Columbia International Affairs Online: Journals

CIAO DATE: 11/2008

The Ties That Bind

The Journal of International Security Affairs

A publication of:
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs

Volume: 15, Issue: 0 (Fall 2008)


Alan Mendoza

Abstract

Full Text

Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (New York: Telos Press, 2007), 180 pp.

On September 11, 2001, Matthias Küntzel had a revelation. A historian of German anti-Semitism, he had been uninterested in Islamic radicalism prior to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. In fact, as an author with intellectual roots on the political left, Küntzel had been wary of using terms such as “Islamism” and “jihad” for fear of potential racist connotations.

On that day, however, Küntzel’s ambivalence collapsed along with the Twin Towers. In seeking to determine why terror had come to the shores of the United States, Küntzel came to the unavoidable conclusion that it was the delusional mind-set of radical Islam, rather than American foreign policy, which was responsible for the carnage. Equally evident was that the core component driving that delusion was an Islamist anti-Semitism steeped in both the methods and ideology of Nazism, dating back to the 1920s and the rise of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand and the ideology of the German Nazi Party on the other.

The resulting study, Jihad and Jew-Hatred, is not a comprehensive examination of Islamic anti-Semitism. Nor is it a thorough review of the state of global Islamism and Islamist movements today. Rather, what it seeks to achieve in approximately 180 pages is to provide a timeline, from the early years of the twentieth century to the present day, of the interplay between anti-Semitism and Islamist thought—and how a relationship that began peripherally has become a central focus of jihadist ideology.

It is to Küntzel’s credit that his minimalist linear approach works brilliantly. In the beginning, he relates, there was the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and its founder, Hassan al-Banna. Aided and abetted by the religious leadership of the noted anti-Semite Hajj Amin el-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Brotherhood took control of the discourse of the “Arab street” across the Islamic world—an unholy alliance that crushed moderate opinion in its wake. Adding Holocaust denial to its anti-Zionist repertoire, the Brotherhood’s defining characteristic following the Second World War was denial of Israel’s right to exist. The Arab humiliation of the 1967 Six-Day War provided the movement with new impetus to expand in Egypt under Nasser, Sadat and then Mubarak. Embracing the vitriolic anti-Semitism of its most notorious thinker, Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood launched its Palestinian branch, Hamas, and ultimately—through the influence of Abdullah Azzam and later Ayman al-Zawahiri—spawned Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Ever-present throughout this journey is the specter of Nazism, first as the financial and logistical supporter of the nascent Arab movements in the Orient and later as a source of inspiration for Islamic extremists, who kept alive the belief in conspiracy theory and the myth of Jewish world domination. This fusion is taken to its ultimate conclusion in the hatred shown by both movements towards the United States. As Küntz- el eerily describes, in 1943 Joseph Goebbels could write that “one can really describe the U.S.A as a Jewish state” and Hitler could dream that he might “be able to teach the Jews a lesson in the form of terror attacks on American metropolises.” Nearly six decades later, in November 2002, Osama bin Laden, the man who had the year before delivered precisely such an atrocity on American soil, was able to justify his reasoning to U.S. citizens in his Letter to the American People: “The Jews have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life, making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense.”

Of course, as Küntzel makes clear, anti-Zionism is not the sole prerogative of Islamists. More than religion and geography, it is hatred of Israel that has provided the Arab world with a consistent identity. But the Islamists have ingeniously added a religious dimension to this common threat. And when the only other ideological message to resonate in the Arab World—communism—collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union, Islamism had the extremist field to itself.

The ascendancy of Islamist thought in the Arab world, in turn, has been assisted by its control of educational outreach, particularly from the 1970s onwards. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat turned to religious groups to combat Marxism in universities and allowed state television and radio to spread Islamist messages. The result was his assassination in 1981 by members of the Tanzim al-Jihad, a group that drew nearly half of its members from Egypt’s universities. The trend toward radicalization has persisted, in Egypt and elsewhere; as Küntzel notes, “[t]o this day, it seems virtually impossible to graduate from Gaza’s Islamic University without becoming an anti-Semite,” and Palestinian Authority television is infamous for its promotion of Holocaust denial, slurs against the Jews and hostility to Israel. The lesson is clear: gain control of the delivery of the message, and you will transform the message itself.

If there is a flaw with Jihad and Jew-Hatred, other than sloppy editing in some places, it is Küntzel’s failure to put the intimate relationship between jihad and Jew-hatred in proper context. Despite its centrality to the Islamist message, were Israel to cease to exist or every last Jew to disappear from the earth, Islamism would still exist and would be no less dangerous. The West is not engaged in conflict with an ideology that solely seeks to eliminate Jews, but rather one that places this at the apex of a more general and vitriolic hatred of Western civilization, culture and liberal values.

If Western policymakers were to pay more attention to these nuances of Islamist ideology, rather than trying to explain them away, we might have made considerably more progress in the struggle against terrorism since 2001. For, as Küntzel reminds us, the Islamists themselves have had an 80-year head start to hone their approach.

 

Alan Mendoza is Executive Director of the London-based Henry Jackson Society.