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One of the little known realities of20th Century history is the roleplayed by Hitler’s Nazi regime inkindling the contemporaryconflagration known as the GlobalWar On Terror. With the incessantand very effective propaganda

war being waged by the Islamo-fascist movementin the media and the Internet, many of the deeperunderlying issues in this conflict are beingobscured, intentionally so.When US analyst Stephen Schwartz coined theterm ‘Islamo-fascism’ to describe al Qaeda, itsmultitude of franchises, and the Tehran regime, heelicited considerable argument. To date, academicanalysts and scholars remain divided on the use ofthis term. This is unfortunate insofar as theseregimes/movements and the underpinningmethodology of public control are clearly fascist inevery respect, once the veneer of fundamentalistIslamic propaganda is stripped away. Schwartzcites his own definition as ‘Islamo-fascism refersto use of the faith of Islam as a cover fortotalitarian ideology’.Every revolutionary warfare movement needscannon fodder, and the primary cannon fodder aredisaffected people. The root of the Jihadistmovement underpinning Al Qaeda is theprogressive economic and political decline of theIslamic world, relative to the industrialised world.While the Jihadist view is that this is aconsequence of Western oppression, the reality isfar simpler. Nearly all of these nations wererecipients of generous economic and military aidduring the Cold War, as they sold their allegiance tothe West or the Soviets since the beginning of theCold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union, thatsource of external subsidy vanished overnight, andthey had to compete in an increasingly globalisedand active world economy. With little or noindustrial base, excluding the handful of nationswith significant petrochemical wealth, most ofthese nations were not viable economically. Thiswas further exacerbated by arcane legal systems,often almost medieval, poor levels of publiceducation, poor governance and dysfunctionalpublic institutions, and often absolutist orauthoritarian governments.Nation states in this condition cannot compete in amodern global economy, and the result wasincreasing poverty, unemployment, and a sense ofhelplessness.

These are conditions no different from those thatspawned the Bolshevik revolution, and the rise ofHitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party(NSDAP). The only missing ingredient was a sharedideology, which provides a supporting beliefsystem to unify recruits. Fundamentalist Islam withits anti-Western, anti-Jewish and anti-wealth beliefsystem forms that ideology, and the result is whatwe see today.Another way of looking at this problem is that onlyTurkey and Iran had made a genuine transitionfrom the medieval form of governance whereChurch and State were linked, and the genuineseparation of Church and State, as occurred in theWest during the reformation period centuries ago.This only remains in Turkey, since Iran’s secularregime collapsed. As a result, political meddling byclerics remains at the root of the political problemswe see today in the Islamic world.

Hitlers legacy -Modern Islamo-fascismand its Nazi originsDr Carlo Kopp

Poster subtitle: Der Grossmufti von Jerusalembei den bosnischen Freiwilligen der Waffen-SS(The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with Bosnianvolunteers of the Waffen-SS).

By far the most active in this respect have beenWahhabi fundamentalists, a deeply conservativeand extreme sect in Sunni Islam, which for a varietyof historical accidents became the official statereligion of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabist clerics receivegenerous state subsidies for both domesticactivities and missionary activities on a globalscale. Wahhabism is the ideology underpinning AlQaeda, and the defunct Taliban state, which wascrushed in Operation Enduring Freedom.The Islamic nations of the world had considerableexposure during the Cold War to Sovietrevolutionary warfare doctrine, which was standardcurriculum material for any students sent to Sovietand other Warsaw Pact nation universities to gainfree undergraduate and postgraduate education.Suffice to say, classics like Lenin’s Gosudarstvo iRevolutsia (The State and the Revolution) werecompulsory reading. To this pool of sociopathicknowledge infused across Islamic nations mustalso be added the extensive training in insurgencytechniques provided by US and UK special forcesand intelligence instructors during the 1980sAfghan war of liberation against the Soviets.Therefore the technique of destabilisinggovernments and political institutions by sustainedinsurgency is well understood across the Islamicworld, and considerable study material especiallyof Soviet origin remains available.Having cannon fodder in the form of a materiallydisadvantaged and disaffected populace, an ex-Soviet cookbook for practising insurgency, and anideological framework of Wahhabism mix asessential ingredients for mayhem, but not enoughto construct a genuinely effective globalisedinsurgency. The glue which is needed to hold thesetogether is a developed ideological doctrine andpropaganda framework.The Soviet model was never going to be acandidate in this environment, since too much ofSoviet propaganda technique was centred onexploiting class divisions in industrialised societies,and too much was centred in ideas like ‘Pan-Slavism’ and ‘internationalism’. The ‘ideal’communist had to fervently believe in thebrotherhood of all men, and accept that only classenemies were evil, and that people of anynationality could be liberated and brought into thefold given enough indoctrination. A revolutionaryIslamic movement needed an ideological doctrineand propaganda framework which waschauvinistic in cultural values, and racist infocusing hatred on non-Islamic nations or groups,especially Jews.The ideal model for this environment is of coursethe destructive creation of Dr Joseph Goebbels,Reich Propaganda Minister, and chief ideologue ofHitler’s NSDAP, the Nazi propaganda machine andits associated doctrine and technique.

Contemporary Western popular culture, exemplifiedby much of what Hollywood has produced on thetopic, tends to portray the Nazis either as buffoons,or caricatures of evil. This is an unfortunatesimplification of the truly destructive nature of theNazi regime, and its clever use of a wide range oftechniques designed to deeply seduce itsfollowers. It is worth observing that the popularityof Nazi ideology in fringe groups in Westernnations, despite the demonstrable moral and socialbankruptcy of Nazism, has if anything grown overrecent decades.The Nazi model was multi-pronged, essentiallypopulist, and was carefully constructed to providepaths via which the socially disadvantaged orambitious individual could advance. A centraltheme of the Nazi cultural construct was that thosewho would take the initiative individually inpromoting Nazi agendas or performing acommunity service (of a variety approved by theregime) would be rapidly promoted. Good ideas andthe willingness to invest effort in them were rapidlyrewarded. In a socially strongly stratified and classstructured pre-Nazi Germany, the Nazis presentedopportunities for upward social mobility unseenuntil then. Individuals who jumped on the Nazibandwagon, if industrious in their pursuits, couldrise socially at a speed unseen until then inGermany. Cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl andaviatrix Hanna Reitsch were classical examples.One byproduct of this arrangement was anenormous burst of technological, industrial andsocial welfare innovation in Germany, during the1930s. Talent which aligned with the Nazis wasrewarded generously, the quid pro quo beingcomplete subservience to the ideological beliefsystem of the regime. The Nazis for instanceactively recruited PhD graduates in a wide range ofdisciplines to staff their bureaucracies and securityapparatus. It is little known that much of theleadership staff of the SS security apparatus helddoctorates from leading German universities.Another key element of the Nazi model was a focuson social welfare, hitherto unseen in developednations, and a mechanism designed to completely

seduce the ‘blue collar’ sections of German society.This extended from the use of youth organisationsto perform community service, to the introductionof innovative health insurance. Which citizen couldnot admire a movement that would organise idleteenagers to help fix a pensioner’s dilapidatedresidence, or clean up the littered town square?The Nazis perfected the model of completeideological seduction of the populace, in a mannerthe Soviets never mastered, despite no lessintensive effort. This is why German troops foughtwith such blind fanaticism during the latter phaseof World War II. Most truly believed, en masse, inthe regime and its view of the world.A key tenet of Nazi propaganda was to attribute allmisfortunes experienced by Germany to influenceconspiracy of others. Therefore, Germanhumiliation, misery and poverty in the post GreatWar Weimar republic, and depression era, wereattributed to the Western powers, a global Jewishconspiracy and the subversive influence of theNazi’s primary ideological competitor, the Soviet ledcommunists. In the Nazi view of the world,Germans were deemed to be perfect, and allmisfortune the fault of others who had to be foughtand ultimately exterminated. The Holocaust, andother mass murder committed against opponentsof the regime across Europe were themanifestation of this deeply indoctrinated belief.Readers who have followed the rise of Islamo-fascist political and revolutionary movementsacross the Islamic world over recent years will notethe striking similarities in social ideology, politicaldoctrine, propaganda and the exploitation of socialinequality, in comparison with the Nazi model. Is itssimilarity a coincidence, or is there a deeperconnection?There is ample evidence to show that during thelatter decade of the Nazi regime, and following thecollapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, elements of Naziideology found their way into the Middle East.There is a good case to be made that initially, anti-Semitism was at the root of this migration of ideas,but later other aspects of the Nazi model becameassimilated.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and ReichsfuhrerSS Heinrich Himmler, commander of the WaffenSS and SS security apparatus.

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The connections between the radical ‘politicalIslam’ movement and Hitler’s regime now spaneight decades, and most recently involve anongoing dialogue between neo-Nazi organisationsand ‘political Islam’ centred organisations.The roots of current ‘political Islam’ and its Islamo-fascist ideology lie in the 1920s when Ataturksecularised Turkey after the fall of the Ottomanregime and dumped the idea of an Islamiccaliphate, which spanned the globe. EgyptianHassan al-Banna, by occupation a schoolteacher,founded Al Ikhwan Al Muslimun (The MuslimBrotherhood) in 1928, a radical revolutionarymovement centred in fundamentalist Islam as anideological model.The Brotherhood followed the pattern of Europeanrevolutionary movements, recruiting followersdisaffected by colonial rule in the Arab world, andbuilding up a covert organization, which by someaccounts had hundreds of thousands of followersin Egypt by 1945, and branch offices across theMiddle East. The aims of the Brotherhood weresimple – recreate the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam byrestoring the Caliphate, and drive the infidel ‘kafer’colonialists out of the Islamic world. The socialgroupings around mosques and traditional Islamicwelfare organisations were used as a cover andconduit for financing the movement. By someaccounts, much of the early activity of theBrotherhood was modelled on the early NSDAP.By 1948 the Brotherhood had gained suchpotential that it prepared a coup against theEgyptian monarchy but was disbanded by theEgyptian government. It responded byassassinating the Prime Minister, the regime inturn killing its leader Hassan al-Banna. Theascendancy of Nasser’s national socialist regimethen saw a sustained campaign by the governmentto destroy the Brotherhood, a campaign that hascontinued to this day. One of the casualties of thiscampaign was al-Banna’s successor, Sayyid Qutb,hanged in 1966.Qutb is often regarded as the father of modernIslamo-fascism, as he fused fundamentalistIslamic ideology with the Nazi propaganda model,his stated aim being to produce a movement thatrivalled Nazism in the West and Communism in theEast. To create this ideological model, Qutbessentially ‘remapped’ the Nazi model into aMiddle Eastern equivalent, replacing ‘Germanracial purity’ with ‘Islamic religious purity’ andadopting the tenets of Nazi anti-Semitism andrejection of Western capitalism and liberaldemocracy. Key elements of Nazi propaganda,such as the ideas of a world Zionist conspiracy,centred in the US, were rolled into this toxic mix,together with the idea of propagating Islam by thesword.

A then young follower of Qutb was Ayman al-Zawahiri, more recently co-founder and deputyleader of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda who wasrecruited into the Brotherhood during the 1960s. Inmany respects, the modern Al Qaeda is a directoffspring of al-Banna’s movement. Al-Zawahiri,like bin Laden, is a dropout from a social elite. Hequalified as a medical practitioner, his grandfatherwas the Grand Imam of the al-Azhar University, andhis uncle the first leader of the Arab League.Another Islamo-fascist who was inspired by Qutbwas a young Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, later tolead the Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah,Reza Pahlavi.The connection with the NSDAP regime inGermany, however, runs deeper, as the Nazis didtheir best to support through finance and advicethe embryonic Islamo-fascist movements in Britishruled Eqypt and Iraq through the late 1930s andearly 1940s. The aim was to destabilise British rulein these strategically critical colonies. A key playerwas the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, implicated in a 1941 coup attempt inBaghdad, and another graduate of the al-AzharUniversity. Al-Husseini was extensively involved inanti-British and anti-Jewish Palestinian unrestduring the 1920s and 1930s, and one sourceclaims he met covertly with representatives of theNazi SS intelligence arm during the late 1930s,including Adolf Eichmann, later a key player in theextermination of European Jews.Once al Husseini wore out his welcome with theBritish he fled to Germany for the remainder ofWorld War II, remaining active as a propagandistand recruiter of Balkan Muslims into the Waffen SSHandschar and Kama Divisions. Non-Germanrecruits were used extensively in the latter part ofthe war, as German manpower available forcombat divisions declined. After the war alHusseini returned to Egypt, and after beingimplicated in numerous acts of political violencewas exiled. Yasser Arafat, deceased leader of thePalestinians, was a nephew of al Husseini.With the withdrawal of the British and French fromtheir Middle Eastern colonies after World War II,and the formation of Israel, the Middle Eastbecame a hotbed of Arab nationalism, in which thefascist Baath movement became the dominantplayer. The Baathists represent yet another threadof Nazi influence, as they assimilated Nazipropaganda materials. As secular ‘nationalsocialists’ they in many respects represented acloser ideological model to that of the Nazis.

Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, broken byCoalition forces in 2003, was a direct descendentof this political movement. Hussein’s admiration forHitler has been well documented.The connections between Nazism and Arabfascism were further reinforced as some Nazi warcriminals sought refuge after the war. The bestdocumented instance is that of SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner, formercommandant of the Drancy concentration camp inParis, who eventually settled in Syria during the1950s. There are claims that in total severalhundred former SS and Gestapo officers eventuallyfound new homes in the Arab world, theseincluding Gestapo officer Joachim Däumling, SSOber-Gruppenfuhrer Oskar Dirlewanger, SSGruppenfuhrer Leopold Gleim, and SS Ober-Gruppenfuhrer Heinrich Selimann.Given the volume of publications that currentlyexist connecting modern Islamo-fascism to theNSDAP regime of the 1930s, and the welldocumented activities of al Husseini in Nazioccupied Europe, the evidence that modernIslamo-fascism has its primary ideological anddoctrinal roots in 20th Century Nazism isoverwhelming.Apologists for Islamo-fascism and ‘political Islam’will no doubt dismiss this historical material as‘Zionist propaganda’, but whether we are preparedto accept or reject such historical claims, the nearlyidentical ideological and doctrinal models used bythe Nazis and modern Islamo-fascists cannot beexplained away so easily. Nor is the adoption ofNazi symbology such as the Hitlergruß straight-arm salute used by Hezbollah, or the widedistribution by Islamo-fascists of anti-semitictracts such as the “The Protocols of the Elders ofZion”, a favourite of Goebbels’ propagandists.There are simply too many threads connecting thetwo ideologies to be dismissed easily asfabrications.World War II may well be sixty years behind us, butit is clear that the poison which almost destroyedthe world’s democracies then is still alive and welltoday.

Hezbollah have adopted the NaziHitlergruß straight arm salute, inaddition to a wide variety of other Naziideas, techniques and propaganda.

Hezbollah paramilitaries (top) and Palestinian security troops (bottom) performing the Hitlergruß straight arm salute.