.....the interviewer says to Herf, “Most Arab historians agree that the Nazis did not contribute great ideas that grew in the region, but you posit the opposite.” Herf tells him:
Remember, these words by Herf will hopefully be read throughout the Arab world.The absurd and false notion that an international Jewish conspiracy existed and was a major force in world politics was a key theme of Nazism’s wartime propaganda. Conspiratorial thinking focused on the supposed power of the Jews persisted after the war in the Middle East. The pejorative and hateful depictions of Jews in Nazi propaganda, the belief that they were inherently evil and that they should be punished as a result found echoes in the postwar publications of the Muslim Brotherhood, the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the postwar activities of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Egyptian government’s propaganda under Nasser and in the Hamas Covenant of 1988.
.....
Herf also makes the following point, which must come as dynamite to many Arab readers:
Nazi officials dealing with propaganda aimed at Arabs and Muslims concluded that a selective reading of the Quran and the commentaries about it was their most effective means of reaching this audience. In so doing they drew out the already existing anti-Jewish themes. They presented Islam — not radical, fundamentalist, political or jihadist Islam, but Islam in general –as a religion infused with and inseparable from hatred for the Jews. In their view, from the time that the Jews rejected Prophet Mohammed’s demands that they convert to Islam, the Jews became an “enemy” of Islam. In so doing, Nazism’s Arabic-language propaganda placed the events of the mid-20th century into the far longer context of a supposed, but actually false, Jewish antagonism to Islam as a religion.
Herf goes on to note that the Mufti’s views prevailed in Arab lands after the war, and what he calls an “ideologically driven distortion” was carried over at the war’s end. The Arabs, he argues, saw the creation of Israel as confirmation of the Jews’ power, and that “the predictions of Nazi propaganda had been accurate.” With an eye to his Egyptian audience, Herf says that those who saw the Nazis as ideological allies “fashioned a blend of Nazism and Islamism,” and were the ones who “always rejected compromise with the state of Israel.” He even tells the readers something they may not have ever acknowledged- that 700,000 Jews had to flee the Arab lands after 1948!
So the question arises. Why did an Egyptian paper, obviously with the government’s approval, allow such an interview to be published, and such an anti-Islamist viewpoint to be expressed? The answer, I suspect, is that the Egyptian government, now in the throes of a massive campaign against the growth of radical Islamist extremism — particularly that of the Muslim Brotherhood — needs to allow this candid expression of the truth to now be heard in Egypt.
(You might want to read the whole thing.)

