Interrupting a history of tolerance - Part I

Another book, from Christian author Habib Faris was Surakh al-Bari fi Buq al-Hurriyya, or The Call of the Innocent With the Trumpet of Freedom. The compilation of anti-Semitic myths, largely of European origin, accuse Jews of ritual sacrifice like the one depicted in the Al-Manar series, ascribing this to Talmudic teachings.

The Ottoman Empire did not approve of early attempts to spread anti-Semitism, and from time to time, Ottoman authorities closed newspapers involved in anti-Jewish incitement as a threat to public order.

In the mid-20th century, German propaganda took over exploiting anti-Jewish sentiments in the Middle East. Seth Arsenian, a former British intelligence officer turned academic, reports that from 1938 until the end of the war, the radio station located at Zeesen near Berlin dominated the Arab scene, utilising the services of well-known Arab exiles and academics in Germany.

A major theme of the radio broadcasts was that the Allies were motivated by “greedy imperialism,” bound to “rob the Arab of his wealth and enslave him forever.” Broadcasts described the Allies as “Jewish controlled” and a “United Jewish nation”, portraying Allied leaders as “untrustworthy, perfidious, and decadent individuals”, and German leaders as sympathetic to Arab Muslim aspirations.

Relentlessly anti-Semitic propaganda insisted that the Jews were tools of British imperialism, bent on expelling the Palestinians from their homeland, creating a Jewish state in Palestine and controlling the whole of the Middle East and its oil. The station extolled Arab culture, and a major aim of the propaganda was to create disturbances and encourage armed rebellion in the Arab world against the British.

Matthias Kuntzel, a German political scientist, agrees with Lewis that anti-Semitism based on the notion of Jewish world conspiracy is not rooted in Islamic tradition, but in European ideological models. In a paper published in 2005 in The Jewish Political Studies Review, building on the work of Arsenian, Kuntzel suggests that the decisive transfer of anti-Semitic ideology to the Muslim Arab world took place between 1937 and 1945 via Nazi propaganda.

According to Kuntzel, Islamism is an independent anti-Semitic and anti-modern ideology. Yet the German National Socialist government supported Hajj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Islamic Brotherhood and the Palestinian Qassamites in translating the European anti-Semitism into an Islamic context.

In 1931 radical Islamist Imam Izz al Din Al-Qassam set up a Salafi movement in Haifa that advocated return to the original Islam of the 7th century with a practice of militant jihad against the infidels. He was killed in a military encounter and Hamas’s suicide-bombing unit bears his name.

Following the recommendation of the British Peel Commission in 1937 for the partition of Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, active in the Palestinian resistance movement against the increasing flow of Jewish immigration from Europe to Palestine, also joined the anti-Jewish agitation and received financial and ideological support from German government agencies.

Kuntzel maintains that the Zeesen transmitter transferred the anti-Semitic ideology to the Arab world, linking early Islamism with German National Socialism. Although radio Zeesen ceased operation in April 1945, its frequencies of hate continued to reverberate into the Arab World.

See Interrupting a history of tolerance - Part II.