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Jew-Hatred and Jihad
The Nazi roots of the 9/11 attack.
by Matthias Küntzel
09/17/2007, Volume 013, Issue 01

The idea of using suicide pilots to obliterate the skyscrapers of
Manhattan originated in 1940s Berlin. "In the latter stages of the war, I
never saw Hitler so beside himself as when, as if in a delirium, he was
picturing to himself and to us the downfall of New York in towers of
flame," wrote Albert Speer in his diary. "He described the skyscrapers
turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and thither, and the
reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky."

Not only Hitler's fantasy but also his plan of action foreshadowed
September 11: He envisioned having kamikaze pilots fly light aircraft
packed with explosives and with no landing gear into Manhattan
skyscrapers. The drawings for the Daimler-Benz Amerikabomber from the
spring of 1944 show giant four-engine planes with raised undercarriages
for transporting small bombers. The bombers would be released shortly
before the planes reached the East Coast, after which the mother plane
would return to Europe.

Hitler's rapture at the thought of Manhattan in flames indicates his
underlying motive: not merely to fight a military adversary, but to kill
all Jews everywhere. Possessed of the notion that the whole of the Second
World War was a struggle against an imaginary Jewish enemy, he deemed
"the USA a Jewish state" and New York the center of world Jewry. "Wall
Street," as a popular book published in Munich in 1919 put it, "is, so to
speak, the Military Headquarters of Judas. From there his threads radiate
out across the entire world." From 1941 on, Hitler pushed to get the
bombers into production, in order to "be able to teach the Jews a lesson
in the form of terror attacks on American metropolises." Towards the end
of the war this idea became an obsession.

Sixty years later, it so happens, the assault on the World Trade Center
was coordinated from Germany. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who piloted the
plane that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center; Marwan al--
Shehhi, from the United Arab Emirates, who steered the plane into the
South Tower; Ziad Jarrah, from Lebanon, who crashed United Airlines
Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and their friends Ramzi
Binalshibh, a Yemeni, and the Moroccan student Mounir al-Motassedeq had
formed an al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, where they held regular "Koran
circle" meetings with sympathizers.

What ideas propelled Atta and the others to act? Witnesses provided part
of the answer at the world's first 9/11-related trial, the prosecution of
al-Motassedeq, which took place in Hamburg between October 2002 and
February 2003. One participant in the Koran circle meetings, Shahid
Nickels, said Atta's Weltanschauung was based on a "National Socialist
way of thinking." Atta was convinced that the Jews were striving for
world domination and considered New York City the center of world Jewry,
which was, in his opinion, Enemy No. 1. Fellow students who lived in
Motassedeq's dormitory testified that he shared these views and waxed
enthusiastic about a forthcoming "big action." One student quoted
Motassedeq as saying, "The Jews will burn and in the end we will dance on
their graves."

Amazingly, neither the American media nor the international press took
much notice of this testimony, largely refusing to report on Atta's and
Motassedeq's explicit Jew-hatred. The above quotations come from the
weekly Der Spiegel and from the detailed notes of the trial taken by
journalist Michael Eggers, who attended every session and wrote about it
for Reuters. If this had been the trial of a Ku Klux Klan member or
someone from the far right such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh,
reports of Nazi-like dreams of exterminating the Jews would probably have
made the headlines. But in this case, involving attackers of Arab
background, journalists apparently found the issue irrelevant. Moreover,
this Jew-hatred was no quirk of the Hamburg cell. Osama bin Laden himself
declared in 1998, "The enmity between us and the Jews goes back far in
time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between us is
inevitable. . . . The Hour of Resurrection shall not come before Muslims
fight Jews."

Even the 9/11 Commission Report, the summation produced by the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in July 2004,
falls short in this regard. Its chapter on "Bin Laden's worldview" makes
no mention of his hatred of Jews. This silence is all the more surprising
in that the commission quotes documents in which bin Laden unambiguously
expresses his hatred of Jews. For example, in the "Letter to the American
People" of November 2002, which the report repeatedly cites, bin Laden
warns: "The Jews have taken control of your media, and now control all
aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims
at your expense." Osama goes on: "Your law is the law of rich and wealthy
people. . . . Behind them stand the Jews who control your policies, media
and economy." Yet the report's authors inexplicably fail to see the
significance of these words and the ideology behind them. The report also
ignores the history of Islamism. It accords the entire pre-1945 period
just five lines. Yet it is precisely this period that fostered the
personal contacts and ideological affinities between early Islamism and
late Nazism--the linkage between Jew-hatred and jihad.

Despite common misconceptions, Islamism was born not during the 1960s but
during the 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasserism
but by the rise of Nazism, and prior to 1951 all its campaigns were
directed not against colonialism but against the Jews. It was the
Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, that established
Islamism as a mass movement. The significance of the Brotherhood to
Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik party to communism: It
was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and
organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al Qaeda and
Hamas.

It is true that British colonial policy produced Islamism, insofar as
Islamism viewed itself as a resistance movement against "cultural
modernity." The Islamists' solution was the call for a new order based on
sharia. But the Brotherhood's jihad was not directed primarily against
the British. Rather, it focused almost exclusively on Zionism and the
Jews. Membership in the Brotherhood shot up from 800 to 200,000 between
1936 and 1938, according to the research of Abd Al-Fattah Muhammad El-
Awaisi for his book The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question
1928-1947. In those two years the Brotherhood conducted only one major
campaign in Egypt, and it was against Zionism and the Jews.

This campaign, which established the Brotherhood as a mass movement, was
set off by a rebellion in Palestine directed against Jewish immigration
and initiated by the notorious grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al--
Husseini. The Brotherhood organized mass demonstrations in Egyptian
cities under the slogans "Down With the Jews!" and "Jews Get Out of Egypt
and Palestine!" Leaflets called for a boycott of Jewish goods and Jewish
shops, and the Brotherhood's newspaper, al-Nadhir, carried a regular
column on "The Danger of the Jews of Egypt," which published the names
and addresses of Jewish businessmen and allegedly Jewish newspaper
publishers all over the world, attributing every evil, from communism to
brothels, to the "Jewish danger."

The Brotherhood's campaign against the Jews used not only Nazi-like
tactics but also German funding. As the historian Brynjar Lia recounted
in his monograph on the Brotherhood, "Documents seized in the flat of
Wilhelm Stellbogen, the Director of the German News Agency affiliated to
the German Legation in Cairo, show that prior to October 1939 the Muslim
Brothers received subsidies from this organization. Stellbogen was
instrumental in transferring these funds to the Brothers, which were
considerably larger than the subsidies offered to other anti-British
activists."

At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood was the first modern
organization to propagate the archaic idea of a belligerent jihad and the
longing for death. In 1938, Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood's
charismatic founder, published his concept of jihad in an article
entitled "The Industry of Death." He wrote: "To a nation that perfects
the industry of death and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud
life in this world and eternal grace in the life to come." This slogan
was enthusiastically taken up by the "Troops of God," as the Brothers
called themselves. As their battalions marched down Cairo's boulevards in
semi-fascist formation they would burst into song: "We are not afraid of
death, we desire it. . . . Let us die to redeem the Muslims!"

The death cult that became a hallmark of modern jihadism was laced with
Jew-hatred from the very beginning. Moreover, this attitude sprang not
only from European influences; it also drew directly on Islamic sources.
First, Islamists considered, and still consider, Palestine an Islamic
territory, Dar al-Islam, where Jews must not run a single village, let
alone a state. At best, in their view, this land should be judenrein; at
the very least, Jews there should be relegated to subservient status.
Second, Islamists justify their aspiration to eliminate the Jews of
Palestine by invoking the example of Muhammad, who in the 7th century not
only expelled two Jewish tribes from Medina, but also beheaded the entire
male population of a third Jewish tribe, before proceeding to sell all
the women and children into slavery. Third, they find support and
encouragement for their actions and plans in the anti-Jewish passages of
the Koran.

After World War II it became apparent that the center of global Jew-
hatred was shifting from Nazi Germany to the Arab world. In November
1945, just half a year after the end of the Third Reich, the Muslim
Brothers carried out the worst anti-Jewish pogroms in Egypt's history,
when demonstrators penetrated the Jewish quarters of Cairo on the
anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. They ransacked houses and shops,
attacked non-Muslims, and torched the synagogues. Six people were killed,
and some hundred more injured. A few weeks later the Islamists'
newspapers "turned to a frontal attack against the Egyptian Jews,
slandering them as Zionists, Communists, capitalists and bloodsuckers, as
pimps and merchants of war, or in general, as subversive elements within
all states and societies," as Gudrun Krämer wrote in her study The Jews
in Egypt 1914-1952.

In 1946, the Brotherhood made sure that Heinrich Himmler's friend Amin al-
Husseini, the former grand mufti who was being sought as a war criminal
by Britain and the United States, was granted asylum and a new lease on
political life in Egypt. As leader of the Palestine National Movement, al-
Husseini had been a close ally of both the Muslim Brotherhood and the
Nazis. Based in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, he had directed the Muslim SS
divisions in the Balkans and had been personally responsible for blocking
negotiations late in the war that might have saved thousands of Jewish
children from the gas chambers. All this was known in 1946. Nonetheless,
Britain and the United States chose to forgo criminal prosecution of al-
Husseini in order to avoid spoiling their relations with the Arab world.
France, which was holding al-Husseini, deliberately let him get away.

For many in the Arab world, what amounted to amnesty for this prominent
Islamic authority who had spent the war years broadcasting Nazi
propaganda from Berlin was a vindication of his actions. They started to
view his Nazi past with pride, not shame, and Nazi criminals on the
wanted list in Europe now flooded into the Arab world. Large print-runs
of the most infamous libel of the Jews, The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, were published in the following decades at the behest of two well-
known former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Gamal Abdel Nasser and
Anwar Sadat. Both the Muslim Brothers' unconditional solidarity with al-
Husseini and their anti-Jewish riots mere months after Auschwitz show
that the Brotherhood did not object, to say the least, to Hitler's
attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

The consequences of this attitude, this blindness to the international
impact of the Holocaust, continue to affect the course of the Arab-Jewish
conflict today. How do Islamists explain international support for Israel
in 1947? Ignoring the actual fate of the Jews during World War II, they
revert to conspiracy theories, viewing the creation of the Jewish state
as a Jewish-inspired attack by the United States and the Soviet Union on
the Arab world. Accordingly, El-Awaisi writes, the Brotherhood
"considered the whole United Nations intervention to be an international
plot carried out by the Americans, the Russians and the British, under
the influence of Zionism." The mad notion of a worldwide Jewish
conspiracy, suppressed in Germany since May 8, 1945, survived and
flourished in the political culture of the Arab world.

In particular, Nazi-like conspiracy thinking persisted and grew. An
especially striking example of its continuing influence is the charter
adopted in 1988 by the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, better known as
Hamas. In this charter--which "sounds as if it were copied from the pages
of Der Stürmer," as Sari Nusseibeh, former PLO representative in
Jerusalem, has written--Hamas defines itself as "the spearhead and the
avant-garde" of the struggle against "world Zionism." The Jews, the
charter explains, "were behind the French Revolution [and] the Communist
Revolution. . . . They were behind World War I . . . they were behind
World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in
armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. . . .
There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in
it. . . . Their plan," states Article 32, "is embodied in The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of
what we are saying."

As in the 1930s and 1940s, the sheer absurdity of the claims makes it
difficult for educated people to believe that anyone could take them
seriously. Nonetheless, this notion of Jews as the root of all evil
continues to inspire the mass murder of civilians in Israel and to
motivate the joy with which Islamists greet those murders. "Hitler's
Islamic heirs," as the historian Jehuda Bauer has called the Islamists,
have replaced an anticolonialism aspiring to emancipation with a Jew-
hatred aspiring to salvation through the annihilation of everyone
"Jewish." It should not be surprising to find Osama bin Laden accusing
"the Jews" of "taking hostage America and the West"--or to find Mohamed
Atta's acquaintances attributing to him a Nazi worldview. What is truly
surprising is that this Islamist hatred of Jews is often overlooked by
Western analysts, political actors, and media.

As noted above, the 9/11 Commission Report is a case in point. Instead of
discussing the fact that Jew-hatred had reached epidemic proportions in
the Islamic world well before September 11, the report gives the
impression that Islamism originally arose in response to recent American
and Western policies. This is first conveyed in a remark on the early
days of Islamism, when, we are told, "Fundamentalists helped articulate
anticolonial grievances," an idea that ignores crucial dimensions of the
outlook of the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1930s. The stereotypical message
that the West is responsible is repeated in the report's analysis of bin
Laden's motives: "Bin Laden's grievance with the United States may have
started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but it quickly became far
deeper." The report gets the history wrong. The al Qaeda leader was first
politicized not by "specific U.S. policies," but by the writings of
Sayyid Qutb and the jihadist lectures of Abdullah Azzam. As a result, the
commission's explanation of al Qaeda's appeal is one-sided: "As
political, social, and economic problems created flammable societies, Bin
Laden used Islam's most extreme fundamentalist traditions as his match."

It is, of course, true that Islamists seek to exploit social problems for
their own ends. But Islamism is not an ideology that ignites protest as
it rubs up against social injustice. On the contrary, what provokes
Islamist violence is any sign of modern development in the Muslim world:
scientific inquiry, political or personal self-determination, economic
progress, women's equality, freedom of expression in cinema and theater.
The radicalization of Islam is less the consequence of poverty and lack
of opportunity than their cause.

The refusal to see this and to recognize the substance of Islamist
ideology--the death cult, the hatred of Jews, and the profound hatred of
freedom--leads back again and again to the mistaken "discovery" that the
"root cause" of terrorism is U.S. policies. Ultimately, the refusal to
recognize al Qaeda's true motives results in a reversal of
responsibility: The more deadly the terrorism, the greater the American
guilt. The appeal of this approach is related to the specious hope it
holds out: If suicide terrorism has its roots in U.S. policy, then a
change in U.S. policy can assuage terrorism and the fear it induces. Al
Qaeda, meanwhile, benefits, since the bloodier its attacks, the greater
the anger against .  .  . the United States.

The same pattern explains the bizarre reaction to the Middle East
conflict that is widespread in the West: The average observer, ignorant
of the anti-Jewish content of the Hamas Charter, has to find some other
explanation for terrorism against Jews, which must be--Israel. It is not
the terrorists who are guilty, but their victims. Finding suicide
terrorism incomprehensible, Westerners rationalize it as an act of
despair that invites sympathy. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.
Here, too, following the principle of "the more barbaric the anti-Jewish
terror, the greater the Israeli guilt," the bombers' victims become the
scapegoat for global terrorism. The old stereotype of Jewish guilt is
thus amplified in contemporary form--and only encourages the terrorists.

A struggle against Islamism waged in ignorance of Islamist ideology
weakens the West. The attribution of guilt to Israel and the United
States adds fuel to the flames of Islamist propaganda and drives the
wedge deeper into the Western camp rather than where it belongs--in the
Muslim world.

Such blindness is especially hazardous in the case of the Iranian nuclear
program, whose danger arises from the unique ideological stew surrounding
it: the mish-mash of Jew-hatred, Holocaust denial, and Shiite death-cult
messianism that is the context for Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and
advanced missiles. Here the worst-case scenario is not an increase in
suicide bombing attacks against individuals, but a perhaps suicidal
nuclear attack on the Israeli state. Back in Munich in 1938, many
believed they could resolve the Sudeten German problem with Hitler
without considering how it fit into the Nazis' overall -strategy. In the
same way today, in U.N. Security Council decisions and the positions of
the Permanent Five, the technical aspects of Iran's nuclear program are
often divorced from their ideological context.

The problem is not that the Islamists hide their goals. The problem is
that the West does not listen. Osama bin Laden's chief reproach of the
Americans in his "Letter to the American People" is that they act as free
citizens who make their own laws instead of accepting sharia. The same
hatred of freedom can be found in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's letter to the
American president: "Those with insight can already hear the sounds of
the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal
democratic systems."

Not to confront the ideological roots of Islamism--notably its well-
documented connection to Nazi Jew-hatred--stymies any Western push for
political, economic, and cultural modernization in the Muslim world. Yet
only such modernization can split the majority of Muslims, who would
benefit from social progress, from the Islamists, who are willing to die
to prevent it. Without challenging the ideological roots of Islamism, it
is impossible to confront the Muslim world with the real choices before
it: Will it choose life and hope, or does it prefer the cult of death?
Will it stand up for individual and social self-determination, or will it
finally submit to the mullahs' program of Jew-hatred and jihad?

Matthias Küntzel is a Hamburg-based political scientist and a research
associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of
Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This essay includes
material from his forthcoming book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism
and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press, November 2007). This article was
translated from German by Colin Meade.