The Muslim Brotherhood, The Nazis and Al-Qa'ida

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Al-Qa'ida is the product of an Arab fascist group that was set up in the 1920s, funded by
Adolf Hitler, used by British, French and American Intelligence after WWII,
and later was supported by the Saudis and reactivated by the CIA

From a speech by John Loftus (former US Justice Department prosecutor) to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, (Yom Ha'Shoah), April 18, 2004

First published in Jewish Community News, August 2004

It always seems a little strange to have an Irish Catholic talking about Yom Ha'Shoah. I had an unusual education in the Holocaust. When I was working for the Attorney General, I was assigned to do the classified research about the Holocaust, so I went underground to a little town called Suitland, Maryland, right outside Washington, DC, and that's where the US Government buries its secrets—literally.

There are 20 vaults underground and each vault is one acre in size. Anyone see the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark? The last scene of that movie is what the underground vaults are really like, only not as organised as they are in the movie. And in those underground vaults I discovered something horrible.

I learned that many of the Nazis that I had been assigned to prosecute were on the CIA payroll, but the CIA didn't know they were Nazis because the British Intelligence Service had lied to them. What the British Intelligence Service didn't know was that their liar was Kim Philby, the Soviet communist double agent—a little scandal of the Cold War. But our State Department swept it all under the rug and allowed the Nazis to stay in America until I was stupid enough to go public with it.

What do you do when you want to go public with a story like this one? You call up 60 Minutes. We had a great time. Mike Wallace gave me 30 minutes on his show. For a long time, it was the longest segment that 60 Minutes ever did. When the episode about Nazis in America went on the air back in 1982, it caused a minor national uproar. Congress demanded hearings; Mike Wallace got the Emmy award, and my family got the death threats. It was a great trip.

Then a funny thing happened. Over the last 25 years, every retired spy in the US and Canada and England all wanted me to be their lawyer—for free, of course. So I had 500 clients; they paid me a dollar apiece. So I am the worst paid lawyer in America, but among the better employed.

Let me give you an example. This year a friend of mine from the CIA, named Bob Baer, wrote a very good book about Saudi Arabia and terrorism; it's called Sleeping with the Devil.1 I was reading the book and I got about a third of the way through and I stopped. Bob was writing about when he worked for the CIA and how bad the files were. He said, for example, the files for the Muslim Brotherhood were almost nothing. There were just a few newspaper clippings.

I called Bob up and said, "Bob, that's wrong. The CIA has enormous files on the Muslim Brotherhood, volumes of them. I know because I read them a quarter of a century ago."

He said, "What do you mean?"

Here's how you can find all of the missing secrets about the Muslim Brotherhood—and you can do this, too.

I said, "Bob, go to your computer and type two words into the search part. Type the word 'Banna', B-a-n-n-a."

He said, "Yeah."

"Type in 'Nazi'."

Bob typed the two words in, and out came 30 to 40 articles from around the world. He read them and called me back and said, "Oh my God, what have we done?"

What I'm doing today is doing what I'm doing now: I'm educating a new generation in the CIA [about the fact] that the Muslim Brotherhood was a fascist organisation that was hired by Western Intelligence and evolved over time into what we today know as Al- Qa'ida [Al-Qaeda].

A brief history of the Muslim Brotherhood

Here's how the story began. In the 1920s there was a young Egyptian named [Hassan] Al-Banna. And Al-Banna formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna was a devout admirer of Adolf Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930s Al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence.

The Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines: they hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture. It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the "fifth parliament", an army inside Egypt.

When war broke out, the Muslim Brotherhood promised in writing that they would rise up and help General Rommel and make sure that no English or American soldier was left alive in Cairo or Alexandria.

The Muslim Brotherhood began to expand in scope and influence during World War II. They even had a Palestinian section headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the great bigots of all time. Here, too, was a man...the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the Muslim Brotherhood representative for Palestine. These were undoubtedly Arab Nazis. The Grand Mufti, for example, went to Germany during the war and helped recruit an international SS division of Arab Nazis. They based it in Croatia and called it the Handzar Muslim Division, but it was to become the core of Hitler's new army of Arab fascists that would conquer the Arabian Peninsula and, from there, on to Africa—grand dreams.

At the end of World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood was wanted for war crimes. Their German Intelligence handlers were captured in Cairo. The whole net was rolled up by the British Secret Service.

Then a horrible thing happened. Instead of prosecuting the Nazis—the Muslim Brotherhood—the British Government hired them. They brought all the fugitive Nazi war criminals of Arab and Muslim descent into Egypt, and for three years trained them on a special mission.

The British Secret Service wanted to use the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood to strike down the infant state of Israel in 1948. Only a few people in the Mossad know this, but many of the members of the Arab armies and terrorist groups that tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Britain was not alone. The French Intelligence Service cooperated by releasing the Grand Mufti and smuggling him to Egypt, so all of the Arab Nazis came together. So, from 1945 to 1948, the British Secret Service protected every Arab Nazi it could, but failed to quash the State of Israel.

What the British did, then, was they sold the Arab Nazis to the predecessor of what became the CIA. It may sound stupid, it may sound evil, but it did happen. The idea was that we were going to use the Arab Nazis in the Middle East as a counterweight to the Arab communists. Just as the Soviet Union was funding Arab communists, we would fund the Arab Nazis to fight against them. And lots of secret classes took place. We kept the Muslim Brotherhood on our payroll.

But the Egyptians became nervous. Nasser ordered all of the Muslim Brotherhood out of Egypt or be imprisoned and executed. So, during the 1950s, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia. Now, when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood, like [Dr Abdullah] Azzam, became the teachers in the madrassas, the religious schools. And there they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabism.

Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not. They think that Islam—the Saudi version of Islam—is typical, but it's not. The Wahhabi cult has been condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence. This is a very harsh cult. Wahhabism was only practised by the Taliban and in Saudi Arabia—that's how extreme it is. It really has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant religion. It always had good relationships with the Jews for the first thousand years of its existence.

For the Saudis, there was a ruler in charge of Saudi Arabia, and they were [providing] the new home of the Muslim Brotherhood. Fascism and extremism were mingled in these schools [the madrassas]. And there was a young student who paid attention: Azzam's student was named Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was taught by the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia.

The CIA and Al-Qa'ida

In 1979, the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. We had to rename them. We couldn't call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi past was too known. So we called them Maktab al-Khadamat al-Mujahidin, the MAK.

And the CIA lied to Congress and said they didn't know who was on the payroll in Afghanistan, except the Saudis. But it was not true. A small section of the CIA knew perfectly well that we had once again hired the Arab Nazis and that we were using them to fight our secret wars.

Azzam and his assistant, Osama bin Laden, rose to some prominence from 1979 to 1989, and they won the war. They drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Our CIA said, "We won—let's go home!", and we left this army of Arab fascists in the field of Afghanistan.

The Saudis didn't want [them] to come back. The Saudis started paying bribes to Osama bin Laden and his followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia. Now the MAK was split in half. Azzam was mysteriously assassinated, apparently by Osama bin Laden himself. The radical group—the most radical of the merge of the Arab fascists and religious extremists—Osama called Al-Qa'ida. But to this day, there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all through Al-Qa'ida.

Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, came from the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the result of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

There are many flavours and branches, but they are all Muslim Brotherhoods. There is one in Israel. The organisation you know as Hamas is actually a secret chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Israel assassinated Sheik [Ahmed] Yassin on March 22, 2004], the Muslim Brotherhood published his obituary in a Cairo newspaper in Arabic and revealed that he was actually the secret leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza.

So the Muslim Brotherhood became this poison that spread throughout the Middle East, and on 9/11 it began to spread around the world.

I know this sounds like some sort of a sick fantasy, but go to your computer and type in the words "Banna" and the word "Nazi", and you will see all of the articles come up. Those are all the pieces of information that the CIA was trying to hide from its employees. It did not want them to know the awful past. In 1984, when I was exposing European Nazis on the CIA payroll, at the same time they were trying to hide from Congress the fact that they had Arab Nazis back on the payroll to fight the Russians—a stupid and corrupt program.

So, when Bob Baer studied his files, he was just stunned. A whole generation...the current CIA people know nothing about this. And believe me, the current generation CIA are good and decent Americans and I like them a lot. They're trying to do a good job, but part of their problem is their files have been shredded. All of these secrets have to come out.

Saudi charities exposed

So, of course, my clients in the intelligence community said, "Well, what are you doing?" They gave me an example. They said, "Here's how the Saudis finance these groups. The Saudis have established a group of charities on a street in Virginia. It's 555 Grove Street, Herndon, Virginia."

So I said, "Okay, the Saudis are terrorists, so what?"

These charities fund Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizballah, Al-Qa'ida. The Saudis are getting tax deductions for terrorism. They have set up front groups so all the terrorist groups in the US and the front groups get the Saudi money as a charitable donation.

I said, "You're kidding me."

"Nope."

And they told me that right near where I lived in Tampa, Florida, was one of the leading terrorists in the world. There were these two professors at the University of South Florida. One had just left and was now in Syria, and he was the world head of Islamic Jihad. His number two, the head of Islamic Jihad in the Western hemisphere, was Dr Sami Al-Arian, who is still employed as a professor at the University of South Florida.

You've got to be kidding. This can't be true.

Yes, these guys are raising money all across America and shipping it to Syria to go down to Palestine, the Palestinian areas, and hire suicide bombers to kill Jews. They sent me the videotapes. There was Professor Al-Arian on stage and one of his friends gets up and says, "Now, who will give me $500 to kill a Jew? There are people standing by in Jerusalem who will go out in the street and stab a Jew with a knife, but we need $500." And he said, "All of this money will go to the Islamic Committee for Palestine." And that is the front group in the United States for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

So I had all my friends in the FBI and CIA send in these files.

I said, "Why haven't you prosecuted this guy? You've known about him since 1989."

We'd love to. We've tried to prosecute him but we were told we couldn't touch him because he gets all of his money from the Saudis, and we are all under orders not to do anything to embarrass the Saudi Government.

I said, "I don't mind embarrassing them."

You know what I did? I donated money to the charity that was the terrorist fund, because under Florida law that gave me the right to sue the charity to find out where my money was going. It was hilarious.

In early March 2002, I drafted a long lawsuit exposing Professor Sami Al-Arian, naming all the crimes he'd committed, all the bombings in Israel, the fundraising in America linked with terrorism. I mentioned how his money got to him from the Saudis and how the Saudis had convinced our government not to prosecute him for political reasons.

Because of my high-level security clearances, everything I write is sort of classified material and has to be sent back to the government before publication, for censorship. So I sent my long lawsuit complaint to the CIA, and they loved it.

They said, "Oh, great. We don't like the Saudis, either. Go sue them."

Three days later, two FBI agents showed up at my door, saying, "You know, there are only 21 people in the US government that knew some of this information, and now you're twenty-two. How did you find out?"

I said, "I'm sorry, I can't tell you: attorney-client privilege." That's why my clients pay me $1.00 each.

The day before I went to file the lawsuit, I got a frantic phone call from the United States Department of Justice. They said, "John, please don't file the lawsuit tomorrow. We really are going to raid these Saudi charities. We're going to close them down. Just give us more time."

Oh yeah, you're going to raid them. That's what you told me in January, and again in February, and now it's March. You want more time? I'll give you until 4.00 o'clock tomorrow. I'm filing my complaint at 10.00 am, so that at 4.00 pm I'm going to release the address of the Saudi charities.

Back to tomorrow. I filed my lawsuit at 10.00 o'clock, and told the press I was going to hold something back for a little bit.

At 10.15 am, the US Government launched Operation Green Quest, a massive raid on all the Saudi charities in homes and businesses, and in one hour we shut down the entire Saudi money-laundering network in America.

From March 20, 2002 to the present, the government has found more and more evidence seized in those archives in that single raid that day. The evidence was so compelling that Professor Al-Arian is no longer giving his speeches. He is now in federal prison awaiting trial. His accomplice, [Sameeh] Hammoudeh, has also been indicted. Some 32 different people have been indicted in the United States as a direct result of these efforts. But not the Saudis—not the Saudis.

A month after I filed my lawsuit against Al-Arian, I did it: I caused some trouble. I invited 40 of the top trial lawyers in America to come down to St Petersburg, Florida. Boy, did I have a deal for them. I wanted them to put up millions of dollars of their own money—I'm poor, I had no money to give them—but I wanted to do something for America. These are lawyers like Ron Motley, who had won billions of dollars in lawsuits against the tobacco industry and the asbestos industry.

I said, "What I want you to do is look at the evidence I've collected. It's the same Saudi banks and charities that funded Sami Al-Arian that also funded Al-Qa'ida."

I said, "I want you to bring a class action in Federal Court in Washington on behalf of everyone who died on September 11 [2001]. I'm going to work for free and collect all the evidence, introduce you to the experts, provide all the exhibits and documents...and we have to do this for America."

The lawyers studied all the documents I collected, and on August 15, 2002 they filed the largest class-action lawsuit in American history in the Federal District Court in Washington, DC, asking for one trillion dollars' damages against the Saudis. The lawsuit said essentially that all these Saudi banks had one thing in common: they were bribing Osama bin Laden 300 million dollars a year to stay out of Saudi Arabia and go blow up someone else.

Well, on 9/11 we found out we were someone else. The Saudis had to pay for their negligence. So, that lawsuit is coming along very well.

Learning from the past

More and more people in the CIA and FBI are sort of using me as a back channel to get out information. So, believe it or not, they've actually given me my own TV show now on Sunday mornings on Fox TV nationwide. I'm on at 11.20 Eastern Standard Time. And ABC Radio has given me a national radio program, but I'm on at 10.30 at night and it's past your bedtime.

What I've become in my old age is a teacher. Twenty-five years ago I was a lot younger, a lot thinner, but now every day I get 500 to 1,000 emails from honest men and women around the world from the intelligence community.

We have to end the evil in this world. We have to recognise that Al-Qa'ida simply didn't spring up on its own. The evil route was Nazism. The Al-Qa'ida doctrine is the same as the Arab Nazis held. They hate Jews, they hate democracy and they hate Westerners for Western culture. Al-Qa'ida is nothing more than the religious expression of Arab fascism. We allowed this branch of the Nazi trunk to survive, to flourish, and it has come back to haunt us.

We must do a better job. Look at these children. They are our legacy. If we are to keep our children safe, we must teach them the lessons of the past. Every generation should know what these candles mean: not only that one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the world really happened, but that the evil that caused it—Nazism—survived because we didn't fight hard enough. We didn't finish the job.

But we must tell our children that in every generation the men and women of America have stood side by side with our Jewish, Christian and Moslem brothers. We have risen up together against hatred. America is united now.

We will win the war on terror, and we will finish the job that these soldiers and survivors started more than a half-century ago. We must set the standard that to teach a child to hate is the worst form of child abuse. We must work together to end racism in our children's lifetime. We must teach our children to remember the Holocaust and be proud, so proud of those who survived and inspired us with their courage. In their name, in their honour, let us go forward and fight together.

Never again!

About the Speaker:

John Loftus is a former US Justice Department prosecutor who lives in St Petersburg, Florida. As a young US Army officer, he helped train Israelis in a covert operation that turned the tide of battle in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. During the Carter and Reagan administrations, he investigated CIA cases and Nazi war criminals for the US Attorney-General. As a private attorney, he works pro bono to help hundreds of intelligence agents obtain lawful permission to declassify and publish the hidden secrets of our times. Loftus is Vice Chair of the Florida Holocaust Museum's Executive Committee. He is the co-author (with Mark Aarons) of The Secret War Against the Jews (St Martin's Press, 1994) and Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks (St Martin's Press, 1992, 1998). His forthcoming book is titled Prophets of Terror: Jonathan Pollard and Peace in the Middle East.

This speech by John Loftus was given to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Ha'Shoah) on April 18, 2004. It was first published in Jewish Community News, August 2004.

Endnote

1. Baer, Robert, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul For Saudi Crude, Three Rivers Press/Crown Publishing, USA, 2003, 2004 (ISBN 1-4000-5268-8).

The War On Terrorism

Nazi interest in Iraq goes back 80 years to the early 1920s, to a time when the Nazionalsozialische Deutsche Arbeiterspartei (NSDAP) was still brawling in the streets of Berlin.

In 1924, Detlef Schmude, one of the leading lights of the NSDAP's forerunner, the Thule Gesellschaft, left Germany on an extended pilgrimage in the Middle East. Schmude had been a Canon in a Thule-related mystic group, the Order of the New Templars, and the editor of the Thule group's magazine, Ostara. Schmude settled in Tabriz, in Iran, and spent the next few years hunting for what he called "the Hidden Masters".

Then, in early 1939, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Hitler's spymaster and head of the Abwehr intelligence agency, sent Dr. Paul Leverkühn to the Middle East to cultivate Muslim allies for the Third Reich. Strangely enough, Dr. Leverkühn's headquarters was Detlef Schmude's old stamping ground, Tabriz. And his most successful convert was Rashid Ali, the pro-Nazi prime minister of Iraq, who was overthrown during the British invasion of Iraq two years later, in 1941.

Admiral Canaris became involved in the Stauffenberg bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944. He was arrested and thrown into the Flossenburg concentration camp, where he was executed in April 1945. Abwehr agents and operations in the Middle East were taken over by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and placed under the control of Rudolf von Sebottendorff (nee Adam Glauer). By some strange coincidence, Sebottendorff was a Thule lodge brother like Schmude and, from 1916 on, a member of the New Templars.

Even stranger, Sebottendorff's dead body was found floating in the Bosporus near the docks of Istanbul on May 9, 1945, the day after World War II in Europe ended.

What happened to the Thule/SS organization in Iraq after 1945, no one in the West knows.

One who took a keen interest in Iraq was SS-Brigadeführer Karl Maria Wiligut, alias Weisthor, who was called "Himmler's Rasputin". In 1940, he called Himmler's attention to important archaeological discoveries in Iraq's Irbil province. Scientists had dug up man-made artifacts dating back to 10,000 B.C.

Wiligut claimed to be the last of a line of sorcerers called the Ueiskuinigs, which had originated hundreds of thousands of years ago on the lost continent of Atlantis. With important Neolithic discoveries being made in Iraq, Wiligut thought it was vital to have the SS-Ahnenerbe on the scene, and it was probably he who advised Himmler to give control of the apparat to Sebottendorff.

After the war, in 1947, the biggest cache of Neolithic items yet was unearthed by Dorothy Garrod of Cambridge University, all dating back to 10,000 B.C. The find was at Zarzi in the upper valley of the as-Zab as-Saghir (or Little Zab River, to give the Arabic a free translation), about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Irbil. Another important discovery was made by Prof. Braidwood of the Chicago Oriental Institute in 1951, Neolithic artifacts dating back to 6,000 B.C.

The ruins of Shimurru, a Sumerian city dating back to 3,000 B.C., is also in that valley.

When Hitler Became Abu Ali
The Miami Herald
June 7, 2002

Forty years ago last week, SS-Oberstumbannführer Adolf Eichmann was executed in Israel. Eichmann was arrested at the end of WWII and confined to an American internment camp, but he managed to escape to Argentina. He lived there for ten years under the name Ricardo Klement until Israeli secret agents abducted him in 1960 and spirited him to Israel. Eight months after his trial opened in Jerusalem, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people and was sentenced to death. Executed in May 31, 1962, his remains were then cremated and the ashes scattered over the Mediterranean Sea--outside Israeli waters. This was the only time the death penalty was ever carried out in Israel.

Eichmann's record is notorious. He was the head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo from 1941 to 1945 and was chief of operations in the deportation of three million Jews to the extermination camps. After the war, he became one of the most sought-out Nazi fugitives. While the international community had condemned Israel's kidnapping of Eichmann, it was nonetheless able to see the justice in, and legitimacy of, Israel's action. The trial itself, marked by strict adherence to legal procedure, elicited worldwide admiration, and the Nazi's execution was seen everywhere as a crucial vindication in the post-Holocaust era.

Everywhere, that is, but in the Arab world. There, Eichmann's capture, trial and execution were universally condemned and Eichmann himself was venerated as a "martyr." The Jordanian daily A-Ra' ai praised him for exterminating "members of the race of dogs and monkeys." The Saudi periodical Al-Bilar saluted him for his courage. The Lebanese newspaper Al-Anwar published a cartoon lamenting the fact that the Nazi officer had not killed more Jews.

But let us view this Arab beatification of Eichmann in its proper historical context.

As soon as Hitler took power in 1933, telegrams of congratulations were dispatched from Arab capitals. In 1937, Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Göbbels praised the Arabs' "national and racial concience" noting that "Nazi flags fly in Palestine and they adorn their houses with Swastikas and portraits of Hitler." In 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, spoke highly of the "natural alliance that exists between the National-Socialism of Great Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the world."

Pro-German parties and youth movements attuned to the trappings of National-Socialism sprouted in Syria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. Even Nazi slogans were translated into Arabic. A Mideast song popular toward the end of the 1930s crooned:

No more Monsieur, no more Mister. In Heaven Allah, on earth Hitler.

The Führer himself was even Islamicized under the new name of Abu Ali.

Love of Nazism spread like wildfire in the region. Among the many Nazi sympathizers at the time were Haj Amin al-Husseini (Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Arab Higher Committee); Ahmed Shukairi (first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization); Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat (both future presidents of Egypt); Islamic fundamentalist leaders; and the founders of the Pan-Arab socialist Ba'ath party, currently ruling Syria and Iraq. (One Ba'ath leader proudly recounted: "We were racists, admiring Nazism, reading their books and sources of their thought. We were the first who thought of translating Mein Kampf.").

Praise for Hitler among Arabs did not vanish after WWII. In 1965, a Moroccan commentator on Middle East affairs wrote this in the French magazine Les Temps Modernes:

A Hitlerian myth is being cultivated on a popular level. Hitler's massacre of the Jews is eulogized. It is even believed that Hitler did not die. His arrival is longed for.

In mid-2001, an Egyptian columnist wrote in the government-sponsored Al-Akhbar:

Thank you Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians avenged in advance against the most vile criminals on earth.

Two months later, Egypt's Press Syndicate awarded this writer its highest distinction.

Since Hitler's ascent to power in 1933, the Arabs have been adulating Nazism. It seems that some things never change--or perhaps some things do. Now they accuse the Jews of being Nazis. In this way, Hitler's loyal fans are currently equating the primary victims of his genocide with the Nazi executioners themselves.

The defining expression of "Chutzpah" is a man who murders his parents and then begs the jury for pity on the grounds that he is an orphan. But the Arabs' perverse historical and moral inversion requires a new definition for the term. For "Chutzpah" cannot sufficiently represent this incredible gall.

Julian Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington, D.C.

WHEN DOCTOR GÖBBELS CAME TO TOWN
by Samir Raafat
Egyptian Mail, 30 September 1995

CAIRO ZEITGEIST Spring 1939

Even as WW2 loomed on the horizon, Egypt remained firmly cosmopolitan and well within the British sphere of influence. In many ways the events of the first half of April 1939 typified the country's colorful socio-political calendar. For one thing, the capital was recovering from a titanic hangover brought on by the month-long festivities celebrating the fairy tale wedding of the beautiful Princess Fawzia of Egypt to the heir of Persia's Peacock Throne, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The celebrations ended when the imperial couple embarked from Port Said en route to Iran with Queen Nazli, the queen mother, in tow along with a large retinue of courtiers and hangers on.

From his impregnable headquarters in Kasr al-Dubara, the high-handed British ambassador Sir Miles Lampson continued to dictate advice to the servile government of Mohammed Mahmoud Pasha who was mercilessly heckled by the leader of the opposition. The chief heckler, Mustafa Nahas, was forever scheming a momentous comeback for his Wafd Party. Meanwhile at the palace Ali Maher Pasha, chief of the royal cabinet, submitted and withdrew his resignation during a 24-hour interlude while his brother Ahmed Maher Pasha, the incumbent minister of finance, made waves at Government House calling for the transformation of that most British of clubs, the National Bank of Egypt, into a Central Bank.

On the social side, the King's maternal uncle, Sherif Abdelrehim Sabri Pasha hosted a splendid tea party at his Giza villa on Abdelrehim Sabri Street (now, Nawal) attended by all of Cairo's feuding politicos. Across the Nile in Zamalek, lording it in their prize Gezira Palace (today the Marriott Hotel) the Lotfallah-Sursocks, the largest landowners in Palestine and parvenu bearers of a doubtful princely Syrian title bestowed upon them by the temporary ruler of that country, entertained Lady Austen Chamberlain, sister-in-law of the British prime minister, as she passed through Cairo… just another day in prewar Cairo.

Stopping in town for an extended visit during their return trip home from the London Conference on the Palestine Question were Princes Feisal and Khaled al-Seoud (later they would take turns at being Kings of Saudi Arabia). Also transiting through Cairo on his way to Palestine having attended the same fruitless conference was Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organization. Accompanying him was his second-in-command, David Ben Gurion, and his fawning admirer the gentile Blanche Dugdale, a self-proclaimed Zionist whose uncle Lord Arthur Balfour had promised the Jews land which already belonged to someone else. Since all the protagonists were in town, an eleventh hour meeting was arranged on April 12 at the Egyptian prime minister's office with the intention of narrowing the chasm separating the warring parties. As expected, nothing came out of the meeting.

On the lighter side, German tennis champion Gottfried Von Cramm trounced America's W. D. McNeil at the Gezira Sporting Club cheered on by an adoring public. Once again, Von Cramm won the prestigious Egyptian International Tournament. Because it was both Easter and Sham al-Nessim season, festivities were a-plenty. The Cairo Arts Circle held a brilliant performance at the Giza Pyramids under the gaze of the Sphinx. He had seen it all before. But what he didn't know was that in a matter of months the largest Allied Army would pass right under his broken nose.

PREPARING FOR WW2

It seemed like after each one of Adolf Hitler’s frenzied speeches the international borders of the Central European countries changed once more. The Führer's insomnia kept Europe's chanceries wide-awake working overtime throughout Easter 1939. Not to be outdone, Mussolini was gobbling up whatever he could lay hands on. Albania's King had barely a few hours to pack up and escape with his young bride and their newborn heir before strutting Italian troops took over the small Moslem Balkan state. For King Ahmed Zogo this was a Red Easter. His next Easter would be spent in Egypt.

On the other side of the Levant, King Ghazi of Iraq died of a car accident catapulting his Alexandria-educated preteen son onto another wobbly throne.

Amidst all these Easter holiday events, a Condor-type tri-motor Focke-Wulf 200 plane bearing the German swastika and a large inscription Max von Müller (a German flying ace) on its fuselage landed at Almaza Airport at exactly 11:20 on the morning of Thursday, April 6. The Max had flown directly from the German-occupied island of Rhodes. On board was Doctor Paul Josef Göbbels (1875-1945) accompanied by eight aides. Also among the passengers was the director of a leading German picture studio, von Waldeck.

On hand to receive the Führer's protégé was von Hunting, the minister at the German Legation in Cairo. He had just replaced Baron von Wehnher who had walked out on his job because his wife had been targeted as a Semite. Also at the airport were the German consul, Alfred Czibulinski and his press attaché von Röntgen. The latter had arrived in Cairo a few weeks earlier bearing the Fuhrer's gift to the Royal-Imperial Wedding.

While the next next morning's papers made no mention of Johann Ivo Theiss who, aside from being the German Legation's lawyer, headed the NSDAP in Egypt, they nevertheless pointed out that the Reichminister was welcomed at Almaza Airport by ranking members of the Austro-German community including the director of the Dresdner Bank, Baron Leonard von Richter.

In his capacity of president of the German Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, von Richter had made the most memorable speech of his career a few days earlier to a packed German audience where he announced that since September 1938 and for the second year running, trade between Germany and Egypt was at a deficit of 4 million marks. While Germany made clear its readiness to increase cotton imports from Egypt, its exports were declining due to adverse propaganda spearheaded by "certain bought newspapers guided by self-defeating propaganda."

"The fact that Austria and the Sudeten merged into the Reich failed to improve trade figures." Announced von Richter. "Germany is the third largest user of the Suez Canal after England and Italy, yet, most of Suez Canal profits are for the benefit of France and England. It is only fair the Company return to Germany its voting seat which it lost in 1889."

In a way von Richter was right for the Suez Canal directorships at the time were distributed into 19 French, 15 English, two Egyptians and one Dutch. The third largest canal user --Germany-- was altogether absent. Von Richter and the German Chamber were hoping to see a reverse in the trade pattern and "would continue to pursue their objectives conforming to the Fuhrer's belief in long term peace."

Another important member on the Reichminister's Welcome Committee was Baron von Richter's Maadi neighbor, Wilhelm van Meeteren, the local director of Siemens. A long term resident in Egypt, Meeteren was president of the German community as well as the German Club located in Boulak, not far from the German School.

The van Meeterens were patrons of Cairo's various music circles where Mrs. van Meeteren and their daughter Clara performed regularly. It was at one of those meets that Clara met her husband-to-be Hans Pilger, the German consul in Cairo who lived at Villa Basque in Maadi.

Pilger and Meeteren had made front-page headlines in January 1934 when a libel suit was brought against them by the local chapter of LICA the Jewish (Ligue Internationale contre l'antisemitisme) on charges of spreading vicious publicity.

Somehow Göbbels propaganda machine met more than its match in Cairo! Local gossip claimed the van Meeteren-Von Richter-Pilger crowd was actually closet Nazi agents. And even if these innuendoes were never actually proven by the powerful Cairo-Judeo clique, the fact that subversive elements were promoting Nazi propaganda all over the globe was no secret. Why, only recently senior Siemens and Krupp representatives were apprehended in Patagonia, Argentina, for illegal dissemination of seditious anti-Semitic information. And was it not in Cairo that incriminating documents were found some years ago in the cabinet of prominent lawyer Maitre Fritz Dahmm?

Egypt's influential Jewish community fumed!

Some among them were already talking about bizarre desert picnics that always ended with pyre burning and Prussian chants complemented by dances that looked like from the ashes would rise a Teutonic apparition! Those in the know claimed these diabolical celebrations were organized by the local NSDAP or Landesgruppen.

As though to fan these weird rumors, a report published in the Journal d'Egypte on April 6 claimed 25,000 Germans had converted to Islam and were en route to various countries in the Moslem Orient in an attempt to de-stabilize Franco-British influence. According to General Niessel, Germany never relented on its old quest to establish footholds in North Africa and the Near East as evidenced earlier by Kaiser Wilhelm's controversial trip to Palestine (staying at Orient House) and his celebrated stop in Tangiers concomitant to the arrival in Constantinople (Istanbul) of Generals Goltz and Liman von Sanders. These visits took place just before WW1.

And now, on the eve of WW2, a series of suspenseful visits and developments were taking place to which the British were not making light of.

To the British the first unwelcome development was the introduction of the Spree-Nile connection consolidated on April 1 by Lufthansa's maiden flight to Egypt making it the second stop in black Africa after Bathurst in West Africa--a refueling stop for Lufthansa's South America connection. The new air service via Cairo allowed for a faster link-up to the Far East via the Bremerhaven steamer from Suez. The 35-day trip to Yokohama was reduced by 10 days! A precious gain for the growing Germano-Japanese Alliance.

The second unwelcome development was the unexpected visit of Doctor Göbbels to Cairo. And if one paid attention to the latest intelligence reports, it was to be followed by a visit of Reichmarshal Hermann Göring to the Italian dependency of Libya.

All that remained was for Hitler’s other zealous advocate, Rudolf Hess, der hinterhältige Ägypter or crafty Egyptian, to return to his birthplace of Alexandria. What the British ignored was that a month later, in May 1939, it would be the turn of the Italian Governor-General of Libya, Air Marshal Italo Balbo, to visit Cairo. Count Mazolini, the cocky Italian minister in Egypt was already flushing his feathers.

THE VISIT

On April 6, the Richter-Meeteren clique were surrounded at Almaza airport by what looked like a platoon of hand-picked rosy-cheeked Aryans from the German School of Boulak. As the athletic males shouted Heil in true Hitlerjugend style, their fair fraulein counterparts curtsied and presented the diminutive Doctor Göbbels with flower bouquets as he made the handshake rounds. The only tarbouches seen on the tarmac were those of Mahmoud Dessouki, the Oriental Secretary at the German Legation and the one belonging to the director of the Tourism Department. No other Egyptian officials were anywhere to be seen. The visit had been listed as private.

Following 'advice' from Sir Miles, the Egyptian council of ministers had made it clear to the Germans that Doctor Göbbels was to refrain from making any press statements or accord interviews while in Egypt. Moreover, a request to fly across the Western Desert had been rejected since the area had been declared a no-fly zone the week before. Aside from these two minor pre-conditions the Doctor's entourage was free to tour the sites and meet at will with the German colony of Egypt.

The Reichminister's program was as follows:

DAY 1

arrival at Almaza Airport
signing visitors book at Abdin Palace
signing visitors book at Manial Palace (crown prince)
lunch at Mena House
visit Giza and Sakara Pyramids
reception German House in Boulak
dinner at German Legation (Garden City)

DAY 2

depart Mena House 09:15
Cairo Museum
German School in Boulak
Cairo Citadel
Khan al-Khalili/ Mousky
lunch at German Legation
departure Almaza Airport

There were to be no meetings with Egyptian politicians whether in government or in opposition. There were no courtesy calls to the head of the government or to his foreign minister Abdelfatah Yehya Pasha. However, court protocol required Doctor Göbbels to sign the Visitors Register at Abdin and Manial Palaces. In his characteristic Gothic script the German visitor entered: "Dr. Göbbels, Reichminister."

According to press reports, during his visit to the Giza plateau Göbbels expressed to Professor Hermann Junker of the Deutsches Institut his deepest admiration for ancient Egyptian civilization. While standing in front of King Tut's collection at the Egyptian Museum, the Doctor reiterated his admiration. Al-Ahram's front page on April 7 tells how Göbbels was in awe of all the golden paraphernalia exhibited in the young pharaoh's chamber and how he was so taken in with the Giza pyramids that he opted for a moonlit camel ride before tucking in at the Mena House. (One wonders if the suite occupied by Göbbels was not the same one later christened the Montgomery Suite.)

According to Germany's Völkischer Beobachter, the fresh-orange-juice-totting Reichminister accepted to have tea in the desert tent belonging to the Archaelogisches Institut. Later in the afternoon he met with the German colony at the German School in Boulak (Deutsche Evangelische Oberschule Kairo) then under the directorship of Karl Ehmann.

In those days the school was situated next to the German Church and what is al-Ahram's present headquarters. But since the meetings were held in camera it was difficult for the press to make out what message the Reichminister was bringing from Berlin. Nevertheless, the weekly Akher Sa'a magazine claimed in its April 23 issue that Doctor Göbbels complimented the gathering for their splendid performance and announced that "the reich recognizes your valiant services and believes you should be rewarded. When I saw young British soldiers walking the Cairo streets I asked myself, wouldn't it be wonderful if they had been our Schmucksoldaten marching out there? This could well be the reward for your services."

The meeting was followed by a reception at the German legation on Sheik al-Arbein Street (off Simon Bolivar Square). Attended mostly by Germans it was conspicuously void of Egyptians. The only one who left his card was Abdelhamid Abaza, a large fruit exporter to Germany. Even the pro-German elements of the palace such as Mohammed Taher Pasha, Prince Ismail Daoud and Medhat Yeken Pasha had had cold feet. None called on Herr Göbbels feigning prior engagements. Likewise, they had turned down personal invitations to visit Berlin for the coming April 20 celebration of the Führer's 50th birthday. By so doing they missed one of the biggest military rallies in history.

With everyone staying away, it was left for the anti-British Nabil Abbas Halim to show up at the legation dinner. Halim, a former Ulan and a recipient of the Iron Cross from the Kaiser during WW1, had studied at the Imperial Academy in Berlin before joining the Kaiser's own officer corps. The gutsy outspoken prince would pay a dear price for his audacity when Sir Miles Lampson would shortly after order his internment during most of WW2.

The second day of Doctor Göbbels visit included a tour of the museum, the Citadel, the Sultan Hassan Mosque ending with a stroll in Khan al-Khalili's bazaar where he purchased a roll of cotton cloth and a silver trinket for his wife Magda.

With time running out, Herr Göbbels declined an invitation to visit Studio Misr, Egypt's answer to Hollywood. Deepest regrets were expressed to Herr Kremp, the studio's German manager, for Göbbels knew very well the importance of celluloid and its powers of persuasion.

By 01:15 on April 7 the visit was over. The Max Von Muller which had been guarded at Almaza Airport by three policemen took off with Doctor Göbbels--a fruit basket by his side--and his elated retinue to the cries of Heil, Heil.

WW2 was declared five months later.

WHAT BECAME OF THEM DURING WW2

The German Charge d'affaire was handed his passport and left for Greece with his staff. A Swedish flag flew over the ex-German Legation at No. 7 Sheik al-Arbein.

German and Austrian subjects excluding Jewish refugees were asked to report at the nearest police station. Many were detained in the premises of the sequestered German School of Boulak pending investigation of their political backgrounds and affiliations.

Baron von Richter was interned in Boulak throughout the war. In the makeshift prison hospital he fell in love with an Egyptian Copt relief worker (Aida Semeika) and later married her and had a child. Meanwhile, his villa in Maadi was taken over by Joshua Green, a Jewish pharmaceutical importer.

In view of his representing the Baltic States, Wilhelm van Meeteren claimed diplomatic immunity and was spared internment. He disappeared just before the Ribbentrop-Molotov Agreement became public and re-surfaced in Maadi after the war.

German property in Egypt was sequestered. The sequester was Ahmed Sadik Bey who was married to Vicky, a redheaded Jew and member of the international café society.

The Deutsches Archaelogisches Institut on Zamalek's No. 5 el-Kamel Mohammed Street was closed. The villa was bought by Ovadia Mercado Salem, a rich Jewish businessman. His wife later leased the house to Egypt's ex-queen, Farida Zulfikar. Later it was sold to the Canadian government, which turned it into the ambassador's residence.

Paul Josef Göbbels survived Adolf Hitler by 24 hours. On May 1, 1945, the Reichminister's six children were poisoned in their Berlin bunker. Complying with his superior's orders, Doctor Göbbels' orderly shot the Reichminister and his wife Magda that same night. Their unburied charred bodies were found the next day by the invading Soviet army.

Note:

Almost five years after the appearance of the above article in the Egyptian Gazette the German School in Cairo celebrated its 125th anniversary. On that landmark occasion a 208-page book "125 Jahre DEO Kairo" was published chronicling the development of the German School in Cairo from a small makeshift classroom in a priest's house to what it is today. Despite its momentous importance to the local German community at the time, the visit of Josef Göbbels to the school was subtly omitted from the book.

The fact that the German School in Cairo remains an institution that teaches 'liberal' arts and science it is unfortunate to note that selective memory is still very much in force. Disregarding or denying events however sinister will not change the outcome of history. What happened has happened. If one embarks on writing the story of an institution, particularly an academic one, then one cannot afford the luxury to be discriminatory.

© Copyright Samir Raafat
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The Victory Strategy Räder Proposed to Hitler

Erich Räder [chief of the German Navy] felt that the senior army generals had a "purely continental outlook," did not understand the war-winning opportunities that had opened up on the south shore of the Mediterranean, and would never counsel Hitler correctly. Although the OKH and OKW did advise Hitler to send troops to North Africa, their proposals lacked Räder's urgency. Never did Brauchitsch, Halder, Jodl, or Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the OKW, express the conviction that the war could be won in the Mediterranean, although Keitel told Benito Mussolini that capture of Cairo was more important than capture of London.

Part of their hesitancy lay in the knowledge that Hitler had been fixed for a long time on destroying the Soviet Union and gaining Lebensraum for the German people. Their careers depended upon not rocking that boat. However, they never stressed to Hitler, as did Räder, that victory in the Mediterranean would make it easier, in the end, to achieve victory over the Soviet Union.

Once Axis forces overran Egypt and the Suez Canal, they would close the eastern Mediterranean to the Royal Navy. The British fleet would immediately retreat into the Red Sea, because it could not be supplied sufficiently by means of convoys through the western Mediterranean. Whether or not the Germans seized Gibraltar by a direct attack---and this was virtually excluded because of [Spanish dictator Francisco] Franco's opposition--- Britain strategically would be paralyzed.

The Axis could move at will into the Middle East, for the British had no substantial forces there. Thus, not only would Syria and Palestine fall, but German panzers could seize Iraq and Iran with little effort. These two countries produced much of the world's oil, and their capture would provide ample amounts of Germany's single most-needed strategic material.

The advance on the southern frontier of Turkey would put the Turks in an impossible position. Hitler was already in the process of gaining Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria as allies. Therefore, Turkey could be approached either by way of Bulgaria across the Bosporus at Istanbul or from northern Iraq and Syria. Turkey would be forced to join the Axis or grant passage for Axis forces and supplies. A defiant stance would result in the swift defeat of the Turkish army and disaster.

Passage through Turkey would reduce the importance of Malta and Gibraltar. However, both could be eliminated without the active support of Franco and without direct assault.

German forces could easily occupy French North Africa ( Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) with or without Vichy France's cooperation. From French Morocco, they could approach from the south the small strip of Morocco along the Strait of Gibraltar ruled by Spain. Spain would be forced to grant transit rights, or stand aside if German forces occupied the strip without permission. Spain could not resist for fear of a German attack into the heart of Spain from France. Consequently, German airfields and batteries could be set up along the south shore of the strait. This would close it to Britain---without an expensive military assault on the rock of Gibraltar.

Furthermore, closing the Strait of Gibraltar would force the British to abandon Malta, because they could not supply it.

With the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean, it would become an Axis lake. This would permit German forces to occupy all of western Africa, including the French base at Dakar, in Senegal. Aircraft, ships, and submarines from Dakar could close down much of Britain's convoy traffic through the South Atlantic, even without seizure of the Cape Verde islands.

In the Middle East the strategic payoff would be even greater. German forces in Iran would block that country as a route for supplies to the Soviet Union from Britain and the United States. Russia would be left with only the ports of Murmansk on the Barents Sea and Archangel on the White Sea through which goods from the west could be funneled. This would require dangerous passages in atrocious weather, with constant danger of attacks by German ships and aircraft stationed in Norway.

Even more important, the Soviet Union's major oil fields were in the Caucasus and along the western shore of the Caspian Sea, just north of Iran. Germany could threaten not only an attack directly from Poland and Romania in the west but also from the south through the Caucasus to the Soviet oil fields. This danger of envelopment and quick loss of oil would immobilize Stalin, and obligate him to provide Germany with whatever grain and raw materials it might need. In other words, Germany---without loss of a single soldier---would have the benefits of the Soviet Union's vast materials storehouse, as well as delivery of tin, rubber, and other goods from southeast Asia by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

A German position in Iran also would pose a huge threat to India, agitating for independence under Mohandas K. Gandhi and other leaders. From Iran Germany could invade India through the Khyber and other passes, invasion routes long before and long after Alexander the Great made the passage in 326 B.C. Germany would not actually have to do a thing. The threat alone would force Britain to commit every possible soldier to defend its crown jewel. Germany, again without the expenditure of a single man, could immobilize Britain.

In possession of the Middle East, all of North and West Africa, and Europe, its armed forces virtually intact, its economy able to exploit the resources of three continents, Germany would be virtually invincible. Britain's defiance on the periphery of Europe would become increasingly irrelevant. Germany would not have to inaugurate an all-out U-boat war against its shipping. Britain's remaining strength would have to be expended in protecting its empire and the convoys to and from the home islands.

The United States would have no hope of launching an invasion against the mainland of Europe and an undefeated and waiting German army until it had spent years building a vast navy, army, and air force, not to speak of the transports, landing craft, vehicles, and weapons necessary for such a giant undertaking. It is possible that the United States would take on this task, but the chances for its success would be extremely small. Far more likely, the American people would turn first to counter the expansion of Japan in the Pacific.

Meanwhile Germany could consolidate its empire, bring subject nations into an economic union, and grow more powerful economically, militarily, and politically every day. Before long, the world would become accustomed to the new German Empire and insist on a return to normal international trade.

This at last would give Hitler the opportunity he had sought for decades. He never wanted more of the Soviet Union than the region west of the Ural mountains. Once a de facto cease-fire had been achieved, Hitler could strike at European Russia from south and west, drive Stalin and the surviving Soviets into Siberia, and get the Lebensraum he coveted.

In 1941 Hitler sent a German army, the Afrika Korps, to support the Italians in Libya. They forced the British back into Egypt and came within 100 kilometres of Alexandria. The German aim was to seize the Suez Canal and beyond that the oilfields of the Persian Gulf. At the same time Hitler had longer-term plans for striking south across the desert, seizing the strategically important territory of Chad and re-occupying the former German colony of Kamerun, lost in 1916. But he never got the chance to put these plans into action. The Allied forces finally broke through the German lines in western Egypt at the battle of El Alamein in October 1942. At almost the same time American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria. Attacked from both sides, the Germans and Italians were pushed back to Tunisia. Here the remnants of Germany's Afrika Korps was forced to surrender in May 1943.

To gain a new favorite status for an alignment of the Muslim world, Hitler with the help of the Palestinians wanted to exterminate half a million Jews in what is now Israel plus all Jews in Tunisia and Syria.

SS Walter Schellenberg (Head of the Secret Service) wrote Summer 1942:

The extreme friendliness of the Muslim world towards Hitler comes from the hope he will remove the Jews from the Middle East.

For this end, a family member of later President Yasser Arafat, leading pan-Arabist Mohammed Amin el-Husseini (1893-1974), met with Adolf Eichman to discuss a ‘Master Plan’ for the alignment of the ‘Arab World’ with Nazi Germany.

In fact the history of the Middle East would have been completely different and a Jewish state could never have been established if the Germans and Arabs had joined forces.

Hitler's holocaust plan for Jews in Palestine stopped by
Desert Rats

Adolf Hitler made plans to conduct a holocaust of Jews living in Palestine during the Second World War, according to German historians who have examined government archives for a new book that examines the extension of the extermination programme outside of Europe and Russia.

It was the victory of the famed Desert Rats of Britain's Eighth Army at El Alamein under the leadership of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery that saved the Jews in Palestine from annihilation. The turning point in the desert war signalled a reprieve from a planned German invasion of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

If Arabs had joined Nazis in genocide, the map of the Middle East could be totally different to present day and the historians speculate whether the state of Israel would ever have been founded if such an unholy alliance had been achieved.

The Nazis stationed a unit of SS troops in Athens, tasked with following invading frontline troops in Palestine and then rounding up and murdering about 500,000 European Jews who had taken refuge there, according to historians at the University of Stuttgart.

But the unit, answerable to the Afrika Corps under Field Marshal Erwin "The Desert Fox" Rommel, never deployed.

It was designed to function like the Einsatzgruppen or "action squads" of the SS that followed the German army into Russia, shooting close to a million Jews and political enemies before the static killing centres such as Treblinka and Auschwitz were established in Poland.

Klaus-Michael Mallmann of the University's Ludwigsburg research team and his assistant Martin Cüppers said they had spent three years studying German wartime archives, including those at the foreign office in Berlin which had hitherto remained sealed.

"The Allied defeat of Rommel at the end of 1942 had prevented the extension of the Holocaust to Palestine," they said. If Rommel had beaten the Allies in the desert and invaded Egypt, a push into Palestine would have followed and the unit would have deployed there.

The researchers, whose findings appear in a new book entitled Germans, Jews, Genocide: The Holocaust as history and the present, said the Athens unit would follow the blueprint drawn by Nazi units that hunted for Jews in Eastern Europe, massacring them on the spot or shipping them off to death camps. In Palestine, they say, it would have been more of the former than the latter due to the greater distances involved.

Mr Mallmann and Mr Cüppers said the Nazis had planned to exploit Arab friendship for their plans.

"The most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem," they say in the book. He was a prime example of how Arabs and Nazis became friends out of a hatred of Jews.

Al-Husseini had met Adolf Eichmann, Adolf Hitler's chief architect of the Holocaust, several times to settle details of the slaughter. In the academic work they draw on documents from the Reich Main Security Office showing "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942.

The Middle East death squad was to be led by the SS Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff.

Rauff was involved in the development of "gassing vans": mobile gas chambers used to fatally poison Jews, persons with disabilities, and communists, who were considered by the SS as enemies of the German state.

After escaping from an American internment camp in Italy after capture, he hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudel, the notorious German cleric at the Vatican credited with providing fake papers for high-ranking Nazis to escape to South America.

Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, where a million people were murdered, was among his "clients." In 1948 he was recruited by Syrian intelligence and went to Damascus, only to fall out of favour after a coup there a year later. He settled in Chile, where he fought off extradition proceedings to stand trial in Germany and died peacefully in 1984. He hinted at plans to kill the Jews in Palestine in an interview in 1979, in which he was unrepentant about his wartime "service to my Fatherland".

Hitler, Northwest Africa and the Path Toward America

Was Adolf Hitler preparing to conquer the United States?

Some historians dismiss the idea that Hitler planned to conquer the world as propaganda or wishful thinking by a dictator whose whims changed daily, but Hitler's strategy in Northwest Africa, especially during the crucial years from the Fall of France in 1940 to Operation Torch in 1942, were designed to secure air and naval bases in preparation for the German-American war that he expected. It was to fight America, not isolate Britain that was Germany's real goal during this period.

Hitler's pre-war plans were or a large surface fleet and very long range bombers, were better suited for combat in the Western Hemisphere than in Europe. More important, the defeat of France and the rise of the Vichy French regime showed Hitler's true intentions. He relentlessly pressed Vichy for the right to build bases in French North Africa, especially at Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. He pressed Franco's Spain for the right to create bases in the Canary Islands and even for Portuguese islands such as the Azores, which would be vital outposts in a transatlantic battle.

Couldn't those bases have been intended as defensive bulwarks against an American drive to relieve Britain, rather than as beachheads for a D-Day at New York? If Hitler's strategy against the U.S. had been defensive, it would have been more logical for Hitler to agree to support Vichy and Spain against an Allied invasion. Yet Hitler would not agree to mere sharing of these countries' bases, but outright control of their own facilities.

One cannot define Hitler's desire to steal strategically favorable positions before his future enemy could do so as defensively motivated; one may as well argue, as Hitler did, that the Germans were defending themselves when they attacked Poland, France and the Soviet Union. One may as well argue that that bombers and battleships are defensive weapons.

Hitler contemplated war with America, however, it was not the overriding German goal in the West. Was the plan to seize Gibraltar aimed at isolating Britain or keeping the U.S. out of the Mediterranean? The answer is that it could have been both.

The political backstabbing was almost comical. Those who think the infighting between the Allied leaders was bad should take a look at the fracas between Germany and its partners. Italy wanted parts of French North Africa, Spain wanted to grab Morocco, while Vichy was determined to keep its African empire intact and fend off the piranhas (including Britain and De Gaulle). Above them all sat Hitler, the master manipulator who thought he could trick everyone into cooperating, and instead had his plans frustrated by French pride and Spanish stubbornness.

The Führer looks less like a devious warlord and more like the father of squabbling siblings. Most interesting is how close Hitler came to actually getting his unlikely, mismatched Mediterranean coalition together. Contrary to popular belief, Franco was quite prepared to join the Axis and to assist in taking Gibraltar, as long as he could get his hands on French Morocco. Vichy was eager to fight the British in Central Africa, figuring that it might as well get its spoils from what seemed like the inevitable victory of Germany. It is terrifying to see just how close Nazi Germany came to forming an Axis coalition that would have dominated the Mediterranean.

Fortunately, Hitler's own hesitations and deviousness destroyed that opportunity. He vacillated between backing Vichy and Spain, and satisfied neither. Despite the willingness of Vichy to join the wolf pack scenting blood from a wounded Britain, the Führer never could quite get over his distrust of France.

In the end, everyone wanted a piece of the pie, but no one was prepared to share his slice.

In the 1920s and '30s, the leader of the Arabs in Jewish Palestine (pre-Independence Israel) was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who resided in Berlin as a welcome guest and ally of the Nazis throughout the years of the Holocaust. and continues to be a revered figure in the Muslim world.

In late March 1933, al-Husseini contacted the German consul general in Jerusalem and requested German help in eliminating Jewish settlements in Palestine--offering, in exchange, a pan-Islamic jihad in alliance with Germany against Jews around the world. It was not until 1938, in the aftermath of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous capitulation to Hitler at Munich, that Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s overtures to Nazi Germany were officially reciprocated. But by then the influence of Nazi ideology had already grown significantly throughout the Arab Middle East.

Several of the Arab political parties founded during the 1930s were modeled after the Nazi party, including the Syrian Popular Party and the Young Egypt Society, which were explicitly anti-Semitic in their ideology and programs. The leader of Syria’s Socialist Nationalist Party, Anton Sa’ada, imagined himself an Arab Hitler and placed a swastika on his party’s banner.

Though he was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini moved his base of operations (and pro-Nazi propaganda) to Lebanon in 1938, to Iraq in 1939 (where he helped establish the strongly pro-German Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as prime minister), and then to Berlin in 1941.

Al-Husseini devised an alternative to Hitler's plan to rid Germany of Jews by sending them to Jewish Palestine when at a meeting in Berlin with Hitler himself on Nov. 21, 1941, he persuaded the Führer that such a plan would result in a powerful independent Jewish state, and that a far better solution would be a Final one: Kill all Jews, in the millions, at extermination centers set up in Europe.

Two months after this meeting, the Holocaust had begun. Al-Husseini was granted his wish. It was a Moslem Arab who originated the idea of the Holocaust.

Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that Hajj Amin al-Husseini “was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz. “

At Auschwitz, al-Husseini reportedly “admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently.”

Nevertheless, al-Husseini was never tried at Nuremberg after the defeat of the Axis powers, and was allowed to return to the Middle East. He spent the rest of his life organizing terror attacks - now with the help of the Soviets via a KGB agent named Yevgeni Primakov - against the Jews of Israel.

In 1964, he founded the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and turned its leadership over to his nephew, Mohammed Abder Rauf Arafat al-Kudwa al-Husseini, alias Yasser Arafat. Up until the time of his death, Arafat continued to pay homage to the Mufti as his hero and mentor.

Hajj Amin al-Husseini has inspired two generations of radical Islamic leaders to carry on Hitler’s war against the Jews.

ISLAM UNDER THE SWASTIKA:

The Grand Mufti and the Nazi Protectorate of Bosnia-Hercegovina 1941-1945

Ali Hassan Salameh was a principal operative of the Black September organization, the reputed mastermind of the 1972 Olympics massacre and (since 1970) an important asset of the CIA .(“Good Spies Need Help from the Bad Guys” by David Ignatius - Washington Post; San Jose Mercury News; 9/18/2001)

Salameh was the son of Hassan Salameh, a key aide to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Grand Mufti was a key Nazi operative before, during and after World War II.

Hassan Salameh was a principal operative in an abortive Third Reich plan to poison the wells of Tel Aviv and precipitate an Arab uprising against the British, in order to divert Allied troops away from the planned offensive in the Ardennes. (“PLO Operative Slain, Purportedly by Israelis, Had Been Helping U.S.” by David Ignatius; Wall Street Journal; 2/10/83)

It should be noted in that regard that, in that capacity, Salameh must have come under the operational control of SS colonel and ODESSA head Otto Skorzeny.

Continuing to do the Grand Mufti’s bidding, Salameh fought against Israel during that country’s war of independence. (Idem)

Ali Hassan Salameh was educated in Germany, spent considerable time there, and ultimately married a relative of the Grand Mufti’s. (Idem)

In 1943, Adolf Hitler schemed to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt, Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill while the three world leaders met in Tehran.....

The German leader had all reasons to pin hopes on Iran. Despite its neutrality officially declared on September 4, 1939, the head of this key Middle East state Reza-shah Pehlevi in fact sought military and political cooperation with Germany. Apart from other things, Iran ensured not only control over the region, including over the Soviet Transcaucasus and Central Asia, but also guaranteed access to the Indian Ocean; that was exactly what the Führer wanted after Moscow's surrender.

By the fall of 1943, one of the means of achieving victory was, in his opinion, liquidation of Stalin; the Kursk battle had completely changed the course of World War II. The "Long Jump" operation designed and elaborated by the German command was to have translated this plan into action. And Wilhelm Canaris's Abwehr and Walther Schellenberg's political intelligence (SD) were concerned only with one circumstance - the activities of the head of Soviet fixed-post spies in Iran Ivan Aghayants, a legendary Soviet intelligence agent.

Hitler, indeed, counted on the "Iranian Card": he was well aware that the course of the war could be broken, also by physically destroying the heads of the USSR, the United States and Great Britain. The Nazi leader realized well the scale of the paralysis that would destroy the "Russian backbone" after the elimination of Josef Stalin. By the fall of 1943, he was a little less concerned about the fates of Roosevelt and Churchill. Nevertheless, he could not miss the opportunity to kill all three "whales" of alternative policies with one shot, especially that they'd chosen Tehran as a venue for their meeting on November 28.

Still in August 1941, Ivan Aghayants was sent to Iran as a fixed-post spy to ensure strategic supplies - armaments, ammunition, foodstuffs, medicines, raw materials and fuel to the Soviet Union; railway communications and unfreezing sea-ports of Iran objectively promoted the development of this plan. A wide network of agents created by Germany controlled German intelligence in the USSR. They were implementing spying, sabotage and undermining activities to disorganize the country's southern borders and even periodically dispatched "visitors" to the Caucasus. Tehran openly supported Germany; in the initial period of the war; more than 20,000 German soldiers and officers were stationed on Iranian soil. And nevertheless, it was the professionalism of the head of Soviet intelligence agents that reduced Hitler's plans to nothing.

Already in August 1943, Aghayants would thwart the implementation of the "Franz" operation devised at Schellenberg's office - staging a spontaneous uprising of Iranian tribes along the "railway perimeter" of supply of American and British cargoes to the USSR. The twenty SS officers immediately working with tribe leaders and especially SD and Abwehr were greatly shocked when the leaders of the "controlled teips" who had accepted expensive gifts suddenly resold them at a profit and vanished into thin air. On the threshold of the Teheran conference it was Aghayants who gave headache to Canaris and Schellenberg most of all.

Fate would provide German spies with a rare chance - at the end of August 1943 the head of the Soviet agents in Iran named 'commissar on repatriation Ivan Avalov' would fly to Algiers. In reality, his meeting with the head of the National Committee of fighting France, Charles de Gaulle, was also to take place there. On the threshold of the Teheran talks Stalin needed information of this general: Could he become the leader of his nation, should he pin certain hopes on him and what was his vision of future Europe? It was at that time that Hitler's choice of the liquidator of the Troika fell on Otto Skorzeny.

Ivan Aghayants was well aware of the Führer's favorite spy's capabilities. It was Skorzeny who had rescued Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in September 1943 and brought him to Hitler; the operation of Ducce's abduction from guerrilla captivity cost the lives of 31 paratroopers and the loss of 12 gliders. However, the Soviet fixed-post spy had totally irreplaceable support - the so-called "light cavalry"- a group moving around Teheran on bicycles would trace six German wireless operators.

It would become known from the diary of SS Unterscharführer Rokstrock that the saboteurs were getting to Tehran on camels for more than two weeks. Clad in Iranian traditional clothes and with dyed hair members of the group stayed in one of the secret flats where they were arrested. The bearings on the work of the radio stations were taken and their reports to Berlin were deciphered.

As a result the German command would have to give up its designs to redeploy the main implementers of the 'Long Jump' operation to Tehran."

Hitler would have another fit of hysteria - his "Iranian Card", on which he pinned a concrete and great hope, proved out-trumped.

Swastika and Crescent
Muslim and Neo-Nazi extremists unite

As Germany’s defeat loomed during the final months of World War II, Adolf Hitler increasingly lapsed into delusional fits of fantasy. Albert Speer, in his prison writings, recounts an episode in which a maniacal Hitler "pictured for himself and for us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire." The Nazi Führer described skyscrapers turning into "gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the dark sky."

An approximation of Hitler’s hellish vision came true on September 11 2001. But it was not Nazis or even neo-Nazis who carried out the attack - the deadliest terror strike in history allegedly came at the hands of foreign Muslim extremists.

Still, in the aftermath of the slaughter, white supremacists in America and Europe applauded the suicide attacks and praised Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the massacre. An official of America’s premier neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance, said he wished his own members had "half as much testicular fortitude." Neo-fascist youth in France celebrated the event that evening with champagne at the headquarters of the extreme right Front National. German neo-Nazis, some wearing chequered Palestinian headscarves, rejoiced at street demonstrations while burning an American flag.

What’s going on here? For decades, American extremists have lumped Arabs in with dark-skinned "mud people." In Europe, neo-Nazis have been implicated in countless xenophobic attacks on Arabs, Turks and other Muslims.

The peculiar bond between white nationalist groups and certain Muslim extremists derives in part from a shared set of enemies: Jews, the United States, race-mixing, ethnic diversity. It is also very much a function of the shared belief that they must shield their own peoples from the corrupting influence of foreign cultures. Both sets of groups also have a penchant for far-flung conspiracy theories that caricature Jewish power.

But there is more. Even before World War II, Western fascists began to forge ideological and operational ties to Islamic extremists. Over the years, these contacts between Nazis and Muslim nationalists developed into dangerous networks that have been implicated in a number of bloody terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East. Wealthy Arab regimes have financed extremists in Europe and the United States, just as Western neo-Nazis have helped to build Holocaust denial machinery in the Arab world. Just last year, a meeting sponsored by a US Holocaust denial group brought together Arab and Western extremists in Jordan. And after the Sept. 11 attacks, a spate of articles by American neo-Nazis and white supremacists appeared in Islamic publications and Web sites.

Although links like these illustrate the ties between Muslim extremists and Americans, such ties are far more developed in Europe. But since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, there are a number of signs that an operational alliance may be taking shape in the United States as well.

Adolf Hitler and the "Arab Reich"

The genesis of the cooperation between militant Islam and the extreme right can be traced back to the early years of the Third Reich. During World War II, when much of the Islamic world sympathized with Hitler, members of the Muslim Brotherhood would often say prayers for an Axis victory during their meetings. Moreover, some Muslims went so far as to fantasize over putative Islamic affinities of fascist leaders. For example, rumors abounded that Benito Mussolini was an Egyptian Muslim whose real name was Musa Nili (Moses of the Nile) and that Adolf Hitler too had secretly converted to Islam and bore the name Hayder, or "the brave one." ( ee Amir Taheri, Holy Terror: Inside the World of Islamic Terrorism, published in 1987)

During the 1930s, the Third Reich had received entreaties from the Arab world. After the Nazi government promulgated the Nuremberg Laws in 1936, which greatly diminished the legal citizenship status of Jews, telegrams of support were sent to Hitler from all over the Arab and Islamic world. And Nazi Germany's war against the British Empire next, electrified the Islamic world even more, whose people viewed it as a noble struggle against imperialism. Furthermore, Germany and the Arab world shared the same enemies (England, Zionism, and communism).

As well as Nazi influence in Iran, the Nazi regime also made overtures to Afghanistan during the 1930s and attempted to establish a political alliance with Mullah Mirza Ali Khan, who, along with his Waziri Mujahideen, resisted British rule of the Northwestern Province of Afghanistan from 1936 to 1947. In 1941 German envoys were sent to Gurwekht, which was a stronghold of Patani Islamic guerrilla action inside the British zone of occupied Sarhad. They brought with them money and a letter of support from Adolf Hitler. However the Afghan monarch was well aware of what happened to pro-German Iran, which was invaded by British forces. Seeking to avert a similar fate, he finally expelled German and Italian diplomats from his country. (Ataullah Bogdan Kopanski, "Muslims and the Reich," Barnes Review, September-October 2003).

The early victories of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps raised the hopes of Arabs seeking to establish independence. Some Arabs from North Mrica volunteered to aid the German war effort, as evidenced by the creation of various Arab auxiliary units, including Freikorps Arabien (Arab Free Corps), the Kommando Deutsch-Arabischer Truppen (German-Arab Commando Troops), and the Deutsch-Arabisches Infanterie Battalion 845 (German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845). After the war, remnants of these units would go on to join the anti colonial struggle in Algeria.

Islamic-fascist alliance was also exemplified by the cordial relationship between Hitler and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, al-Husseini joined the Ottoman Turkish Army, serving as an artillery officer until November 1916. As such, he would serve as a bridge carrying over imperialist ideas of Islam and Ottoman Turkey into modern times -- not unlike Hitler who feigned to be German in order to join Kaiser Wilhelm II’s battle, the German Kaiser who stood next to Ottoman Emperor Abdul Hamid inside the Great Mosque, solemnly declaring himself 'protector of all Muslims.'

In April 1920 then, al-Husseini gained notoriety in Jerusalem when his followers went on a rampage at the festival of Nebi Musa, during which 5 Jews were killed and 211 Jews injured. He is credited with having introduced the first modern "one who is ready to sacrifice his life for his cause" suicide squads, which primarily targeted moderate Arabs who refused to support his agenda.

Despite this record of incitement, the British appointed him Grand Mufti in 1922. On August 23, 1929, he led a second massacre of Jews in Hebron, followed by a third massacre in 1936. (Kenneth R. Timmerman, Preachers of Hate, 2003)

Adolf Eichmann initially supported Jewish immigration into Palestine. After his trip to Jerusalem in 1937, however, he recommended that Jewish immigration be forbidden. He was apparently taken by the display of Nazi flags and portraits of Hitler that he saw during his stay there. (Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism)

When Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Poland in 1939, France and England declared war on Germany, al-Husseini decided to seek refuge in Iraq, where he found an ally in Rashid Ali al-Gilani, who became prime minister of that country in March 1940. In October 1939 al-Husseini already had gone to Baghdad and met with the Committee of Free Arabs, which was led by the so-called colonels of the Golden Square, to discuss plans for a revolution against the British. The Free Arabs demanded an immediate cessation of Jewish immigration to Palestine and a crackdown on violence perpetrated by Zionist organizations such as Betar, led by Vladimir Jabotinski. (Preachers of Hate, 2003)

In October 1940, representatives of the Free Arabs signed an Axis-Arab Manifesto of Liberation in Berlin. Both Hitler and Mussolini expressed strong support for an independent, united Arab nation. Thus while in Iraq, al-Husseini helped organize the new government led by Rashid Ali al-Gilani and the current minister of justice, Nadif Shaukat. Al-Gilani appointed Nur Said as his new foreign minister, a choice that would later doom his short-lived regime, when the latter conspired with the British embassy. Previously, in June, Said had helped to negotiate the German-Arab Peace and Cooperation Treaty in Ankara, Turkey. On January 31, 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the removal of al-Gilani, and a power struggle ensued over the control of the new Iraqi government. Nur Said and Abdullah bin Ali briefly seized power with British support. However, a coup d' etat on April 1, 1941, restored al-Gilani to the position of prime minister. Abdullah and Nur Said escaped to Amman, Jordan. Soon thereafter, Germany recognized the new Iraqi government led by al-Gilani. On May 12, 1941, al-Gilani declared independence from Great Britain. In doing so, he sparked a greater anti colonial uprising of nationalist Muslims in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. One of the coup planners was an Iraqi officer named Khairallah Tulfah, the future father-in-law of Saddam Hussein. (Timmerman, Preachers of Hate)

Al-Gilani's second regime was also short-lived, however, as British forces quickly deposed it, but not before troops and policeman loyal to al-Gilani carried out a pogrom in which roughly 200 Jews were killed. By May 29, the British Army had seized Baghdad and reinstalled Nur Said as the Iraqi leader. To show his gratitude, Nur declared war against Germany in January 1943. Seeking to find a more hospitable location, the mufti thus sought refuge in Iran.

The nationalist general Shah Reza Pahlavi, who seized power in 1925, was an admirer of Adolf Hitler's racial policies and even went so far as to rename his county Iran, which translates into Aryan in Persian. However, with the arrival of British and American troops in October 1941, the mufti was forced once again to relocate. Thus in November 1941, al- Husseini traveled to Berlin, where he met Hitler and offered his full support.

Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop helped prepare the meeting. In doing so, he forged an alliance between Nazi Germany and the Palestine Arab High Command, which al-Husseini led. According to the recent “Wegbereiter der Shoa” this meeting was the genesis of Nazi-style anti-Semitism as a mass movement in the Arab world. Hitler recognized al-Husseini as the leader of the Arab world and pledged to install him as the Arab Führer when the time was feasible.

Hitler dedicated a text to Christoph Schröder and Frau Junge, his secretary, which is called the Hitler-Bormann Documents, or the Testament of Adolf Hitler. In this text, Hitler makes a criticism of his policies. For his part, Hitler was very proud of his stature among Muslims and, near the war's end, regretted that he had not done more to take advantage of this alliance. According to documented private conversations he had with his staff, Hitler lamented his alliance with Italy, insofar as it alienated some people in the Muslim world. Italian adventures were looked upon as imperialistic aggression by those countries in North Africa that Mussolini had invaded. Hitler expressed admiration for the solidarity of the Muslim people and believed that they could have been potentially useful allies against his enemies. (See L. Craig Fraser, The Hitler-Bormann Documents. Date and publisher unknown.) Hitler even went so far as to accept the grand mufti as an "honorary Aryan" (Norman Cameron and R. H. Steven, trans., Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944, New York, 2000) and to support Hitler's war efforts, al-Husseini next traveled to Bosnia in 1943 and helped organize the Waffen-SS Handschar Division in Yugoslavia, which was composed of Bosnian Muslim volunteers. (For more on the Handschar Division, see George Lepre, Himmler's Bosnian Division: The Waffen-SS Handschar Division, 1943-1945, Schiffer Military History, 1997.

According to one estimate, approximately 100,000 European Muslims fought for the Third Reich during the course of World War II. (Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism,2003)

To further recruitment, al-Husseini wrote a book titled Islam and the Jews, which was distributed to Bosnian Muslim SS units during the war as motivational literature, and were encouraged to identify themselves spiritually as Muslim and Arab but racially as German. (Morse,2003, Yossef Bodansky, Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument, 1999)

In appreciation for his services, al-Husseini was elected as the supreme sheikh-ul Islam (supreme religious leader) of the Muslim troops of the Axis. (Kopanski, "Muslims and the Reich”)

The German occupation government in territory that it had conquered in the Soviet Union , garnered some goodwill from the local Muslim populations by reconstructing mosques that had been destroyed by the Soviets. Furthermore, German authorities actually restored the institution of the mufti, which had been abolished by the Bolsheviks not long after the Russian Revolution. According to one estimate, over 500,000 Muslim Turkomans, Tadjiks, and Uzbeks from the Central Asian Soviet republics volunteered to fight on the side of the Third Reich. More than 180,000 Muslims were recruited to fight from the Caucasus, Crimea, and hil-Ural Tataristan. Many of these Muslim soldiers came from Lithuania and Latvia and according to “Wegbereiter der Shoa” became known as ‘Askaris.’ Reportedly, the Islamic Waffen-SS fought in the Battle of Stalingrad.

In 1945, the German military founded the Nordkaukasische Waffengruppe (North Caucus Armed Group) for Muslim volunteers from Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Ossetia. They were organized into nineteen independent Islamic combat battalions and twenty-four infantry companies in the Wehrmacht. Furthermore, Muslim Turks and Tartars formed a Waffen-SS division known as the Osttürkischer Waffenverband (East Turkish Armed League) and SS-Waffengruppe "Turkestan" (SS Armed Turkestan Group). Many Muslim soldiers had been recruited from Soviet labor camps by SS Sturmbannführer Andreas Mayer. Mayer died from a Soviet sniper's bullet in 1944 while conducting antipartisan operations in Belarus. In April 1944, SS- Standartenführer Haruan al-Rashid (William Hintersatz), an Austrian convert to Islam took over. He led several Muslim units in battle against partisans in the Warsaw uprising in April 1943. (Kopanski, "Muslims and the Reich")

Many Arab nationalists looked to Germany for inspiration during the 1930s and 1940s and saw National Socialism as a viable model for state building. Hitler's Mein Kamf found a receptive readership in parts of the Arabic world. Many aspiring Arab leaders sought to emulate the German Führer and his National Socialist movement. As far back as 1933, Arab nationalists in Syria and Iraq embraced National Socialism. In Egypt, a protofascist organization, Young Egypt, also known as the Green Shirts, attracted many army officers, The grand mufti is believed to have been instrumental in the group's formation. The Green Shirts went by different official names during its history, including Misf alFarlit in the 1930s, the Islamic National Party in 1940, and the Socialist Party in 1946. Its leader, Mmed Hussein, also wrote a book in the style of Hitler's Mein Kampf titled Imlini and published a rabidly anti-Semitic journal called al-Ichtirakya. During a visit to New York in the late 1940s, Mmed Hussein, the leader of the Green Shirt Party, addressed a meeting of the extreme right National Renaissance Party (NRP). Kurt Mertig, the NRP's first chairman, hoped to get a post at Cairo University. (Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, 1999).

Members of the Green Shirts, including young lieutenant colonel and future Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, along with Wing Commander Hassan Ibrahim and General Aziz al-Masri, attempted to execute a scheme in World War II in which they would link up with Rommel's Afrika Korps and supply them with secret information on British strategy and troop movements. The Nazis with the help of the Palestinians also were to exterminate half a million Jews in what is now Israel plus all Jews in Tunisia and Syria. And as detailed in the recent “Wegbereiter der Shoa. Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung 1939 - 1945”) In 1942, the Nazis created a special "Einsatzgruppe," a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe. "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942, attached to the "Afrika Korps." Although hopes of a pan-German and pan-Arab alliance would be dashed with the defeat of Rommel, his early military successes gained admiration from the Arab population and this endured after the war.

Not long after the war, many German military officers and Nazi party officials were granted sanctuary in Middle Eastern countries, most notably Egypt and Syria, where they helped develop the militaries and intelligences agencies of those countries. Unrepentant former Nazis formed clandestine networks that occasionally included contacts in the Middle East. In the early postwar years, Egypt hosted many leading Nazi refugees. For example, Major General Otto Ernst Remer, the officer that squelched the anti-Hitler coup in July 1944, found refuge in Egypt, where he offered his services to the Nasser regime. (See Martin Cüppers, Wegbereiter der Shoa, 2006.)

With the help of Remer and other German military and technical advisers, Egypt developed a support base for Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian guerrillas fighting against France, as well as anti-British movements in Aden and the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya. Cairo became the nerve center for the Front de liberation nationale (FLN, or National Liberation Front) insurgency and the seat of the provisional government for Algerian rebels. Remer also served as the front man for German arms traffickers who supplied the FLN and other Algerian guerrillas. Also, Homanned Said, a former SS volunteer who fought in the grand mufti's Handschar Division, assisted the Algerian insurrection as well, commanding FLN guerrilla operations near the Tunisian border. The Algerian war, however, proved to be a divisive issue among the international extreme right in the early postwar years. As the investigative journalist, Martin Lee, noted, this conflict split the extreme right in Europe into two camps. Among the leaders of the Secret Army Organization (OAS) were several French fascists, Vichy collaborators, and French Waffen SS volunteers who did not take kindly to the support that many of the German neo-Nazis provided to the FLN. (See Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens, 1997)

In 1953 rumors spread in the Middle East that Hitler might still be alive and living in Brazil. This prompted AI-Musawaar, an Egyptian weekly journal, to ask public figures what they would say to the Führer if they could write to him at that time. Future Egyptian president Sadat expressed admiration for Hitler in the Egyptian Weekly:

Dear Hitler, I welcome you back with all my heart. You have been defeated, but in fact one should regard you as the real victor. There will be no peace in the world until Germany again takes first place. Your principal mistake was in opening too many fronts, but everything is forgiven, for you are a shining example of belief in one's fatherland and people. You are eternal, and we shall not be surprised if we see you again, or a second Hitler, back in Germany.

~Irving Sedar and Harold J. Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx, 1960

Although Sadat would go on to sign a historic peace treaty with his archnemesis, Israel, according to some sources, he never really had a change of heart. According to Anis Mansour, one of Sadat's closest friends and advisers, the peace treaty did not mean that Sadat had a change of heart toward Israel. Rather, the treaty was a diplomatic maneuver that allowed Egypt to sit down with Israel and settle its accounts. (Bodansky, Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument).

The German model of centralized government and corporatist nationalism remained attractive to many of the early pan-Arab nationalists in Egypt, some of whom sought the creation of an "Arab Reich" that would unite all Arabs into' one nation. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphin).

The early pan-Arab leaders searched for methods to mobilize their populations and build independent nations. They were influenced in large part by European fascists who viewed the state as an organic outgrowth of the nation. As they saw it, only a strong, authoritarian state could protect the nation. Hence, the German model of bureaucratic centralization and authoritarianism looked attractive to many Arabs who sought an alternative way to modernize their countries. Moreover, the fact that Germany was opposed to the Western powers, such as England and France, made it all the more appealing to Middle Easterners, who deeply resented colonialism. Perhaps no other Arab country was more deeply influenced by National Socialism than Egypt.

King Farouk, who ruled Egypt during World War II, was initially seen as pro-Nazi, although his country was occupied by Britain. By the early 1950s, a wave of anti-British and anti-American sentiment had swept Egypt. Eventually both the U.S. and British governments decided that Farouk had to be replaced. The CIA, under the influence of John Foster Dulles, selected Egyptian army general Muhammad Naguib to lead a new Egyptian government. On July 22, 1952, with the help of the CIA, Naguib sent the army into the streets of Cairo and Alexandria and established himself as the commander in chief of military forces. Although Naguib was the titular head of state, unbeknown to the CIA, the real power ultimately rested with Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who soon assumed the position of president. This coup was also significant because it opened the door for numerous Nazis to take prominent positions in the Egyptian government.

Arguably, the most important former Nazi in Nasser's employ was Hitler's commando extraordinaire, Otto Skorzeny, who arrived in Egypt in the early 1950s. According to Martin Lee, Colonel Nasser, Otto Skorzeny, and Haj Amin al-Husseini (the grand mufti) formed a triumvirate to further both their personal and common goals. Nasser is reported to have had great respect for Skorzeny. Coincidentally, a young Yasser Arafat-a distant cousin of the grand mufti-participated in unconventional warfare training under the Egyptian soldiers, during which time he developed a rapport with Skorzeny that would reportedly last for many years. ( Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens, 1997)

Skorzeny's principal responsibility was to train thousands of Egyptian commandos in guerrilla and desert warfare. Furthermore, he organized and planned the initial forays of the early Palestinian terrorists into Israel and the Gaza Strip around 1953-1954. (Glenn B. Infield, Skorzeny: Hitler's Commando, 1981)

An Arab Foreign Legion was created, whose nucleus consisted of 400 former Nazi veterans who were recruited by Arab League agents in Germany. Finally, Skorzeny sought to protect German scientists, technicians, and engineers who were recruited to work on Egypt's special military program. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx).

Not surprisingly, the Mossad -the newly created Israeli espionage agency- considered these personnel to be a serious threat to the security of Israel. Consequently, the Mossad launched numerous missions to assassinate them-usually through the use of letter bombs-some of which found their intended targets. During this period, renascent Nazis saw the rise of Arab and Third World nationalism as an excellent opportunity to create a German-Islamic neutralist alliance that would extend from the heart of Europe to the South China Sea. (Lee, The Beast Reawakens). This idea was consistent with the late Karl Haushofer's policy of an alliance with the "Colored World."(Coogan, Dreamer of the Day )

One vision of this new extreme right foreign policy was to create-with the assistance of the grand mufti and the Arab League-a German-Egyptian-dominated power bloc that could resist both the United States and the Soviet Union. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx).

Several other unrepentant German Nazis made their way to the Middle East and played important roles as well. For example, Skorzeny's uncle-in-law, Hjalmar Schacht, brokered the "Jeddah agreement" between German industrial firms and Saudi Arabia in 1954. Under the agreement, the Saudi government agreed to establish a fleet of supertankers to be built in German shipyards that would transport Saudi oil around the world. The Greek magnate, Aristotle Onassis, was chosen to manage the shipping side of the arrangement. The Jeddah agreement occasioned considerable consternation among various Western oil companies; not only would the agreement have been extremely lucrative for the Ruhr shipbuilders, but it would also have threatened the market dominance of the "Seven Sisters" oil companies' distribution of Middle East oil. Ultimately, with the help of the CIA, the Western oil cartel was able to block the Jeddah agreement. (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day ).

Former Nazis also served the new Nasser government in the realm of propaganda. For example, German expatriate Louis al-Hadj translated Hitler's Mein Kampf into Arabic. Johann von Leers, a former high-ranking assistant to Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Göbbels who worked in the Berlin Foreign Ministry, eventually settled in Cairo, where he churned out anti-Western and anti-Israeli propaganda for Nasser's government. (Martin Lee, "The Swastika and Crescent," Intelligence Report, Spring 2002).

He eventually converted to Islam, assumed the Arabized name of Oman Amin von Leers, and went so far as to predict that the German people would turn their backs on Christianity and embrace Islam. He confided his thoughts to his friend H. Keith Thompson in conversations and correspondence:

The Islamic bloc is today the only spiritual power in the world fighting for a real religion and human values and freedom I think sometimes 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 that half of our nation.

One thing is clear-more and more patriot[ic] Germans join the great Arab revolution against beastly imperialism. 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! ... Indeed, for our nation there is only one hope-to get rid of Western imperialism by joining the Arab-led antiimperialist group. (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day). .

Still other former Nazis who worked for Nasser included SS lieutenant general Wilhelm Farmbacher, who was the head of the original military adviser group in Egypt, and his assistant, Major General Oskar Munzel, who organized the Egyptian Parachute Corps. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx )

In the realm of economic development, Dr. Wilhelm Voss, the former director of the Skoda arms factory in Czechoslovakia and the Hermann Göring Steel Mills, was the architect of the Egyptian economy in the early postwar years. Working with Reinhard Gehlen, Skorzeny, and Hjalmar Schacht, he increased West Germany's trade with Egypt. (Infield, Skorzeny).

During the Cold War, former Nazi officials would occasionally play off both sides of the East-West divide. The case of Dr. Fritz Grobba, a German Orientalist who converted to Islam, is instructive. Grobba was Berlin's minister to Baghdad and also to the court of King Ibn Saud at Riyadh. In the years leading up to World War II, with his colleagues and agents in the Middle East, Grobba conspired with the grand mufti to sabotage Anglo-French military and economic influence in the region. In 1941, they helped spark Rashid Ali alGilani's revolt in Iraq, which was quickly suppressed by the British government. Driven out of the Middle East by the Allies, Grobba, the grand mufti, al-Gilani, and their assistants took refuge in Berlin, where Hitler installed them in a special Bureau of Arab Affairs that was designed to disseminate propaganda to the Muslim world. Grobba survived the war and eventually served as the director of Arab affairs at the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow. Serving as a Soviet diplomatic intermediary, Grobba brokered an arms deal between Nasser's Egypt and the Soviet Union. His former compatriot, Otto Skorzeny, is thought to have helped engineer Nasser's alliance with the Soviet Union. Bolstered by the new alliance and relying on Nazi-trained military forces at his disposal, Nasser felt confident enough to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. His confidence backfired three months later, when Great Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt in order to regain control of the canal. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx),

Ultimately, the Egyptian-Soviet alliance undercut Skorzeny's influence with Nasser. Under pressure from the Soviets to establish relations with East Germany, Nasser alienated the German Federal Republic, which broke off diplomatic relations with Egypt and cut off all economic aid. That effectively put an end to Skorzeny's work in Egypt, including a rocket program in Helwan. (Infield, Skorzeny).

Not to be left out of the action, some American right-wing extremists also sojourned in the Middle East in the early postwar years as well. For example, in 1953 Francis Parker Yockey, the author of the 600-page tome Imperium, and H. Keith Thompson were reported to have visited Cairo in an effort to forge an alliance with the Nasser regime. Yockey was an early postwar exponent of panEutopeanism. In his geo-political framework, the United States was a more serious enemy to the European-derived peoples than the Soviet Union. He praised Hitler as the "hero of the Second World War" and the Nazi seizure of power as the "European Revolution of 1933." Yockey and an associate, Fred Weiss, reportedly sought to persuade Nasser to underwrite the development of a "cobalt bomb" on which exiled Nazi scientists were working. (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day; and Lee, The Beast Reawakens.)

Other American extremists reached out to Arabs in the Middle East as well. In 1959, the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, was reported to have made overtures to then President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic. (FBI Internal Memorandum, File Number 97-3835-33, July 13,1959).

And James H. Madole, the leader of the extreme right National Renaissance Party, openly supported Arab regimes and may have received financial backing from Arab nationalists, including diplomats in the United States. There is some indication that these overtures were taken at least somewhat seriously. For example, Abdul Mawgoud Hassan, the press attaché of the Egyptian United Nations delegation, once spoke at an NRP meeting. The NRP also corresponded with the grand mufti. However, by all known accounts, not much ever came of these efforts. (Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, 2002).

Coogan believed that Nazi scientists in Argentina may have been working on a "cobalt bomb" project. Just exactly what the "cobalt bomb" is, is unclear. Weiss described it as 'a "goose-egg bomb, capable of destroying four city blocks." It sounds as if it might have been a forerunner to the so called suitcase nuclear bombs produced in the former Soviet Union. (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day).

The rise of Palestinian terrorism in the early 1970’s then, caused some elements of the European extreme right to once again take interest in the Middle Eastern affairs. After King Hussein of Jordan expelled the PLO from Jordan in 1970, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat created a new terrorist organization called Black September. The organization established strong ties with German left-wing radicals. Working together, they carried out one of the most infamous acts in the annals of European terrorism-the kidnapping and subsequent killing of several Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympic games in Munich, Germany. Actually, representatives of the extreme right had collaborated with Palestinian rejectionist groups long before the representatives of the radical left had.

A few neofascists even fought alongside Arab guerrillas in Middle Eastern conflicts. For example, Robert Courdroy, a veteran of the Belgian SS, died in combat while fighting for the Palestinians in 1968. And, on some occasions, the extreme right actually worked side by side with the radical left in support of Palestinian terrorists.

Both the extreme right and Palestinian rejectionists shared hostility toward Zionism. Early efforts on the part of the European extreme right to assist Palestinian rejectionists consisted primarily of financial support. The case of Francois Genoud is illustrative. Genoud founded a Swiss extreme right organization and worked as a trusted banker for German neo-Nazis. Reportedly well connected to Arab circles in the Middle East, Genoud founded the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva and became a formidable financial power as tens of millions of dollars were funneled through his hands for the use of Palestinians in Europe. Through his various connections, Genoud was an important nexus between groups like Fatah and Black September on the one hand, and extremist groups in Europe on the other. (Claire Sterling, The Terror Network, 1984).

In his capacity as a shadowy financier, Genoud paid the legal costs for three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who stood trial for blowing up an Israeli jet in Zurich. Genoud's Nazi roots went quite deep. While studying in Bonn as a teenager in 1932, Genoud actually met Hitler. The young Genoud shook hands with his mentor and expressed his admiration for National Socialism. When he returned to Switzerland in 1934, he joined the proNazi Swiss National Front. Shortly thereafter in 1936, he traveled to Palestine, where he became a confidant of Grand Mufti al-Husseini. After the war, Genoud acquired all the posthumous rights to the writings of Hitler, Martin Bormann, and Josef Göbbels, increasing his fortune in the process. Using his Swiss banking connections, he helped many Nazis escape from Germany, an effort to which Grand Mufti al-Husseini also allegedly lent assistance. (Peter Wyden, The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adol Hitler, 2001).

Genoud also helped underwrite the costs for the legal defense of Adolf Eichmann. According to some European press accounts, Genoud sold defeated Nazis' gold and deposited the proceeds into Swiss bank accounts to finance these projects. Genoud was particularly close to the grand mufti, serving as his financial adviser.

In 1958, he founded the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva to manage the assets of the Algerian National Liberation Front. As mentioned earlier, several former Nazis, including Major General Otto Ernst Remer, assisted the rebels in their struggle against French colonial rule. Genoud was reportedly involved in financing terrorist groups, disseminating anti-Israeli propaganda throughout the Middle East, and assisting the Palestinian hijackers of a Lufthansa plane in 1972. He was particularly close to Dr. Waddi Haddad, the cofounder of the PFLP, and Ali Hassan Salameh of the Black September group. However, his activities did not go unnoticed by his enemies. In 1993 a bomb exploded in front of his house, and he barely escaped alive. Feeling trapped, Genoud committed suicide by drinking poison in May 1996. (Wyden, The Hitler Virus).

Another important financial benefactor of Palestinian causes was the wealthy Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Ironically, Feltrinelli was a financial supporter of communist groups; however, he met secretly with the Italian neofascist Prince Valerio Borghese to discuss ways in which both the left and right could work together to battle imperialism. (Sterling, The Terror Network)

The Black International, which operated under the name of the European New Order, held a summit in Barcelona on behalf of the Palestinians. The organization was composed of various Nazis and fascists from Nazi Germany, Vichy France, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Mussolini's Italy, and the Greek colonels' military junta. The Spanish leader, General Francesco Franco, is believed to have endorsed the meeting. Two representatives from Fatah, the military arm of the PLO, attended the event. Reportedly, the delegates discussed raising money, organizing arms traffic, and providing ex-Nazi military instructors to help train guerrillas. A major endeavor was to recruit Caucasians to augment Fatah's forces in the Middle East and also collaborate in acts of sabotage and terrorism in Europe. (Ibid).

Several summits followed this event, including one held on September 16, 1972, barely ten days after Palestinian Black September terrorists killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Six hundred delegates to this gathering reportedly cheered Black September to the rafters. (Ibid).

In May 1979, another summit was held in Paris, where a former SS officer and Rexist Parry (a pro-fascist Belgian political parry that was active during the interwar years) member, Jean Roberts Debbaudt, pledged support to the Palestinian resistance. Still another right-wing extremist who established contacts in the Middle East was Jean Thiriart from Belgium, who served as a secretary for a neo-Nazi group called La Nation Europeene.

He shared many of the ideas of Francis Parker Yockey, including creating a European Third World bloc that could resist the United States. In 1968, he traveled to several Arab countries to gain support for his idea of a "European brigade," which he envisaged as a guerrilla army that would engage in armed struggle against American soldiers stationed in Europe. Reportedly, Thiriart actually served as an adviser to Fatah in 1969. He sought to convince his Arab interlocutors that it would be in their interest if the United States became enmeshed in a "silent war" against neofascist terrorists in Europe. (Lee, The Beast Reawakens).

He traveled to Iraq and conferred with Colonel Saddam Hussein, the future dictator of the country. According to Thiriart, the Iraqis were enthusiastic about the plan but were persuaded by their then sponsor, the Soviet Union, to abandon the plan. Thiriart was also believed to have been close to PFLP leader George Habash. (Ibid).

Other efforts to collaborate in the field of terrorism followed. For example, there were several instances of cooperation between German right-wing extremists and terrorist groups in the Middle East. Following the example of European left-wing terrorists, members of a small German neo-Nazi group, Wehrsportgruppe-Hoffmann, sought to develop an alliance with the PLO and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups during the 1970s and early 1980s. Karl Heinz Hoffman, the leader of the group, traveled to Damascus in July 1980 to develop links between the PLO and East German intelligence agents. Hoffman also worked out a deal that provided used trucks to the PLO in exchange for training. (Ibid).

Members of this group reportedly received paramilitary training in PLO camps in Jordan and fought alongside Palestinians in that country during the "Black September" of 1970. (Bruce Hoffman, Right- Wing Terrorism in Europe since 1980).

One German neo-Nazi mercenary, Karl von Kyna, even died in combat during a Palestinian commando raid in September 1967. (Lee, "The Swastika and Crescent") .

One of the most notorious terrorist groups of this period was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which gained widespread notoriety in 1968 by hijacking several commercial airplanes. The leader of the PFLP, George Habash, received support from neo-fascists in Europe known as the Black International. The PFLP reportedly carried out terrorist attacks against Jewish targets in Europe with the assistance of Odfried Hepp and his neo-Nazi group, which unleashed a wave of bombings at four U.S. Army bases in Germany that damaged property and injured military personnel. (Benjamin Netanyahu, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network, New York, 2001).

In early 1970, a neo-Nazi group calling itself the Freikorps Adolf Hitler, founded by Udo Albrecht, was identified as having participated in the Black September war against King Hussein's government in Jordan. In 1978 German police arrested members of the Freikorps Adolf Hitler and another organization, the Hilfskorps Arabien, on suspicion of smuggling arms from the Middle East into West Germany for Palestinian operatives that were living there. In that same year, Albrecht was arrested in Germany and was found to be carrying a card that connected him to the Fatah organization. This arrest was the first direct proof German authorities had linking German radicals with Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. (Rand C. Lewis, A Nazi Legacy: Right- Wing Extremism in Postwar Germany, 1991).

Still another neo-Nazi with whom the PLO had contact was Manfred Röder. Following advice from Albrecht, he traveled to Lebanon to make contact with Yasser Arafat. He never met with the PLO chairman, however, instead speaking with his deputy, Abu Jihad. Disappointingly for Röder, Jihad refused to cooperate with him, which was a setback for relations between neo-Nazis and Palestinians. (Ibid).

Undaunted, Röder continued to look for supporters in the Middle East. In 1980 he traveled to Syria and Iraq to build a relationship of mutual support and trust, but these efforts appear to have failed. Other German extremists, however, were able to establish significant ties. There were also sporadic reports that surfaced during the 1980s of cooperation between German neo-Nazis and a Turkish fascist organization known as the "Gray Wolves." Mehmet Kengerle, who served with the SS in World War II, was the figure that allegedly sought to arrange this alliance. (Ibid).

The organization's most infamous member, Mehmet Ali Aga, attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul 11 in May 1981. This alliance, like the others that preceded it, was also short-lived and of limited significance.

More recently Fawsi Salim el-Mahdi, the leader of Yasser Arafat's Praetorian Guard, "Tanzim 17," included the Nazi salute in a graduation ceremony for Palestinian Authority police cadets. Known to his colleagues as "Abu Hitler." In fact his affection for the Third Reich is reflected in his choice of names for his two sons, Eichmann and Hitler. (Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism).

By the late 1980’s however, there was little cooperation between militant Islam and the extreme right. Arab nationalism had waned considerably, and most of the leading Nazi fugitives were dead or in permanent retirement. The Palestinian rejectionists had begun to moderate. What is more, the new Palestinian groups, such as Hamas, had no history of cooperation with the extreme right. However, the end of the Cold War significantly changed international politics.

Furthermore, the revolution in telecommunications greatly facilitated the exchange of ideas between dissident groups around the world. As one observer noted, the Internet has been key to the development of the nascent alliance between Islam and the right. By one estimate, more than 2,000 extremist sites dot the World Wide Web. 104 Another important factor is the demise of communism. The extreme right abandoned the communist threat as its chief enemy; in its place emerged the nemesis of the new world order, which, as one observer noted, is often perceived as "a juggernaut of international corporate finance, Jewish media, and American military power." (See David J. Whitaker, ed., The Terrorism Reader).

The right's conceptualization of this new enemy parallels closely the principal adversaries of militant Islam. Finally, both the extreme right and Islam share a similar eschatology, in which the old order is viewed as incorrigibly corrupt, something that must be totally effaced in order to build a new order. For these reasons, new opportunities for cooperation began to emerge by the late 1990’s..

During the 1980s Iran began to sponsor conferences to establish a working relationship among Middle Eastern terrorist group. (Bodansky, Bin Laden). Michael Ledeen believed that "in all probability the working relationship between al Qaeda and Iran was forged in the Afghan war, and continued uninterrupted throughout the nineties." (Ledeen, The War against the Terror Masters). .

Tehran resolved to transform Hezbollah into the "vanguard of the revolution." Despite its Shi'ite orientation, Iran sought to build bridges with Sunni terrorist organizations. The Iranian arm of Hezbollah had been involved in international terrorism since 1981, but this most recent initiative broadened the scope of its operations. Although Tehran had previously sponsored numerous foreign terrorist groups, it could exert only a limited amount of influence over them, mostly by financial power and ideological suasion. (Taheri, Holy Terror).

Khomeini's successor, President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, established the Supreme Council for Intelligence Afairs, which was construed elsewhere as the Supreme Council for Terrorism.The council laid the foundation for a broad-based terrorist organization known as Hezbollah Internationa1. And in 1996 Dr. Mahdi Chamran Savehie from the Supreme Council convened a conference in Tehran, which brought many groups and leaders together, including Mustafa Al Liddawi of Hamas, George Habbash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abdullah Ocalan of the Kurdish People's Party, Ramadan Shalah of the Palestinian branch of Islamic Jihad, Ahmed Sala of the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad, and Osama bin Laden. (Robinson, Bin Laden).

The summit participants agreed to the unification of their financial system as well as the standardization of training in order to establish interoperability for their terrorist operatives. Reportedly, a Committee of Three was established, which included Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda, Imad Mughniya of the Lebanese branch of Islamic Jihad, and Ahmed Sala of the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad. Although two of these individuals were Sunnis and one was a Shi'ite, all sides were comfortable with the arrangement, and Iran trusted them.

In 1996 the Qods Force, the covert action arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, arranged the Khobar Towers bombing. (It is worth noting that there is still some uncertainty surrounding the Khobar Towers bombing. For example, the 9-11 Commission concluded, "While the evidence of Iranian involvement is strong, there are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown.")

In early June 2002 the leaders of four major terrorist organizations-Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine general command-met in Tehran, Iran, presumably to work on a common strategy to oppose Israel. (David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win theWar on Terror, 2003).

Richard Clarke (a former National Security Council staffer) in Against All Enemies makes it clear that Iran was a "priority" country "as important as the others," including the Taliban's Afghanistan, in the post 9/11 war on terrorism. And that,” al Qaeda regularly used Iranian territory for transit and sanctuary prior to September 11. Al Qaeda's Egyptian branch, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, operated openly in Tehran. It is no coincidence that many of the al Qaeda management team, or Shura Council, moved across the border into Iran after U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan. (See also the February 27, 2006 Weekly Standard article Tehran plays host to al Qaeda:

In fact the 9/11 Commission reports last year stated that al Qaeda operatives received explosives training from Iran in the early 1990s. Bin Laden "showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the one that had killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983." This early history of collaboration did not come to an end. Even after 1996, Iran continued to open its doors to al Qaeda. The Clinton administration's original unsealed indictment of al Qaeda in November 1998 states that bin Laden's group had allied itself with Iran and its terrorist puppet, Hezbollah. The 9/11 Commission even left open the possibility that Hezbollah had assisted al Qaeda's execution of the September 11 plot.

And although still part of an ongoing investigation following the gradual release of Saddam Hussein documents these days, early on some intelligence analysts already maintained that al Qaeda had endeavored to create an operational alliance with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Simon Reeve claims that by early 1999, bin Laden was in the process of forging a secret alliance with Saddam Hussein. Contact between the two sides was first allegedly made in the early 1990s when Hassan al-Turabi put bin Laden in contact with operatives from the Iraqi secret service. These contacts were supposed to have been maintained by representatives of the Iranian terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), which had its headquarters in Baghdad. (Bergen, Holy War, Inc).

A recent Foreign Affairs article titled “Blessed July,” refers to a book-length report with Iraqi documents and interviews with over 100 officials of Saddam’s regime which was, in the words of the Foreign Affairs article, “a regime-directed wave of ‘martyrdom’ operations against targets in the West.” The Foreign Affairs article mentions terror training camps operated by the Fedayeen Saddam, the militia of soldiers most loyal to Saddam. Started in 1994, according to the documents, it trained some 7,200 Iraqis in the art of terrorism in the first year alone. “Beginning in 1998,” according to the full report, “these camps began hosting ‘Arab volunteers from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, “the Gulf, and Syria.”

Laurie Mylroie asserted that bin Laden had known ties to Iraqi intelligence and that both parties share similar objectives, such as overthrowing the Saudi regime, ending the U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf, and having sanctions against Iraq lifted. (Mylroie, The new war against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks, 2001).

Accordingly, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited Baghdad in 1998 and received a $300,000 payment just before he merged the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad group with al Qaeda. (Frum and Perle, An End to Evil).

.

Whereas there is evidence of Nazi Government links to various Governments in the Middle East including Iraq and Iran; according to accounts , a convoluted web of terrorists that includes elements of al Qaeda, Iraqi intelligence, and German neo-Nazis have established a working relationship. In the fall of 2002, investigators with the German government's Office for the Protection of the Constitution reported that right-wing extremists and radical Muslims were increasingly using similar rhetoric. They both decry the new world order, which they see as controlled by Jews and enforced by U.S. military power. Both movements are also wary of democracy. Recently, German neo-Nazis have been seen sporting Palestinian headscarves at rallies and calling for worldwide intifada. Also Udo Voigt, the chairman of the National Democratic Party, has reached out to Muslim extremists. (Jeffrey Fleishman, "Shared Hatred Draws Groups Closer," Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2003,

Some investigators believe that Hezbollah and Argentinean right-wing extremists may have been responsible for the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1993 and 1994. Jewish institutions outside Israel are generally less protected, and local anti-Semitic extremists can provide logistical help for attacks. (Bodansky, Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrumen).

In 1993, Imad Mughniya of Hezbollah masterminded the truck bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 29 people and wounded over 200 others. This attack was followed by a second bombing on July 18, 1994, which destroyed the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AIMA) building in Buenos Aires, which housed several Argentine Jewish organizations. The attack killed 86 people and wounded several hundred more. And some speculate that the Arab and Nazi expatriate communities may have assisted in the attack. (Samuel Katz, Relentless Pursuit: The DSS and the Manhunt for the al-Qaeda Terrorists, 2002).

Although several factors would seem to militate against such an alliance, militant Islamic groups, including al Qaeda, have previously sought to cooperate with non-Islamic militant groups. For example, in Ireland, army intelligence investigated the possibility that funds raised by the Mercy International Relief Agency (MIRA) may have found their way into the coffers of the Irish Republican Army. In Spain, authorities discovered an alleged plan hatched by al Qaeda and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, or Basque Nation and Liberty) to car-bomb a meeting of leaders of the European Union. In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front was charged with selling millions of dollars worth of illegally mined diamonds to al Qaeda. Finally, in Sri Lanka, the media reported that Liberation Tigers of Tamil had established ties with al Qaeda.

One of the chief obstacles to cooperation would seem to be a disagreement over religion. However, there may be ways in which to hurdle this obstacle. For example, inasmuch as the Koran teaches that Allah sent prophets to all major civilizations, it is conceivable that the extreme right could reconcile some of its beliefs with Islam. (For example, some Muslim scholars have attempted to show that Socrates, Lao-Tzu, Hammurabi, and Zoroaster were prophets of Allah and thus acceptable to Islam. (Yahiya Emerick, The Complete Idiots Guide to Understanding Islam, 2002).

Furthermore, the entry requirements for Islam are relatively few in number. Technically, all one need do to become a Muslim is to recite the Shahadah:

I declare there is no god except God, and I declare that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

One significant difference between right-wing terrorists and the more prominent variants of terrorists (e.g., left-wing during the 1970s, contemporary Islamic) is that the former have had no significant state sponsors. This material and logistical disadvantage could conceivably make the more radical elements of the extreme right more amenable to an alliance with outside groups. Without governments to offer intelligence, funds, sanctuaries, training facilities, and other kinds of support, their effectiveness has been very limited. (Benjamin Netanyahu, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, 1986).

One of the principal reasons terrorism spread from the Middle East and Latin America to Western Europe in the 1970s was that a shared ideology of anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism cemented ties among radical group. (Martha Crenshaw, "Suicide Terrorism in Comparative Perspective," in International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Countering Suicide Terrorism, 2002).

The chief difference today is that the nascent anti-American global movement lacks a powerful state sponsor. However, it is worth noting that most lethal acts of terrorism over the past decade have been perpetrated by groups and individuals unaffiliated with state sponsors. Another very significant difference between right-wing and Islamic terrorists is the latter's propensity for martyrdom. Islamic extremists have demonstrated time and again their commitment to carry out suicide attacks, whereas such methods are virtually nonexistent among right-wing terrorists, for both logistical and ideological reasons. Alex Curtis praised the exploits of Benjamin Smith, a former member of the World Church of the Creator, who went on a shooting spree that killed two and injured several others. Just before he was about to be apprehended by the police, Smith committed suicide via a gunshot to the head. Curtis lauded Smith as an ''Aryan kamikaze" in a subsequent newsletter. (''Aryan Kamikaze Terrorizes Midwest," Nationalist Observer, No. 15 July 1999).

Sophisticated suicide operations require an extensive network capable of support and planning. Islamic terrorists have such a network, but right-wing terrorists do not. Perhaps more important, for Islamic terrorists, dying in a suicide operation is considered an act of martyrdom that will immediately be rewarded with splendid afterlife bliss. Although right-wing extremists have traditionally not practiced suicide terrorism, the theme occasionally appears in their literature, most notably in William Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries. The conclusion is strikingly similar to the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. The story's protagonist, Earl Turner, writes in his diary just hours before his scheduled attack:

It's still three hours until first flight, and all systems are "go." I'll use the time to write a few pages-my last diary entry. Then it's a one-way trip to the Pentagon for me. The warhead is strapped into the front seat of the old Stearman and rigged to detonate either on impact or when I flip a switch in the back seat. Hopefully, I'll be able to manage a low-level air burst directly over the center of the Pentagon. Failing that, I'll at least try to fly as close as I can before I'm shot down.

~William Pierce, The Turner Diaries, 1993

Not unlike Muhammad Atta, Turner expressed a sense of calm before his mission.

It is a comforting thought in these last hours of my physical existence that, of all the billions of men and women of my race who have ever lived, I will have been able to play a more vital role than all but a handful of them in determining the ultimate destiny of mankind. What I will do today will be of more weight in the annals of the race than all the conquests of Caesar and Napoleon if ! succeed!

~Ibid

Finally, like Atta, Turner shares a sense of religious fellowship with his comrades. The night before his suicide mission, Turner is inducted into "the Order," the quasi-religious inner circle of the organization:

Knowing what was demanded in character and commitment of each man who stood before me, my chest swelled with pride. These were no soft-bellied, conservative businessmen assembled for some Masonic mumbo-jumbo; no loudmouthed, beery red necks letting off a little ritualized steam about "the goddam niggers"; no pious, frightened churchgoers whining for the guidance or protection of an anthropomorphic deity. These were real men, White men who were now one with me in spirit and consciousness as well as in blood.

~Ibid.

Where it is known that Arab newspapers often reprint articles written by extreme right activists, there is also evidence to suggest that anti-Semitism has spread to some parts of the non-Arab Muslim World. Even during the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Malaysian prime minister Muhammad Mahathir went so far as to blame this predicament on Jews. The high-powered currency speculator, George Soros, was seen as the chief culprit in adversely affecting the Malaysian economy. More recently, in a speech presented at an Organization of the Islamic Conference summit in October 2003, Mahathir accused Jews of trying to "rule [the] world by proxy [and] get others to fight and die for them." Further, he asserted that Jews promoted socialism, communism, human rights, and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, and by doing so they have "gained control of the most powerful countries." Mahathir exhorted the Islamic umma "to face the enemy" and opined that 1.3 billion Muslims could not be "defeated by a few million Jews." (Speech by Prime Minister Muhammad Mahathir," October 16, 2003).

Mahathir's remarks were met with scorn by President George Bush, as well as various European governments, however, numerous extreme right groups and Muslims commended him for speaking out on this issue. Defiant, Mahathir reiterated his criticism of Jews and Israel in an interview in May 2005, in which he accused American politicians of being "scared stiff of the Jews because anybody who votes against the Jews will lose elections. (Quoted in Simon Tisdall, ''Father' of Malaysia Savages Bush and Blair," Guardian, May 27,2005).

Just as Islamists and the extreme right are beginning to find common ground, the gap between the far left and the far right may be narrowing as well. Both movements often decry globalization. Increasingly, they both share a criticism of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. A case in point is the case of Rachel Corrie, an attractive twenty-three-year-old American student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and a member of the International Solidarity Movement, who took a semester off to work as a peace activist in Gaza. While there, she took part in a protest in which an Israel driver using a bulldozer was preparing to knock down a Palestinian's house. Corrie stood between the bulldozer and the house and refused to move. However, the Israel driver ran over her, and she sustained injuries from which she ultimately died. Despite Corrie's presumably left-leaning political orientation, various right-wing publications and websites eulogized her as an Aryan martyr. What is more, the antiglobalization rhetoric of the contemporary extreme right could conceivably make its agenda more palatable to the far left, which also champions a similar platform, including radical environmentalism and animal rights. In fact, in 2002, the National Alliance created a front group, the Anti-Globalism Action Network (AGAN), to capitalize on the left's opposition to globalist organizations such as the World Bank, G8, and the International Monetary Fund and sent it to Kananaskis, Canada, to protest a G8 meeting. AGAN added an antiSemitic twist to the traditional left-wing conspiracy narrative. (Center for New Community. "CNC Uncovers Neo-Nazis Masquerading as AntiGlobalization Activists," June 21, 2002).

Extreme right stalwarts, such as Louis Beam, the chief proponent of the leaderless resistance approach in the United States, expressed solidarity with anti-World Trade Organization protestors in Seattle. (Reynolds, "Virtual Reich").

The conflation of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism arises in large part from the relationship between the United States and Israel. The paradox of modern Israel, as Christopher Hitchens argued, is that the state was created to provide a safe, stable, and proudly independent nation to which Jews from around the world could come to escape from fluctuations in gentile goodwill. However, today Israel is largely reliant on foreign aid, most notably the annual subsidy of $3 billion from the United States. Furthermore, the tiny nation appears to be hopelessly involved in endless battles that have the effect of catalyzing anti-Zionist sentiment around the world. Anti-Semitism generated in the lands of the diaspora is weak, but anti-Zionism generated from the Middle East conflict grows strong. Therefore, paradoxically, the "new anti-Semitism" appears to be engendered in large part by the existence of Israel. In recent years, some observers have also noted the parallels between traditional anti-Semitism and the current incarnation of anti Americanism. (Hitchens, "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril," Vanity Fair, September 2002).

But as Waiter Laqueur observed, since the 1960s the American extreme right has been transformed from an ultrapatriotic movement to one that is increasingly antipatriotic and nihilistic.(Laqueur, No End to War, 2003). This shift explains how the extreme right could find common cause with anti-American movements such as militant Islam. Both movements see the United States as being under the control of the Jews. It thus follows that with the global rise of American prominence, the Jewish threat extends to the entire world. A new synthesis has been created, centered on the narrative of a U.5.-Israeli alliance. The Israeli-Jewish hand is seen as pulling the strings of the American leviathan. Just as bin Laden has conflated the United States and Israel under the rubric of the "Zionist-crusader" alliance, so has the international extreme right reified the notion of the U.S. government hopelessly under the control of a Jewish cabal in the phrase "Zionist occupation government," or "ZOG."

For many years, the European extreme right has identified the United States and its pervasive popular culture as an existential threat to the racial, cultural, and spiritual integrity of European civilization. Ahmed Huber wrote an essay in this vein in 1982, titled "The Unknown Islam." In it he identified three principal threats to Islam: Zionism, Marxism, and finally "the American way of life," which was largely a code phrase for "Judaism." Huber commented on a trend in which anti-Semitism coincided with anti-Americanism: Now the anti-Americanism all over the world, which should be directed at the American government, against Zionist power in America, becomes now a general anti-Americanism. (For Huber see the article by Kevin Coogan, "The Mysterious Achmed Huber: Friend to Hitler, Allah and bin Laden")

Similarly however, in an audio tape released in October 2003, Osama bin Laden voiced his contempt for the United States, replete with anti-Semitic themes: Some have the impression that you [Americans] are a reasonable people. But the majority of you are vulgar and without sound ethics or good manners. You elect the evil from among you, the greatest liars and the least decent and you are enslaved by your richest and the most influential among you, especially the Jews, who lead you using the lie of democracy to support the Israelis and their schemes and in complete antagonism towards our religion, Islam. ("Bin Laden Calls Americans 'Vulgar and without Sound Ethics,''' al- Jazeera, October 18, 2003).

A similar pattern to the anti-Americanism in Europe in the wake of 9/11 could be obseved. Although anti-Americanism in the media came overwhelmingly from the political left, protests in the streets were almost all sponsored by the extreme right and radical Muslims.

Militant Islam and the extreme right both share a strikingly similar critique on several issues. This development has not gone unnoticed by authorities. Dale Watson, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) assistant director for counterterrorism, saw evidence of communication between extremists in the United States and Muslim extremists overseas. (John Solomon, "U.S. Extremists' Links with Terror Groups Watched," Salon. corn, February 28, 2002.)

In recent years however, domestic right-wing extremists appear to be more internationally inclined than they traditionally have been in the past. In the realm of terrorism, such cooperation would make for a very formidable challenge, if carried out deftly. Islamic terrorists have traditionally been foreign young men of Middle Eastern origin. Despite the pronouncements on the part of authorities that they abhor racial profiling and would not condone its use, the fact remains that young men of Middle Eastern ancestry will tend to make people more suspicious than other population groups, for no other reason than that previous Islamic terrorists shared the same ethnic and religious characteristics. If well-funded Middle Eastern terrorists could enlist the support of terrorists with white, Anglo-Saxon ethnic features, it could present an intelligence nightmare to authorities. Reportedly, al Qaeda has already entertained this scheme. According to a statement by then US. attorney general John Ashcroft in May 2004, al Qaeda was seeking to recruit operatives "who can portray themselves as Europeans."

Also Alfred Schobert, a researcher at the Information Service against Right-Wing Extremism in Duisburg, Germany, made this observation with regard to the situation in Germany. He conceded, however, that some far-right leaders see potential in such an alliance. In order to avoid the intense scrutiny received by travelers from certain Middle Eastern countries, it is believed that al Qaeda is now using operatives from Chechnya, Bosnia, and even Western Europe. Furthermore, some Muslim operatives are believed to have converted to Christianity in order to obscure their backgrounds and allay suspicion.

The U.S. government has warned law enforcement agencies that Islamic extremists, without any formal affiliation with al Qaeda, might carry out terrorist attacks in the United States and overseas. The FBI fears that individuals on the fringes of extremist groups may carry out attacks on their own initiative. Certain events, such as the war on Iraq and increasing tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, could act as catalysts for such attacks. (David Johnston and James Risen, "Agencies Warn of Lone Terrorists," New York Times, February 23,2003) Extremists had used right-wing extremist propaganda to augment their anti-Zionist propaganda.

One major obstacle to any kind of serious collaboration is the fact that in the United States, there is no real right-wing terrorist infrastructure to speak of; leaderless resistance-actually a sign of desperation-predominates. However the significance of potential collaboration in the area of propaganda should not be blithely dismissed, as conflicts in the future will increasingly revolve around information and communication matters. So-called soft power is important in an era of globalization. Joseph Nye was the first to distinguish between "hard power" and "soft power." The former consists of traditional measures such as military and economic strength, and the latter includes culture and ideology. Adversaries will emphasize media operations and "perception management" in order to get their side of the story out. As David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla argued, what happens at the "narrative level" is very important to the success of a network:

Networks, like other organizations, are held together by the narratives, or stories that people tell. ... these narratives provide a grounded _expression of people's experiences, interests, and values. First of all, stories express a sense of identity and belonging-who "we" are, why we have come together, and what makes us different from "them." Second, stories communicate a sense of cause, purpose, and mission. The express aims and methods as well as cultural dispositions-what "we" believe in, and what we mean to do, and how. (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror. Crime, and Militancy, 2001).

In fact there have been indications that the United States and the UK are losing the war of ideas, most notably in the Islamic world. A survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in forty-four countries and released in June 2003 found that a significant number of people in the Muslim world would trust Osama bin Laden to "do the right thing regarding world affairs." (Faye Bowers, "Al Qaeda's Profile: Slimmer but Menacing," Christian Science Monitor, September 9, 2003).

It is known that the war in Iraq sent support for the United States to record lows in the Muslim world, and the extreme right is keenly aware of this, so next a more in detailed review.

The new alliance has come. The eleventh of September has brought together [the two sides] because the new right has reacted positively They say, and I agree with them 100 percent, what happened on the eleventh of September, if it is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of counterterrorism.”

~Ahmed Huber, as quoted in Peter Finn, "Unlikely Allies Bound by a Common Hatred," Washington Post, April 29, 2002.

Saddam Hussein's uncle and future father-in law, Khairallah Tulfah, along with General Rashid Ali al-Gilani and the so-called colonels of the Golden Square, participated in a coup against the pro-British government of Iraq, and recognized as Iraq’s new Government by Germany declared independence from Great Britain on May 12, 1941. This pro-Nazi regime as we have seen was then ejected by a British military intervention soon thereafter, but not before the regime instigated an anti-Jewish pogrom in which 200 people were killed. (See also David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, 2003).

Tulfah had a strong influence on his son-in-law, regaling him with his vision of a pan-Islamic Nazi alliance. Not unlike Hitler, Saddam Hussein sought to implement a new order based on the principles of nationalism and socialism under the dictatorial control of the Führerprinzip. (Charles A. Morse, "The Nazi Background of Saddam Hussein," February 21, 2003).

His Ba'ath (Renaissance) Party like the regimes in Iran, Syria, and soon also Egypt, had the characteristics of a European fascist party of the interwar years, seeking to mold the masses into a single organic collectivity through a program of corporatism and national regeneration. Saddam Hussein's defiant position toward the United States and Israel throughout the 1990s bolstered his image in some quarters. As a result, several representatives of the extreme right have reached out to him on numerous occasions.

In the weeks leading up to the Gulf War, some European right-wing extremists sought to provide token assistance and moral support. For example, the late German neo-Nazi leader Michael Kuhnen reportedly negotiated with Iraqi diplomats in an effort to build an "Anti-Zionist Legion" to fight for Saddam Hussein and repel the U.S.-led coalition. Another German neo-Nazi leader, Heinz Reisz, appeared on Russian state television on January 25, 1991, and proclaimed "Long live the fight for Saddam Hussein; long live his people; long live their leader; God save the Arab people." A French neo-Nazi, Michel Faci, traveled to Baghdad where he and twenty or so assorted activists and historical revisionists were guests of Saddam Hussein at a government-sponsored event titled "Friendship, Solidarity and Peace with Iraq."

In 1986 famous Paganist and at the time intellectual leader of the so called, French Nouvelle Droite, Alain de Benoist released a publication, Europe, Tiers monde, meme combat (Europe, the Third World, the Same Fight), in which he called for an alliance between Europe and the Arab Middle East, to weaken both the U.S. and Soviet blocs and their hold on Europe. This rightist variant of "Third Worldism" was not informed by the more liberal-oriented admiration of the "noble savage" or white racial guilt, but rather by geopolitical hostility to the bloc system and its hold over Europe. In January 1991, Alain de Benoist, joined with a coalition that included various leftists, trade unionists, and anti-American rightists to protest the U.S.-led aggression against Iraq. (Michael O'Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, 2004).

More recently Alain de Benoist has also been mentioned in a booklet with the misleading title “New Religions and The Nazis” 2006, by Karla Poewe. Poorly argued and under-researched, rather then having anything to do with the “Nazis” (as the that time Government of Germany), Karla Poewe’s booklet rather is a micro history of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer’s religious ideas.

Saddam found support by Jean Marie Le Pen's Front National. Christian fundamentalists in the party favored Saddam because Iraq had been a major arms supplier to the Falange in its battle against Muslims in Lebanon during the civil war. Anti-Americanism and anti-British sentiment played a role as well. In October 1990, Le Pen traveled to Baghdad as part of a delegation of right-wing parties from Europe to meet with Saddam Hussein. They returned with fifty-three European hostages that were held by Iraq in the months prior to the war. For his part, supporting Iraq was a clever way in which Le Pen could defuse criticism that he was anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. (Harvey G. Simmons, The French National Front: The Extremist Challenge to Democracy, 1996).

Reportedly, some elements of Jorg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) have also sympathized with Saddam Hussein's regime. For example, there is the case of Abdul Moneim Jebra, a sixty-year-old Iraqi arms dealer, who has reportedly sought to strengthen ties between the radical right and militant Islam. Jebra now lives in Austria, where members of Jorg Haider's FPO established an Iraqi-Austrian Association to promote ties with Baghdad. In 1998 a plot to smuggle helicopters to Iraq that involved Jebra was uncovered during a Swiss bribery case.

Plus of course there is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Russian ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, who accused the Kremlin of "betraying" its long-term Arab partners and clients. The Soviet Union had strong diplomatic ties with many countries in the Middle East, and until its collapse, Moscow played a key role in the region, supporting Arab leaders such as Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. However, Mikhail Gorbachev's government consented to the U.5.-led military action in the Gulf War, an operation that it could have vetoed in the Security Council. Furthermore, by that time, and even more so during Boris Yeltsin's tenure, relations with the United States became the top Russian priority. Zhirinovsky has sought to reestablish an alliance with Iraq. Toward this end, he reportedly developed a warm relationship with Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi ambassador to Russia appreciated Zhirinovsky's gestures of support and has frequently been in attendance at Zhirinovsky's birthday parties. (Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Zhirinovsky: Russian Fascism and the Making of a Dictator, 1995).

Zhirinovsky visited Baghdad on numerous occasions during the 1990s and was a guest of Saddam Hussein. In one instance, he lectured the Iraq leader for four hours on the need to unite against the "American-Israeli plot" to dominate the world. (Ibid) In 1993, Zhirinvosky even went so far as to send a contingent of his paramilitary "falcons" to Iraq to fight against "American imperialism." Hussein is rumored to have contributed considerable financial support to Zhirinovsky. After his trip to Baghdad, Zhirinovsky increased the frequency and the stridency of his anti-American rhetoric. (Ibid).

Other Russian right-wing extremists have also reached out to Muslims, so for example, Heidar Jamal has sojourned in several extremist organizations. He worked briefly for the ultranationalist Pamyat (Memory) organization in 1989 and the late Ahmed Khomeini, the son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1990. In 1993, he joined the Russian branch of the Islamic Committee. He ran unsuccessfully for the Duma in 1995. Finally, in 1999, his Islamic Committee joined forces with hard-line communists Victor Ilyukhin and Albert Marashov. One constant theme that links all his projects is a virulent disdain for the West.( Nabi Abdullaev, "Fundamentalism in Russia: An Interview with Islam Committee's Heidar Jamal," in Parfrey, Extreme Islam).

With Heidar Jamal and his friend Alexander Dugin who translated both Rene Guenon and Julius Evola in Russian, we are back to the larger circle of intellectuals that include also Alain de Benoit, and what Mark Sedgwick for lack of a better word called ‘Traditionalism.’

It was during Perestroika that Russian Traditionalists first took active steps. In 1987 Dugin and Jamal together joined Pamyat' (Memory), later described by Dugin as "the most reactionary organization available." They hoped to influence it toward Traditionalism, rather as Eliade had hoped to use the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania, and Evola had hoped to use the Fascists, the Herrenklub, and the SS. (Sedgwick, 2004).

Pamyat' was the focus of popular opposition to Perestroika. But Dugin's and Jamal's attempts at infiltration of Pamyat' were no more successful than had been Eliade's or Evola's similar efforts earlier. Seminars they gave attracted respectable audiences (up to 100 people), and Dugin was appointed to Pamyat’s Central Council in late 1988, but in 1989 they gave up and left. Pamyat'; Dugin later described its members as "hysterics and KGB collaborators." Its importance for Russian opposition politics in fact was like that of Theosophy for Western esotericism: it was the forum that facilitated the emergence of figures who would later be important elsewhere.

After they left Pamyat, where Jamal continued in the line of Islamist Traditionalism, Dugin in a parallel course of action became involved with Eurasianism. In 1999 was appointed special advisor to Gennady Nikolayevich Seleznev, the CPRF speaker of the Duma. (Ivan Kurilla, Geopolitika i kommunizm, “Geopolitics and Communism”, Russki Zhurnal 23, February 1999).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dugin helped found the not entirely serious National Bolshevik Party and became increasingly associated with two major figures in Russian political life. One was Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). The other, closer associate was Alexander Andreyevich Prokhanov, leader of a group known as the Pochvenniki (Patriots). In the end however Dugin would found his own Eurasian Party, characterized by Democratic intellectual Igor Vinogradov:

They are undertaking a noisy galvanization of a reactionary utopia that failed long ago, an attempt to revive it through the injection of a new vaccine-a combination of "Orthodoxy" and "Islam" in the name of combating insidious "Zionism," putrid Western "Catholicism" and any kind of Jew- Masonry whatever ... For all their [intellectual] ineptitude, they are very dangerous. After all, the temptation of religious fundamentalism in our century of unbelief and general spiritual corruption is attractive to many desperate people who have lost their way in this chaos. (Vinogradov, in Yelena Yakovich, "Kontinent in Moscow: Voice of Russian Culture," interview with Igor Vinogradov, Literaturnaya Gazeta, July 22, 1992).

The credit for this revivification of a "failed" ideology must go to Dugin and Traditionalism, clearly the source of the "new vaccine" referred to. Dugin continue to maintain his friendly relations first established with Dugin's visits to the West in 1989, and continued with visits to Russia by de Benoist and his Belgian ally Robert Steuckers (the first of which took place in March 1992). And with the publication of two collections of Dugin's articles in Italian by Claudio Mutti, in 1991 and 1992.

Where Mark Sedgwick’s book is specifically about the ‘traditionalism’ of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola, what this has in common with other forms of traditionalism ore preservatist*, is that they construct a revisionist view of history that fits their own agenda. If we take as an example political traditionalists or new right groups in the USA, we will see that the patriot movement looks to the American Revolution for inspiration, whereas the neo-Confederates look to the Civil War. The Odinists idealize the Viking era, whereas the National Socialists and many of the historical revisionists admire Hitler's Third Reich. The World Church of the Creator idealizes not only the Third Reich but also the Roman Empire and the American Western frontier of the nineteenth century. And the Christian Identity followers identify with the lost tribes of Israel. For a preservatist/traditionalist political group in India we would look at (the recently covered on this website) RSS/Hindutva, and so on.

Another expression used is heritage (in German called 'Völkish') for example leader of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke explains it as, “people understand very well that I'm not a white supremacist and that I am a European American who wants to preserve my heritage like all people in the world want to, but the real danger to all heritages is Jewish supremacism, which seeks to destroy every heritage but the Jewish heritage.” (G. Michael, The Enemy of My Enemy, 2006).

Thus terms like the ‘new right’ or/and ‘extreme right’ today therefore, are not without contradictions , another good case example is the right/left mélange that came in the aftermath of a pamphlet written in 1950 by Julius Evola titled Orientamenti (Orientations). Ultra-conservative, paganist/occultist, Julius Evola at the time when he wrote this, was a supporter of Junio Valerio Borghese-- an aristocrat, a Fascist, and Second World War military hero. (For details see Gianfranco De Turris, Elogio e diftsa di Julius Evola: Il Barone e i terroristi, 1997).

When in 1951 the Italian police arrested some thirty members of the ‘Fasces Revolutionary Action’ (FAR), Evola-- because his articles appeared in their publication was accused of also supporting the latter--however he was acquitted.( De Turris,1999). It was the publicity surrounding this trial, that helped launch Evola on his postwar career, and he expanded Orientamenti into a book published in 1961, Cavalcare la Tigre: Orientamenti esistenziali per un'epoca della dissoluzione (Riding the Tiger: Existential Orientations for a Period of Dissolution). Here, Evola introduced the concept of what in Islam is titled hijra (emigration), fundamental to the more extreme varieties of late twentieth-century political Islam. Cavalcare la Tigre became one of the central texts for the Italian new right.

Earlier the Ordine Nuovo (New Order), established by Pino Rauti a dedicated follower of Evola was publicly committed to the defense of "all that of the traditional that has been saved and has found a pole.” It launched a joumal, Ordine Nuovo, and offered courses and seminars based around Evola's (and sometimes Rene Guenon's) works, including Evola's Orientamenti. One small group from within Ordine Nuovo even followed Evola's earliest interest, ceremonial magic and Roman neo-Paganism, establishing I Dioscuri (Greek Dioskouroi, sons of Zeus) in Rome in the late 1960’s.( Franco Ferraresi, Minacce alia democrazia: La Destra radicale e la strategia de’la tensione in Italia ne’ dopoguerra, 1995).

Little is known of the activities of this latter group, except that it ran into difficulties of some sort that led to the suicide of many of its members. Most of the activities of Ordine Nuovo, however, were intellectual and political. When the Ordine Nuovo became involved with terrorism a court order called for it’s forced dissolution in 1974.

But also for many leftists by then, the old division between left and right was no longer of much importance and had been replaced by a divide identified by Asor Rosa as a division between In and Out. Bourgeois industrialists were In, as were unionized workers and the PCI; the unemployed, women, students, and other marginal groups were Out.

Next Franco Freda, another student of Julius Evola sentenced to 16 years in prison in 1972, founded the Fronte Nazionali (National Front). Its supporters were predominantly skin-heads, and their crusading issue was immigration, not as crude racism but as an attack on multiculturalism in the name of preserving the purity of distinct traditions.

Exactly what Evola did mean by apoliteia in practical terms-in the realm of action-has since been much disputed. But just like is the case with various interpretations of what the exact meaning is of certain statements in the Koran, what is more important than what Evola meant, is what he was taken to mean. Evola's apoliteia thus was developed by Freda into a call for action against the bourgeois state irrespective of effect, a sort of Traditionalist existentialism-and the word "existentialism" is used in the subtitle of Cavalcare la Tigre. Freda's development of Evolian Traditionalism was not entirely nihilistic-he also argued for the destruction of the bourgeois state as a necessary preliminary to further developments, which implies belief in the possibility of "rectifying action" -but his call was in effect a call to what Gianfranco de Turris calls "rightist anarchism." (Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia, and De Turris, Elogio e d fesa).

Mark Sedgwick maintains that Evola, “seems to have approved of what was being done in his name on condition that it was done with proper spiritual preparation.”(Sedgwick, 2004).

Just as Evola shifted (or was thought to have shifted) the emphasis from the objectives of action to the interior state that gives rise to action, so Freda shifted the emphasis from the objective-which implied some central planning and organization-to the individual. Freda was one of the earliest and most important proponents of the "archipelago solution," the new organizational pattern of Italian ‘new right ‘terrorism that emerged a solution, by implication, to the problems raised by the dismantling of Ordine Nuovo. This meant the replacement of earlier, relatively large and hierarchical structures by small and fluid groupings, usually forming for a particular operation and then dissolving, and normally acting independently of each other and of any central command. (Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia).

The archipelago solution presents certain obvious operational advantages. As an extension of the Leninist cell system, it is the ultimate guard against police infiltration: no more than a single operation can ever be compromised. It is, however, more than a defense, since the abandonment of any control over operational groups makes sense only as a corollary to the abandonment of overall strategy. The archipelago solution, then, is the companion of apoliteia, at least as Freda understood apoliteia. The two together make up spontaneismo armato (armed spontaneity), Freda's most destructive discovery, later popularized in his journal, Quex. Again, Mark Sedgwick suggests, “there were echoes of Freda in both the organizational method and the apparent objectives of the terrorists who carried out the attacks on the USA September 11, 2001.” (Sedgwick, 2004).

Finally Freda and some fifty of his followers were, convicted in 1999 of "incitement to racial discrimination," and in 2000 the Fronte Nazionali was dissolved by decree of the minister of the interior and its assets were confiscated. (Ruotolo Guido, "Il PM di Verona Papalia: 'C'e' un vero pericolo" interview with Procurator Guido Papalia, La Stampa, December 3, 2000).

There were rumors, however, that Fronte Nazionali activists, in alliance with members of the Alleanza Nazionale, this time financed by Osama bin-Laden, had helped ferment the violence that shocked Italy during anti-globalization protests at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. (On the basis of reports in Il Secolo XIX “July 25, 2001”, ascribed to sources in the Italian security services.)

According to a report in the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Serra, also German intelligence services claimed that Osama bin Laden had financed extreme right organizations in Europe in the hope that they would assist him in carrying out terrorist attacks during a G-8 summit meeting held in Genoa in the summer of 2001.189

Though the Traditionalist terror in Italy ended in 1983, that was not the end of the Traditionalists who had been involved in it. Some, like Claudio Mutti after having spend some years in jail where he converted to Islam, continued nonviolently. (Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia).

Two factors influenced his conversion: the writings of Guenon, to which he had been led by the writings of Evola, and Colonel Qaddafi. Guenon had convinced him of the need for a "path of realization," something Evola had not accomplished. Qaddafi is a more unusual source. Freda had had an interest in Qaddafi and Islam; he wrote in Quex about Evola's requirement for a spiritual basis for action in terms of the relationship between the "lesser jihad" (armed conflict) and the "greater jihad" (the struggle to subdue the lower self), and he published a translation of some of Qaddafi's speeches. (Mutti, "Pourquoi j'ai choisi l'Islam," Elements: Revue de la Nouvelle Droite 53; Spring 1985).

Mutti's Islam is militant and political. Like we have seen above he has published Italian translations of Jamal's work, but also of the Ayatollah Khomeini a preference he seems to have in common with Ahmed Huber cited at the beginning of this article. That Islam is installed on top of his early Evolianism is symbolized by the decor of his office, which is predominantly Islamic but includes a Nazi standard propped behind the filing cabinet, reported by Sedgwick who visited Mutti. (Sedgwick,2004).

But also Heidar Jamal during the time he was the ideologist for the Party of the Islamic Renaissance and editor of its organ Tavhid [Unity].In the first issue Jamal analyzed the state of Islam in Traditionalist terms, adding a historical angle rarely found elsewhere, derived in this case from Islamist writings. Islam, he pointed out, existed in time and was subject to decline just as everything else was. Further, there had been no real Islamic government since the death of the Prophet, and certainly not since the Mongols. Matters had grown much worse since then, since the "post-colonial elites" in the Islamic world were either nationalists (and hence enemies of universal Islam) or "atheist cosmopolitan[s]," equally enemies of true Islam.

In an article from I99I in Tavhid, translated in Italian, Jamal, after comparing the existential significance of death in Evolian Traditionalism to the metaphysical significance of death (the final return to God) in Islam, argues that "authentic Islam and the authentic right are non-conformist; their vital character consists of opposition, disagreement, non-identification." ("Islam and the Right," Giperbort a Vilnius, 1991, in Jamal, Tawhid).

For a Christian, "God is almost synonymous with hyper-conformism," whereas Islam is a "protest ... against the reduction of God to 'consensus.''' The political right and Islam both fight the snares of the world, including self-deification and "profane elitarianism." (Ro'i, Muslim Eurasia).

The PIR split in I992 over the issue of relations with Yeltsin and his project of Russian democracy, with the Jamall faction aligning with radical Islamists and Wahhabis in the Middle East and with the domestic opposition to Yeltsin, in the form of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) under Gennady Zyuganov and the rightist "Patriots" under Alexander Prokhanov. (Leonid Berres, "The Wahhabis are Ready to Make an Alliance with Makashov and Ilyukhin," Kommersant, July 24, 1999).

Both men were associates of Jamal from his time in Pamyat', and both also associated with the other major Traditionalist in Russia, Dugin. And Jamal's relations in the Middle East were with men such as Hasan al Turabi, the leader of the Sudanese Islamic Front and according to Michael Asher in his book about the Sudanes Mahdi, at least one of the eminence grise behind Osama bin Laden. (Asher, Khartoum, 2005).

The PIR as Jamal's institutional framework was replaced by the Islamic Committee of Russia-a network of such Islamic Committees was established under al Turabi's guidance at a conference in Khartoum in I993 in order to unite the leaders of various radical Islamist movements such as Turabi's own National Islamic Front, Hamas in Palestine, and the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Jamal became leader of the Moscow branch of this Islamic Committee. In a 1999 interview he spoke of contacts with the Hezbollah, Hamas, the Wolves of Islam (a Chechen group), and the Afghan Taliban. (Berres, "The Wahhabis.")

According to Walid Pharis it was during the above meeting in Khartoum that the decision was made from now on al-Qaeda would be the “mother ship” of global Jihad. Or as Pharis notes: The central force of jihad, after the Khartoum gathering, targeted the United States head-on, both overseas and at home. By this point al Qaeda was in charge of the world conflict with America. The "princes" (or emirs) were assigned the various battlefields, but the "Lord" assumed the task of destroying the "greater Satan," America.The first wave started in 1993 on two axes: One was in Somalia, where jihadists met U.S. Marines in Mogadishu in bloodshed. The United States withdrew. The same year, the blind sheikh Ahdul Rahman and Ramzi Yusuf conspired to blow up the Twin Towers in New York. (Phares, Future Jihad, 2005)

Finally of course a common ground between the extreme right and the Muslim world is the historical revisionism of Holocaust denial. For example the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggested that the Holocaust had been greatly exaggerated in part to undermine Islam:

There is evidence which shows that Zionists had close relations with German Nazis and exaggerated statistics on Jewish killings. There is evidence on hand that a large number of non-Jewish hooligans and thugs of Eastern Europe were forced to migrate to Palestine as Jews. The purpose was to install in the heart of the Islamic world an anti-Islamic state under the guise of supporting the victims of racism and to create a rift between the East and the West of the Islamic world. (A.Foxman, Never Again, 2003).

And the recent President of Iran, Rafsanjani exclaimed that he was convinced that "Hitler had only killed twenty thousand Jews and not six million." (Foxman). Rafsanjani even went so far as to raise the prospect of national suicide as part of an effort to destroy Israel, musing that the nuclear annihilation of Iran as a result of a retaliatory attack by Israel would be an acceptable price to pay to destroy half of the world's Jewish population. In such a conflagration, only a small portion of the world's Muslims would perish. (Michael A. Ledeen, The War against the Terror Masters, New York: St. Martin's, 2003).

Abraham Foxman, believes that many Arabs are embracing Holocaust revisionism to delegitimate the state of Israel. According to the reasoning of Holocaust revisionism, the tragedy was deliberately exaggerated in order to generate global sympathy for Jews and support for the creation of the Jewish state. Furthermore, it has been used to "extort" billions of dollars from the West and demoralize Aryans and the West "so that Jews could more easily control the world." (Foxman, Never Again?).

David Duke has been in the forefront of efforts to reach out to the Islamic world. In the fall of 2002, when he presented two lectures in Bahrain titled "The Global Struggle against Zionism" and "Israeli Involvement in September 11." And in an article published in the Arab News, a Saudi Arabian English daily newspaper, Duke repeated his assertion that Israel had assisted the terrorists in the 9/11 attack.

Duke’s take on religion by the way, include things like “the Anti-Christ” , and “Satanic-Christianity”:

T

he truth is there is no such thing as Judeo-Christianity. That would be saying Satanic-Christianity. The religion now called Judaism did not even come formally into existence until six hundred years after Jesus Christ. It began with the codification of the Babylon Talmud . Interestingly enough, Islam is much closer to Christianity than Judaism. For instance, Judaism condemns the Virgin Mary as a prostitute and viciously condemns Jesus as an evil sorcerer and a bastard . In stark contrast, although Islam certainly does not share all the Christian views of Jesus Christ, it views Christ as the true prophet of God, virgin-born, and that God resurrected Jesus from the dead. Ironically, the chief religious book of Islam, the Qur'an, actually defends Jesus Christ from the obscene slanders made against Him in the Jewish Talmud. ("Evangelicals Who Serve the Anti-Christ!" January 25, 2003).

More recently, in September 2005, Duke received a doctorate in history from the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management-a major private university system in the Ukraine. And in November 2005, he traveled to Syria, where he held a news conference.

Duke is not the only right-winger to draw parallels between Christianity and Islam. For example, Bill Baker, former chairman of the Populist Party, gave a lecture titled "Reviving the Islamic Spirit." (Gil Francisco White, "Islamist-Nazi Alliance Reborn on Campus?" The Daily Pennsylvanian, November 5, 2003).

From the above we have also seen that just as Islamists and the (extreme) new right are beginning to find common ground, the gap between the far left and the far right have been narrowing as well. Both movements often decry globalization. Increasingly, they both share a criticism of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. A case in point is the case of Rachel Corrie, an attractive twenty-three-year-o1d American student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and a member of the International Solidarity Movement, who took a semester off to work as a peace activist in Gaza. While there, she took part in a protest in which an Israel driver using a bulldozer was preparing to knock down a Palestinian's house. Corrie stood between the bulldozer and the house and refused to move. However, the Israel driver ran over her, and she sustained injuries from which she ultimately died. Despite Corrie's presumably left-leaning political orientation, various right-wing publications and websites eulogized her as an Aryan martyr. What is more, the antig10ba1ization rhetoric of the contemporary extreme right could conceivably make its agenda more palatable to the far left, which also champions a similar platform, including radical environmentalism and animal rights. In fact, in 2002, the National Alliance created a front group, the Anti-Globalism Action Network (AGAN), to capitalize on the left's opposition to globa1ist organizations such as the World Bank, G8, and the International Monetary Fund and sent it to Kananaskis, Canada, to protest a G8 meeting. AGAN added an antiSemitic twist to the traditional left-wing conspiracy narrative. (Center for New Community, “CNC Uncovers Neo-Nazis Masquerading as AntiGlobalization Acrivists,” June 21, 2002).

And extreme right stalwarts, such as Louis Beam, the chief proponent of (Evola student Franco Freda’s see above) 1eaderless resistance approach in the United States, expressed solidarity with anti-World Trade Organization protestors in Seattle. Similar to Freda’s example also left-wing radicals now extol revolutionary strategies that sound very similar to the 1eader1ess resistance approach advocated by extreme right revolutionaries. Although there have been no significant displays of overt antiSemitism on the part of so-called eco-extremists, some elements have become increasingly strident in their opposition to the war on terror, especially once it expanded to encompass Iraq. A former spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, Craig Rosebraugh, exhorted antiwar activists to escalate their opposition to the war. Among his suggestions to foment revolution were attacking the financial centers of the country; provoking large-scale urban rioting; attacking the media centers of power; spreading the battle to the individuals responsible for the war (the heads of government and U.S. corporations); publicly announcing that the antiwar movement does not support U.S. troops; targeting U.S. military establishments within the United States; and when engaging in the aforementioned activities, striking hard and fast and retreating in anonymity. (Rosebraugh's strategy is described in Michelle Malkin, "Eco-terrorists Declare War," Washington Times, March 24, 2003).

Thus if anything, the far left is in a state of flux, while some of its activists question traditional tenets of their platform, such as unrestricted immigration. (See Neil Clark, "Why the Left and Right Must Unite and Fight: The View from the Left," Anti-Wancom, April 1, 2003).

At first, 9/11 and its immediate aftermath appeared to galvanize the National Alliance, overtly praising the 9/11 hijackers. Its chairman, Dr. William L. Pierce, became even more strident in his rhetoric in his American Dissident Voices radio broadcasts, and interest in his American Dissident Voices program increased significantly after the 9/11 attacks.

Then there is the Aryan Nations' Islamic outreach with its own ‘Liaison’ website with as one of the frequent writers David Wulstan Myatt. Reputed to have been a member of the underground paramilitary groups Column 88 and Combat 18 in the UK, he was twice imprisoned for violent political activism. (Nick Ryan, Into a World of Hate: A Journey among the Extreme Right, 2004).

After several years of radical politics, Myatt became disillusioned and during his travels joined Islam. Myatt is also the chief proponent of the "leaderless resistance" (see Franco Freda above) in England and joined the small Reichsfolk organization, which had the twofold aim of propagating the philosophy of National Socialism and forming rural communities where the like-minded could live in accord with the "ethos of their Aryan culture." (David Myatt, "Towards the Galactic Empire: Autobiographical Notes Part Two”)

Myatt was much impressed with the power of religion so evident in the ranks of Muslim militants:

What motivated the fighters discussed was an intense faith: a real belief in an after-life; a belief that it was their duty to act in such a way, and that by doing their duty in the way they did, they would be assured of entering Paradise. And this faith was not a political belief they had acquired or accepted in adult life: it was part of their very culture. Indeed, it was their culture, their tradition, and their way of life, from birth through death. It was this type of faith, this immersion in one's own culture, which our own people so sadly lacked. We were trying to motivate people in a political way, whereas Muslim fighters did what they did because it was accepted as their duty, as their own people understood this duty and gladly accepted their martyrdom.

~David Myatt, "A Covert Life”

Myatt had little difficulty reconciling his newfound faith with National Socialism:

How could a National Socialist - an admirer of Adolf Hitler and his SS - come to sit happily in the homes of a Pakistani, an Arab, an African from Chad, share a meal, talk affably about God, our dreams for the future, the need for a spiritual renaissance, and of course, the common enemy? Because the truth about National Socialism has been obscured for over fifty years, thanks to the intensive, hateful, worldwide, well-financed and unending propaganda campaign directed against it. There is some common ground, since both ways-when correctly understood-produce civilized, honorable individuals who use reason as a Islam shared common enemies, the capitalist-consumer West and international finance.

~Myatt, "Towards the Galactic Empire"

There is some common ground, since both ways-when correctly understood-produce civilized, honorable individuals who use reason as a guide. The differences are, first, that Islam concentrates on the next life, on Jannah, and there is therefore what I have called an individualistic and Earth-based ethic: individuals do what they do in anticipation of the reward of Jannah; and, second, that the individual is understood in relation to such things as taqwa [the conscious awareness that God is watching you] and imaan [faith or belief], for these define them. For Islam, the folk-and the diversity and difference of human culture-is basically irrelevant. For National Socialism, this diversity and difference should be treasured and developed in an honorable, rational way. In addition, National Socialism concentrates on our connection to our folk and thus to Nature and the Cosmos, with Nature and the Cosmos being understood as living beings. That is, we, as part of our folk, are Nature made manifest, and that our purpose is to aid Nature, and thus the Cosmos, through our folk: to evolve ourselves, our folk, our culture, and thus our human species. Hence, the perspective of National Socialism and the basis for its ethics-is a cosmic, evolutionary one, of ourselves as a nexus, a connection between our human past and our human future. National Socialism believes we can and should evolve further: that this is our unique human destiny. In National Socialism (and folk culture, I should add) the individual is defined by honor, loyalty, and duty, just as a National-Socialist society is. So, in one sense Islam was part of my lifelong quest to discover the meaning, the purpose, of our lives. As a result, I do believe I understand Islam, which is why I know an alliance between Muslims and National Socialists is possible, and indeed necessary.

According to Myatt, the great potential for cooperation between the extreme right and militant Islam stems from both movement's shared opposition to the so-called new world order, which he defines as a collection of Western capitalist nations whose way of life is dominated by materialism. According to Myatt, the plan of the new world order is to subjugate the planet through an oppressive world police force so that no dissidents can escape its reach-in short, a one-world government, with its own police force, courts, and army that have jurisdiction anywhere in the world. In that sense, the new world order regime amounts to "bully-made law." By contrast, Myatt sees Islamic sharia as far superior in that it was putatively derived from God, thus making it superior to fallible human-derived laws. Myatt has publicly expressed admiration for the Taliban movement in Afghanistan because it sought to establish "a true Islamic society" and defended Mullah Muhammad Omar's decision to continue to grant Osama bin Laden sanctuary in the wake of 9/11. ("Islamic Sanctuary”).

In Myatt's analysis, the only real significant opposition to the new world order comes from militant Islam. On previous occasions, he has expressed open admiration for Osama bin Laden and views him as an exemplary warrior who has forsaken a life of luxury to pursue his Islamic duty. (Myatt, "Why I Support Sheikh Usama bin Laden”).

Like David Myatt, also Ahmed Huber found no contradiction in terms of his Islamic faith and his admiration for German National Socialism, as he explained:

I judge as a Muslim, I judge Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich and his movement in a different way than the Zionists, or the Marxists, or the Anglo-Americans do because I know very, very much. I have been studying the sources of what was the Third Reich. And I met a lot of people who knew Hitler personally. I have met his secretary, Frau Gertrud Junge, who recently died, and Christa Schröder. I have met Arlton Axman, the last Hitler Youth leader, who brought the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun to the Reich Chancellery and burnt them. I met a lot of Waffen-SS generals from the Leibstandarte, who personally knew Hitler.

We Muslims were fascinated by the Third Reich in the 1930s because Hitler had some ideas at the political level and the economic level, and the cultural field, which were very close to the political, economic, and cultural sharia. For instance, the economic concept of an interest-free noncapitalist economy is very close to the Islamic concept of the economy. His [Hitler's] idea that art should represent God and not be degenerate and make a cult of ugliness, of lies, and of evil, this corresponds to the cultural sharia, and so on.

So this man and his movement were fascinating to many Muslim intellectuals all during the 1930s. And since 1945, Muslims have been studying all of these things. And we judge him in a different way. Even if now, of course, when the Muslims protest against America, they say Bush equals Hitler, or Shawn equals Hitler, they say that not for themselves, but [because] they know that it has an impact on Western public opinion.

Hitler himself said several times, "The only religion I respect is Islam. The only prophet I admire is the Prophet Muhammad." He said several times in his table talks that ''After the final war the swastika will rule over Europe and will represent a new Europe. We will help the Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East to reestablish the Caliphate." That means there would be an Islamic civilization.

(See also Coogan, "The Mysterious Ahhmed Huber: Friend to Hitler, Allah and Ibn Laden?")

As for the new, Huber explained:

You see, in the past ten years I have been in Switzerland, Austria, France, and Germany. I have been around with groups of young people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, and especially what we call the new right. Sometimes we hold meetings together, Muslims and people from the new right, to speak about these things and to show what we have in common. I also spoke about this at the University of Tehran. I spoke at a seminar and workshops about these problems. Explaining what was the Third Reich, what it was all about. (Michael).

On March 20, 2002, a U.S. Treasury task force raided businesses connected to individuals which they thought financed al-Qaeda. For example Jamal Barzinji’s northern Virginia-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth was alleged to have been deeply involved in providing cover for Wahhabi terrorism. (Stephen Schwarz, "Wahhabis in the Old Dominion: What the Federal Raids in Northern Virginia Uncovered," Weekly Standard 7, no. 29, April 8, 2002). Here a connection was found to Alessandro Ghe, an Italian, who has been questioned by Italian authorities for possible ties to bin Laden. And again, Ghe belonged to the Ordine Nuovo (New Order) organization, which began to reach out to Muslim radicals in the 1970’s.

An attractive quality of Arabs is their admiration of courage. If one day professional rather than politicized officers were to lead them, they would prove formidable soldiers. Suicide bombers are widely admired because they seem to exemplify courage in some superhuman sphere beyond the limit that rational people can understand. Saddam played with virtuosity on this cultural trait, magnifying the bravery and heroic status of all Iraqis, himself above all. He threatened to wage the Mother of All Battles, and promised to die fighting at the head of his troops. Never, he said, would he be a deserter.

Dictators create the fantasy world in which they force everyone to live. Hitler fantasized about race, and Stalin about class. Saddam learned from them both - in method, especially - but essentially his was a fantasy about absolute power. Iraq could and should have been a medium-rank nation, with resources enough to guarantee peace and prosperity for all its inhabitants. Saddam instead imagined himself the heir of Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, the hero who had only to conquer Iran and Kuwait and Israel, and beyond that unify the entire Arab world under him. Like all such fantasies, its strength lay in its untruthfulness, its one-dimensional simplicity. Fascinatingly, he had writers publish novels in his name, in which absolute power was presented as the solution to all ills.

Reality-enforcement comes as something of an anti-climax in contrast to the vivid fantasy it explodes. Saddam, who smoked the best Havana cigars in the faces of colleagues he was condemning to summary execution, and who ordered silk suits by the score from his Armenian tailor, was discovered by American soldiers in a ramshackle hole dug under a mud outbuilding on a farm not far from his birthplace. Although he had a revolver with him, he emerged with his hands up, looking like a hobo but nonetheless boasting to his captors that he was the President of Iraq. He did not match the resolution of his two sons, who fought to the end, nor did he spare himself the indignity of capture by putting a bullet in his head. Hitler in his own bunker had at least made that final statementLike everybody else, the Arab and Muslim world has watched those clips of film showing a Coalition medico examining his beard for lice, and probing into his mouth, perhaps in search of a cyanide capsule, perhaps to take a DNA swab. The disgrace of it could hardly be more complete. In Muslim society, a beard signifies piety; and a stranger who so much as touches another man's beard insults him. For a long time to come, the Arab and Muslim world will be coming to terms with the searing memory of that examination, every detail of which goes against its core values.

In common with other dictators, Saddam did everything to ensure that he would be taken at his word, and that people would come to accept his fantasy as reality. His many palaces and gigantic monuments to himself, the mass graves and hundreds of thousands of victims, were expressions of his absolute power. The values of that society, as he well understood, conflated honor and power. People of course knew that he was cruel and unjust, the latest in the run of dictators under whom they have suffered during so much of their history, but they also perceived that he was doing deeds of which they themselves were incapable. Seemingly he was defying the West, that is to say the Christians and the Jews, and so standing up for Muslims. The honor he acquired was therefore a complex blend of admiration, resentment, and fear; he was both monster and champion, in any case altogether larger than life. The term these admirers used to describe him was fahl, which carries meanings denoting potency, or as the dictionary puts it: "male (of large animals), stallion; outstanding personality, luminary, star, master."

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers - Already, you see, the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing Christianity! - Then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.

(August 28, 1942)

~Hitler's Table Talk; 1941-1944 translated by N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Enigma Books (1953)

Does the Koran really promise Islamic martyrs 72 virgins?

There's been a lot of talk about how the hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center expected to receive 72 virgins (or 70 or 50, depending on whom you listen to) in paradise. Is this really true? (That they expected this, I mean, not that they'll receive it.) It seems a rather unsophisticated and juvenile theology: "In heaven you can eat all the ice cream you want and stay up past ten o'clock and it's always recess." Is there any Koranic basis for believing that those who kill and die for the faith will get the aforementioned virgins?

A couple observations.

First, nonfundamentalist Muslims don't take the cosmological parts of the Koran any more literally than nonfundamentalist Christians take the biblical story of Genesis. They understand the bits about virgins and so on as metaphors for the ineffable joys of the afterlife. Second, while dreams of celestial babes may motivate the impoverished Palestinian kids who blow themselves up on Israeli street corners, a number of the 9-11 terrorists were older and had known something of earthly delights. That these middle-class types nonetheless were suicidal fanatics is yet another indication that we've entered a scary new phase.

Now to the question

The difficulty in determining what the Koran has to say about virgins and such is establishing what the Koran says, period. Translators vary widely in their rendering of the spare and often opaque text.

For example, we find the following passage in a Web-based version of Islam's holy book:

Verily, for the Muttaqun [righteous], there will be a success (paradise); gardens and grapeyards; and young full-breasted (mature) maidens of equal age; and a full cup (of wine).

~An-Naba 78:31-34.

Whoa, one thinks--the Kingdom of Heaven meets the Playboy Advisor! However, most other English translations, both on-line and in print, replace "full-breasted maidens" with some tame construction such as "companions." Inquiring further, we find that the Arabic word at issue is WakawaAAiba, which appears nowhere else in the Koran. The French, less prudish in these matters, usually render it as something like des belles aux seins arrondis, "beautiful women with round breasts," so I think it's pretty clear what the Prophet, or at least his stenographers, had in mind.

Nothing in the Koran specifically states that the faithful are allotted 72 virgins apiece. For this elaboration we turn to the hadith, traditional sayings traced with varying degrees of credibility to Muhammad. Hadith number 2,562 in the collection known as the Sunan al-Tirmidhi says:

The least [reward] for the people of Heaven is 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome of pearls, aquamarine and ruby.

A little hype from the marketing department, you may say.

Fine. Let's return to the Koran, Islam's font of religious authority. Even if we leave out the racy detail and make allowances for metaphor, we're obliged to admit that Islamic heaven is a pretty rockin' place, with an emphasis on sensual pleasures. The provision of virgins in indeterminate quantities is alluded to at numerous points, and you know they're not just there to fluff the pillows. (In fairness to the Prophet, the physical quality usually attributed to the houris, as they're called, is "wide lovely eyes.")

The food, service, ambience., etc, are great. You're allowed to enjoy things the Koran explicitly denies you on earth, such as alcohol, and you won't even get sick. ("Wine . . . delicious to those who drink it . . . will neither dull their senses nor they will become drunk.") Granted, the whole thing is skewed toward the male idea of a good time, a defect by no means confined to Islam. Were Muhammad to found a religion today, I'm confident that each female arrival in heaven would be assigned a comely stud who would provide fabulous sex and in addition hang the curtain rods the first time he was asked. Granted, also, the emphasis on virgins is a little weird. Still, you have to admit, heaven as Party Central sure beats the Christian idea of angels with harps.

Does this make Islamic cosmology "unsophisticated and juvenile"? But don't be too quick to judge. Christianity, after all, invented the idea of paradise in the first place. Looking at things from the point of view of a cynical materialist, which is the more outrageous proposition--luring the proles with the promise of eternal life, or throwing 72 virgins into the bargain?

Appeasement of Saddam Hussein

In 1983, Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad as Ronald Reagan's special envoy and met Saddam Hussein, despite evidence that Iraq possessed chemical weapons and had used it on civilians in Iraq and on soldiers in Iran. After his return, Rumsfeld successfully lobbied for financial and military aid for Iraq's war with Iran. Chemical and biological intermediaries and labs were provided by the US to Iraq. Other western countries followed suit. Predictably, Saddam used the weapons in the Kurdish north. In one instance, a set of Hughes helicopters provided by Ronald Reagan was used in a chemical attack that left 5000 dead in a Kurdish village called Halabja. Following this, the US Senate passed a Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime but the Reagan White House blocked it.

Between 1983 and 1988, Saddam used chemical weapons 195 times against Iran killing about 50,000 of their soldiers. In 1987, an Iraqi Exocet missile hit an American destroyer, the USS Stark, in the Persian Gulf killing 37 crewmen. Incredibly, the United States excused Iraq for making an unintentional mistake and instead used the incident to accuse Iran of escalating the war in the gulf. The American tilt to Iraq then became more pronounced. U.S. commandos began blowing up Iranian oil platforms and attacking Iranian patrol boats. In 1988, an American warship in the gulf shot down an Iranian Airbus killing 290 civilians. Within a few weeks, Iran, fearing American intervention, gave up its war with Iraq.

Weekly World News
18 September 1990

George Bush Sr., as Vice President and later as President, used a number of covert and overt schemes to help with Baghdad's WMD programme. Strangely enough, Israel was one of the countries that helped in the transshipment of banned weapons. Saddam was so encouraged by this level of support that he thought he could get away with an invasion Kuwait. Sam Gejdenson, chairperson of a subcommittee in the US Congress investigating US exports to Iraq, disclosed that between 1985 and 1990 the US government approved 771 licenses for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment used for military applications.

To build the case for the war against Iraq, the Bush administration used the anthrax scare to frighten lawmakers into submission. The US Secretary of State Colin Powell, accompanied by CIA Directory George Tenet, even gave an anthrax demo in the UN Security Council. Interestingly, the anthrax found in Capitol Hill was found to be the same grade as those in the stocks of the US military.

The Nazi Background of Saddam Hussein
By Chuck Morse
February 17, 2003

Kharaillah Tulfah, Saddam Hussein's uncle and future father-in-law, along with Gen. Rashid Ali and the so-called "golden square" cabal of pro-Nazi officers, participated in a failed coup against the pro-British government of Iraq in 1941. Operating behind the scenes in Baghdad at the time, and arranging for Nazi weapons and assistance was the notorious pro-Nazi Haj Amin al-Husseini the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti had been on the Nazi payroll, according to testimony at the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, since 1937 when he had met with Adolf Eichmann during Eichmann's brief visit to Palestine. Saddam Hussein was born in 1937.

The Mufti, after instigating a pogrom against Jews in Palestine in 1920, the first such pogrom against Jews in the Arab world in hundreds of years, went on to inspire the development of pro-Nazi parties throughout the Arab world including Young Egypt, led by Gamal Abdul Nasser, and the Social Nationalist Party of Syria led by Anton Sa'ada. After the failure of the 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Iraq, the Mufti fled to Berlin where he spent the war years heading a Nazi-Muslim government in exile and using confiscated Jewish funds in a largely successful effort to further pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic propaganda in the Arab world. While in Berlin, the Mufti also helped form pro-Nazi Muslim Hanschar brigades in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

Kharaillah Tulfah, participant in the 1941 pro-Nazi coup and an advocate of a pan-Islamic Nazi alliance along with the Mufti, raised and educated his nephew Saddam Hussein from age 10. In 1959, the 22-year-old Saddam failed in an attempt to assassinate Iraqi leader Abdel Karim Qassim. He subsequently fled to Egypt where he received refuge from fellow Mufti disciple Nasser. At the time, Nasser, along with the Mufti himself, who resided in Cairo after the war and his conviction by the Nuremberg Tribunal of war crimes, was spearheading what was known as the Odessa Network, which facilitated the settlement of thousands of Nazi criminals in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. In 1962, Saddam married Sajidah Tuffah, the daughter of his uncle and mentor.

Saddam triumphantly returned to Baghdad in 1963 after a successful coup by the Ba'ath Party against Qassim where he assumed control of State Security. The Ba'ath seizure of power in Iraq was followed by firing squads and murder of political opponents reminiscent of Castro's seizure of Cuba. Saddam was chief interrogator and torturer at the infamous Palace of the End set up as a torture chamber under the auspices of State Security.

Saddam became absolute ruler in 1979 after assassinating over 20 leaders of his own party. He immediately proceeded to implement the Nazi vision of his uncle and the Mufti. In Iraq, Saddam annihilated of his opponents and, using his absolute power, developed a personality-cult around himself reminiscent of the Nazi Führerprincip. Like the Nazis, who sought to implement a new social order based on socialist and nationalist principles, Saddam has sought to develop a united Arab order under his personal control. Imitating the example of Hitler, Saddam set up concentration camps and began to carry out a planned program of genocide against the Kurds.

Saddam, in control of weapons of mass destruction, is today's chief disciple of the infamous Grand Mufti, the Nazi war criminal. Like the Mufti, he will stop at nothing in his quest to annihilate the Jews and defeat the western democracies. His regime is the Nazi principle manifested today in all its horror and inherent evil and like the Nazi's before him, he must be utterly crushed if there is to be any peace.

Saddam Hussein and the Paranormal

His bizarre connections to immortality, UFOs
and Planet X

Jun 22 2004

Saddam Hussein has been captured alive in Iraq. That will come as no surprise to many Iraqis who believe (perhaps not as strongly as they once did) that he never will die - because they believe Saddam is immortal.

As often happens with figures prominent in the news - especially figures as notorious as Saddam Hussein - stories, legends and rumors of a paranormal nature tend to surface. With regard to Saddam, some say he possesses mystical, super-human powers, that he is the reincarnation of a great ancient king, that he bio-engineered giant scorpions, and that was tinkering with alien UFO technology and even sheltered extraterrestrials.

Saddam and Nebuchadnezzar

Saddam believes he is the literal reincarnation of King Nebuchadnezzar II, according to "investigative mythologist" William Henry and others. Nebuchadnezzar II is considered by historians to have been one of the greatest kings of ancient Babylon (now Iraq), who ruled that land from 605 to 562 BC. Credited with building the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Nebuchadnezzar created an era of prosperity for Babylon, undertaking great construction projects, including temples, shrines, fortification walls and pyramids, and making Babylon the most powerful nation in the world. Saddam saw himself in the same role. "Saddam is saying he is the reincarnated Nebuchadnezzar," writes Henry in Saddam Hussein, the Stairway to Heaven and the Return of Planet X. "He is attempting to recreate and outdo the feats of the biblical king."

Although some researchers say Saddam only considers himself the latest in a line of great kings, in the tradition of Nebuchadnezzar, Henry contends there is evidence Saddam promoted himself as the actual reincarnated king:

"It is well known that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has connected himself with Nebuchadnezzar, spending over $500 million during the 1980s on the reconstruction and the re-establishment of ancient Babylon, the capitol of Nebuchadnezzar. Over sixty million bricks have been made to place in the walls of Babylon, each engraved with the inscription 'To King Nebuchadnezzar in the reign of Saddam Hussein.'"

Saddam and Planet X

William Henry also believes there is a connection between Saddam and Planet X, the alleged "12th Planet." This phantom planet, Nibiru, maintains Zecharia Sitchin in his many books on the subject, was the home of the Elohim - the gods of antiquity and Genesis - who created humanity through genetic manipulation.

"Saddam controls an asset infinitely more important and powerful than oil, or even, nuclear weapons," writes Henry. "He controls access to the temples that housed the history [of] humanity's origins, and potentially, the secrets of stargates. Buried deep beneath the sands of Iraq are the secrets of the Shining Ones of Planet X. Saddam's actions reveal that he knows the political value of these secrets."

Saddam and UFOs

The war in Iraq isn't about Iraqi freedom, eliminating weapons of mass destruction or even oil, say some UFO researchers. It's because Saddam possessed alien technology from a crashed UFO, and the U.S. didn't want him to have it.

It's a wild accusation that has its roots, perhaps, in a 1998 article that appeared in Joseph Trainor's UFO Roundup:

On Thursday, December 16, 1998, at 2:31 a.m. local time, 'a triangle-shaped pattern of lights' appeared over downtown Baghdad and was picked up by CNN's night-vision video camera.

The lights hovered in position and moved slowly to the right, as Iraqi anti-aircraft tracer fire streaked away into the night. It was described as a V-shaped formation like the one at Phoenix, Arizona on March 13, 1997.

Some UFO followers believe that flying saucer crashed in Iraq. "Top American secret agents have been worried since then that Iraqi president Saddam would break it down to find out how to build his own spaceship and weapons, they claim," said a New Zealand web article.

Then a story surfaced that an American F-16 had shot down a UFO over Saudi Arabia sometime during the 1990-91 Operation Desert Storm. The convoluted, mixed-up story says that the downed alien craft was recovered by the U.S. military and flown to the U.S., but that no alien bodies were found. The connection to Saddam is that the UFO was allegedly heading toward Baghdad when it was shot down. This, supposedly, bolstered the rumor that Saddam played host to extraterrestrials.

An Arab reporter named Mohammed Daud al-Hayyat is quoted as saying, "There are talks about extraterrestrials in Iraq... It is rumored at a market in Sulaimaniya, to the south of Zarzi, that aliens are Saddam's guests."

And another reporter, Mohammed Hajj al-Amdar, said, "Saddam gave the aliens sanctuary, so that they couldn't be captured by Americans. They say that the aliens created 'watchdogs' for Saddam. The aliens took ordinary desert scorpions and used their bio-engineering to grow the scorpions to giant size. Scorpions of a cow-size! They are wonderful watchdogs: they blend in with the desert, swiftly and silently move on their warm-blooded prey for a decisive attack. Luckless intruders hear just some strange sound from behind stones, then a pincer crushes their necks, another pincer crushes their legs; then the victims is slammed to the ground and beaten with a barbed tail six or seven times. Death comes almost immediately."

Saddam, the Immortal

According to an interesting article by Sudarsan Raghavan for Mercury News, many Iraqis believe that Saddam Hussein cannot be killed. It is a belief that has been reinforced by his uncanny ability to survive whatever bombs we drop on him. He survived (or was allowed to survive, depending on who you listen to) the first Gulf War, slipping through George Bush Sr.'s grip and remaining in power. Then he managed to evade the heavy bombs dropped in the early days of this "War for Iraqi Freedom" when coalition forces had reliable intelligence that he was meeting with his cabinet in a certain government building.

Even now that he has been captured, many Iraqis remain convinced that Saddam is immortal.

What gives him this mystical power? A magic blue stone.

Saddam had this magic stone made, so the story goes, by his favorite fortuneteller not long after he came to power 24 years ago. To be sure the stone was effective, it was tested first with a chicken. The stone was somehow placed inside the chicken, then a soldier fired at it at point-blank range. All of its feathers were blown off, but the protected chicken survived. So Saddam had the magic stone implanted in the upper section of one of his arms, protecting him from any assault, including bullets and bombs.

"That belief," writes Raghaven in the article, "common throughout Iraq, presents uncommon challenges for U.S. and British forces as they try to persuade Iraqis that Saddam is gone and will not return. Without a body to display, it may be impossible to overcome the mythical creation of a propaganda apparatus that was bent on showing he was a worthy heir to a long line of Babylonian kings."

An Iraqi army deserter named Adnan Mohammad Yousef told Raghaven that Saddam has seven lives and cannot die. He illustrated that belief with a story about an attempted assassination of Saddam by one of his Republican Guard. When the soldier pointed the gun at the dictator and pulled the trigger, it jammed. Saddam then allegedly grabbed the gun, pointed it at the soldier, saying, "This is how you do it," and shot him dead.

His capture has shown that Saddam has once again escaped death - magic blue stone or no.

What are we to make of these somewhat comical tales of Saddam and the paranormal? At best they should be taken with a Gibralter-sized grain of salt or, at the least, extreme skepticism, if considered at all. They are undoubtedly examples of how government propaganda machines can use paranormal themes and superstition to instill fear, maintain control and further a cause.

Saddam’s magic stone
May 25, 2005

The Sun, a British tabloid that published pictures of imprisoned, former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his underwear may have missed something more intriguing than Saddam's BVDs.

While the `Butcher of Baghdad’ has long been a stone around the neck of his own people, it is ironic to consider that sorcerers say he wears one of their stones around his own neck.

One of his palace-seers-for-rent purportedly made for Saddam, a special talisman to keep the Grim Reaper at bay. Some say it’s a magic stone worn like a necklace. Others contend he had it implanted under the skin on his arm.

Tyrants throughout history, including Adolf Hitler maintained life long love affairs with the occult. Saddam’s mother, Sabha was a peasant woman who sometimes moonlighted as a fortune-teller.

Saddam comes to the black arts naturally.

Incredibly, he once ordered Baghdad University to set up a department of parapsychology when plain psychology may have been more in order. The university’s Saddam ordered discipline of study was launched to investigate methods to use in the Iran-Iraq war, and later to `mind-read’ UN inspectors searching for WMDs in Iraq.

While some of us have aunties who read tea leaves, Saddam "studied the sands", where he summoned up jinn (genies) to do his bidding. Supposed to have inherited some of his mother’s psychic gifts, Saddam was believed by many people in Iraq to have seven jinn lined up for his personal protection. According to these people, Saddam spoke daily with the king and queen of the jinn, who actually advised him.

Saddam’s emotionally unstable son, Uday also dabbled in the occult. Uday once advertised on his own TV station, asking magicians and psychics to come forward to dedicate their services for the protection of the royal family.

An ardent believer in reincarnation, Saddam believes he’s the reincarnated King Nebuchadnezzar, whose legacy to the world were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

But Nebuchadnezzar also restored religious monuments and painstakingly improved canals. How the ancient king would have felt about his reincarnation flooding the ancient desert is a matter of speculation.

If genies let out of the bottle can be relied on for sage military advice, it should surprise no one that Saddam believes in flying saucers.

The things the deposed Iraqi leader believed in the UFO realm could inspire a new science fiction cartoon strip.

Stories about Saddam and Ufology include one about his housing extraterrestrial guests along with magicians in his palaces. These extraterrestrial guests were aliens rescued from a UFO that had crashed in the desert. As the story goes, these aliens taught Saddam and his scientists some awesome biotechnology.

While the free world was cloning Dolly the sheep, Saddam was bioengineering a race of giant scorpions to be employed as guard dogs outside weapons facilities. One ZAP from the scorpions could also prove their reputation as killing machines.

Some conspiracy adherents will never shake the belief that the Iraq war was really all about Saddam having access to `stargates’ to the so-called `Planet X’, or `Nirbiru’, a planet beyond Pluto which is supposed to be the home of the `Elohim’, the angels.

Saddam counts on the power of the sorcerer’s stone to make it impossible for anyone, even the hangman to kill him. He did survive several assassination attempts, including one by Mossad, which rarely misses its target. The infamous Butcher of Baghdad has ducked countless plots, emerged victorious over palace revolts and escaped virtually unscathed from the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War.

The world’s most famous prisoner is more the cat of nine lives fame than he is the reincarnation of King Nebuchadnezzar.

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti
(Arabic: صدام حسين عبد المجيد التكريتي )
was hanged on the first day of Eid ul-Adha,
December 30, 2006 at approximately 6:00 a.m.

US marines offer Babylon apology

Since their deployment in Iraq, the Western forces have occupied various locations within Iraq, ostensibly for the reason of supplying troops with bases from which they can operate. The most well-known of these has been at the ancient and partially buried city of Babylon, and it still beggars belief that such a construction, or indeed any building work, has been permitted at such a historically important site.

The depths of this seemingly cynical disregard for our archaeological heritage seem to have been plumbed with the news that troops have been filling their sandbags with whatever bits and pieces they happened to have found lying on the ground, seemingly oblivious to their true significance.

In defending the building of a helicopter pad onsite, a Colonel John Coleman has sought to justify these actions by saying that the alternative would have seen the site being looted by local people, as has frequently been the case at numerous other sites around the country.

In a further report, there are claims that Russian satellite cameras have detected what is described as a ritual 1 km circle depicting a feathered serpent around the excavations at Babylon. The plumed serpent is well represented in meso-American mythology - it has even been suggested that the name 'America' is derived from the word 'Amaracu', apparently meaning 'Land of the Great Plumed Serpent', while William Henry notes that the old name for Egypt was 'Mera', meaning 'beloved land', so maybe there's a connection there.

According to author Michael Tsarion, one of the real reasons for what he terms as the occult motive for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, is that there are pure-blooded Nephilim - fallen Angels - buried beneath the sands in subterranean caverns, and there is a race on to revive and resurrect them, in a bid to discover their secrets. A similar mission is reported to be in progress, which involves the translation of thousands of clay cuneiform tablets, that allegedly give clues to exotic technology that exploits stargates and space-time manipulation.

The Victory Strategy Räder Proposed to Hitler

Saddam Hussein and the Paranormal

His bizarre connections to immortality, UFOs and Planet X

His bizarre connections to immortality, UFOs
and Planet X