Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (46 page)

The close ties between al-Banna and Husseini were a source of concern for American and British officials in Jerusalem. By early January 1948, they knew that Husseini's leadership role in Palestinian politics was firm and that the pro-Axis exiles were playing important roles in the emerging conflict in Palestine. One British officer described the Mufti as "without the slightest doubt ... the one hero in the Arab world" whose position with the Palestine Arabs was unchallenged. However, "if he were to disappear, the Palestine Arabs would produce someone in his place."55 The American and British officials also knew that Husseini and others who had supported the Axis during the war composed the leadership of the Arab Higher Committee.56 Moreover, on January 13, Edmund J. Doran, in the American Embassy in Baghdad, reported that an eightyman Iraqi contingent of volunteers to fight in Palestine was led by one Abdul Hamid Baqir, who had been a follower of Rashid Ali Kilani in the 1941 coup. Doron added that "many of the non-commissioned officers are also former Rashid-Ali troops, and are strongly anti-British."57

On March 31, the U.S. Legation in Damascus informed Washington that the "Palestine Liberation Army" had established a radio station broadcasting news twice daily in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The director of the station was Sa'adi Basbous. Basbous had been an announcer on Damascus radio for the previous ten months. During World War II, he had "propagandized Islam world from Athens' so-called `liberal Arab' (i.e., Nazi) station."58 For men like Basbous and for Husseini and his supporters, the war against the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine represented a continuation of their activities and beliefs during World War II. Opposition to Zionism extended far beyond those who had been drawn to fascism and Nazism during the war, yet some of the most militant and most prominent leaders of the anti-Zionist forces were former Axis collaborators.

On April 30, Pinkney Tuck in Cairo cabled Secretary of State George Marshall (who had been appointed to that post in January 1947) that the previous day mullahs at Al Azhar University "called on all Moslem countries for immediate military and economic action to save Palestine." Seventy thousand copies of the resolution were circulated to the press, Muslim representatives, the palace, and the cabinet. The Muslim scholars declared that "saving Palestine" was a "religious duty of all Moslems everywhere," that Arab and Islamic governments "must cooperate decisively now and be supported by the people with lives and money." They should aid and house displaced Palestine refugees. Further, this decision rested on obedience to the Koran's statement: "He who dies fighting for Allah will be greatly recompensed in life to come. 1151 On May 15, Tuck wrote to Marshall about "anti-Jewish sentiment in Egypt." While King Farouk was distinguishing between acceptable Jews and unacceptable Zionists and the government was promising to protect the lives and property of all who lived in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had engaged in an anti-Jewish press campaign in articles published on May 10, 11, and 14 in Ikhwan Al Muslimin. The series attacked "several Jews in the Egyptian administration" as well as the Jews who "control the financial establishments in Egypt and a number of newspapers." Tuck reported that the newspaper alleged that these people, who "employ former Cabinet Ministers and well-known Egyptians in order to execute their secret plans and satisfy their greed," were "a real threat to our [Egyptians'] safety." It noted, "We are called fanatics, but the successes scored by the Jews of Palestine, thanks to the help of Egypt's Jews, should open the eyes of the Egyptians." In the same issue it accused Jewish "spies" of mixing with the workers engaged on the Aswan Dam electrification project in order to engage in sabotage. According to the articles, Jews in Arabic and Islamic countries would be automatically deprived of nationality, have property confiscated, and be treated as enemies when and if a Jewish state was created in Palestine.60

The newspaper Al Misri, associated with the nationalist Wafd Party, endorsed Farouk's distinction between Jews and Zionists. The distinction between Zionism as "a political doctrine which is based on seizing the land from its rightful owners by force, and Judaism as a religion, should be kept in view by the authorities in the Arab countries when they impose martial law. We, the Arabs, wish to appear before the world to be more civilized and to have better perception of affairs than the barbarous Zionists and those who supported them at the United Nations."61 During the summer and fall of 1948, in periods of fighting as well as truce in the war in Israel, these fine distinctions between Jews and Zionists went by the wayside as the Egyptian government engaged in seizure of Jewish property in Cairo and Alexandria.62

An adequate and soundly documented history of the response to Nazism and fascism among Arabs, Persians, and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East remains a task for scholars who read Arabic and Persian and who will thus be able to take the evidence and arguments presented so far into ac- count.63 Yet there is one author and one text of particular importance that fortunately has been translated into English. Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) is generally regarded as the most influential of the thinkers who inspired postwar Islamic extremism. Our Struggle with the Jews, which he wrote in Cairo in the early 195os, became a key text, so much so that the Saudi regime published a new edition in 1970.64 I have indicated that Nazi wartime Arabic broadcasts fused modern European and German anti-Semitism with the anti-Jewish themes extracted from the traditions of Islam. Qutb, who was first and foremost an Islamic fundamentalist intellectual, advanced this project of synthesis with his detailed knowledge of the relevant Islamic texts. After his execution by the Egyptian government in 1966, he became both a martyr and an ideological inspiration for such radical Islamist groups as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas.65 The title itself, Our Struggle with the Jews, evokes disconcerting comparisons to Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle). More important, in its views of the Jews and in its conspiratorial mode of analysis, the book displayed a striking continuity with the themes of Nazism's wartime broadcasts, with the important difference that it was far more embedded in the Koran and Islamic commentaries.

Qutb began by linking past and present. The "Muslim Community" continued to "suffer from the same Jewish machinations and double-dealing which discomfited the Early Muslims." Regretfully it did not resort to "Koranic directives" and "Divine Guidance" as had its ancestors. Only by drawing on "Islamic sources" were "the Ancestors able to overcome the Jewish conspiracy and double-dealing in Medina. And thus did the Religion [Islam] arise; and thus was the Muslim Community born." Through what he called their "wickedness and double-dealing," the Jews were continuing to lead the "Muslim Community away from its Religion and to alienate it from its Qur'an." Anyone who led this community away from its religion was a "Jewish agent." Safety from the Jews required an end to the existing alienation from the Koran's "unique Truth." Qutb counted the Jews among "the enemies of Islam" who "fought it first in the realm of Creed!!" by "conspiring, sowing doubt and confusion, and hatching plots." Indeed, "the worst enemies of Islam" were those "who lead it away from the creed of belief, dissuading it from taking Allah's way and path and deceiving it about the reality of its enemies and their ultimate goals." Qutb asserted that a "struggle" was taking place between "the Muslim Community," on the one hand, and "its enemies," on the other. Above all, it was a battle about "this Creed," that is, an ideological battle. Islamic belief was "the means through which the community remains cognizant of its enemies' plot."66

The Koran was the most important defensive weapon against the Jews' efforts to sow confusion among Muslims. It "would first always repel this poisoned weapon, ... repudiate the suspicions and doubts which the People of the Book [the Jews] cast upon it.... warn the Community against the conspiracy of the conspirators, and unmask for the Muslim Community the hidden designs of its enemies, their dirty ways, their dangerous intentions and their hatred of Islam and the Muslims because of Islam's uniquely great superiority." It would also make clear "the weakness of enemies, their insignificance in Allah's estimation, their blindness to Truth, their rejection of what Allah had previously revealed to them and their killing of the prophets." Positively, it would affirm the power and greatness of the Muslim community, remind them that Allah was with the Muslims, and "lead the ungrateful Jews to exemplary pun- ishment."67 Qutb's Manicheanism was a religious counterpart to Nazism's secular battle against the Jewish enemy. Whereas the Nazis depicted Jewry as obsessed with plans to destroy Germany, Qutb, as Nazi propaganda broadcasts had done, presented the Jews as preoccupied with an effort to destroy Islam. Where Nazism attacked the Jews for undermining the values of the nation and community with the solvent of rationalism, Qutb saw Jews as agents of confusion and doubt about religious belief. Where Nazism appealed to the authority of a secular prophet, Hitler, and the belief in him and his ideas, Qutb evoked the even more unshakable authority of the Koran and Allah himself.

The pervasiveness of ideas about Jewish plots and conspiracies in Nazi ideology found an echo in Qutb. The Jews' character was one of "deception and plotting." Over the centuries they had "poisoned the Islamic heritage, ... plotted against Islamic history... conspired to distort the Islamic Oral Revelation, ... conspired against and falsified the exegesis of the Qur'an." Theirs "is a very dangerous conspiracy." The Jews had "instilled men and regimes (in the Islamic world), in order to conspire against the Muslim Community. Hundreds, then even thousands, were plotting within the Islamic world" in the form of "Orientalists" and their students, who now played an important role in the intellectual life of the Arab and Muslim countries. As the conspiracy continued without interruption, rigorous adherence to the Koran alone offered a "source of security and salvation" in "this fierce battle of so many centuries."68

The Islamic world was threatened by "a massive army of agents in the form of professors, philosophers, doctors, and researchers-sometimes also writers, poets, scientists, and journalists-carrying Muslim names because they are of Muslim descent!" Yet they were attempting to "break the Creed of the Muslims" through "research, learning, literature, science and journalism." These unnamed Muslim intellectuals thus became, willingly or not, "agents of Zionism." They agreed on one issue, "the destruction of this (Islamic) Creed" at the first opportunity. With arguments that recalled those of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Qutb wrote, "This Jewish consensus (on destroying Islam) would never be found in a pact or open conference. Rather it is the (secret) agreement of one (Zionist) agent with another on the important goal, as something fundamental (and unquestioned)."69

Qutb then turned to the Koran for an explanation for Jewish behavior. "The Qur'an," he noted, "spoke much about its Jews and elucidated their evil psychology." He then offered an Islamic version of the Christian attack on alleged Jewish murderousness. "No other group" was as merciless or ungrateful. The Jews "had killed, butchered, and expelled many of their prophets. This is the most disgusting act that has come out of any community which had sincere preachers of the Truth. The Jews perpetrated the worst sort of disobedience (against Allah), behaving in the most disgustingly aggressive manner and sinning in the ugliest way." They had everywhere "committed unprecedented abominations." Qutb found the source of this Jewish rage and misbehavior in the Jews' "jealousy" because Allah chose the prophet Gabriel rather than themselves to be his representative to Mohammed. As a consequence of their anger at Allah, the Jews had a "natural disposition" to selfishness and fanaticism. They live in "isolation," bereft of "any larger human connection which binds humanity together." Not surprisingly, they sowed dissension and fomented wars in which they cultivated hatred and destructiveness. All of this evil arose "only from their destructive egoism." It was this "black hatred of Allah's messenger, the Qur'an and Islam" that led the Jews to prefer polytheism to Islam. In the postwar years, they preferred Communism to Islam.70

Drawing on this reading of the Koran, Qutb reached conclusions about the Jews identical to those of Europe's radical anti-Semites in the twentieth century. Although European anti-Semitism was very old, it was the Nazis who first claimed both that the Jews had launched an international full-scale war against their enemies and that therefore all the Jews should be murdered. Qutb, like Husseini and his associates broadcasting from wartime Berlin, claimed that the Jews had been waging war on Islam since its inception. "The Jews have confronted Islam with Enmity from the moment that the Islamic state was established in Medina. They plotted against the Muslim Community from the first day it became a community. The Qu'ran (in fact) contained directives and suggestions concerning this (Jewish) enmity and plot. These directives were themselves sufficient to portray this bitter war which the Jews launched against Islam, the Messenger of Allah and the Muslim Community during its long history. This is a war which has not been extinguished, even for one moment, for close to fourteen centuries, and which continues until this moment, its blaze raging in all corners of the earth."7'

In the postwar era, Qutb called the Jewish attack against Islam "a CrusaderZionist war!! How right was Allah, the most Mighty, saying: `You will surely find the worst enemies of the Muslims to be the Jews and polytheists.."172 "A Jew" was behind various transgressions in the history of Islam. In modern times, it was the Jews who were behind efforts to remove Shariah from legislation or to introduce constitutions in the Arab world. "Behind the doctrine of atheistic materialism was a Jew [Karl Marx]; behind the doctrine of animalistic sexuality was a Jew [Sigmund Freud]; and behind the destruction of the family and the shattering of sacred relationships in society ... was a Jew [Emile Durkheim]."73 Attacks on Durkheim, Freud, and Marx were also standard fare for European anti-Semites.