New Book Wrongly Blames Nazis for Muslim Hatred Of Israel Pamela Geller, Big Journalism
Read my latest over at Big Journalism. The book got the goods (the Mufti's radio addresses) but made all the wrong conclusions:
The latest attempt to excuse or minimize the evils committed in the name of Islam comes in a new book by University of Maryland professor Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. In an interview with the Telegraph, the author says:
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts.
This doesn’t even make any sense. If Muslim hatred of the Jews was “religiously inspired,” i.e., inspired by Islam, then why did it need to be “articulated” by the Nazis, who despised all religion? In reality, it is “articulated” in the Qur’an, which says that the Jews are accursed (2:89), are the Muslims’ worst enemies (5:82), and should be fought against (9:29). Muhammad says in a hadith that the end times won’t come until Muslims kill Jews wholesale, and when Jews hide behind trees, the trees will cry out, “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me – come and kill him!”
Muslims were not and are not inspired by Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler and the Nazis were inspired by Islam – just as modern-day Muslims hate Jews because the Qur’an and Islam tell them to. Islamic scholar Robert Spencer explains:There is much more here.
There is a strong native strain of anti-Semitism in Islam, which is rooted in the Qur’an. The Muslim holy book contains a great deal of material that forms the foundation for a hatred of Jews that has perdured throughout Islamic history. It is virulent and hard to eradicate. The Qur’an portrays the Jews as the craftiest, most persistent, and most implacable enemies of the Muslims — and there is no Islamic authority that has moved to mitigate the most destructive interpretations of all this. The Qur’anic material on the Jews remains the prism through which far too many Muslims see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–and Jews in general–to this day.The Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was the Muslim Hitler. He continually coaxed, urged, and demanded Jewish annihilation. And it was not that he got with the Nazi program: he preceded it. He mentored it. His role is irrefutable, and is documented in thousands of pages of documents released after the war.
The Mufti, whom his nephew Yasser Arafat called “our hero,” was famous for his fanatical Jew-hatred. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he met Hitler and traveled in top Nazi circles (he even stayed in Hitler’s bunker toward the end of the war). Among his close friends was Adolf Eichmann, who is sometimes described as the “architect” of the Holocaust.
