Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (48 page)

Nazi propaganda everywhere, including in the Middle East, was not only a set of assertions about events. It also offered daily examples of how to think about the world in a conspiratorial and paranoid manner. The international Jewish conspiracy became the dens ex machina that explained all of the events of contemporary history. In the aftermath of World War II, and then in the aftermath of Israel's victory in the War of Independence in 1948, such leaders as Haj Amin el-Husseini and Hassan al-Banna could point to Israel's emergence as confirmation of Nazism's wartime predictions. The Allies had won the war. The Jewish state had been established. Jewish sovereignty now existed in what the believers saw as exclusively Islamic territory. Did this not prove how powerful the Jews were? How else could one explain the astonishing fact of the existence of the State of Israel? As my brief examination of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Arab attitudes toward Israel in the 1950s indicated, continuity with the conspiracy theories that came daily from Radio Berlin extended beyond the Islamist fringe and included Egypt's President Nasser and official publications of his and other Arab governments. The fact that Nasser hired the former Nazi propagandist Johann von Leers to work for Egyptian information agencies in the 195os demonstrated his willingness to support ideas and ways of thinking about Israel and the Jews that had their roots in Nazi ideology and propaganda.

An adequate examination of the impact, reception, and aftereffects of Nazism's Arabic-language propaganda is beyond the scope of this work. In the decades since World War II, the passions of anti-imperialism have shifted attention away from the issue of the diffusion of elements of fascist and Nazi ideology beyond their European origins. The issue of the lineages between and diffusion of Nazism and fascism to the Middle East and the reception and intermingling of those ideas in postwar Arab secular and religious radicalism should be an important item on the agenda of scholars whose expertise lies in the study of Arab and Islamist politics. The present work, I hope, will contribute to advancing such research and writing. The history of Europe's impact on the non-European world in the long era of colonialism and imperialism has been thoroughly examined. Though comparatively brief, the history of the impact of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism on the Arab and Islamic world as well as the history of its aftermath has received less attention. The need to do so in this case is particularly acute as the Nazis used the language of anti-imperialism in order to facilitate their own plans for military expansion, occupation, and imperialism.'

The Allied victories in Iraq in 1941 and in North Africa in 1942 and 1943 ended Nazi Germany's armed presence in the Middle East and North Africa. They also prevented Hitler from implementing plans to extend the Final Solu tion to the 700,000 Jews then living in the region. Yet despite military defeat, Nazism left traces behind, especially traces of hatred of the Jews that drew on the distinctly European traditions of radical anti-Semitism. The evidence of the immediate postwar years in the Middle East examined in this book lends plausibility to the thesis of continuity and lineages between Nazism's Arabiclanguage propaganda, on the one hand, and radical Islam in the subsequent decades, on the other. The thesis of continuity does not mean that Islamism was (or is) identical to Nazism. It does, however, suggest that one chapter of its history was written in Nazi-dominated Europe and in particular in wartime Berlin. The diffusion of Nazi ideology and in particular of radical anti-Semitism struck a nerve because it expressed ideas that connected to the indigenous traditions being selectively received and accentuated by Arab and Islamist ideologues. Just as Nazism briefly expanded beyond its Eurocentric origins, so militant Islam in the twentieth century should be understood as one result of the interactions of cultural and ideological traditions from different parts of the globe. In wartime Berlin, pro-Nazi Arab exiles worked together with officials of the Nazi regime to rearrange and reinvigorate components of already existing elements of the religion of Islam and of Arab nationalism. As a result, hatred of the Jews, which was discredited in the mainstream politics of postwar and post-Holocaust Europe, found renewed life when embedded in very different cultural, religious, and political traditions and contexts of the Middle East. The Third Reich was short-lived. Tragically, traces of the ideological diffusion examined in these pages have had a much longer life.

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