74 No. 73 JUSTICE hile it has long been a staple of anti-Israel propaganda that Muslim opposition to Israel is motivated by anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism, this pretense is not only completely unfounded, but the inverse of the truth. Rather than being a response to Zionist activity, it is because Zionism is equated with the worst characteristics traditionally associated with Jews, such as moral depravity, greed, perfidy, racism and the insatiable urge for domination, that it has invariably attracted Muslim-Arab hatred well beyond the “normal” level of hostility to be expected of a prolonged and bitter conflict. Dating to the prophet Muhammad’s rage over the rejection of his newly proclaimed religion by the Arabian Jews, this deeply ingrained hatred runs like a red thread in both the Qur’an and later biographical traditions of the prophet, where Jews are portrayed as a deceitful, evil, and treacherous people who are condemned to miserable existence in this world until their eventual annihilation by the forces of Islam and their dispatch to the fires of hell. In the words of a famous saying (hadith) attributed to Muhammad: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Given the depth of this millennial anti-Jewish bigotry, it is hardly surprising that some of the hoariest and most bizarre themes of European antisemitism were quickly assimilated across the Muslim Middle East when they made their way there over the course of the centuries, be it the “blood libel,” that medieval Christian fabrication according to which Jews use Gentile blood, and particularly the blood of children, for ritual purposes, or the calumny of an organized Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination, particularly as spelled out in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a virulent antisemitic tract fabricated by the Russian secret police at the turn of the twentieth century. Nor does it come as a surprise that many Arabs looked to the Third Reich for help and inspiration well before the outbreak of World War II, and none more so than the Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin Husseini, leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, who fused Islam’s millenarian disparagement of Jews with Christian antisemitic motifs to create a local version of anti-Jewish bigotry. During World War II the Mufti became “the most important Arab Quisling in German hands” (to use the words of a British intelligence report), broadcasting Nazi propaganda to Arabs and Muslims worldwide, recruiting Arabs and Balkan Muslims for the Nazi fighting and killing machine (including the formation of an “Arab Legion” and a Muslim SS division), urging the extermination of Jews wherever they were, and toiling tirelessly to ensure that no Jews escaped the European inferno. Standing by his Nazi paymasters to the bitter end, the Mufti narrowly escaped persecution (at Yugoslavia’s demand) in the Nuremberg war crime trials by fleeing (in May 1946) the Paris mansion where he had been detained for a year pending a decision on the matter and arriving in Cairo, from where he led the Palestinian Arabs to national ruin. In his recently published Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East, German historian and political scientist Matthias Küntzel sheds important fresh light on the Mufti’s central role in fusing Islamic and Nazi antisemitism, all the way from the mid-1930s to the 1948 war. He ascribes particular importance to an August 1937 pamphlet titled “Islam and Judaism,” which Hajj Amin apparently wrote while hiding in the Temple Mount complex to evade arrest for instigating the mass violence Reviewed by Efraim Karsh W BOOK REVIEWS Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II By Matthias Küntzel Routledge, London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (2024, 150 pp.)
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