Although Hitler and Muhammad shared an enthusiasm
for military adventurism and a hatred of Jews, still, their world views would
seem to be diametrically opposed. Let us see.
Hitler grounds his Jew-hatred in racism as well as
atheism. His Jew-hatred flows from the sewers of 19th-century “race
theory”. Its calculated blasphemy, its materialism (despite Hitler’s
self-described “idealism”), and most obviously its idolatry of a “master race”,
ought to offend, and deeply offend, any serious student of the Qur`ran. Islam
calls for the conversion of all “races” to Islam, and it does much more than
merely call for such conversion – it conquers for it. Moreover, the insistent
legalism of Islam sets strict limits on any would-be tyrant. To be sure, Islam
is “totalistic”, as are most religions. Islam seeks to explain and to regulate
all of human life. This suggests that Islam is “totalitarian”. Various scholars
– Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes among them – deny this.
One may indeed conclude that Islam is not
“totalitarian” in the modern sense, since modern totalitarianism involves the
all-encompassing power of the state and the exaltation of its leader. Hence it
can be said that might does not make right for the Muslim, as it does for the
Nazi, the Communist, or the Fascist. Besides, is it not obvious that for the
Muslim God rules, not Hitler or Stalin? It may well be, however, that we are
here dealing with half-truths which obscure Islam’s linkage to Nazism.
What links Islam to Nazism is the ethos of jihad.
For both Islam and Nazism, war is not merely a means to an end: mere conquest.
War for both is a moral imperative: for the Nazi, to purge the world of racial
impurity, for the Muslim, to purge the world of religious impurity. Both have or
require an enemy: for the Muslim the “infidel”, for the Nazi the “Jew”.
Accordingly, both Islam and Nazism aim at purifying i.e. conquering the world,
and there is no limit to the violence that may be used to achieve that aim. The
genocide perpetrated by Muslims against the Armenians preceded the genocide the
Nazis perpetrated against the Jews.
The Nazis regarded the Jews as a virus infecting
mankind, something that had to be eradicated. Although Muslims reject this
racism – for a Jew could convert to Islam – Islam’s contempt for non-believers has
much in common with the Nazi’s contempt for non-Aryans, Jews in particular. As
in Nazism, Islam has never respected the sanctity of human life; it has always
regarded infidels, Jews or Christians, as devoid of human rights – as subhuman.
Bat Ye’or has documented 14 centuries of dhimmitude – the degradation
and dehumanization of countless Jews and Christians. Dhimmitude is
inherent in the ethos of jihad – the most distinctive principle of Islam.
Also inherent in the ethos of jihad, but
which has no parallel in Nazism, is the will to martyrdom. The most
horrific manifestation of this jihad ethos is the homicide-suicide
bomber. Islam may forbid what may be termed “personal” suicide but not in the
ethos of holy war. That Arab parents can exult in their children being
sacrificed as human bombs is of course mind-boggling. This pagan-like phenomenon
indicates that the sanctity of human life is not a normative Islamic doctrine.
Indeed, on page after page of the Qur`ran¸ unbelievers are consigned to
Hell – Islam’s crematoria.
If the will to martyrdom is construed in terms of
sacrificing the individual for the sake of the community, then Islam converges
with Nazism. While Muslims exalt the umma, the Islamic nation, Nazis
exalt the volk, the Aryan race. Lost in both is the dignity of the
individual.
In Jewish law the individual stands on a par with
the community, and such is his infinite worth or dignity that he cannot rightly
be sacrificed for the sake of his community. (That Nazism regards Jews as
“selfish” should be understood in this light.) The dignity of the individual has
no other rational source than the Torah’s conception of man’s creation in the
image of God. Adam is an individual. It follows, given Islam’s
subordination of the individual to the collective, that Islam, like Nazism,
rejects the God of the Bible! The same God also creates diverse nations, which
attests to His infinite creativity. Both Islam and Nazism reject the existence
of diverse nations. Both would impose on mankind a stultifying uniformity.
The contrast with Judaism could hardly be more
striking. Aside from the Seven Noahide Laws of Universal Morality, Judaism
insists on differentiation and individuation. One nation should not impose order
on others by erasing their salutary national differences. Diversity in unity,
reflected in the twelve distinctive tribes of Israel, is a basic Torah
principle.
Militant nations cannot tolerate much diversity,
especially where the militancy is animated by a creed or ideology as in Islam
and Nazism. In the case of Islam, its extraordinary military success and global
expansion during the first hundred years of its inception was perceived by
Muslims as “proof” of Islam’s validity and superiority. Might did indeed make
right, in Islamic history. In fact, according to Islamic doctrine, the mere
seizure of state power gives religious authority to its leader even if he is not
a devout Muslim.
The ethos of jihad has an ethics which is
quite pragmatic, as one may expect from a militaristic religion. One might go so
far as to say that Nazi militarism is jihad secularized – jihad
without religious pretensions and obfuscations. Although literary Islam and
Nazism have profound differences, these are of little significance to the
victims of these militant doctrines. The one reduces human beings to dhimmis,
the other to slaves. Militarism in a religious as well as in an atheistic creed
means expansionism, murder, and degradation.
In Islam, as well as
in Christianity, belief in its founder is part of the creed. The Jews have
suffered the consequences of rejecting both. Many if not most Christians have
forgiven the Jews for their stubborn adherence to Judaism, a religion that does
not proselytize and that seeks not external glory but internal perfection. The
Jewish rejection of Muhammad always rankled Muslims and aroused their hatred.
But with the progress of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, and especially with
the rebirth of Israel, fear began to take hold of Muslim clerics and rulers. So
long as Jews were
dhimmis, Muslims did not feel threatened theologically or politically. This
is no longer the case, which is why Muslim leaders throughout the world have
held conferences to confront the “Jewish and Zionist menace” and have issued
papers which could have been written by Nazis.
Consider, for example, a 1968 international
conference of Arab theologians held at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University – Islam’s most
authoritative university. The mufti of Lebanon referred to the Jews as the “dogs
of humanity”. They do not even constitute a true people or nation. Their
evilness has been transmitted throughout their history by means of their
cultural inheritance. By their behavior, the Jews have called forth the hatred
and persecution of all the peoples with whom they have come into contact. They
deserve their fate. As for the State of Israel, it is the culmination of the
historical and cultural depravity of the Jews. It must be destroyed, having been
established through aggression which is its congenital and immutable nature.
This must be achieved by jihad.
The participants at this conference make no
distinction between Judaism and Zionism. Their virulent statements against Jews
and the State of Israel point to nothing less than genocide and politicide.
For decades, Muslim anti-Semitism, worldwide, has
outpaced those of the neo-Nazis; “what was historically a Christian
phenomenon” – largely transcended – “is now primarily a Muslim phenomenon”. “The
mounting scale and sheer extent of this vehemently anti-Semitic literature and
commentary in the newspapers, journals, magazines, radio, television, and in the
everyday life of the Middle East [is indescribable]...” Not only is Mein Kampf
a fast-selling title in the region, but even in Egypt, which has a peace treaty
with Israel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has reappeared on a
41-part Egyptian television program and in recycled form in Arab print
media. And this is actually one of the least toxic of such excrescences.
Palestinian Authority TV had this to say about Jews and Judaism: “Their Torah
today is just a collection of writings in which those people wrote lies about
God, His prophets and His teachings... To their prophets they attribute the
greatest crimes: murder, prostitution, and drunkenness. The Jews do not believe
in God...” Meanwhile, in countless mosques, Muslims are poisoned by recent Islamic
sermons denigrating Jews:
Their
tongues never cease lying, [disseminating] abomination and obscenity... The
Jews preached permissiveness and corruption, as they hid behind false
slogans like freedom and equality, humanism and brotherhood. They kill
Muslim youth, entice the [Muslim] woman with shameful deeds, and act to lure
others through her. They defile the minds of adolescents by arousing their
urges. They are envious of the Muslim woman who conceals herself and
protects her honor; for this reason, they preach to her to expose herself
and throw off her values. Their goal is to destroy the Muslim family, to
shatter religious and social ties and foundations. They are cowards in
battle. They flee from death and fear fighting. They love life.
Read history and you will understand that the
Jews of yesterday are the evil forefathers of the even more evil Jews of
today: infidels, falsifiers of words, calf worshippers, prophet murderers,
deniers of prophecies. The scum of the human race, accursed by Allah, who
turned them into apes and pigs. These are the Jews – an ongoing continuum of
deceit, obstinacy, licentiousness, evil, and corruption.
The Jews
are miserly, and enslaved by money... Most of the world's wars,
particularly the great modern wars, were planned and started by the Jews so
as to disseminate corruption in the land, and to achieve their goals on the
ruins of the human race.
The Jews
are defiled creatures and satanic scum... The Jews are the cause of the
misery of the human race... The Jews are our enemies and hatred of them is
in our hearts. Jihad against them is our worship.
Der Sturmer is tame compared to the
anti-Semitic cartoons of the Arab world. Such is their hatred and loathing that
Arabs depicts Jews as snakes, dogs, spiders, rats, and locusts.
A chilling example of
what this zoomorphism signifies may be gleaned from the Syrian celebration of
the tenth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. In that ceremony,
Syrian
militia trainees [male and female] put on a show for Syrian president Hafez
Assad. Martial music reached a crescendo as Syrian teenage girls suddenly bit
into live snakes [some four or five feet long], repeatedly tearing off flesh and
spitting it out as blood ran down their chins. As Assad applauded, the girls
then attached the snakes to sticks and grilled them over fire, eating them
triumphantly. Others [militiamen] then proceeded to strangle puppies and drink
their blood.
Bearing also in mind that the Syrians exterminated
some 18,000 Sunni residents of the city of Hama in 1982 with cyanide – to speak of
Arab Nazis is not to succumb to hyperbole.
Some scholars may contend that what has here been
imputed to Islam should in truth be imputed to “Islamism”. They allege that
Islamism, as distinct from Islam, twists Qur`ranic teachings to un-Qur`ranic uses.
The candid scholar will admit that the Qur`ran lends itself to such twists, and
much more clearly so viewed from the Shari`ah, Islamic law. Robert Westrich lists
Qur`ranic verses condemning a variety of vices imputed to certain Jews, including
falsehood, distortion, cowardice, greed, corruption of Scripture. But the fact
that the Qur`ran condemns these vices does not preclude those influenced by the
Qur`ran from attributing such vices to the Jews – the more readily so given the
Qur`ran’s unrelenting degradation of non-believers. This degradation was canonized
by the Umariyah – the legal code of the seventh-century Caliph Umar – which
established dhimmitude. That dhimmitude was also construed as an
act of charity or patronage hardly minimizes its dehumanization of Jews and
Christians under Muslim rule. Indeed, as Bat Ye’or has shown, the condition of
the dhimmi was in certain respects inferior to that of a slave.
Still, while admitting that Jew-hatred is inherent
in Islam, why has it metamorphosed into the Nazi-like anti-Semitic race-baiting
that now inundates the Muslim world?
A historical account might begin with the turn of
the last century. “[I]t was not until around 1900, with the growing influence of
Europeans in the Middle East, and with the active dissemination of anti-Semitism
by European colonists, that extreme anti-Semitism” – as a racial doctrine – “began
to spread both among Arab Christians and among Muslims”. The English themselves
installed the notorious anti-Semite, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, as the Grand Mufti
of Jerusalem. Much of the Mufti’s early material derived from The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, a document that focuses not on racial categories but
on the charge that Jews are Satanists associated with democracy, capitalism, and
socialism.
For the true racist anti-Semitism we must look at
the inroads Nazis made in the Middle East before and during the Second World
War, when they exploited the sentiments of Arab populations eager to throw off
British and French imperialism. This story is well known, as is the
collaboration of the Mufti of Jerusalem in deepening those inroads. Sayyid Qutb,
founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his secularist enemy, Egyptian President
Nasser, both continued anti-Semitic propaganda after the war, combining the
Protocols’ “Satanism” charge with “race theory”. In one of those spectacular
reversals seen only in the nightmare land of propaganda, where the principle of
non-contradiction may be suspended so long as the purpose is sufficiently
malicious, some Arabs began to charge Israel with Nazi-like racism, as
the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ahmad Shukeiry, was
wont to do. And to bring things full circle, the current PLO chief, Yasser
Arafat, has referred to the Grand Mufti as “our hero”, claiming to have been
“one of his troops” in the 1948 war.
But the mere introduction of an ideology does not
explain its currency. Only its political utility does. The political utility of
Nazi race propaganda to Arabs in the Middle East in the 1930s and 1940s served
as a foil against the capitalist and democratic regimes that dominated the
region. And although those regimes have receded, the commercial regimes of
Israel and the United States, demonized as the smaller and greater Satans,
respectively, have taken their place as useful targets for Muslim political
elites in the region. It is one thing to cite religio-cultural and ideological
reasons for any prevalent mindset in a given part of the world. Ideas do matter,
and they do have consequences. But those consequences will be slight so long as
they serve no political regime, real or intended. It is the political
regime – the institutional structure and the persons who frame and use that
structure – that influences, if it does not wholly determine, the character of the
intellectual life, the moral atmosphere, of any human society.
Barry Rubin has correctly observed that “The Middle
East is the only region in the world where the modern type of society most
influenced by the West has not yet been accepted.” The modern type of society,
as Alexis de Tocqueville saw in the 1830s, is democracy. By democracy,
Tocqueville did not mean simply a government characterized by equal rights,
personal and civil liberty, the rule of law. Democratic society might have
none of those things. Tocqueville understood modern democracy to mean
social egalitarianism, seen primarily in the decline of the titled
aristocracies throughout Europe, and, eventually, throughout the world.
Democracy was first of all a social phenomenon, the rise of the middle
class, and not for some Marxian reason of “historical inevitability”, but
because human nature itself was emerging as men sought to enlist more and
more of their fellows in ambitious projects to conquer physical nature.
The political implications of this social
phenomenon were two: modern, egalitarian societies might go the way of the
United States, the way of representative government or commercial
republicanism; alternatively, these societies might go the way of Russia,
the despotism of the rule of one man, who enforces equal subordination or
dhimmitude upon all, except his small circle of courtiers. Tocqueville
writes:
The American struggles against the obstacles
that nature opposes to him; the Russian grapples with men. The one combats
the wilderness and barbarism, the other, civilization vested with all its
arms: thus the conquests of the American are made with the plowshare of the
laborer, those of Russian, with the sword of the soldier.
To attain his goal, the first relies on
personal interest and allows the force and the reason of individuals to act,
without directing them. The second in a way concentrates all the power of
society in one man. The one has freedom for his principal means of action;
the other servitude.
Their point of departure is different, their
ways are diverse; nonetheless, each of them seems called by a secret design
of Providence to hold the destinies of half the world in its hands one day.
Tocqueville’s prediction of the bipolar world of
the Cold War astonishes his new readers to this day. But the prediction follows
logically from his insight into the democratic character of modern society. The
United States and Russia were in fact the two most conspicuous examples of the
two roads modernity could take. This was obscured for a long time by the rise of
Germany, but Germany represents exactly the same thing. Where, except in a
society that has failed to manage the transition from the old aristocratic order
to the new – where, except in an egalitarian society could a ranting guttersnipe
like Hitler cunningly boost himself not only as the champion of lost
aristocratic glory, but also of the long-suffering workers and soldiers?
Modernity, with its social egalitarianism and its technologically-fueled drive
to master nature, puts enormous power in the hands of the masses and those who
rule, and are ruled by, the masses. It makes a very great difference which
political regime wins the struggle between “America” and “Russia”.
Turning to the Middle East, if distinctions are to
be made between Islam and Islamism, two are in order. First and foremost,
Islamism is a rejection of Arab nationalism and, in this respect, a return to
classical Islam. However, Islamists have been influenced by modernism, which
makes the return to classical Islam impossible. Second, Islamism has adopted the
anti-Semitic racism of Nazism.
It is easy to see exactly where Israel stands with
respect both to Arab nationalism and Islamism. Arab nationalism was always an
instrument of state-builders, just as nationalism had been in Europe. It opposes
the imperial state (except when a given nation-state decides to take on an
empire), but loyally serves whatever state the state-builders envision. What
were Nasser, yesterday, and Saddam Hussein, today, if not nationalism-mongering
state-builders (with vain imperial ambitions)? And what are the Islamists, but
Muslims who seek to seize control of the apparatus of the modern state, which
they nonetheless reject as fragmenting the umma?
To Islamists, the Oslo
“peace process” seemed
profoundly threatening. Such a peace could result in one of two outcomes,
equally disgusting. The peace might be part of a “salami-tactic”, wherein Arab
secular nation-states set Israel up for the kill. This would only enhance the
authority of such secularists. Alternatively, if the peace process resulted in
real peace, Israel would survive and thrive, its commercial republicanism
infecting Muslim souls with the insidious temptations of prosperity and
tolerance. (Turkish politics stands as a fearful object-lesson; here, the
Islamist party splits, as ideologues always do in a commercial-republican
atmosphere.)
Commercial republicanism would spell death to
Islamism, and must be stopped. Symbolically and physically, Israel, for all its
socialist trimmings remains the sole commercial republic in the Middle East.
After the repeated failures of the nationalist states to eradicate Israel, and
especially after Israel acquired submarine-launched nuclear missiles, those
states, and also their Islamist enemies, needed a new strategy. Terrorism was an
obvious choice, whether by proxy (in the case of the Arab states) or directly
(as with the Islamists, who have controlled only one state, Iran, for an
extended period). Increasingly, terrorist organizations have operated
independently of states, with funding from individuals, fronts, legitimate and
illegitimate businesses, sympathetic bankers, and charities. Another technique
of conquest is immigration, a technique of traditional Islam as well. Europe has
been a major target, and the political effects of that targeting have been seen
in the reluctance of Europe to intervene forcefully in the region. In the United
States, Daniel Pipes reports, every leading Islamic group has links with
Islamist terrorist groups, as do 80% of the mosques; half-a-dozen
terrorist acts in New York City in the 1990s arose out of such links, as of
course did the attacks of September 11. Even the racist demi-Islamist Nation of
Islam, under its demagogic leader Louis Farrakhan, has introduced the inane
charge that Jews, not Muslims, ran the African slave trade.
The core institution transformed by this strategy
was the Islamic madrasa. “Westernized and usually affluent Muslims lack an
interest in religious matters, but religious scholars, marginalized by
modernization, seek to assert their own relevance by insisting on orthodoxy.”
The madrasas reach out to the most democratic of the democrats: the impoverished
Muslim masses. The Shi`ite Muslims of Iran and the Sunni Muslims of Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan, and elsewhere attempted to outbid one another in funding
madrasas run by Islamist mullahs. These institutions are ideological
breeding-grounds for terrorism.
Yossef Bodansky is
right:
Since there
has never been any democratization in any Arab country, and since the likelihood
of diverting resources from corruption and military build-up toward betterment
of the average citizen was virtually nil, it became imperative for Arab
governments to come up with Satanic enemies of the State in order to legitimate
the current state of affairs.
The idea that Christians and Jews are fellow “People of the
Book” – even if decidedly inferior fellows – has given way to a war to subordinate
them as dhimmis. (This is consistent with traditional Islam.)
Alternatively, they may simply be exterminated by any means, including
homicide-suicide, as racial parasites. (This is Nazism-cum-Islamism.)
Bodansky is again right in identifying Islamism as
a form of populism – with all the egalitarian and racialist motifs
of populism. However, Bodansky’s insights must be qualified, in a way we suspect
he would accept, by saying that this populism, this modern egalitarianism, is of
course in no way a form of political democracy. It is rather what Barry
Rubin calls “populist dictatorship”, identical (although neither Rubin nor
Bodansky sees this) to what Tocqueville calls “democratic despotism”.
Tocqueville saw that such despotism would be nationalistic, patronage-based, and
fully compatible with bureaucratization. Left alone, it is self-perpetuating,
because the despot ruling a leveled, democratized society need only satisfy a
small, hand-picked clique of military officers and police. In the modern world,
there is no more independent aristocratic class to stand up to such despots.
As propaganda, anti-Semitism perfectly fits the
social egalitarianism of the modern world. Tocqueville describes the propensity
of democratized peoples for what he calls “general ideas”. The human mind
requires general ideas or abstractions in order to function; the mind’s very
limitations require it to enclose “a very great number of analogous objects
under the same form so as to think about them more conveniently”. If human
beings attempted to understand every tree, every cat, every house, as “a thing
in itself”, it would sink like a stone in an ocean of details. Nonetheless, we
all know that general ideas must be disciplined by attention to details.
Mohandas Gandhi and Josef Stalin both correspond to the general idea, “man”, but
anyone who left it at that would, if he found himself in the wrong time and
place, make some serious, even life-threatening, errors of judgment! Tocqueville
observes that democratic men and women have a weakness for general ideas.
Because they live in societies in which social differentiation is less clear,
less stable, than in aristocratic times, they tend to lump things together.
Because democratic societies require them to work, to be eternally busy, they
will fall back on general ideas about anything that does not pertain immediately
to their own business.
In such a moral and intellectual climate,
anti-Semitism easily gains a foothold. For what is anti-Semitism, if not the
most general of general ideas, a perfect refuge for harried, inattentive
minds – especially minds already predisposed by age-old prejudices? If, as a
non-Jew, one knows very few Jewish people, regards them as alien to one’s own
beliefs, and is encouraged by political demagogues, why would one not accept
sweeping racial stereotypes, fantasies of worldwide conspiracy – the whole
anti-Semitic line?
This means two things. First, the only way to get
rid of modern anti-Semitism, or for that matter traditionalist anti-Judaism, in
the Muslim world of today is to change the political regimes that now rule that
world, and to prevent the Islamist would-be regime founders from replacing the
existing populist despotisms. Second, the existing regimes in the Islamic world
are highly unlikely to change (except for the worse) by means of internal
forces – “inside-out”. Democratic despotism can be quite stable, making victory
out of failure. Only a comprehensive geopolitical strategy will transform those
regimes, “outside-in”.
