From Hitler to Hamas (and Hezbollah)
Nazi Germany was the incubator for what would become Hamas and Hezbollah. This post includes a downloadable book chapter detailing this underappreciated history and discussion with the book's author.
INTRODUCTION (by Robert Graboyes)
It is impossible to understand Hamas without knowing its historical pedigree. Today, Bastiat’s Window is honored to offer a powerful resource for understanding that history—a downloadable chapter (“Islamic Jihadism: The Legacy of Nazi Antisemitism”) from Professor David Patterson’s book, Judaism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust: Making the Connections (Cambridge University Press, 2022)—referred to hereafter as JA&H. This chapter is the most compact, sweeping account I’ve found of the historical, organizational, and philosophical connections between 1930s Nazism and contemporary Jihadism. Once you’ve read it, please pass the link to this post along to others so they might also read Professor Patterson’s account.
In brief, Hamas is as an especially fervent local chapter of an organization whose early funding, rituals, and philosophy came directly from Nazi Germany. Hamas’s spiritual mentor was a cleric employed by Hitler to organize Jihadist SS squads to murder Jews in Europe. Hamas’s 1987 founding charter maintained the Nazi/Jihadist goal of exterminating Jews worldwide. Hezbollah’s pedigree differs somewhat from Hamas’s, but they share goals and forebears.
This history is essential to comprehending October 7, 2023, its lead-up, and its aftermath. It explains the Bibas family’s torment—the manual strangulation of a 4-year-old and a 9-month-old, perhaps before the eyes of their soon-to-be-murdered mother; the jubilant community celebration that surrounded the parading of the babies’ desecrated remains; the three-card monte game played with the mother’s corpse; the emotional torture of the father.
Knowing this history also reveals the naïveté of those who presume Hamas can be or wishes to be a reliable negotiating partner or peaceful neighbor to Israel. It suggests why Gaza grew more impoverished and depraved after Israel forcibly removed every single Jew from Gaza in 2005. And it speaks worlds of the Western students chanting “we are Hamas,” flying the flag of Hezbollah, telling Jews on campuses “the 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” and spray-painting “Hamas is coming” on monuments.
In his book chapter, Patterson explains how Nazism and Jihadism were radical, mutually reinforcing departures from traditional Christian and Muslim antisemitism. Before the early 20th century, both cultures generally offered Jews redemption or tolerance in exchange for conversion, submission, ghettoization, or emigration—with the occasional pogrom to remind them of the alternative. In contrast, Nazism and Jihadism viewed extermination as the only remedy.
David Patterson is Hillel Feinberg Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). At $75.00, JA&H is the most expensive Kindle book I’ve ever purchased, and also one of the biggest bargains.
What follows below are excerpts from this chapter, followed by additional observations by the author and by me. Thanks to Professor Patterson and Cambridge University Press for permission to post this portion of the book.
THE BLOODY DIAGONAL
World War I was a global catastrophe. It left humanity awash in a sea of blood, despair, emptiness, and chaos. The devastation lay not only in the unprecedented number of casualties—up to 22 million dead and 23 million wounded—but also in the radical overturning of reality itself. Humanity had taken on a heretofore unheard-of capacity for killing, preconceptions about human decency collapsed, and every notion of rational and moral progress was rendered utterly bankrupt. The pervasive suffering, both physical and spiritual, was felt to be not only horrific but meaningless. How to explain such a profound and universal upheaval of truth, understanding, and value? Why, the Jews, of course. It's all right here in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the dissemination of which went viral in the aftermath of World War I, with the German-language edition appearing in 1919, the English-language edition in the United States and Great Britain in 1920, and the Arabic-language translation in 1921. … Assuming global dimensions, the millennial hatred of the Jews soon assumed an exterminationist aspect that became a first principle of National Socialism: One could not be a Nazi without embracing this foundational directive of extermination. [JA&H]
GRABOYES: World War II blinds us to the futility of World War I. While the names are parallel, the wars bear no similarity. Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin battled over vastly different futures for mankind; they might as well have ruled three different planets. A generation earlier, their warring nations were led by George, his first cousin Willy, and cousin Alex’s husband, Nicky. The whole thing began when a subject of their distant cousin Petar assassinated the nephew of their other distant cousin, Franz. Ill-conceived mutual defense treaties dragged the rest of Europe into the conflagration like derailing freight cars. Rulers and subjects alike knew from the start that the war was so much spilt coal burning, but pride and fear kept them stoking the flames for four years. … … Geography also helps explain the misery of WWI and the close bonds between the seemingly distant cultures of Germany and the Mideast. WWII was fought round the world, while one can visit most of the killing fields of WWI in a day of driving. As you can see from the map above, the Central Powers comprised a slender diagonal corridor from the North Sea to the Indian Ocean. The German border was only 800 miles from the Muslim world—and only 2,000 miles from what would become Israel, 2,500 miles from the Persian Gulf, and 3,000 miles from the Gulf of Aden.
PATTERSON: It should be noted that the slaughter of the Armenian Christians at the hands of the Turks began well before the First World War. Under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman Turks murdered more than 200,000 Armenians between 1894 and 1896. On 13 November 1914 the Sultan Mehmed V issued a called for jihad against the Christians in the Ottoman Empire. The conventional starting date for what is known as the Armenian Genocide is 24 April 1915, under the direction of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), led by Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Djemal Pasha. Assyrian Christians were also targeted, with an estimated 800,000 Christians brutally slaughtered during the First World War. The Germans, who were allies of the Turks in the Central Powers, were also involved. Prefiguring the Holocaust, the Turks transported the Christians to twenty-five concentration camps, and, just as the Germans would later organize killing units known as the Einsatzgruppen, so the Turks formed killing units called the Teshkilat-I Mahsusa. In keeping with sharia law (Quran 5:33), they starved, shot, butchered, and crucified Armenian and Assyrian men, women, and children. Among the Germans involved in the genocide were General Fritz Bronsart, Admiral Guido ven Usedom, Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, and General Hans Friedrich Leopold von Seeckt. A pivotal figure who served in the Turkish army in the killing fields of Smyrna and who would later be directly involved in the Holocaust was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the future Mufti of Jerusalem under the British mandate in Palestine.
JEWS AS BIOLOGICAL PATHOGENS
In 1935 the journal of the Association of German Physicians stated, “Just as the human body does not absorb the TB germs into its general organism, so a natural, homogeneous society cannot absorb the Jews into its organic association.” Similarly, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah borrowed Hitler’s metaphor of Jews and Judaism as a disease, asserting that Jews are a “cancerous growth and harmful microbe, this entity without borders.” [JA&H]
GRABOYES: The Nazi rhetoric emerges in 1935 and Nasrallah was in power 90 years later. Nasrallah’s quote was published in 2007. These sentiments are not quaint libels from bygone days.
PATTERSON: The metaphor of contagion in reference to the Jews is a frequent one in the discourse of antisemites. It is a metaphor used by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who declared that the Aryan Geist or spirit was poisoned not merely by Jewish blood but by Judaism, because the -ism is in the blood: Judaism is the pathogen. All Jews, he insisted, are prone to think “talmudically,” which means that the extermination of the Jews had to be total, in order to rid the world of the contagion of Judaism. Similarly, Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihadism, maintained not that all Jews were evil but that all evil is Jewish. Therefore the redemption of humanity itself rests upon the extermination of the Jews.
BROTHERHOOD AND MUFTI
[A] few words must be said about the Muslim Brotherhood from which Hamas stems and Haj Amin al-Husseini [the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem], the key to the ties that bind Hitler to Hamas. … Inspired by Hitler, [Brotherhood co-founder] al-Banna asserted that he learned from the Führer the power of propaganda in the fight against the Jews, as a means not of persuasion but of incitement, the incitement of Jew hatred. [JA&H]
GRABOYES: One can almost find a ray of hope in all this when considering, as David’s book chapter notes, that “In 1941 Anwar Sadat joined the Brotherhood’s military organization, and in 1943 he was arrested as a Nazi spy.” Somehow, Sadat put that history behind him and emerged as the visionary who made peace with Israel. But that ray is darkened once again when you consider that Sadat was assassinated within four years for his apostasy, albeit by a different Jihadist organization.
PATTERSON: Yes, after the humiliation of the Six-Day War under Gamal Abdel Nasser, who suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood and executed Sayyid Qutb in 1966, Anwar Sadat welcomed the Brotherhood back into Egyptian society in 1971; in 1973-1975, members of the Brotherhood were released from Egyptian jails. In 1973, they established a front organization in Gaza called the Islamic Center (al-Mujamma‘ al-Islami). The heads of the Islamic Center were Ahmed Yassin, the future founder of Hamas, and Abd-al-Aziz al-Rantisi, also one of the leaders of Hamas. Frustrated with the “moderation” of the Brotherhood, an offshoot called the Tanzim al-Jihad was founded by Abd as-Salam Faraj, whose father was in the Muslim Brotherhood; led by Khalid al-Istambuli, they assassinated Anwar Sadat on 6 October 1981.
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MUTUAL CAUSALITY
In May 1937, “on the occasion of the observance of Mohammed’s birth, German and Italian flags were displayed [in Palestine] as well as portraits of Hitler and Mussolini.” … …
“The close and at times active relationship that developed between Nazi Germany and sections of the Arab leadership, in the years from 1933 to 1945,” writes [Bernard] Lewis, “was due not to a German attempt to win over the Arabs but rather to a series of Arab approaches to the Germans.” … …
The Mufti had such a close relationship with the Nazis that they provided him with funds to wage the Arab Revolt of 1936–9. Matthias Küntzel notes that the Revolt “took place against the background of the swastika; youth organizations … paraded as ‘Nazi-scouts,’ and Arab children greeted each other with the Nazi salute.” [JA&H]
GRABOYES: Again, it’s worth noting that Jihadist fascination with the trappings of Nazi Germany is not some long-gone phenomenon. Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion remain best-sellers in Gaza.
PATTERSON: Yes, that is true. An Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came out on 15 January 1926 in the periodical Raqib Sahyun, which was published in Jerusalem. In October 1938 the Brotherhood distributed Arabic translations of portions of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the Parliamentary Conference for Arab and Muslim Countries held in Cairo. And Article Thirty-Two of the Hamas Charter of Allah declares that the intentions of the Jew “have been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what is said there.” Indeed, the Charter invokes three prooftexts to demonstrate the truth of its claims: the Quran, selections from the Hadith, and the Protocols.
HITLER TO MUFTI: “THE JEWS ARE YOURS”
Two years later, now officially on the Nazis’ payroll, al-Husseini set up a base of operations in Baghdad, where on April 3, 1941, he led a coup against the British-backed government of Iraq. On May 9, in a radio broadcast, he announced a jihad against the British and the Jews. By the end of May, however, the British had suppressed the coup. Al-Husseini fled to Tehran, but not before organizing the slaughter of 600 Jews in Baghdad on June 1, 1941, in an action known as the Farhud. From Tehran the Mufti made his way to Rome, and from Rome to Berlin, where he had his first meeting with the Führer on November 28, 1941. “Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany,” he wrote in his memoirs, “was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: “The Jews are yours.” [JA&H]
GRABOYES: None of the present-day libels against Israel—“occupation,” “apartheid,” “genocide,” applied in this period. Jews had lived in Baghdad for 2,500 years and, for the most part, had no intention of departing for Palestine. And yet, they were victims of mass murder by the Mufti—the intellectual godfather of both Hamas and Hezbollah.
PATTERSON: Yes, when the war came to an end, Haj Amin al-Husseini was wanted as a Nazi war criminal for his involvement in the recruitment of Muslim SS killing units that operated in the Balkans, the most infamous of which was the Handschar Division. In June 1946, he turned up in Cairo, where the Muslim Brotherhood gave him a hero’s welcome. The newspaper Al Ahram wrote, “God preserved the Mufti for the Arab world.” On 12 June 1946 the paper Al Kutla welcomed Husseini “in the field of Jihad.” On 30 June 1946 the Muslim Brotherhood tabloid Al Ikhwan Al Muslimin said of al-Husseini, “The Arab hero and symbol of Al Jihad and patience and struggle is here in Egypt.” Within a week of his arrival in Cairo he met with Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. Said al-Banna, “The Mufti is worth the people of a whole nation put together. The Mufti is Palestine and Palestine is the Mufti.” That same year, the Mufti took in Yasser Arafat, whose mother was the daughter of al-Husseini’s first cousin, as his protégé and brought in a former Nazi commando officer to train Arafat in guerilla warfare. Some scholars claim that al-Husseini was behind the founding of the al-Fatah in 1959.
INTO OUR TIME
Jihadist cleric, Ahmad Abu Halabiya, cried out on October 13, 2000: “Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country.” … …
On December 9, 1987, Hamas emerged as a militant Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. … … As in the case of the Nazis, these ideologues, for whom exterminationist Jew hatred was foundational, were not from the uneducated, disenfranchised victims of society—it is just the opposite: They came from the highest social and cultural echelons of the Arab Muslim world … …
Yassin and his cohorts, notes scholar Ziad Abu-Amr, embraced the Nazis’ view that the Jews are “the dirtiest and meanest of all races,” making “no distinctions between Jews, Zionists, and Israelis.” … …
Like their predecessors, Haniyeh and Sinwar applied lessons learned from the Nazis on the use of propaganda to incite what Hitler called a “wrathful hatred” of the Jews. … …
Quoting Hasan al-Banna, the [Hamas charter] preamble goes on to declare the exterminationist aims of Hamas: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” where Israel is a reference to the Jewish people, not to the Jewish state, since al-Banna made his assertion before the Jewish state existed. [JA&H]
GRABOYES: To comprehend pre-1948 references to “Israel,” it’s helpful to know that the Jewish state’s name—“Israel”—came as a last-minute surprise to most observers at the time of independence. Many had expected the new country would be called Zion, Judea, or Palestine, and some advocated names like Ivriya (i.e. “Land of the Hebrews”) or Herzliya (after Zionism founder Theodore Herzl).
PATTERSON: Somehow the name “Israel” or “Yisrael” is well suited to the Jewish state, as it emerged not because of, but in spite of, the Holocaust. Jacob received the name of Israel—the name of an individual and of a people—when he wrestled through the night with the Angel of Death. After wrestling with the Angel of Murder in a time when they were engulfed by the Kingdom of Night, the Jewish people reclaimed the name Yisrael and the name of their nation. Then and now, Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, embody the meaning of their name: “one who strives with God and man and prevails.”
THE CENTRALITY OF EXTERMINATION
A key to the universal rule of Islam is the universal extermination of the Jews, a position affirmed in Article Seven’s invocation of a teaching of the Prophet found in the al-Bukhari Hadith, no. 3593, … “The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, “O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”’” Nature itself rebels against the existence of the Jews; nature itself vomits up the Jews. … …
Reading further in the [Hamas Charter], one sees that the Jihadists have taken Hitler’s assertion in Mein Kampf to heart: “Only the greatness of the sacrifices,” said the Führer, “will win new fighters for the cause.” What sacrifice is greater than child sacrifice, made at the hands of the mothers who brought them into the world? If the Nazis corrupt the souls of their children, the Jihadists destroy them by training them not just for sacrifice but for murder.
GRABOYES: Here, we begin to understand the presence of jubilatory children amid the Bibas abomination.
PATTERSON: That image of jubilatory children is an embodiment of evil. Here we would do well to recall the timing of the slaughter on 7 October 2023 and the jubilation that came with it. On the Hebrew calendar, 7 October 2023 was 22 Tishrei 5784: Simchat Torah, which is “Rejoicing in the Torah,” when Jews throughout the world celebrate the renewal of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. Some refer to that day as the day of the Simchat Torah Massacre, a time when the Holy One enters His creation to rejoice in His children’s rejoicing. In Israel, Simchat Torah is also Shemini Atzeret, or “The Eighth Day of Gathering,” when, after the conclusion of Sukkot, God comes to embrace His people and draw them close to Him. It was also a Sabbath, when the Jews go forth to greet the Sabbath Bride, the Shekhinah, who is God’s “Indwelling Presence” in this realm. Just as the Nazis planned their actions against the Jews according to the holy calendar, so Hamas planned its murderous actions not for 7 October but for Simchat Torah, Shemini Atzeret, and Shabbat. Here we discover what the anti-Zionist antisemites are anti-: they set out to obliterate the Torah that goes forth from Zion, as the prophet says (Micah 4:2). That is what Ten/Seven is about: Palestine will be free from the river to the sea—free of God, Israel, and Torah, who are one, as taught by the Chasidic master known as the Koretzer Rebbe.
IT’S NOT ABOUT PALESTINE
Repeating Hitler’s insistence that the Jew is an “invisible wirepuller” who by stealth conspires to rule the world, Article Twenty-Two states: “[The Jews] took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world” … In a word, the Jews are the hidden root of every evil that plagues humankind, and Hamas is the salvation of humanity from the Zionist invasion not of Palestine but of the world.
It is a metaphysical war, as evidenced by a speech given on January 17, 2009 on Egypt’s Al-Rahma television by Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Yaqoub (b. 1956): “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? … The Jews are infidels – not because I say so, … but because … Allah said that they are infidels … They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing … Our fighting with the Jews is eternal …, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth” [JA&H]
GRABOYES: I’m reminded of a quote often attributed to Elie Wiesel: “When someone says they want to kill you, believe them.”
PATTERSON: Yes. Part of the difficulty in believing them lies in the goodness of people who, due to their goodness, cannot imagine such evil. And what if your enemies say they will rape, burn, butcher, and behead you? When I point out the refrain in Article Fifteen of the Hamas charter—“I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill,” which now means assault and torture and maim and slaughter—I am often greeted by disbelief and a dismissal of such statements as bravado. Even more pressing for humanity is another statement from Elie Wiesel, namely that “what begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews.” Why? Because those who hate the Jews set out to obliterate an ancient teaching revealed to the world through the Jews, a teaching concerning the infinite dearness, the holiness, of every human being as a child of God. Because the other human being is infinitely precious, our responsibility runs infinitely deep. Indeed, the more we respond, the more responsible we become—hence the antisemitic stereotype of the Jews as the keepers of the ledgers of the world. Reminding us of our humanity, the Jew allows us no sleep. Jew hatred, then, is a hatred that stems from the time of Adam. It is a hatred of the question put to Adam: Where are you? It is a hatred of the questions put to Cain: Where is your brother? And what have you done? It is, above all, a hatred of the One who asks: Jew hatred is God hatred.
BASTIAT’S WINDOW publisher Robert F. Graboyes is an economist, journalist, and musician whose five degrees include a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, he received the Reason Foundation’s 2014 Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His musical compositions are on YouTube.
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The jubilant response of Gazans to atrocities is worth noting.
Students of history will be aware of the Nazis' need to design their extermination apparatus in convoluted and ingenuous ways in order to work around the human conscience, to make it so that the individual Nazi soldiers actually doing the killing had plausible deniability and could say to themselves "I wasn't responsible for murdering all those people; I only did this little thing."
In Gaza, *they do not have that.* They openly commit mass murder, rejoice over it, and call their parents to brag about the Jews they just killed.
Hamas did not simply adopt and perpetuate what they learned from Hitler; they iterated on its design, and have produced a society that is, in a very real and literal sense, even more evil than Nazi Germany.
I never could figure out why so many people who don't give a fig about Christianity or Islam or any other religion should be so relentlessly antisemitic. Dr Patterson's last paragraph explains it very neatly: it is just a manifestation of original sin. I wonder if Calvin ever made that connection.