If They're Such Moderates, Why Was The Muslim Brotherhood Such Big Fans Of The Nazis--After WWII?

Following their defeat in WWII, Nazis--and Nazism--was discredited.
By everyone, that is, except the Arabs in general, and the Moslem Brotherhood in particular.

The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism recently came out with a special issue of Antisemitism International, an annual research journal. In one of the articles, Broadcasting Antisemitism To The Arab World: Nazi Propaganda During the Holocaust, Professor Jeffrey Herf describes the meeting of the minds between the Nazis and the Muslim world:

The result of that conjuncture was the production of thousands of hours of Arabic radio broadcasts and hundreds of thousands Arabic leaflets and pamphlets that translated and diffused Nazism's radical antisemitism into an easily understandable political discourse adapted to the political realities of local circumstances in the Middle East.

Of course, to make that work Hitler reinterpreted his antisemitism, which in Mein Kampf originally applied to Arabs as well--"a coalition of cripples" suffering from a "racial inferiority"--subsequently defining it more narrowly to apply only to Jews.

But once these broadcasts got started, they found a receptive audience--one that included the Moslem Brotherhood. Herf writes:

Tantalizing hints of "fifth column" activity in the Moslem Brotherhood, by students at al-Azhar University in Cairo, Young Egypt, and segments of the officer corps are to be found in reports by American and British diplomats and intelligence agencies. The immediate postwar months and years produced evidence regarding the very enthusiastic reception of the Grand Mufi's message in the Moslem Brotherhood in Cairo.

As a example of just how receptive the Muslim Brotherhood was to the Nazi message, Herf quotes a statement on June 11, 1946 by Hassan al-Banna--then leader of the Muslim Brotherhood--to the officials of the Arab League:

Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimin [the Moslem Brotherhood] and all Arabs request the Arab League on which Arab hopes are pinned, to declare that the Mufti is welcome to stay in any Arab country he may choose and that great welcome should be extended to him wherever he goes, as a sign of appreciation for his great services for the glory of Islam and the Arabs...What a hero, what a miracle of a man. We wish to know what the Arab youth, Cabinet Ministers, rich men, and princes of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli are going to do to be worthy of this hero. Yes, this hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle.[emphasis added]

The defeat of the Nazis did not dull al-Banna's enthusiasm for them.

Herf also quotes Sayid Qutb, who served as an inspiration to the founders of al-Qaeda and was himself a member of the Moslem Brotherhood. In 1950, Qutb published an essay "Our Struggle with the Jews", where he wrote:

And the Jews did indeed return to evil-doing, so Allah gave to the Muslims power over them. The Muslims then expelled them from the whole of the Arabian Peninsula...Then the Jews again returned to evil-doing and consequently Allah sent against them others of his servants, until the modern period. Then Allah brought Hitler to rule over them. And once again today the Jews have returned to evil-doing, in the form of "Israel" which made the Arabs, the owners of the Land taste of sorrows and woe.[emphasis added]

Qutb didn't get that from the Koran. He likely picked up that idea from the Nazi broadcasts.

And the defeat of the Nazis did nothing to diminish its impact on the Muslim world:

The defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and the subsequent full revelation of the extent of the crimes of the Third Reich, discredited Nazism, fascism, and antisemitism in post-1945 Europe. yet the evidence at our disposal point to the persistence and deepening of antisemitism in the Middle East before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

Of course, that is not all that surprising, considering the fact that Muslim antisemitism did not originate with the Nazis. Andrew Bostom has documented the long history of The Legacy Of Islamic Antisemitism which originates in the Koran itself. It is no wonder that the Nazis found such a receptive audience--one that saw itself as carrying on its work.

And among those receptive to the message of the Nazis was the Moslem Brotherhood

Technorati Tag: Muslim Brotherhood and Nazis.