crazy. But were Hitler’s speeches any less crazy? Hitler sincerely believed his propaganda and attempted, in his peculiar sense of the word, to “free” the world of the Jews by murdering them. Islamists too genuinely believe in their own hate-filled tirades. They celebrate suicide attacks on any and all Jews as “acts of liberation”.

The fact that people who are not Islamists participate in this jubilation reveals a second similarity with the Nazi era. I am referring here to the impact of antisemitic brainwashing techniques, which have been refined since the days of Josef Goebbels.

One of the instruments of this brainwashing is the Hizbollah satellite TV channel Al-Manar, which reaches (...)

Dr. Matthias Küntzel, born in 1955, is an author and a political scientist and holds a tenured part-time position as a teacher of political science at a technical college in Hamburg/Germany.

His most recent book Djihad und Judenhass. Über den neuen antijüdischen Krieg (Jihad and Jew-hatred. About the new anti-Jewish war) was published in 2002 (Ca ira pubs., Freiburg/Germany) the American edition of which is forthcoming from Telos Press in 2007.