Islamofascism. Hitler, Muhammad, and Islam. Part 2
Part 1
By Andrew G. Bostom

Danish translation: Islamofascisme. Hitler, Muhammed og islam. Del 2
Source: Family Security Matters, February 4, 2008
Published on myIslam.dk: December 1, 2011

34 years ago (1974), Bat Ye’or published a remarkably foresighted analysis of the Islamic anti-Semitism and resurgent Jihadism in her native Egypt, being packaged for dissemination throughout the Muslim world. The primary, core Antisemitic and Jihadist motifs were Islamic, derived from Islam’s foundational texts, on to which European, especially Nazi elements were grafted.

The pejorative characteristics of Jews as they are described in Muslim religious texts are applied to modern Jews. Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent – due to the inferior status of Jews in Islam, and because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad.
Here the Pan-Arab and anti-Western theses that consider Israel as an advanced instrument of the West in the Islamic world, come to reinforce religious anti-Judaism. The religious and political fuse in a purely Islamic context onto which are grafted foreign elements. If, on the doctrinal level, Nazi influence is secondary to the Islamic base, the technique with which the Antisemitic material has been reworked, and the political purposes being pursued, present striking similarites with Hitler’s Germany. That anti-Jewish opinions have been widely spread in Arab nationalist circles since the 1930s is not in doubt. But their confirmation at [Al] Azhar [University] by the most important authorities of Islam enabled them to be definitively imposed, with the cachet of infallible authenticity, upon illiterate masses that were strongly attached to religious traditions.

Nazi academic and propagandist of extermination Johannes von Leers’ writings and personal career trajectory – as a favored contributor in Goebbel’s propaganda ministry, to his eventual adoption of Islam (as Omar Amin von Leers) while working as an anti-Western, and anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist propagandist under Nasser’s regime from the mid-1950s, until his death in 1965 – epitomizes this convergence of Jihad, Islamic anti-Semitism, and racist, Nazi anti-Semitism, as described by Bat Ye’or.

Leers – who was Goebbel’s favorite Nazi propagandist of annihilation – expressed two decades before eventually converting to Islam, in Blut und Rasse in der Gesetzgebung (Blood and Race in Legislation, 1936), his admiration for “the imperious and warlike Islam [of the peoples] who still had a clear Nordic racial component,” while also extolling in Der Kardinal und die Germanen (“The Cardinal and the Germans,” 1934) Islam’s ecumenical “tolerance.” In subsequent essays published during 1938 and 1942, von Leers produced analyses focused primarily on Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina. Collectively, these essays reveal his pious reverence for Islam and its prophet, and a thorough understanding of the sacralized Islamic sources for this narrative, i.e., the Koran, hadith, and sira, which is entirely consistent with standard Muslim apologetics.

Citing (or referring to) the relevant foundational text sources (i.e., Koran 13:36; 8:55-58; 59:1-15; the sira and canonical hadith descriptions of the fate of individual Jews such as Abu Afak and Ka’b ibn Ashraf, and the Jewish tribes Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, Banu Qurayzah, as well as the Jews of the Khaybar oasis), von Leers in his 1942 essay “Judiasm and Islam as Opposites,” chronicles Muhammad’s successful campaigns which vanquished these Jews, killing and dispersing them, “…or at most allow[ing] them to remain in certain places if they paid a poll tax.” Von Leers further describes the accounts (from the hadith, and more elaborately, the sira) of Muhammad’s poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess, and also notes the canonical hadith which records Caliph Umar’s rationale for his putative expulsion from northern Arabia of those remaining Jews who survived Muhammad’s earlier campaigns:

On his deathbed Mohammed is supposed to have said: “There must not be two religions in Arabia.” One of his successors, the caliph Omar, resolutely drove the Jews out of Arabia.

And von Leers even invokes the apocalyptic canonical hadith which 46 years later became the keystone of Hamas’ 1988 charter sanctioning a Jihad genocide against the Jewish State of Israel:

Ibn Huraira even communicates to us the following assertion of the great man of God: “Judgment Day will come only when the Moslems have inflicted an annihilating defeat on the Jews, when every stone and every tree behind which a Jew has hidden says to believers: ‘Behind me stands a Jew, smite him.’”

Von Leers’ 1942 essay concludes by simultaneously extolling the “model” of oppression the Jews experienced under Islamic suzerainty, and the nobility of Muhammad, Islam, and the contemporary Muslims of the World War II era, foreshadowing his own conversion to Islam just over a decade later:

They [the Jews] were subjected to a very restrictive and oppressive special regulation that completely crippled Jewish activities. All reporters of the time when the Islamic lands still completely obeyed their own laws agree that the Jews were particularly despised… Mohammed’s opposition to the Jews undoubtedly had an effect – oriental Jewry was completely paralyzed by Islam. Its back was broken. Oriental Jewry has played almost no role in Judaism’s massive rise to power over the last two centuries. Scorned, the Jews vegetated in the dirty alleys of the mellah, and were subject to a special regulation that did not allow them to profiteer, as they did in Europe, or even to receive stolen goods, but instead kept them fearful and under pressure. Had the rest of the world adopted a similar method, today we would have no Jewish question – and here we must absolutely note that there were also Islamic rulers, among them especially the Spanish caliphs of the House of Muawiyah, who did not adhere to Islam’s traditional hostility to Jews – to their own disadvantage. However, as a religion Islam has performed the immortal service of preventing the Jews from carrying out their threatened conquest of Arabia and of defeating the dreadful doctrine of Jehovah through a pure faith that opened the way to higher culture for many peoples and gave them an education and humane training, so that still today a Moslem who takes his religion seriously is one of the most worthy phenomena in this world in turmoil.

And even earlier, in a 1938 essay, von Leers further sympathized with, “the leading role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem [Hajj Amin el-Husseini] in the Arabians’ battles against the Jewish invasion in Palestine.” Von Leers observes that to the pious Muslim, “…the Jew is an enemy, not simply an ‘unbeliever’ who might perhaps be converted or, despite the fact that he does not belong to Islam, might still be a person of some estimation. Rather, the Jew is the predestined opponent of the Muslim, one who desired to bring down the work of the Prophet.”

Leers’ description of the origins of the Muslim “forename” (Omar Amin) that he adopted as part of his formal conversion to Islam in a November, 1957 letter to American Nazi H. Keith Thompson, highlights his personal and doctrinal connections to the Mufti, with whom he engaged in a longstanding collaboration:

I myself have embraced Islam and accepted the new forename Omar Amin, Omar according to the great Caliph Omar who was a grim enemy of the Jews, Amin in honor of my friend Hadj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti.

Leers’ ceaseless efforts as a formal propagandist for the Nasser regime and Arab League were complemented by a staggering array of additional writing activities before and during this last decade of his life, including: translating modern Arabic treatises on Jihad and Islamic financing into German; writing the Foreword to an anti-Zionist analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict by an Egyptian scholar; and reviewing and promoting the works of neo-Nazi and Fascist ideologues as editor (while in Buenos Aires) of Der Weg (most prominently, his 1951 review of Francis Parker Yockey’s “Imperium”), while maintaining a prolific worldwide correspondence with individual Fascists, designed to garner their support for his global Jihad. Thus he wrote (again, to American Nazi H. Keith Thompson) in 1957 and 1958,

[1957] The Islamic bloc is today the only spiritual power in the world fighting for a real religion and human values and freedom. Besides that, it is a wonderful religion with a great philosophy and enormous richness of wisdom. I think sometime if my nation had got Islam instead of Christianity we should not have had all the traitors we had in World War II, two million women would not have been burnt as “witches” by the Christian churches, there would have been no Thirty Years War which destroyed Germany and killed more than half our nation.
[1958] One thing is clear – more and more patriot Germans join the great Arab revolution against beastly imperialism. In Algeria half a company of German soldiers, dragging with them two French officers and two non-commissioned officers, have cut their throats in the view of the Algerian revolutionaries and have gone on the side of the Algerians and have embraced Islam. That is good! To hell with Christianity, for in Christianity’s name Germany has been sold to our oppressors! Our place as an oppressed nation under the execrable Western colonialist Bonn government must be on the side of the Arab nationalist revolt against the West….I hamd ul Allah! (“Thanks be to Allah!”)

This recently declassified October 1957 U.S. intelligence report on von Leers’ writings and activities for Egypt and the Arab League independently confirms his complete adoption of the triumphalist Muslim worldview, desirous of nothing less than the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization by Jihad:

He [Dr. Omar Amin von Leers] is becoming more and more a religious zealot, even to the extent of advocating an expansion of Islam in Europe in order to bring about stronger unity through a common religion. This expansion he believes can come not only from contact with the Arabs in the Near East and Africa but with Islamic elements in the USSR. The results he envisions as the formation of a political bloc against which neither East nor West could prevail.

Leers’ final vision of an Islamic supremacist hegemony – as formulated in the two decades after World War II – has had a profound influence on contemporary trends, now robust, from Morocco to Indonesia, and within Muslim communities living in Western, and other non-Muslim societies across the globe. All too prevalent today, numerous examples of this shared vision can be adduced, ranging from the activities and pronouncements of well-known jihad terror organizations (such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas), to the mainstream Organization of the Islamic Conference, and individuals, such as the profoundly influential Muslim cleric (“Spiritual adviser” to the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jazeera television personality, and head of the European Fatwa Council) Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the Mufti-Leers disciple, and Swiss convert to Islam, Ahmed Huber – a former manager of Al Taqwa financial institution, alleged to have laundered money for Osama bin Laden.

The extent to which Nazi convert to Islam Omar Amin von Leers’ ugly vision has been implemented over the past 50 years – his “successful” living legacy – supports a simple, profoundly disturbing conception articulated by writer Lawrence Auster. Oblivious to the firmly entrenched politically correct orthodoxy, Auster has termed Muhammad a “successful Hitler.” Auster argues that Muhammad, whom he also calls “one of the great geniuses of history,” conceived

… a highly flexible and therefore sustainable ideology and program of subversion, conquest, and domination (as well as a sustainable way of life), while Hitler’s ideology and program had no internal brakes. It was pedal to the metal, aiming at the instant and total destruction of other countries and of Western civilization as a whole, and thus making it necessary for other countries utterly to destroy Hitlerism

Whether or not one accepts this overall conception, a crucial aspect of Auster’s argument regarding Muhammad’s lingering pernicious influence – including upon mentally docile non-Muslims – is irrefragable:

…getting people, even fourteen centuries after his death, voluntarily to embrace his program of self-abnegation, the willing surrender of their mind and identity…

Part 1




Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School.
He is the author of:
The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Books (2005),
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, Prometheus Books (2008),
Sharia Versus Freedom. The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism, Prometheus Books (2012),
The Mufti's Islamic Jew Hatred. What the Nazis Learned From the 'Muslim Pope', Bravura Books (2013), and
Iran's Final Solution for Israel. The Legacy of Jihad and Shi'ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran, Bravura Books (2014).