Comparing Islam and Nazism: some common misconceptions

ANJULI PANDAVAR | Nov 18, 2024

In reaction to legacy media reports on the pogrom against Jews in Amsterdam following a football match between a Dutch and a visiting Israeli team on 7 November 2024, many criticised the characterising of the Israeli fans as “football hooligans,” and the assertion that the melée was spontaneous. Shocking as the media and police conduct were, it was not surprising. In this horrible episode, as in so many others, the propaganda machine that is the media and the supposed Western European forces of law and order have much to answer for.

What was surprising, however, was that the media consistently described the brutal perpetrators as Muslims, rather than jihadists, extremists, fundamentalists or “Islamists”. In this case, thankfully, we do not have that shameful obfuscation of Muslim behaviour to contend with alongside everything else. As analyses started coming in, though, other bad habits became evident. Notable is the notion that Muslims learned their anti-Semitism from the Nazis.

In some instances, blaming the Nazis for Muslim Jew-hatred is an attempt to exculpate Muslims, such as in the work of Dr Matthias Küntzel, and in the others, such as J-TV in the present context, it could be down to simple ignorance. The close collaboration between the Nazis and Arab Muslims, and the existence of Arab Nazis, are well-established, as is the Nazi promotion and encouragement of Arab Jew-hatred. Undoubtedly, Muslim Jew-hatred intensified and took more organised forms as a result of Nazi cultivation of a relationship with Middle Eastern Muslim leaders. “August 14, 1938. Ahmed Hussein, leader of Young Egypt, returns from Europe more active in calling for fascism and Nazism in Egypt,” Said Shahat in Youm7, (electr. translation).

It can equally easily be shown that German and Muslim authoritarianism, in the coinciding aspects of their mindsets, sought each other out, and had found each other already before the outbreak of WWI, when what was later to become Nazism manifested only as its still uncoalesced components. These components appealed to both the Turkish and the Arab intelligentsias, who admired the pre-WWI Germans as suitable role models, while in the 1920s, both Mussolini and Hitler looked up to Ataturk as the model dictator, a dictator’s dictator, one might say. Even Rohullah Khomeini spent many an hour absorbing Nazi radio broadcasts from Berlin. The fascist Young Egypt Party (Green Shirts), of which Gamal Abdel Nasser was a member, modelled itself on the Nazi Brown Shirts. The Muslim Brotherhood goons were described as the Supreme Guide Hassan al-Banna’s Gestapo. The governance system that the Muslim Brotherhood had, and still has, in mind is akin to what Adolf Hitler had in mind. According to Al-Banna:

We are not eager to have a Parliament of the representatives of the people, or a cabinet of ministers, unless such representatives and ministers are Qur’anic Moslems. If we do not find them, then we must ourselves serve as the Parliament. Allah and the religious councils will limit our authority so that no one has to fear dictatorship. (Hassan el-Banna, quoted in John Roy Carlson, From Cairo to Damascus, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1951, p92ff.)

By the time the Nazis started their persecution of Jews, Arab Muslims of all classes were wild with enthusiasm for Nazism, some seeing it as a form of Islam. The Nazis were managing to accomplish what Muslims could only dream of. The most that can be said, though, is that the Nazis showed Muslims a way towards their goal, and that goal, right from the beginning, has always been the extermination of the Jews.

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.? (Sahih Muslim 6985)

The ideological ground for this Islamic final solution of the Jewish problem is well-prepared in the Muslim holy texts. In his brilliant The Palestinian Delusion, Robert Spencer manages to dissect no fewer than sixty-nine Qur’anic verses for their role in the extreme Muslim hatred towards Jews.

Furthermore, when Muslims taunt and threaten Jews, they often say that Hitler did not finish the job, but they do not invoke any of his specific acts. They chant, Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud! Jaish Muhammad soufa ya?oud! The specific Jew-killing event they invoke is Muhammad’s destruction of the oasis of Khaybar, six years into Islam. Lately, the most egregious aspects of the life of Muhammad have been subject to aggressive sanitising by Muslim apologists and Western useful idiots, which contradicts the continued chanting of the slogan as a threat. The point here is, though, that Muslims needed no lessons in either Jew-hating or genocide from the Nazis. They came up with that idea by themselves right at the dawn of Islam. Some would even say before Islam became Islam.

Islam and Nazism are both totalitarian systems, but Islam is stronger than Nazism for two reasons: one intrinsic; the other contingent. The intrinsic reason is the way the structure of Islam relates to the structure of the ummah. There is a separation of faith and law. Faith is the domain of the lay Muslims, the overwhelming majority; law is the domain of the ‘scholars’ (they are not in the business of scholarship, but more of the nature of political commissars), a select few, collectively known as the ulema. Lay Muslims experience Islam as a religion and are usually ignorant of Islam as a legal system, Shari’a, knowing only as much as the scholars vouch safe for them to know. Lay Muslims are commanded by Allah to hear and obey, never to question, and to imitate their sheikh.

In the Shari’a manual, Reliance of the Traveller, we read:

Three spiritual stations a servant [of Allah (a Muslim)] may have in his worship: (1) to worship in a way that fulfils its obligations, by observing all its conditions and integrals; …

[…]

All three of these are the perfection of faith (ihsan), but the perfection required for the validity of worship is only the first, while perfection in the latter senses is the mark of the elect, and not possible for many. (My emphasis)

The above passage, complements the one below, and together they form the heart of Islam as a totalitarian system.

Allah Most High prohibited the people to go out altogether in military expeditions and jihad, and ordered a segment of them to engage solely in becoming knowledgeable in the religion of Allah. (Reliance of the Traveller, Book B2.2. My emphasis)

The totalitarian system operationalises through the doctrine of commanding the right and forbidding the wrong, meaning that every Muslim polices every other Muslim. This is an obligation on all adults, regardless of the content of their character or the stature of the one confronted. Children are commended for reprimanding their transgressing parents, but they are obligated to report their parents to the authorities.

“The elect” control “the masses” through religion. The strict stratification of the ummah into the scholars (“the elect”) and lay Muslims (“the masses”), the former ordained to study the laws of Allah and “guide” the latter, while the latter is ordained to hear and obey the former without question, and to fight and die in jihad warfare, thus makes Islam a functioning totalitarian system.

Lay Muslims are not supposed to know what Shari’a is, for that risks compromising the availability of “martyrdom seekers,” people eager to die in the act of killing, when the scholars need them to go forth and do exactly that. This is why the texts of Shari’a are forbidden to lay Muslims. They are supposed to simply hear and obey the “scholars,” who will tell them whatever they deem safe for them to know at that moment. Should lay Muslims retain any critical faculties after their childhood years in madrassa, they might, despite prohibition, actually try to understand the Islamic texts for themselves. Shari’a warns them about the confusion they will run into, should they attempt that. Lay Muslims find validation in their own ignorance and are proud of that. The self-negation of the oppressed is a hallmark of totalitarianism.

To drive the point home, Reliance of the Traveller adds, “It is obligatory for the ordinary person to follow the scholar who is a mujtahid, [someone trained in Sacred Law, i.e., Shari’a].” For lay Muslims, there is nothing else to Islam, and for Islamic totalitarianism to work, this is exactly how it has to be. All that lay Muslims are meant to do is to hear and obey, as Qur’an 24:51 commands. Dr Joseph Goebbels might have been hard at work developing these finer aspects of Nazism, but a world war might have proved a bit of a distraction, even for a committed propaganda mastermind.

Yet, despite its careful future-proofing, Islam has a fatal flaw built in, one that Nazism lacked: Islam’s utopia is behind it. Muslims hold the best Islamic society and the very best of Muslims to have been Muhammad and his band of companions. Muslims themselves maintain, and children are taught in madrassa, that every successive generation of Muslims is weaker than the one preceding it, and Muslim society, consequently, is always in the worse condition it has ever been. This means that the ideology cannot mobilise its adherents for a better world, something that Nazism can do. This leaves Islam with no alternative but to promise a better world after death, a promise that has outlived Muhammad.

The psychological effect of this is a disaffection from the present that manifests as anything from indifference to this world and this life, to a burning urge to escape both and reach that Next Life, the Ahira, as soon as possible. The very best and the most assured way of accomplishing that is to be killed while killing an infidel. Nothing shatters a Muslim more than to survive his killing of an infidel. Theo van Gogh’s murderer lamented during his trial, “I shot to kill and be killed. You cannot understand.” The Shi’a maimed in Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah weep for the humiliation of being tricked out of the opportunity to kill and be killed. When a Palestinian called his family in Gaza on 7 October 2023 after having “killed ten Jews with my own hands,” his brother urged him to return home, whereupon he shrieked, “There’s no coming back! It’s victory or martyrdom! My mother gave birth to me for the sake of the religion!” Nazis did it for the sake of Hitler, not for the sake of Nazism. And they did not do it in order to die in the process. In the closing chapters of WWII, the Nazis sent young boys into battle as a last desperate throw of the dice. It is also clear that they were conflicted over doing this. No such qualms for the Iranian regime that sent thousands of schoolchildren running into minefields so soldiers might have a safe path through, or ISIS brides setting out specifically to breed “cubs” fi-sabilillah, in the cause of Allah, i.e., to die in jihad.

Arabic for martyrdom, shahada, which also means “certificate.” A Palestinian terrorist, while planning a jihad attack, was killed before he could attain his high school certificate. His mother said:

Bassel succeeded and received martyrdom (Shahada in Arabic -Ed.), which is more important than the certificate (also Shahada -Ed.) of the matriculation exams… Bassel succeeded, by Allah he succeeded. Everyone came to congratulate me – his friends and also his study friends. (WAFA, official PA news agency, July 29, 2024)

Lest the reader should see in this evidence of a fanatical nationalist struggle, it is not. For almost one-and-a-half millennia, long before nations existed, Muslims have shunned all innovation, all development, all improvement, unless these serve the cause of Allah, i.e., spreads Islam, for that is the only way to at least mitigate the weakening of the ummah relative to the Muslims who went before. Wherever Islam prevails, as soon as the Muslims are no longer able to plunder, whether their neighbours, their dhimmis or their own natural resources, they will stagnate and decay on every conceivable level. Yet, this does not mean that the society will implode. Muslims will simply become increasingly immiserated, and at the same time firmer in their conviction that they are the best of people, because “this life is but a test for the next life,” and they are passing the test.

Nazism, of course, promises its adherents a better future on earth. There is, therefore, every reason to improve and excel, even for an extremely dark purpose. Nazism could bring the very best in industrial power, technology and expertise, as well as work-ethic and organisation, to the same task of genocide, and achieve results that Muslims could not achieve in 1400 years, leaving them in awe and flocking to attach themselves to the Nazis. They saw in the Nazis a way to put at the disposal of jihad that which they were, and remain, incapable of producing themselves, the same logic that motivated a group of Muslims to learn to fly passenger jets, and Muslims to become nuclear physicists. Any such interest ought to be a red alert to the world, but it seldom is.

While the Nazis were a thousand years ahead of the Muslims in technical prowess and organisational ability, Muslims are capable of a level of cruelty that would cause Nazis to pass out. Every now and again, the world gets an inkling of this, such as the doings of the Islamic State, or the string of horrific massacres that Arab Muslims have perpetrated on the Jews, both before and since they usurped the demonym “Palestinians”. Consider the following factual account:

House to house, Arab mobs went, bursting into every room looking for hiding Jews.  Religious books and scrolls were burned or torn to shreds.  The defenceless Jews were variously beheaded, castrated, their breasts and fingers sliced off, and in some cases their eyes plucked from their sockets.  Infant or adult, man or woman—it mattered not.  The carnage went on for hours, with the Arab policemen standing down—or joining in.  Blood ran in streamlets down the narrow stone staircases outside the buildings.  House to house, room by room, the savagery was repeated.

The astute reader will have noticed that this is not a description of the October 7 massacre. It is the Hebron massacre of 1929. The detail that gives it away is: “the Arab policemen standing down—or joining in.” The cruelty is a universal Muslim constant, as is the conduct of Muslim police officers. Muslim police officers in Amsterdam “stood down” from guard duty at the city’s synagogues and other places of Jewish significance, in anticipation of what, you may ask. Ahlam Tamimi, the Palestinian terrorist who accompanied a suicide bomber to his target, the families dining in a Jerusalem pizzeria, recounts how a busload of regular Palestinians, not trained killers, was very happy when news of the bombing came through and how the beaming Palestinian police stepped onto the bus specifically to congratulate them all.

Civilised people are simply incapable of processing that there exists on this planet a kind of human being capable of such depravity. It is an exception, an aberration, an anomaly, an outlier, perpetrated by a handful of extremists, etc. No, no, no, no, no. Cruelty and inhumanity are very much the lifeblood of Islam. Such mind-numbing events as we witnessed on 7 October are far from the worst they are capable off. Long after Nazi mass murderers have got themselves blind-drunk at the end of a hard day’s killing so they might sleep at night, Muslim mass-murders would still be on the phone to their parents boasting about how many Jews they had killed with their own hands.

None of this should surprise us. As grotesque and barbaric as the Nazis were, they did not have a body of law that compels a divorced man to first pimp out his former wife before they may remarry. Shari’a does. They did not have a body of law that permits grown men to have sex with infants. Shari’a does. They did not have a body of law that regulates the marital obligations of an infant after her vagina and anus have ruptured into a single orifice. Shari’a does. Cruelty and violence are integral to the Muslim psyche. Some readers might object that they know Muslims who do not agree with this. That might be so, but their Muslim acquaintances will not be mujtahids, making their opinions irrelevant. Shari’a stipulates that one of the conditions that must be met for a determination to become law is:

All mujtahids of the Muslims in the period of the thing or event agree on its ruling, regardless of their country, race, or group, though non-mujtahids are of no consequence. (Reliance of the Traveller, Book B7.1(b))

In short, the opinions of lay Muslim do not and cannot ever have any bearing on Islam. When pressed, such Muslim “opinions” will come down to, “we must leave it to the scholars.” The horrors perpetrated by the Nazis were concealed from the wider Nazi population for very good reason: they were not cruel enough to stomach it, despite their rabid anti-Semitism. This is why unfavourably comparing Hamas to the Nazis is just plain wrong.

The contingent reason for Islam’s strength is the same contingent reason for Nazism’s weakness: the one condition that a totalitarian society must meet in order to become self-sustaining. It has to have at least one generation that, from cradle to grave, has known nothing but totalitarianism. Islam had 1200 years’ worth of such generations, that each faithfully prepared the next generation for the only reality it knew. Nazism never had the opportunity to raise its first complete generation, given that it had existed as a fully-formed ideology for less than twenty years, the last six of which was spent in war. The fears and habits of mind that a people acquires after major, and especially repeated, trauma, such as a deliberate famine or a reign of terror, have not had time to become hardwired into the Nazi psyche. Once such fears and habits are inculcated in future generations removed from the events, they assume a persistence of their own, independent of reality and immune to reason.

Amongst people who have left Islam, oftentimes subtleties in their responses to criticism of Muslims betray a residual loyalty to the ummah, itself betraying a persistence of the fears and habits of mind that keep Muslims Muslim, such as an inability to laugh at a joke at Muslims’ expense. Residual Muslim loyalty can also be overt, such as when ex-Muslims defend the hijab. It can even be disgraceful, such as when they deflect blame for the British gang-rape pandemic onto anyone, as long as it’s away from Muslims, or they claim, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that Muslims had nothing to do with the Easter massacres in Sri Lanka. All of this by people who supposedly left Islam. It was a great deal easier to denazify a population of Nazis than it is to de-Islamise a population of Muslims. Nazism is dead, but even if Islam is apparently killed, it can live on in some unknown corner of an ex-Muslim’s heart, ready to be rekindled when a charismatic Muslim comes along. No matter how peaceful or “integrated” a country’s Muslim population, at some point in the future, Islam will come to claim them.

But there is a silver lining to this horrible cloud. Islam’s good fortune had started deserting it from the early 17^th century through to the early 19^th century, when various Western Powers refused to submit to Muslim plunder, and defeated the Ottomans in war, after which Western Powers began seizing and colonising “Muslim lands” from the Ottomans and humiliating the ummah as a whole. Thus, a rival reality had penetrated the hitherto impenetrable reality of Muslims. Another 150 years would go by before a generation lacking the pristine certainties of totalitarianism would rise to prominence in the Muslim world, its existence today challenging the very viability of Islam.

The implications of this difference with Islam is that whereas Nazism could fail (and did), Islam must fail (and will). Islam will not go down without a fight and its leaders would not hesitate for a moment to unleash nuclear war upon the world in the full knowledge that they will go down with it. The point is that all Jews will die, and Muslims will finally have their Ahira. Failing such a catastrophe, the end of Islam will come when the last vestiges of loyalty to the ummah are wrenched from every heart in which it is sealed and the ideology finally dies.

Picture credits:

Abdulrazzaq Badran (Photo Journalist to Egyptian Dar El Hilal magazine) – interet-general.infoReferences for this description (or part of this) or for the depiction in the file are not provided., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1193611

Amsterdam pogrom screenshot from aljazeera video https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/8/israeli-football-fans-clash-with-protesters-in-amsterdam

Dirk Jansz van Santen – This digital media file – and/or the physical objects depicted on it – originates from the digital and/or physical collections of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, national library of the Netherlands., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41650225

https://www.youm7.com/story/2018/8/14/%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%8A%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%AD%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%8A%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A8-%D8%B0%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%85-14-%D8%A3%D8%BA%D8%B3%D8%B7%D8%B3-1938-%D8%A3%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%AF-%D8%AD%D8%B3%D9%8A%D9%86/3913095 “August 14, 1938. Ahmed Hussein, leader of Young Egypt, returns from Europe more active in calling for fascism and Nazism in Egypt,” Said Shahat.

Extracted from: Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1980-036-05, Amin al Husseini bei bosnischen SS-Freiwilligen.jpg

Unknown author – http://qudsday.org/hassanimages/per/slides/pic2.jpg, http://www.hassanalbanna.org/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19201471