Answer to Dr Matthias Küntzel (Part 3)
It is not at all surprising that Küntzel does not care to mention that Islam is thoroughly steeped in Jew-hatred. If he did, he would be forced to draw the line between the genocide hadith and the rest of Islam. He would have to come down on: the Muslim Final Solution – no, very bad, very bad – but everything up to that point – just fine. He has to go along with Harkabi that the genocide hadith is not essential to Islam, not only because no one knew about it (Harkabi), but also because it is too cruel and sadistic (Küntzel).
Muslims are compelled by their religion to obey “Allah and his Messenger,” i.e., both the Qur’an and the hadith. Not only does Islam command Muslims to “fight the Jews and kill them,” the Ahira, the Afterlife that Muslims yearn for, with its jannah and associated delights, “will not come,” threatens the messenger of Allah, until every single Jew is killed—”There is a Jew behind me, kill him!” In other words, the Day of Judgement will not come until the world is free of Jews, moreover, rendered so by the hands of Muslims. Obscenely barbaric as the Nazis were, they did not get there first.
What Küntzel has produced is a massive piece of propaganda deflecting responsibility for Muslim hatred of Jews and antipathy towards Israel away from Islam. It is just unfortunate that Küntzel, like the editor whose note introduces his writing, prefer to remain in the warm and comfortable Islam-is-innocent space. The editor, to his or her credit, at least hints at not being intimidated by “Islamophobia.” Dr Küntzel is a wholesale merchant of it.
It would be quite natural for the Jewish and Israeli ear to be particularly attuned to expositions on Nazism, especially where this is linked to the Arabs and Iranians, and it would not be unfair to counsel caution in assessing Jewish and Israeli receptiveness to such studies. A case in point is the IAM’s uncritical acceptance of Dr Matthias Küntzel’s assertions linking Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism to Nazi propaganda to the a priori exclusion of their anti-Semitism stemming from Islam.
This has not been a review of Dr Matthias Küntzel’s book, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II, but of Dr Küntzel’s talking about his book – in a speech and in an article. It is possible that Dr Küntzel’s book does not bear out the charges I bring against him, but what he thought important enough to say about his book, does bear me out. Dr Küntzel might have done excellent work in linking Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism to Nazi propaganda. It is just a shame that he felt the need to positively assert no Islamic input to Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism, when he could so easily have hedged his claims with a note that he did not examine the Islamic origins of such attitudes and beliefs, or something a bit more credible. There is no denying that Nazi propaganda had strengthened Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism, but it did not create it. That task was performed, and continues to be performed, by Islam, the very force that Dr Küntzel a priori dismissed in favour of the propaganda pretender, “Islamism,” taking IAM along for the ride.
Not that the IAM did not willingly go along for the ride. Consider the first line of the Editor’s Note: “IAM notes that Western scholarship has, by and large, avoided topics that could upset Arabs and Iranians.” (My emphasis) It is not “Arabs and Iranians” that Western scholarship are worried about upsetting. Arabs and Iranians in general do not cause problems when they get upset. Christian, secular or Druze Arabs, as well as Christian, Jewish, secular or Zoroastrian Iranians are unlikely to be the people the editor had in mind when writing about “Arabs and Iranians” that scholars try to avoid upsetting.
Furthermore, the Nazis broadcast also to India, which at that point included Pakistan and Bangladesh. They were not after impressing Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs or Jains. The IAM editor is aware that the Nazis were not interested in reaching such people. Nazi propaganda to the east, referencing as it did, the Qur’an and Muhammad, was aimed specifically at Muslims. The propaganda exploited popular Muslim conceptions of Hitler as secretly a Muslim, the new caliph, the twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, leading a jihad against the British, and so on. The editor is well aware that his or her wording could be more accurate: Western scholarship has, by and large, avoided topics that could upset Muslims. For reasons given above, the editor of Israel Academia Monitor is unlikely to scrutinise Dr Küntzel’s arguments against Nazis too closely.
By contrast, only Muslims are crystal clear about whom they want to kill. That the hatred and killing of Jews is taught every day in Palestinian schools, and practical training for it provided in Gaza children’s summer camps each year, bears no echo of the Nazi propaganda that Küntzel wishes to attribute them to, but is unquestionably Islamic through and through, whether Islam pre-1937 or post-1937. The IAM is alert to scholars bowing to “Islamophobia” intimidation, while Islamophilia slips right through its net.
Finally, it is perhaps prudent to explicitly state that the Nazis were unquestionably one of the most evil regimes of modern times, but one does not improve one’s moral capital by attributing to them that which they were not responsible for. Truth does not require such cheapening.
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