Media Ignore Muslim Brotherhood Role in Fomenting Anti-Jew Hatred and Pro-Hitler Sentiment

  As the mainstream media have reported on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s beliefs, failing to pick up on contradictory claims by its leaders that the Islamist group opposes terrorism, also ignored was the role that the Muslim Brotherhood has long played in fomenting anti-Jew hatred in the Middle East. After Nazi Germany financed and helped build up the previously struggling Brotherhood in the 1930s and 1940s, the group disseminated anti-Jew propaganda and inspired the kind of persecution that sent almost a million Jewish refugees fleeing violence, confiscation of property, and expulsion in Muslim countries between the 1940s and the 1970s. Some even estimate that the land confiscated from Jewish residents in Muslim countries amounts to four times or even five times the total area of the state of Israel. A number of Muslim countries saw their Jewish populations almost completely erased, including Egypt where the number dwindled from about 100,000 Jews to only a couple of hundred.

Even somewhat recently, Brotherhood leaders have made such incendiary statements as praising Adolf Hitler to declaring that Muslims should stop fighting each other and fight against Israel instead. As previously documented by NewsBusters, an interview on CNN's Parker-Spitzer helped reveal the tendency of Muslim Brotherhood leaders to twist the meaning of words, as one leader claimed that the group opposes terrorism and violence but then suggested that Palestinian militants are not engaged in terrorism against Israel but instead "resistance," which he rationalized. He also refused to give a straight answer on whether the group would support adherence to Egypt’s treaty with Israel.

But on the January 31 NBC Nightly News, not picking up on Muslim Brotherhood wordplay, correspondent Richard Engel claimed, "The Muslim Brotherhood denounces terrorism, but supports Islamic law, is anti-Israel, and opposes U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East."

On the February 6 World News Sunday, ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, having just interviewed a high-ranking Muslim Brotherhood member, claimed, "He told us the Brotherhood is not seeking the presidency or any cabinet position, and he says the Brotherhood accepts Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel."

Back to the Parker-Spitzer interview, when Eliot Spitzer asked if the Brotherhood had any connections to terrorist organizations, spokesman Mohammed Morsy claimed that his group opposes violence: "We do not have any kind of relationships with any organization that is practicing violence. We are against violence, wherever it comes from, governments, states, individuals, organizations. This is not acceptable at all."

But, moments later, when asked about Israel and the Palestinians, Morsy justified violent actions against Israel as "resistance" by Palestinians. Morsy: "We do not use violence against anyone. What’s going on on the Palestinian land is resistance. The resistance is acceptable by all mankind, and it’s the right of people to resist imperialism."

In the February 7, 2011, article, "The New Leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in His Own Words," CAMERA’s Steven Stotsky picked up on a translation of Mohammed Badie’s first public address after being chosen as Muslim Brotherhood leader in January 2010. Badie encouraged Muslims to stop fighting each other and fight against Israel instead:

"[The Arab and Muslim regimes] have forgotten, or are pretending to have forgotten, that the real enemy lying in wait for them is the Zionist entity. They are aiming their weapons against their own peoples, while avoiding any confrontation with these Zionists and achieving neither unity nor revival for their nations. Moreover, they are disregarding Allah's commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and [their] lives, so that Allah's word will reign supreme and the infidels' word will be inferior...

"Today the Muslims desperately need a mentality of honor and means of power [that will enable them] to confront global Zionism. [This movement] knows nothing but the language of force, so [the Muslims] must meet iron with iron, and winds with [even more powerful] storms. They crucially need to understand that the improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life."

As he complained about the most recent negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, Badie declared that "Resistance is the only solution."

Stotsky also cited the Carnegie Guide to Egypt’s Elections as having related that "Badie’s election was generally viewed as a victory for the Brotherhood’s conservative wing and a marginalization of its reformist trend."

In the February 16, 2011, article, "Tariq Ramadan Obscures the Truth About Muslim Brotherhood," CAMERA's Dexter Van Zile recounted Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusef Qaradawi’s recent history of expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler:

Then there are the public statements of Yusef Qaradawi, who was twice offered the position of Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood and who is described as the movement's spiritual leader or father figure. In January 2009 he stated that Hitler was a "divine tool" sent to punish the Jewish people for their sins. He also called on Allah to "take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one." (Qaradawi, who is mentioned nowhere in Ramadan's piece, offered a prayer in the 1995 funeral of Tariq's father, Said Ramadan.)

The same article also relates German Professor and author Matthias Kuntzel's contention that anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle East was fomented by the Muslim Brotherhood:

"The Muslim Brotherhood was also responsible for stoking anti-Jewish hostility – not just in Palestine – but in Egypt as well. Matthias Küntzel, author of Jihad and Jew Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (2009, Telos), reports that the Muslim Brotherhood was a "driving force" behind "a shift in direction in Egypt from a rather neutral or pro-Jewish mood to a rabidly anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish one, a shift that changed the whole Arab world and affects it to this day." This shift, Küntzel states, took place between 1925 and 1945 and was stoked by a 1936 boycott against Jewish business owners in Egypt organized by the Muslim Brotherhood. Küntzel writes "In mosques, schools, and workplaces, the Brotherhood worked up the believers with the legend that the Jews and British wished to destroy the holy places of Jerusalem, tear up the Koran, and trample it underfoot." (Page 21)"

In the September 17, 2007, Weekly Standard article, "Jew-Hatred and Jihad; The Nazi Roots of the 9/11 Attack," Matthias Kuntzel recounted the Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, and Nazi ally Amin al-Husseini, and its role in stirring up violence against Jews in the Middle East:

After World War II it became apparent that the center of global Jew-hatred was shifting from Nazi Germany to the Arab world. In November 1945, just half a year after the end of the Third Reich, the Muslim Brothers carried out the worst anti-Jewish pogroms in Egypt's history, when demonstrators penetrated the Jewish quarters of Cairo on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. They ransacked houses and shops, attacked non-Muslims, and torched the synagogues. Six people were killed, and some hundred more injured. A few weeks later the Islamists' newspapers "turned to a frontal attack against the Egyptian Jews, slandering them as Zionists, Communists, capitalists and bloodsuckers, as pimps and merchants of war, or in general, as subversive elements within all states and societies," as Gudrun Krämer wrote in her study The Jews in Egypt 1914-1952.

In 1946, the Brotherhood made sure that Heinrich Himmler's friend Amin al-Husseini, the former grand mufti who was being sought as a war criminal by Britain and the United States, was granted asylum and a new lease on political life in Egypt. As leader of the Palestine National Movement, al-Husseini had been a close ally of both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazis. Based in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, he had directed the Muslim SS divisions in the Balkans and had been personally responsible for blocking negotiations late in the war that might have saved thousands of Jewish children from the gas chambers. All this was known in 1946. Nonetheless, Britain and the United States chose to forgo criminal prosecution of al-Husseini in order to avoid spoiling their relations with the Arab world. France, which was holding al-Husseini, deliberately let him get away.

For many in the Arab world, what amounted to amnesty for this prominent Islamic authority who had spent the war years broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Berlin was a vindication of his actions. They started to view his Nazi past with pride, not shame, and Nazi criminals on the wanted list in Europe now flooded into the Arab world. Large print-runs of the most infamous libel of the Jews, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were published in the following decades at the behest of two well-known former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Both the Muslim Brothers' unconditional solidarity with al-Husseini and their anti-Jewish riots mere months after Auschwitz show that the Brotherhood did not object, to say the least, to Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

In the January 31, 2011, American Thinker article, "Why We Should Fear the Moslem Brother," Karin McQuillan recounted:

What you haven't been told is this: the Moslem Brothers were a small, unpopular group of anti-modern fanatics unable to attract members, until they were adopted by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich beginning in the 1930s. Under the tutelage of the Third Reich, the Brothers started the modern jihadi movement, complete with a genocidal program against Jews. In the words of Matthias Kuntzel, "[t]he significance of the Brotherhood to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas."

What is equally ominous for Jews and Israel is that despite Mubarak's pragmatic coexistence with Israel for the last thirty years, every Egyptian leader from Nasser through Sadat to Mubarak has enshrined Nazi Jew-hatred in mainstream Egyptian culture out of both conviction and political calculation. Nasser, trained by Nazis as a youth, spread the genocidal conspiracy theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, making it a bestseller throughout the Arab world. On the Ramadan following 9/11, Mubarak presided over a thirty-week-long TV series dramatizing Elders and its genocidal message.

She later continued:

In the 1930s, the Third Reich poured men, money, weapons, and propaganda training into the Moslem Brotherhood. It was the Reich that taught the fundamentalists to focus their anger on the Jews instead of on women. By war's end, thanks entirely to Hitler's tutelage and direct support, the brotherhood had swelled to a million members, and Jew-hatred had become central to mainstream Arab culture. Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini listened daily to the Nazi propaganda broadcast from Berlin by Moslem Brother Haj Amin al-Husseini. So did every Arab with a radio, throughout the war, as it was the most popular programming in the Middle East. Thanks to Hitler, the Moslem Brothers enshrined anti-Semitism as the main organizing force of Middle East politics for the next eighty years.