Parallels between Nazi and Islamist Anti-Semitism

The first half of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of two distinct strains of especially virulent hatred for Jews, the “scientific,” pseudo-Darwinian racism of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and the theological anti-Semitism of the nascent Islamic revival, represented by such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood. These two groups had much in common ideologically and made natural allies during the Second World War.¹ There is one especially striking and important belief that they had in common and that deserves attention because of its relevance to current events in the Middle East, namely, the view of global Jewry as an enemy conspiring to subjugate and ultimately destroy non-Jews.

A brief description of Nazi Jew-hatred in the first section will prepare the ground for comparison with Jew-hatred in both Sunni and Shiite strains of Islamism in the second one. This article will demonstrate that both Nazism and Islamism posit a Jewish enemy with genocidal intentions vis-à-vis non-Jews and meriting a genocidal response in return.

Hitler on the Jews

In his erudite and prophetic study Hitler’s Apocalypse: Jews and the Nazi Legacy, the late Robert Wistrich lays out in chilling detail Hitler’s “politics of either-or”:

This either-or, which formed the central core of Hitler’s ideology and sense of mission, was built on an essentially religious perception of the world – one that resembles ancient Manichean and Gnostic heresies within Christianity. Hitler’s struggle against the Jews was in fact conceived as an eschatological war of the Forces of Light against a fiendish enemy whose agents were everywhere hell-bent on the destruction of Germany and of the “Aryan” races.… There were only two possible outcomes in this life-and-death struggle [with the Jews]. “Either the enemy will walk over our corpses, or we will walk over his.”²

For Hitler, “the resurgence of Germany and the destruction of the Jews were organically related processes.”³  The war against the Jews was “an encounter of cosmic significance between two antagonistic forces fighting a life-and-death struggle for world domination. No neutrality was possible and no quarter could be given, for Jewry did not represent a partial defect in society that could be corrected but a totality of evils which spelled the doom of ‘Aryan’ man and his culture unless the Jew was eradicated.”⁴

For Hitler, therefore, the stakes in this struggle could not possibly have been higher. The ultimate objective of the Jews was “the enslavement of German labour power to Jewish finance.”⁵

As early as 1922 Hitler insisted that in this clash of ideologies there were only two possibilities: “either the victory of the Aryan or the annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.” The victory of “Jewish Bolshevism” would mean nothing less than the complete destruction of “Aryan” humanity and the ruin of civilization. Again and again, throughout his political career, Hitler would return to this simple formula which for him encapsulated the stark choice that was eventually to justify the Holocaust. In a speech on 30 January 1942, six months after the programme of systematic mass murder had begun, he declared that “the war can end only in that either the Aryan peoples are annihilated or Jewry would disappear from Europe.”⁶

Hitler’s view of the Jews as the diabolical agents of a global plot to destroy the German people was thus a key component driving him to embrace genocide as “the final solution of the Jewish question.”

More recently, in his meticulous study of Nazi propaganda, Jeffrey Herf has reached exactly the same conclusion that Wistrich reached in 1985. Herf shows that the Nazi allegation of an international Jewish conspiracy to annihilate the German people was a central component of Nazi propaganda, and indeed a sincerely held belief of the top Nazi leaders.⁷ In his diary entry for March 27, 1942, for example, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, wrote: “If we hadn’t defended ourselves against them, the Jews would exterminate us. It is a battle of life or death between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.”⁸ In his diary entry for November 2, 1941, Goebbels wrote:  “The Jews are the lice of civilized humanity. They have to be exterminated somehow.… When you spare them, you subsequently become their victim.”⁹ According to Herf, this paranoid conviction that the Jews posed an existential threat to Germany and its people “remained an enduring leitmotif of Nazi propaganda and a key public justification for its murderous policy toward the Jews.”¹⁰

Hitler’s “either-or” was based on his reading of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery most likely concocted by agents of the Czarist Russian secret police in the late 19^th or early 20^th century.¹¹ The Protocols depict the Jews as conspiring to dominate the world and as being “interested in…the diminution, the killing out of the goyim [i.e., non-Jews]” (emphasis in the original).¹² The Protocols also represent the Jews as asserting that “when we come into our kingdom, it will be undesirable for us that there should exist any other religion than ours…. We must therefore sweep away all other forms of belief.”¹³ It is with good reason that the Protocols has been called a “warrant for genocide.”¹⁴ In his classic study of the Protocols, Norman Cohn writes: “…the deadliest kind of antisemitism, the kind that results in massacre and attempted genocide, has little to do with real conflicts of interest between living people, or even with racial prejudice itself. At its heart lies the belief that Jews – all Jews everywhere – form a conspiratorial body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind.”¹⁵ The first German translations of the Protocols appeared in 1919 and 1920 and were instantly embraced by Hitler and his far-right German nationalist colleagues; as of 1934 Hitler made the Protocols required reading in German schools, and the allegation of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate and ruin non-Jews became central to Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust.¹⁶

The “Either-Or” of Islamist Jew-Hatred

If we turn to the writings of key Islamists of the 20^th century, we find repeated over and over again the claim that there is a global Jewish conspiracy to destroy Muslims, the Islamic faith, and Islamic culture. We also find a clear link between this belief and calls for genocide against Jews and Israelis.

Hajj Amin al-Husseini

We begin with Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem under the British Mandate and by far the most respected and powerful leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the 1920s through the 1940s. Indeed, in the words of one of his biographers, he was “the founder of the Palestinian national movement.”¹⁷

In 1937, Hajj Amin al-Husseini issued a “Proclamation to the Muslim World” as a way of rallying Muslim opposition to the Zionist project in Palestine generally, and to the British Peel Commission’s partition proposal specifically. Already in the 1920s, Husseini had begun invoking the Protocols to foment violence against the Jews in Palestine,¹⁸ but his 1937 “Proclamation” draws almost entirely on the Islamic tradition for its anti-Jewish polemics. The opening line of this document states: “Since the earliest days of their history, the Jews have been an oppressed people and there must be good reason for that. As far back as the Egyptian pharaohs, energetic oppressive measures had to be taken against the Jews….”¹⁹ The Mufti places the struggle with the Zionists in the context of Islamic history. “This battle of Jews against Arabs is nothing new; the venue has just changed over time. The Jews hate Muhammad and Islam…. The battle between the Jews and Islam began when Muhammad fled from Mecca to Medina….”²⁰ After numerous references to anti-Jewish passages in the Koran, the traditional accounts of Muhammad’s life, and the sayings of Muhammad (hadith), the Mufti concludes as follows: “I present to my Muslim brothers in the entire world the history and the true experience which the Jews cannot deny. The verses from the Koran and hadith prove to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. They know only hypocrisy and guile. Hold together, fight for Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews” (emphasis added).²¹ Here we see al-Husseini addressing not only Palestinians and Arabs but Muslims the world over, telling them that they are involved in a fight for their religion and their very existence against a Jewish (not Zionist) enemy whose goal is to destroy Islam.

The Mufti’s “Proclamation” is described by Jeffrey Herf²² and Matthias Küntzel²³ as one of the foundational documents of 20th-century Islamism.  Herf observes that al-Husseini’s 1937 “Proclamation,” written only four years after the Nazis’ rise to power and well before al-Husseini’s arrival in Berlin in 1941, “was not a result of the impact of an external force, Nazism, with Husseini a passive receptor…. Husseini’s text of 1937…is evidence that Islamism as a distinct political ideology had begun to take shape as a result of his own intellectual labors and those of other Islamist radicals in the 1930s.”²⁴

From 1941 to 1945, Hajj Amin al-Husseini lived in Nazi Germany where he served the Nazi war effort in many ways, including the broadcast of Nazi propaganda to the Arab world. In his radio broadcasts and leaflets, al-Husseini repeated his allegation that “the Jews” wished to “wipe out the Arabs and Islam.”²⁵ The Jews believed that “everything had been created for their sake” and that “other men are animals which could be used for their own purposes.”²⁶ The Jews “have been the enemies of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence.”²⁷ The Nazis eagerly took up this refrain in other Arabic-language radio broadcasts, portraying World War II as “a war for the survival of the Arabs and Islam.”²⁸ The high stakes in this existential struggle for the survival of Islam dictated an appropriately aggressive response, as called for by the Mufti in his Nazi radio broadcasts. Muhammad “drove the Jews completely out of the Arab countries.” In so doing, he “gave us a great example.”²⁹ Tolerance toward the Jews was “a stupid plan and a shameful crime against the fatherland.… [The only solution is the] expulsion of all the Jews from all the Arab countries. This is the only remedy. It is what the Prophet did thirteen centuries ago.”³⁰

Al-Husseini often went beyond calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Muslim lands and openly incited genocide. “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion” (emphasis in the original).³¹ In November 1943, when the Holocaust was in full swing, al-Husseini informed his audience that the Germans had “decided to find a definitive solution to the Jewish danger,” and he urged all Arabs and Muslims to join the Germans in this “common battle against the Jewish danger.”³²

In 1954, Hajj Amin al-Husseini published a series of articles on “the Palestine problem” in an Egyptian newspaper affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Misri.³³ There was, as Brynjar Lia has written, “a lasting friendship between the Muslim Brothers and the Grand Mufti of Palestine.”³⁴ Indeed, in 1947, knowing full well what al-Husseini had said in his Nazi radio broadcasts to the Middle East, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, appointed the Mufti leader of the Brotherhood in Palestine and al-Banna’s deputy.³⁵ In his 1954 essays, published later as a book, al-Husseini wrote that

the Zionist problem is…a very serious problem, which threatens not only Palestine, but rather all Arab countries. The damage it wreaks is not only occupation and control, rather a most basic threat to Arab existence in the entire Middle East, including its independence, sovereignty, holy places, beliefs, and other foundations. Our battle with World Jewry…is a crucial and most important battle, and we must know that it is a question of life and death, a battle between two conflicting faiths, each of which can exist only on the ruins of the other.”³⁶ (emphasis added)

Here we find al-Husseini’s Islamist version of Hitler’s stark “either-or”: either the Muslims will annihilate the Jews, or the Jews will annihilate the Muslims. The Mufti’s language allows no middle position. The Mufti insisted that “reconciliation with the Jews is suicidal for the Arab nation,” and he rejected utterly (in 1954) “the peace that the English, the Americans and the Jews are trying to achieve based on present circumstances in Palestine,” for such a peace “spells suicide for the Arab nation and ruin for the future and the independence of the Arab countries.”³⁷ Arabs and Muslims must never again make the mistake of underestimating the “Jewish-colonialist plot,” the danger that “the Jewish conspiracy poses to the Arab nation,” or “the ancient hatred harboured by the Jews” for Muslims and Arabs.³⁸

The Muslim Brotherhood: Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb

From the time he founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949) made opposition to Zionism a top priority for his organization. In the words of historian Abd al-Fattah El-Awaisi, “…the Muslim Brothers proclaimed that ‘Jews are the historic enemies of Muslims and carry the greatest hatred for the nation of Muhammad.’ As such, the Muslim Brothers professed to see no difference between Judaism and Zionism.”³⁹ The Muslim Brotherhood held that a Zionist state would threaten the entire Arab and Islamic world because it would aspire to control the whole Middle East, including the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, while spreading apostasy and permissiveness everywhere.⁴⁰

In the early 1950s, at roughly the same time that al-Husseini was writing the articles quoted above, another important Muslim Brotherhood thinker, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote his influential book Our Struggle with the Jews. Jeffrey Herf points out that this 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.”⁴¹ In this book, Qutb wrote that “the Muslim community continues to suffer from the same Jewish machinations and double-dealing which discomfited the early Muslims.”⁴² Nothing has changed in 1,400 years, according to Qutb. “The Jews continue – through their wickedness and double-dealing – to lead this (Muslim) community away from its religion and to alienate it from its Qur’an.”⁴³ The Jews “from the first moment” have deceived and plotted against the Muslims, and “this conspiracy continues uninterruptedly.”⁴⁴ The agents of Zionism “agree with each other on one issue…which is the destruction of this (Islamic) creed…” (emphasis added).⁴⁵ “Therefore: 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)” (emphasis added).⁴⁶ So wicked are the Jews that Allah has repeatedly had to send “his servants” to rule over them and punish them. “Then Allah brought Hitler to rule over them. And once again today the Jews have returned to evildoing, in the form of ‘Israel’… So let Allah bring down upon the Jews people who will mete out to them the worst kind of punishment.…”⁴⁷

The Muslim Brotherhood: Hamas

The worldview of Hajj Amin al-Husseini and Sayyid Qutb lives on, for it is the worldview of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, which adopted the name of Hamas in 1987-88.⁴⁸ As German political scientist Matthias Küntzel has pointed out, Hamas is the true ideological heir to Hajj Amin al-Husseini in the Palestinian community.⁴⁹ In its statement of foundational principles, the Hamas Covenant (or Charter), Hamas asserts that there is a vast Zionist conspiracy, comprising B’nai B’rith, the Freemasons, the Lions Club, and the Rotary Club, among others, which controls the international media and financial system.⁵⁰ This conspiracy was behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution, and World Wars I and II; indeed, “Wherever there is war in the world, it is they who are pulling the strings behind the scenes.”⁵¹ Article 32 of the Covenant states: “Their plan is expounded in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion….” This conspiracy is “hostile to humanity and to Islam,”⁵² and “their aim is to break societies, undermine values, destroy people’s honor, create moral degeneration and annihilate Islam. [Zionism] is behind all types of trafficking in drugs and alcohol, so as to make it easier for it to take control and expand” (emphasis added).⁵³ Given that Hamas’ Zionist adversary allegedly aims to “annihilate Islam,” it is no understatement when the Hamas Covenant points out that “our fight with the Jews is very extensive and very grave….”⁵⁴ Contrary to what some authors have written, the Hamas Covenant still accurately reflects the thinking of the Hamas leadership.⁵⁵

Here we find a virtual carbon copy of Hitler’s paranoid conviction that a Jewish conspiracy aimed to destroy the German people, transposed into an Islamic context with the aim now being the annihilation of Islam. Like the Mufti before it, Hamas concludes from the gravity of the threat to Islam that no peace with the Zionist/Jewish enemy is possible. Article 13 of the Hamas Covenant states: “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are a waste of time and a farce.”

In May 2017, Hamas released “A Document of General Principles and Policies” in which it made the following statement: “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”⁵⁶ There are at least six reasons for not taking this claim seriously.

First, anti-Semitism is central to Hamas propaganda, as documented copiously below, and Hamas has not renounced or ceased producing such propaganda. For example, in April 2017, just as Hamas was about to release its May 2017 “Document,” Hamas member of the Palestinian legislature Marwan Abu Ras gave a Friday sermon at a mosque in the Gaza Strip in which he said, “History attests that in every era, the Jews were the most abhorred of people. Throughout history, the most hated race was the Jewish race…. Why did [Hitler] hate the Jews? Because they are a people of treachery and betrayal…. Therefore, we can never accept the Jews….”⁵⁷ Bear in mind that the speaker was a Hamas elected official and that sermons at Gaza Strip mosques are strictly monitored and controlled by Hamas and staffed by Hamas appointees.

Second, Hamas has made it clear that it has not revoked its 1988 Covenant, which remains its statement of foundational principles.⁵⁸

Third, strictly speaking, the Hamas Covenant of 1988 focused its anti-Semitic language on Zionists, for example, describing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the blueprint for the Zionist project (Article 32) and accusing the Zionists of aiming to “annihilate Islam” (Article 28). The May 2017 “Document” continues in this vein, albeit in somewhat less florid language, asserting that “the Zionist project does not target the Palestinian people alone; it is the enemy of the Arabic and Islamic Ummah posing a grave threat to its security and interests. It is also hostile to the Ummah’s aspirations for unity, renaissance, and liberation and has been the major source of its troubles. The Zionist project also poses a danger to international security and peace and to mankind….” (#15). As in the 1988 Covenant, the 2017 “Document” merely takes all the classical tropes of anti-Semitism and focuses them on Zionism, noting that “it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity” (#16). In effect, Hamas is saying that it is at war with all Jews except those who are anti-Zionist, thus it is not anti-Semitic. This can hardly be regarded as a serious repudiation of anti-Semitism.

Fourth, the release of the May 2017 “Document” coincides with a tightening of the grip of hardliners on the Hamas Politbureau.⁵⁹ These include former Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hammad, who told Al Jazeera TV on September 16, 2016: “I address the American people: Is it conceivable that a handful of Jews control your policies, your military, your money, and everything…? We have five million of the Zionist enemy here [in Israel], and they control the world. Perhaps there are ten million more of them in America. These ten million control over 280 million Americans.”⁶⁰ Hammad’s use of the term Zionist in this statement as a synonym for “Jew” makes his anti-Semitism as clear as can be.  And in an interview on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV on December 14, 2010, Fathi Hammad made no pretense of focusing on “Zionists,” asserting: “The Jews have become abhorred and loathed outcasts, because they live off of corruption and the plundering of the peoples – not only the Arab and Islamic peoples, but all the peoples of the world.”⁶¹ The suggestion that leaders such as Fathi Hammad have abandoned anti-Semitism is hardly credible.

Fifth, Hamas has a well-documented history of dissembling, especially when addressing non-Muslims. In 1993, as revealed by FBI surveillance, Hamas operatives met in Philadelphia to establish a front in the United States, which they would call the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR.⁶² The Hamas officials at the 1993 Philadelphia meeting called for outright dishonesty to mask the true agenda of CAIR. “I swear by Allah that war is deception,” said one, quoting the Prophet Muhammad.⁶³ “Deceive, camouflage, pretend…. Deceive your enemy…politics is a completion of war.”⁶⁴ This kind of duplicity is a standard part of the Muslim Brotherhood modus operandi in Western countries. In a 2004 investigative report on the Brotherhood in the United States, the Chicago Tribune noted: “Documents obtained by the Tribune and translated from Arabic show that the U.S. Brotherhood has been careful to obscure its beliefs from outsiders.”⁶⁵ To better deceive their American audience, the Brotherhood/Hamas operatives in Philadelphia decided to create a new organization, one whose “Islamic hue is not very conspicuous…. Let’s not hoist a large Islamic flag and let’s not be barbaric-talking,”⁶⁶ as one participant put it. Yet when addressing fellow Muslims, Hamas operatives speak their mind openly, as when Hamas military leader Sheikh Muhammad Siyam told an audience in Los Angeles in 1994, “I’m going to speak the truth to you. It’s simple. Finish off the Israelis! Kill them all! Exterminate them! No peace ever!”⁶⁷ The May 2017 “Document” gives Hamas rhetorical flexibility: when addressing true believers, they can stress that the Hamas Covenant of 1988 remains in full force; and when addressing gullible Westerners, they can switch gears and insist (insincerely) that their dispute is only with “Zionists” not Jews qua Jews.

Finally, there is the unmistakable fact that the May 2017 “Document of General Principles and Policies” proclaims Hamas’ intention to commit politicide against the world’s only Jewish state. It makes it clear that “Palestine” encompasses the entire former British Mandate, including Israel proper as well as the West Bank and Gaza: “Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the West…is an integral territorial unit” (#2); “Palestine is an Arab Islamic land” (#3). The goal of Hamas is “to liberate Palestine” so defined (#1); “There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity” (#19); “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea,” although it considers the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, including a full “right of return” for the Palestinian “refugees,” as a “formula for national consensus,” a mere description without any endorsement (#20). Any establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, however, will be a mere step toward the full “liberation” of “Palestine,” and such a (partial) Palestinian state will be a staging ground for ceaseless war against Israel, since “resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honour for all the sons and daughters of our people and our Ummah [i.e., the whole Muslim world]” (#23; cf. #25-27). Hamas also makes clear its ongoing commitment to building up its military capacity and waging terrorism against Israelis: “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws….” (#25) and “Hamas rejects any attempt to undermine the resistance and its arms. It also affirms the right of our people to develop the means and mechanisms of resistance” (#26).

Given what is at stake in this war against the Jews – the very survival of Islam, on which the salvation of the world depends – the leaders of Hamas, like Hitler and Hajj Amin al-Husseini before them, call openly for genocide as the only commensurate response. Consider a few representative examples, all taken from the official Hamas TV station, Al-Aqsa TV.

On July 25, 2014, Al Aqsa TV aired a mosque sermon from the Deir al-Balah Mosque in the Gaza Strip, in which the preacher said: “Our doctrine in fighting you (the Jews) is that we will totally exterminate you. We will not leave a single one of you alive, because you are alien usurpers of the land and eternal mercenaries.… Wherever the Jews lived, they spread corruption.”⁶⁸

On May 2, 2014, a Hamas children’s show on Al-Aqsa TV included the following exchange between a little girl and the child host and moderator:

Child host (Rawan): “Tulin, why do you want to be a police officer? Like who?”
Girl (Tulin): “Like my uncle…”
Child host: “OK, so what does a policeman do?”
Nahul (adult in giant bee costume): “He catches thieves and people who make trouble.”
Child host: “And shoots Jews. Right?”
Girl: “Yes.”
Child host: “You want to be like him?”
[Girl nods]
Child host: “Allah willing, when you grow up.”
Girl: “So that I can shoot Jews.”
[Nahul the bee cheers]
Child host: “All of them? All of them?”
Girl: “Yes.”
Child host: “Good.”⁶⁹

On August 10, 2012, Al-Aqsa TV aired a sermon delivered by Deputy Speaker of the Hamas Parliament Ahmad Bahr, in which he said, “Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count them one by one and kill them all, without leaving a single one.”⁷⁰

On May 16, 2011, Hamas Member of Parliament and cleric Yunis al-Astal made the following comments in an interview aired on Al- Aqsa TV:

The [Jews] are brought in droves to Palestine so that the Palestinians – and the Islamic nation behind them – will have the honor of annihilating the evil of this gang.… All the predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews.… In just a few years, all the Zionists and all the settlers will realize that their arrival in Palestine was for the purpose of the great massacre, by means of which Allah wants to relieve humanity of their evil.⁷¹

Al-Aqsa TV broadcast a public address by the foreign minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza, Mahmoud al-Zahar, on November 5, 2010, in which al-Zahar made the following statements:

Why did France, in 1253, expel and uproot the Jewish entity, which was represented by the ghetto? Why did they expel them? Because they sucked the blood of the French, because they shed the blood of the French, slaughtered them, stole their money, and conspired against them. At the end of the day, the French had no choice but to expel them in 1253. [Al-Zahar goes on to make the same assertion about the expulsion of Jews from other medieval European countries, from ancient Egypt, and from Germany under Hitler]… The series of expulsions continues to this day. Blood continues to be shed, martyrs continue to fall, our sons continue to hoist the banner high, and Allah willing, their expulsion from Palestine in its entirety is certain to come. We are no weaker or less honorable than the peoples that expelled and annihilated the Jews. The day we expel them is drawing near…. We have learned the lesson – there is no place for you among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation.⁷²

On February 8, 2010, Al-Aqsa TV ran an interview with Abdallah Jarbu, the Hamas deputy minister of religious endowments (the ministry responsible for staffing and supervising mosques in the Gaza Strip), in which Jarbu said:

[The Jews] suffer from a mental disorder, because they are thieves and aggressors.… They want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but in fact, they are foreign bacteria – a microbe unparalleled in the world. It’s not me who says this. The Koran itself says they have no parallel: “You shall find the strongest men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews.” May He [Allah] annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience. I condemn whoever believes in normalizing relations with them, whoever supports sitting down with them, and whoever believes they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people. They have no religion, no conscience, and no moral values.⁷³

Many more examples of extreme anti-Semitic statements from Hamas officials and Hamas media outlets, including more incitement of genocide, can be found in this footnote.⁷⁴

The Muslim Brotherhood: Yusuf al-Qaradawi

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, “easily one of the most admired and best-known representatives of Sunni Islam today,”⁷⁵ accepted as the highest religious authority by Hamas and the global Muslim Brotherhood,⁷⁶ has also asserted that Hitler meted out divinely sanctioned punishment to the Jews and has called for Muslims to impose a similar punishment, calling openly for genocide (“kill them, down to the very last one”).⁷⁷ His appeals for genocide are coupled with paranoid conspiracy thinking that identifies the Jews as the greatest enemies of Islam; alleges a Jewish plot to take over the entire Middle East, including Mecca and Medina; blames the Jews for the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate in 1924 and the spread of communism; and accuses the Jews of planning to tear down the al-Aqsa Mosque so as to build a Jewish Temple in its place.⁷⁸

The Islamic Republic of Iran

The influence of the Muslim Brotherhood extends far beyond the Arab portion of the Muslim world. It has also left its mark on the Persian-speaking Shiite community in Iran. The Ayatollah Khomeini met representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s and read the writings of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Brotherhood.⁷⁹ One of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s heroes, indeed a hero to the entire current leadership of Iran, was Sayyed Muhammad Navab-Safavi, founder of a terrorist movement in the 1940s and 1950s dedicated to imposing an Islamic state in Iran. Navab-Safavi was an admirer of the Muslim Brotherhood who met with Sayyid Qutb.⁸⁰ Like Qutb, Navab-Safavi taught that “the Cross-worshippers of the West and the Jews who really guide them have only one objective: to eliminate Islam.”⁸¹ Qutb’s written works “inspired…the Iranian students who helped bring Khomeini to power.…”⁸² The current Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a “devoted admirer of Sayyid Qutb”⁸³ who translated his works into Persian.⁸⁴ The Twelver Shiites of Iran had their own tradition of Jew-hatred⁸⁵ and perhaps did not need extra instruction from Sunnis like Sayyid Qutb, but they were nonetheless eager pupils, as Iranian anti-Semitic propaganda makes clear. Like Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Sayyid Qutb, and Hamas, the Iranian leadership is convinced that they are locked in a life-or-death struggle with a World Jewry that is conspiring to destroy the Islamic faith and Islamic civilization.

In his biography of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian journalist and scholar Amir Taheri writes: “The Ayatollah was…convinced that the central political theme of contemporary life was an elaborate and highly complex conspiracy by the Jews – ‘who controlled everything’ – to ‘emasculate Islam’ and dominate the world thanks to the natural wealth of the Muslim nations.”⁸⁶ Khomeini repeatedly accused the Jews, and Israel, of attempting to destroy the Islamic faith.⁸⁷ Khomeini taught his followers that the Jews “would never be satisfied with anything less than world domination.”⁸⁸ He was therefore committed to “the cause of physically destroying the Jewish state and forcing its inhabitants out of the Middle East….”⁸⁹ Khomeini also taught that “America, dominated by ‘evil Jews,’ is Islam’s arch-enemy.…”⁹⁰ Thus the chants of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America,” still heard routinely on Iranian streets and encouraged by top Iranian leaders,⁹¹ are more than mere rhetoric. If the Jews control Israel and America and are plotting to destroy Islam, humanity’s only hope for salvation, then destroying Israel and America becomes a clear moral obligation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Indeed, Khomeini’s anti-Semitic legacy is alive and well in Iran and has become a central component of the Iranian regime’s worldview. Anti-Semitic messages from senior officials and the major Iranian media “typically denounce Jews at large, attribute to them unique negative characteristics, and depict them as an eternal force for evil and the root of evil in the world since ancient times – perceptions which have their theological and psychological roots in early Islamic traditions.”⁹² Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2010, for example, denied that Israeli Jews are even human, asserting that they “only appear to be human,” and anyway, since they are atheists, they “are not entitled to man’s minimal rights.”⁹³ The warrant for genocide could not be clearer. Ahmadinejad is joined in this Jew-hatred by so-called “moderates” such as the late former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who at the annual Jerusalem Day in 2007 explained to his audience that the Nazis’ “first objective was to free Europe of the evils of Zionism,” and this was entirely justified, because “the Zionists…constituted a strong political party in Europe, causing much disorder there. Since the Zionists had a lot of property and controlled an empire of propaganda, they made the European governments helpless.”⁹⁴ Here we see retrospective justification of Nazi persecution of the Jews, the complete obliteration of any distinction between Judaism and Zionism, and the assumption of an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy.

Mehdi Taeb (also spelled Mahdi Tayeb), head of the Ammar Base think tank and adviser to Supreme Leader Khamenei, delivered a public address in Iran in 2013 in which he said:

The one thing the Jews want is to take over the entire world….They have divided the world into three classes: first-class people, second-class people, and third-class people. The Jews, or the Israelite race, are the first-class people. God created the world for them.… He told them to take over the world. The second-class people are people who do not belong to the Israelite race…but who accept the Jews to be first-class people.… They have the right to live, but they must serve the Israelites.… Who are the third-class people? They are the ones who do not belong to the Israelite people, and do not accept Jewish supremacy…. What do they deserve? They deserve [to be buried] one meter underground. Therefore, all the Muslims must be killed because they do not accept Jewish supremacy. They must all be killed.…The only ones who need an atomic bomb in order to become global are the Jews.… In order to become global the Jews must kill Muslims en masse. In other words, they have to kill 1.4 billion people…. So they need means of mass killing…. Do you know who invented the atomic bomb? Einstein… [In] the history of world politics, he was one of the most despicable figures. He was a Zionist, a Jew, one of the founders of the state of Israel.⁹⁵

In 2014, Mehdi Taeb gave a Friday mosque sermon, posted online several times since, in which he said that the Jews are working to block the return of the Hidden Imam, the apocalyptic figure who will usher in the end times according to Shiite doctrine.⁹⁶

The Iranian regime, which practices strict control of the press, nevertheless permits the publication of Persian translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf.⁹⁷ Meir Litvak, a leading expert on modern Iran, notes that

state-run Iranian television regularly broadcasts documentaries and drama shows based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Such programs claim that the State of Israel was founded on the basis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which exposed the Jewish plot to take over the world. The programs also depict Jews as murderers, bloodthirsty demons, and criminals. Iranian television also accused the Jews of being involved in the September 11 attacks on the US.⁹⁸

An example of Iranian anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking is a speech given by then-Vice-President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi at an international antidrug conference in Tehran in 2012. Rahimi asserted that the Talmud was responsible for the spread of illegal drugs around the world, because the Talmud teaches to “destroy everyone who opposes the Jews.” According to Rahimi, the international drug trade is under the control of “the Zionists,” who also started the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. According to the New York Times, “He also said the Talmud teaches Jews to think that they are a superior race. ‘They think God has created the world so that all other nations can serve them,’ he said.”⁹⁹

Holocaust denial is another important aspect of the anti-Semitism of the Iranian regime. Matthias Küntzel explains the significance of Holocaust denial: “To claim that ‘Auschwitz’ is a myth is to accuse ‘the Jews’ of deceiving humanity for the past 60 years in pursuit of filthy lucre. To talk of the ‘so-called Holocaust’ is to imply that over 90% of the world’s academic posts and media are controlled by ‘the Jews’ and are hermetically protected from the ‘real’ truth. Every denial of the Holocaust therefore implicitly contains within it the demand for its repetition.”¹⁰⁰ Holocaust denial is thus an integral part of the Iranian regime’s paranoid conspiracy thinking, which posits a nefarious and all-powerful international Jewish/Zionist conspiracy. Meir Litvak makes the same point and adds that Iranian Holocaust denial “aims to demolish the legitimacy of the Jewish state, which is allegedly based on the Holocaust myth.”¹⁰¹

The repeated threats of Iranian leaders to obliterate the state of Israel and its people must be understood as logical implications of the claim that there is a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to destroy Islam and that Israel is the spearhead of this conspiracy in the heart of the Muslim world.  For example, on December 31, 1999, Supreme Leader Khamenei stated before tens of thousands at a Jerusalem Day rally in Tehran, “There is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Zionist state.”¹⁰² Another example is the statement by the so-called “moderate” Rafsanjani, who on December 14, 2001, said, “The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy Israel, while [the same] against the Islamic world would only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable.”¹⁰³ Dozens more examples of explicit Iranian threats to destroy Israel can be found in this footnote.¹⁰⁴ The genocidal implications of Iran’s state-sponsored anti-Semitic propaganda are crystal clear.

Hizbullah

Hizbullah (literally “The Party of God”) is an armed Lebanese Shiite political movement founded in 1982 that has “assimilated the doctrine of the Islamic Republic of Iran totally and pledged allegiance to its leader, Ayatollah Khomeyni [or Khomeini], and his heir, ‘Ali Khamaneh’i [or Khamenei].”¹⁰⁵ For Hizbullah, “The struggle with Israel and the Jews is a total life-or-death war,” a modern continuation of the historical struggle between Judaism and Islam dating back to the founding of Islam.¹⁰⁶ According to Hizbullah leaders, “either we destroy Israel or Israel destroys us,”¹⁰⁷ “the Jews are the enemy of the entire human race,”¹⁰⁸ and “the struggle with the Jews is a struggle for Islamic survival.”¹⁰⁹ Hizbullah alludes to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion repeatedly in its propaganda.¹¹⁰ Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, has repeatedly denied Israel’s right to exist, threatened to wipe out Israel, and stated in 2002 that “if they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”¹¹¹

Conclusion

Writing in 1985, Robert Wistrich noted the flourishing of an extreme form of Jew-hatred in the Muslim world with strong affinities to the Nazi version. He wrote: “The evidence I have been able to marshal concerning the continuity of a radical and murderous antisemitism into the post-war era convinced me that we are dealing with a highly dangerous and fateful phenomenon which may possibly determine the future of our planet.”¹¹²

In 1995, Martin Kramer noted that

there is a belief among many Muslims that Jews everywhere, in league with Israel, are behind a sinister plot to destroy Islam…. Wherever they may be, the Jews are linked together in a sinister plot, not merely to maintain the state of Israel, but to undermine and eradicate Islam…. At stake here, then, is not Palestinian land or even Jerusalem, but Islamic culture itself. Here is a view of Jew and Muslim locked in a total confrontation which will continue until one side completely subjugates the other.¹¹³

Since Kramer wrote those words in 1995, the evidence of growing Islamic and Islamist Jew-hatred, already substantial, has continued to accumulate.¹¹⁴ In 2006, Abu Musab al-Suri, a veteran of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who became one of Al Qaeda’s top strategists, wrote a highly influential manifesto in which he accused the Jews (and “Crusaders”) of aiming at “the total elimination of the civilizational, religious, political, economic, social, and cultural existence of Muslims.”¹¹⁵ In 2015, Esther Webman, one of the world’s leading scholars of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism, wrote: “The alleged eternal enmity of the Jews to Islam is dominant in Islamist thought today, suggesting a justification for genocidal measures against them to free humanity from their evil.”¹¹⁶ The stark “either-or” of Adolf Hitler, which led to genocide against the Jews, lives on today in the minds of millions of Muslims, including the Muslims in Iran who are clearly working to acquire nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles even as they threaten to obliterate the world’s only Jewish state, Israel, and its chief supporter, the United States, which they regard as equally Jewish and thus equally worthy of destruction.

Even as extreme anti-Semitism thrives across the Islamic world, the U.S. foreign policy, intelligence, defense, journalistic, and academic establishments largely ignore it, as if it had no relevance to an understanding of current events or national security challenges. “Read through State Department telegrams and Central Intelligence Agency operational and intelligence cables on the Middle East,” the CIA veteran Reuel Marc Gerecht observes, “and you will seldom find it discussed, even though Jew-hatred – not just anti-Zionism – has been a significant aspect, if not a core component, of modern Arab nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, and what usually passes for critical thought among sophisticated Arab elites.”¹¹⁷ The reason for this persistent and dangerous blind spot is that the academic establishment that educates U.S. policymakers, journalists, and intelligence analysts systematically ignores the phenomenon of Islamic anti-Semitism, preferring instead to focus obsessively on the moral failings of white, Western societies, as Neil J. Kressel and Samuel W. Kressel have rigorously documented.¹¹⁸ As Ofira Seliktar notes in discussing the chronic failures of U.S. Iran policy since 1979, these failures can be traced in no small measure to the fact that “the paradigms that drive American foreign policy are generated by a scholarly community often highly politicized and out of touch with reality.”¹¹⁹ The smart money will bet on further failures, since the American academic establishment shows no sign of waking from its dogmatic slumber.

Cartoon from Summer 2016 Holocaust Cartoon Contest held in Iran¹²⁰

Fatah cartoon: Long-nosed Jew explodes Muslim world

Fatah Information and Culture Commission website, July 28, 2016.¹²¹

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Notes