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The Brotherhood, Nazism And Islamofascism

The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, declared his support for the virulent anti-Semite Haj Amin Al-Husseini, who was then the “Mufti of Jerusalem”. The British High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, had bestowed this title upon Husseini on May 8, 1921, even though he had organized anti-Jewish riots on April 4, 1920, in which five Jews had been killed. Husseini was expected to maintain order in the region, but continued to enact pogroms against Jews in the region in 1921, 1929 and 1936. Samuel sacked Husseini in 1936 after he led a general strike and instigated a revolt against British rule. After the British tried to arrest him in July 1937, the “Mufti” went into hiding and in October disguised himself as a woman and fled to Lebanon.

Husseini (1895 - 1974) had developed links with the German Nazi party during the 1930s, and in 1941 he traveled to Germany. He had a formal meeting with Hitler on November 28, 1941. He collaborated with Eichmann and Himmler on their plans to exterminate Jews. On July 15, 1946 at the Nuremburg trials, Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that Husseini had said that “accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz”. Wisliceny also said that Husseini intervened when Eichmann had been persuaded to spare thousands of Polish Jewish children in a prisoner exchange. The deal was abandoned and the children were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp to be processed and dispatched to death camps.

After the war, Husseini went to Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood ensured that he was granted asylum. Though he was not allowed to enter Jerusalem, when a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood opened there in the mid-1940s, Husseini was declared a local leader of the group.

The anti-Semitism of the Muslim Brotherhood was displayed in its literature. Dr Matthias Kuntzel observed that “up to 1951 the jihad movement of the Brotherhood was almost exclusively focused on Zionism and Jews.... Their newspaper al-Nadhir published a regular column called ‘The danger of the Jews of Egypt’. They published the names and addresses of Jewish businessmen and the publishers of allegedly Jewish newspapers all over the world, attributing every evil - from communism to prostitution - to the ‘Jewish menace’.”

The 1947 decision by the UN to partition Palestine was denounced by the Brotherhood as an “international plot carried out by the Americans, the Russians and the British, under the influence of Zionism.” The Muslim Brotherhood sent 10,000 fighters to Israel in 1948, and at this time had established links with members of the “Free Officers” group - Anwar Sadat and also the future dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, who would lead the 1952 revolution.

Sayyid Qutb, like Hassan al-Banna, was an ardent anti-Semite. In 1950 he had written an essay entitled “Our struggle with the Jews”. In this, he maintained that Jews were identical to their ancestors who “confronted Islam with Enmity from the moment that the Islamic state was established in Medina. They plotted against the Muslim Community from the first day it became a Community.”

In the same document, Qutb claimed that Jews employed “machinations and double dealings which discomfited the Early Muslims... The Jews continue - through their wickedness and double-dealing - to lead this (Muslim) community away from its religion and to alienate it from its Koran.” He asserted that “From such creatures who kill, massacre and defame prophets one can only expect the spilling of human blood and dirty means which would further their machinations and evilness.”

Qutb declared in this work that “Allah brought Hitler to rule over them” and wished the worst upon the Jews - “Allah bring down upon the Jews people who will mete out to them the worst kind of punishment, as confirmation of his unequivocal promise.”

Qutb’s undiluted hatred of the West, hatred for the Jews and hatred of anything that did not conform to the society established under the leadership of Mohammed the prophet led to his works having an influence beyond the Muslim Brotherhood. His ideas were closely followed by two Islamist groups that emerged in Egypt after Nasser had died in 1970. These were Islamic Jihad and Gamaa Islamiya (also called Jamaa Islamiya or al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya). The latter group had been founded as a response to an official decision by the Muslim Brotherhood to renounce violence.

Nasser’s successor was Anwar Sadat, who promised the Muslim Brotherhood that he would impose Sharia law upon Egypt. In 1970 he released all Muslim Brotherhood members who were in prison. Later, Sadat reneged on his promise of Sharia and alienated the Brotherhood and other Salafists (conservative traditionalists) such as Gamaah Islamiya and Islamic Jihad. In the Egyptian general election of 1976, no Muslim Brotherhood members were allowed to stand as candidates. Some Brotherhood members stood as “independents” and some as members of the Arab Socialist Party. Thus they managed to gain 15 seats in the People’s Assembly.

One Egyptian admirer of Qutb was a young eye surgeon called Ayman al-Zawahiri, who came from an affluent family in Cairo’s Maadi district. He had first been arrested in 1966, for being a member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. He was 15 at this time. A decade later he was the leader of Islamic Jihad. This group, acting with Gamaa Islamiya, carried out the bomb attack which killed Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981.

Sadat had alienated Islamists by signing a peace accord with Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister, on March 26, 1979. After Sadat’s killing, Zawahiri was arrested. Though no evidence pointed to his direct role in the assassination, he was imprisoned for three years for possessing a rifle. Ayman al-Zawahiri is now famous as the second-in-command of Al Qaeda. Many of his current speeches imitate the style and content of Qutb’s writings. In August 2006, Ayman al-Zawahiri announced that Gamaa Islamiya had officially become an affiliate of al-Qaeda.
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