Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (47 page)

Qutb's explosion of hatred culminated in a call for war against the Jews in Israel. This was a war between Islam and the Jews. "The struggle between Islam and the Jews continues in force and will thus continue, because the Jews will be satisfied only with the destruction of this religion (Islam). Even after Islam had subjugated them, they continued to fight against this religion through conspiracies, treacheries and activating their agents in evil-doing." Now that the Jews had established the State of Israel, nothing would "curb their greed short of Islam's defeating them." This was another chapter in a long history of Jewish "evil-doing;" which Qutb documented with more selective quotations from the Koran. He summarized the history of the Jews as follows: "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 evildoing, in the form of `Israel' which made the Arabs, the owners of the Land, taste of sorrows and woe. So let Allah bring down upon the Jews people who will mete out the worst kind of punishment, as a confirmation of His unequivocal promise: `If you return, then We return'; and in keeping with his Surma, which does not vary. So for one who expects tomorrow, it is close!!"74

It is plausible that during World War II, Sayyid Qutb listened to Nazi broadcasts and traveled in the pro-Axis intellectual milieu of the radical Islamists in and around Al Azhar University. Perhaps he heard or read German propaganda that described Hitler as having been sent by Allah to fight the evil Jews. All we can say now is that this idea emerged both from the offices of the SS in 1944 and again from the pen of Islam's leading political fundamentalist in Cairo in the early 1950s. Our Struggle with the Jews was not a case of Holocaust denial. On the contrary, like the incitement that came over shortwave radio during the war, it constituted a justification of an allegedly well-deserved punishment. Just as the Nazis had threatened the Jews with "punishment" for alleged past misdeeds, so Qutb offered a religious justification for yet another attempt to "mete out the worst kind of punishment" to the Jews then in Israel. In terms that his audience understood, Our Struggle with the Jewswas a call to massacre the Jews living in Israel. It is evidence of ideological continuity with the radical Islamist propaganda coming from wartime Berlin. Qutb fused the radical anti-Semitism of modern European history with a radical anti-Semitism rooted in a detailed reading of the Koran. Qutb continued and expanded on the project of cultural fusion and selective appropriation of the traditions of Islam that Husseini and his associates in wartime Berlin had performed. In so doing, he and others breathed new life into the anti-Semitic hatred that had only recently been defeated and morally discredited in Europe.

The execution of Sayyid Qutb was a culminating moment in the violent conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the regime of Egyptian President Gamal Nasser. Yet though Qutb and Nasser became bitter enemies, it would be mistaken to ignore impressive evidence of their agreement on some fundamental issues. As the Israeli historian Yehoshafat Harkaby demonstrated almost forty years ago, Nasser and the Egyptian government's public assertions also displayed ways of thinking that echoed themes of Nazi wartime propaganda. Nasser and his associates, the champions of secular Arab nationalism, based their hostility to Zionism and Israel on a mixture of twentieth-century anti-imperialism and references to anti-Jewish themes of an Islamic nature.75 In the 1950s, the Egyptian government published a complete edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as writings that claimed that Judaism fostered a conspiracy aiming at world domination.76 In 1958, Nasser told an interviewer that the Protocols proved "beyond a shadow of a doubt that three hundred Zionists, each of whom knows all the others, govern the fate of the European continent."77 In 1956, Nasser hired Johann von Leers, one of the Nazi regime's leading anti-Semitic propagandists, to assist the Egyptian Ministry of Information in fashioning its own anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist campaigns. In wartime Berlin, von Leers wrote "Judaism and Islam as Opposites," an essay in which he argued that Islam and National Socialism had a common bond forged by shared hostility to the Jews.78 In so doing, he shared in the effort by Himmler and others in the SS to find common ground between National Socialism and Islam .79 As Nasser's decision to hire von Leers indicated, the question of the aftereffects of Nazism's Arabic-language propaganda during World War II concerned trends that encompassed but were also much broader than those expressed by Qutb and his fellow Islamist jihadists. For the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East in the wake of the war of 1948 following the founding of the State of Israel, the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the Middle East had ceased to matter. Most of the region's 700,000 Jews fled to Israel in the face of hostility in their own countries.

Conclusion

azi Germany's Arabic-language propaganda during World War II was the product of a remarkable political and ideological synthesis that took place in wartime Berlin. Beginning in 1939 and with even greater intensity after fall 1941, officials of the German dictatorship worked closely with pro-Nazi Arab exiles to produce leaflets that were distributed in the millions, and hundreds of thousands of hours of radio broadcasts. These materials displayed a synthesis of Nazism, Arab nationalism, and fundamentalist Islam. Just as National Socialism represented a radicalization of already existing and longheld anti-Semitic traditions in Europe, so the pro-Axis exiles in Berlin reinforced and radicalized an already existing antipathy to the Jews that had been a long-standing component of the traditions of Islam. Nazi Germany's Arabiclanguage propaganda was neither an imposition of a set of hatreds previously unknown to the traditions of Islam nor a matter of simply lighting the match to long-standing but suppressed anti-Jewish hatreds. In this conjuncture of passions and interest, both the Nazis and their Arab collaborators engaged in the work of selective tradition, drawing on and accentuating the most despicable and hate-filled aspects of the cultures of Europe and of Islam.

To be sure, the translations of Hitler's Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arabic were important sources of the diffusion of Nazi ideology and anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking to Arab and Muslim intellectuals. Although both texts were available in various Arabic editions before the war began, they played little role in the Third Reich's Arabic propaganda. Rather, it was the Koran and its selective appropriation and interpretation that was the most important text for Nazism's point of cultural entry to Arab and Muslim readers and listeners. So it should come as no surprise that in this same climate, the Nazis would bring the anti-Jewish elements of the Koran to the fore. Like any major religious text, the Koran has been the subject of varying interpretations and receptions, including those which have deemphasized its anti-Jewish passages. Yet it was the interpretation and reception of this core text in wartime Berlin that mattered for the propaganda campaign documented in this book. These labors of selective tradition certainly did foreground those anti-Jewish elements in the Koran and in subsequent commentaries. The Koran offered sufficient textual confirmation of Nazism's claims that the Jews were ineradicably evil and that they were determined to destroy Islam in the twentieth century just as they had supposedly been attempting to do for the past 1,300 years. In contrast to the canonical texts of Nazism and European anti-Semitism, the Koran was a text venerated by and familiar to the mass radio audience of Berlin in Arabic and the Voice of Free Arabism. At the same time, this specifically religious dimension was inseparable from the secular, political issues of World War II and opposition to British influence and to the Zionist project in the Middle East. The boundary between secular appeals to Arab nationalism and religious appeals to Muslims as Muslims was often blurred to the point of insignificance. At times the propaganda focused on the themes of secular anticolonialism and opposition to British, French, or American influence, and at other times it justified Jew-hatred on religious grounds. Often secular and religious themes were indistinguishable in the propaganda about the Jews, nowhere more so than in the convergence of wartime Jew-hatred with opposition to Zionism. The Nazis and their Arab and Muslim collaborators attacked Zionism both as a product of British, American, and "Jewish imperialism" and as the most recent chapter in a continuing Jewish hostility to Islam that they alleged to have begun with the Jews' rej ection of Mohammed's call to convert to the religion of Islam in Medina thirteen centuries earlier. This propaganda was the classic case of convergence between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.'

Nazi propagandists adapted the central themes of Nazism's anti-Semitic propaganda to the context of the wartime Middle East. At the center of the German-centered anti-Semitic narrative lay the paranoid delusion that a political subject called "international Jewry" had organized a conspiracy to seize power in the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union and had then launched a war intended both to destroy the Nazi regime and to exterminate the German people. As Hitler said on numerous public occasions, his response to this alleged threat was to "exterminate" and "annihilate" the Jews of Europe. The Nazis thus called World War II a "Jewish war" and viewed the victory of the Allies as a victory for the Jews. In its propaganda aimed at the Middle East, the Nazis claimed that an additional aim of international Jewry and its Allied stooges was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine that would expand and threaten the entire Middle East and Islamic world. At times, they also claimed that the Jews were intent on exterminating the Arabs and Muslims in Palestine and even on seeking to "destroy" Islam. In Europe, the Nazis presented their policy of "exterminating" and "annihilating" the Jews as a desperate and justified act of self-defense." In its propaganda directed at the Middle East, they urged Arabs and Muslims to take matters into their own hands and "kill the Jews" before the Jews were able to kill them. In both its European and Middle Eastern dimensions, the propaganda rested on the identical logic of paranoia and projection.

That the North Africa campaign and propaganda aimed at the region as a whole failed to achieve its stated goals was not due to lack of effort or interest. To be sure, the primary focus of Nazi policy lay in the European continent. Nazi Germany's economic and military power was no more able to match that of the Allies in North Africa and the Middle East than it could over the skies of Germany or on the Eastern Front. Yet as the evidence of millions of leaflets and thousands of hours of radio broadcasts indicates, Hitler and his leading associates in the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Propaganda, in the SS, and in the military leadership made strenuous efforts with the resources at their disposal to export the regime's ideology in ways that they hoped would strike a nerve among Arabs and Muslims.

Fortunately, the question of how Arabs and Muslims would have responded to an Axis military victory in the Middle East remained in the realm of speculation. Yet the German, British, and American intelligence services all found evidence that there were individuals, groups, and institutions from which the Axis could have expected strong support. Ambassadors Alexander Kirk and Miles Lampson expressed a consensus among the Allies that the success or failure of propaganda appeals in the Middle East was inseparable from the outcome of the battles raging in North Africa. Far from depicting an undifferentiated view of an "Arab" or "Muslim" mentality, both Kirk and Lampson and other American and British diplomats and intelligence analysts generally, offered a highly nuanced view of the Arab and Muslim responses to Axis propaganda. Their memos are devoid of generalizations about "Arabs" or "Muslims." German officials also avoided large generalizations about "the Arabs" or "Muslims." Yet some thought that their anti-Jewish message struck a chord with particular audiences. After the war, the staff of the Historical Division of the U.S. Army requested that former General Helmut Felmy contribute to a report titled "German Exploitation of Arab Nationalist Movements in World War II" He concluded that "the only real political rallying point among the Arabs was their common hatred of Jews.."3

With the exception of Rashid Ali Kilani's short-lived pro-Axis coup in Iraq in 1941, no Arab government emerged that supported the Axis. Yet throughout the war, the Nazi regime's fierce and unwavering opposition to Zionism placed it firmly within an Arab and Islamic consensus on that issue. Those Arabs and Muslims who did support the Axis powers represented the extremist wing of a much broader anti-Zionist consensus. Although opposition to Zionism in the military and diplomatic establishment in the United States was intense, Franklin Roosevelt kept open the possibility of supporting a Jewish state when the war was over. Roosevelt's supposed subordination to the Jews had been a key theme of Nazi propaganda in Germany since the early days of the war. When the German Foreign Ministry officials discussed how best to stimulate anti-Americanism in the Middle East, they concluded that it could be done most effectively by associating Roosevelt with Zionism and the Jews. Those Arab political leaders who supported the Allies did so in spite of the Allies' apparent support for a Zionist option after the war. As American officials in the State Department and the Office of War Information became more aware of the depth of hostility to both Zionism and the Jews, they eschewed any "war of ideas" against anti-Semitism in favor of propaganda appeals that avoided such "controversial" topics as Zionism, anti-Semitism, or the murder of Jews in Europe. Yet Allied reticence about discussing the mass murder of Europe's Jews or even mentioning the subject of Zionism did not prevent Nazi propagandists from repeatedly seeking to discredit the Allied cause by associating it with the Jews.