Anne Karpf: Islamofascist slanders
[Anne Karpf is a columnist in the Saturday Guardian's Family section.]
We live in McCarthyist times, or so it sometimes seems. An Indiana election official, it emerged last week, has distributed a blog that called Barack Obama a "young, black Adolf Hitler", while elsewhere an email was sent to Jewish voters warning of a "second Holocaust" if the Democrat was elected. Meanwhile, campuses around America last week marked "Islamofascism Awareness Week" with events on jihad and Islamic totalitarianism.
"Islamofascism" slips easily from the mouth of war-on-terror ideologues but it has a deeper narrative, too, as it attempts to elide modern Islam with 1930s National Socialism, and equate Muslims and Nazis. Obama, by virtue of his Muslim father (whom he met once), earns a central place in this narrative, where (according to Colin Powell) calling someone a Muslim - accurately or not - constitutes a smear campaign. It follows, QED, that having studied the Qur'an makes you the antichrist.
It is, perhaps, understandable that Israel invoked the spectre of a Holocaust in the Middle East in the aftermath of the liberation of the concentration camps; but Israeli historians have documented the ways in which, as the country became the dominant military power in the region, successive Israeli prime ministers deployed it as an ideological tool, even as the state demonstrated indifference to real Holocaust survivors in its midst. No one collapsed the differences between the Nazi genocide and the Middle East conflict more unashamedly than Menachem Begin who, at the height of his country's bombardment of Beirut, sent a telegram to Ronald Reagan declaring that he felt as though he was facing Berlin where Hitler and his henchmen were hiding in a bunker. To which the novelist Amos Oz responded tartly: "Mr Begin, Hitler died 37 years ago ... Again and again ... you reveal to the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler in order to kill him every day anew in the guise of terrorists."
But the biggest weapon wielded by those intent on confusing Arabs or Muslims with Nazis is the person of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In a new book, Icons of Evil, two American academics rehash the charges against the Mufti - that he received funding from the Nazis, met Hitler, sat out much of the war in Berlin, and helped establish a Muslim-Balkan unit in the Waffen-SS. In their inflation of the importance of the Mufti (an inflation deliberately encouraged in Israel by the 1961 Eichmann trial), what such accounts fail to provide is evidence that the Mufti gained any power over Nazi policy. Conversely, plenty of evidence shows he lost almost all his influence over Palestinian Arabs in the period.
More recently, consanguinity is claimed between the Mufti and Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein - all of whom are brought in to retrospectively implicate the Palestinians in the Holocaust, as if this might somehow prove that they're entitled to only a small portion of their own land. Since the Jewish genocide is used so shamelessly in legitimation of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, it's hardly surprising if many Arabs and Muslims respond either with Holocaust denial or by trying to appropriate the Holocaust themselves. In a mirror-image of Arabs-are-Nazis, Zionism-is-Nazism: they accuse Israel of acting like Nazis even while they represent Jews in the crude and offensive stereotypes used by Nazi propaganda.
One consequence of using the Holocaust in this way is that it naturalises antisemitism, turning it into an endemic, unchangeable part of human nature. By refusing to see the differences between different kinds of antisemitism that might look similar but have different historical causes, antisemitism becomes paradoxically harder to challenge. It also encourages Jews to see themselves as permanent victims and live in perpetual fear: we can never escape Auschwitz. And it polemicises the Holocaust, devaluing the real event and traducing the memory of the millions who perished in it - genocide as metaphor...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
We live in McCarthyist times, or so it sometimes seems. An Indiana election official, it emerged last week, has distributed a blog that called Barack Obama a "young, black Adolf Hitler", while elsewhere an email was sent to Jewish voters warning of a "second Holocaust" if the Democrat was elected. Meanwhile, campuses around America last week marked "Islamofascism Awareness Week" with events on jihad and Islamic totalitarianism.
"Islamofascism" slips easily from the mouth of war-on-terror ideologues but it has a deeper narrative, too, as it attempts to elide modern Islam with 1930s National Socialism, and equate Muslims and Nazis. Obama, by virtue of his Muslim father (whom he met once), earns a central place in this narrative, where (according to Colin Powell) calling someone a Muslim - accurately or not - constitutes a smear campaign. It follows, QED, that having studied the Qur'an makes you the antichrist.
It is, perhaps, understandable that Israel invoked the spectre of a Holocaust in the Middle East in the aftermath of the liberation of the concentration camps; but Israeli historians have documented the ways in which, as the country became the dominant military power in the region, successive Israeli prime ministers deployed it as an ideological tool, even as the state demonstrated indifference to real Holocaust survivors in its midst. No one collapsed the differences between the Nazi genocide and the Middle East conflict more unashamedly than Menachem Begin who, at the height of his country's bombardment of Beirut, sent a telegram to Ronald Reagan declaring that he felt as though he was facing Berlin where Hitler and his henchmen were hiding in a bunker. To which the novelist Amos Oz responded tartly: "Mr Begin, Hitler died 37 years ago ... Again and again ... you reveal to the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler in order to kill him every day anew in the guise of terrorists."
But the biggest weapon wielded by those intent on confusing Arabs or Muslims with Nazis is the person of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In a new book, Icons of Evil, two American academics rehash the charges against the Mufti - that he received funding from the Nazis, met Hitler, sat out much of the war in Berlin, and helped establish a Muslim-Balkan unit in the Waffen-SS. In their inflation of the importance of the Mufti (an inflation deliberately encouraged in Israel by the 1961 Eichmann trial), what such accounts fail to provide is evidence that the Mufti gained any power over Nazi policy. Conversely, plenty of evidence shows he lost almost all his influence over Palestinian Arabs in the period.
More recently, consanguinity is claimed between the Mufti and Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein - all of whom are brought in to retrospectively implicate the Palestinians in the Holocaust, as if this might somehow prove that they're entitled to only a small portion of their own land. Since the Jewish genocide is used so shamelessly in legitimation of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, it's hardly surprising if many Arabs and Muslims respond either with Holocaust denial or by trying to appropriate the Holocaust themselves. In a mirror-image of Arabs-are-Nazis, Zionism-is-Nazism: they accuse Israel of acting like Nazis even while they represent Jews in the crude and offensive stereotypes used by Nazi propaganda.
One consequence of using the Holocaust in this way is that it naturalises antisemitism, turning it into an endemic, unchangeable part of human nature. By refusing to see the differences between different kinds of antisemitism that might look similar but have different historical causes, antisemitism becomes paradoxically harder to challenge. It also encourages Jews to see themselves as permanent victims and live in perpetual fear: we can never escape Auschwitz. And it polemicises the Holocaust, devaluing the real event and traducing the memory of the millions who perished in it - genocide as metaphor...