The Nazi Roots of the Radical Jihad

Say "hello" to Matthias Küntzel. Küntzel is, perhaps, the world's foremost expert on the connections to, and influence of, the Nazi regime to the rise of the Radical Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Of all the various taboos within progressive-left discourse (and there are many, many things that one is not allowed to discuss among progressives) a big one is not just the history of Islamism (or the Radical Jihad, as I call it) but even the movement, itself, is to be entirely ignored. As I like to say, your average progressive wouldn't acknowledge the Radical Jihad if he was on his hands and knees, blindfolded in some basement in Karachi.

Below is a relatively brief excerpt from a longer piece entitled Hitler's Legacy: Islamic antisemitism and the impact of the Muslim Brotherhood.

If you want to understand the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a genocidal Jew-hating organization, this is a good place to start.

Oh, and by the way, this is the organization currently coming into power in Egypt that the Obama administration would have you believe is both secular and moderate.

Such a claim is entirely false. It is a lie:

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"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 Fascism and of Nazism.

It was the Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 in Egypt, 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 or the group around Sidique Khan.

It is true that British colonial policy produced Islamism, insofar as Islamism viewed itself as a resistance movement against “cultural modernity.” Their “liberation struggle”, however, had more in common with the “liberation struggle” of the Nazis than with any kind of progressive movement.

Thus, the Brotherhood advocated the replacement of Parliamentarianism by an “organic” state order based on the Caliphate. It demanded the abolition of interest and profit in favour of a forcibly imposed community of interests between capital and labour.

At the forefront of the Brotherhood’s efforts lay the struggle against all the sensual and “materialistic” temptations of the capitalist and communist world. At the tender age of 13, the pubescent al-Banna had founded a “Society for the Prevention of the Forbidden”[8] and this is in essence what the Brothers were and are – a community of male zealots, whose primary concern is to prevent all the sensual and sexual sins forbidden according to their interpretation of the Koran. Their signature was most clearly apparent when they periodically reduced their local night clubs, brothels and cinemas – constantly identified with Jewish influence – to ashes.

Gripped by this phobia, the Society of Muslim Brothers, from the day of its foundation, provided a haven for any man dedicated to the restoration of male supremacy. At the very time when the liberation of women from the inferiority decreed by Islam was gradually getting under way the Muslim Brotherhood set itself up as the rallying point for the restoration of patriarchal domination.

It was on the one hand a conservative religious movement: For al-Banna, only a return to orthodox Islam could pave the way for an end to the intolerable conditions and humiliations of Muslims and newly establish the righteous Islamic order.[9] It was at the same time a revolutionary political movement and as such in many respects a trailblazer. The Brotherhood was the first Islamic organization to put down roots in the cities and to organize a mass movement able in 1948 to muster one million people in Egypt alone. It was a populist and activist, not an elitist movement and it was the first movement that systematically set about building a kind of “Islamist international.”

The Islamists’ answer to everything 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.[10] In those two years the Brotherhood conducted only one major campaign in Egypt, a campaign directed against Zionism and the Jews."