Nazis und der Nahe Osten: Wie der Islamische Antisemitismus Entstand by Matthias Küntzel (review)

Nazis und der Nahe Osten is an important book, one that builds on almost two decades of writing by one of Germany's bravest and most important scholars. In 2003, ca ira, a small left-liberal publisher in Freiburg, Germany published Matthias Küntzel's Jihad und Judenhass: Über die neuen antijüdischen Krieg (Jihad and Jew-Hatred: On the New Anti-Jewish War). In its 183 pages, Küntzel traced the ideological lineage of the Al Qaeda terrorists of 9/11 from the Arab collaborators with Nazi Germany, the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1940s to the 1960s, to the Hamas Charter of 1988, and then to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In 2007, Telos Press in the United States published a revised and expanded English translation entitled Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. As I was working on the anti-Jewish propaganda of the Nazi regime and shared Küntzel's views of the reactionary character of Islamist ideology, I agreed to write the foreword to the American edition.

Jihad and Jew-Hatred, together with Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, was one of the most important works published in Europe and the United States on Islamism and terror in the decade following the 9/11 attacks. Where Berman focused on the writings of Sayyid Qutb, Küntzel brought the issue of Nazism and its aftereffects to the fore, confronting his German readers with some of the factual record that connected Nazi Germany to Haj Amin el-Husseini and the Moslem Brotherhood. Since then, Küntzel, a professor at a technical college in Hamburg, has produced a steady stream of essays on antisemitism, Islamism, and the conflict in the Middle East. In 2012 he published Deutschland, Iran und die Bombe, a work that Telos Press published in the United States as Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold. All of these works are notable for careful empirical research, compelling writing, and a focus on the threats to Israel and to Jews coming from Islamist organizations and the government of Iran. At a time when some conventional wisdom in the universities rejected such work as a form of "Islamophobia," Küntzel was an important leader of a group of scholars and writers in Europe, Britain, the United States, and Israel who insisted that, on the contrary, doing so was the logical result of rejection of all kinds of racism and antisemitism no matter what their origins (on the reluctance of some other German scholars to address these issues, see Jeffrey Herf, "Drei Gesichter des Antisemitismus," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [March 26, 2020]).

Nazis und der Nahe Osten emerges as well from a specific intellectual and political context in Germany created in part by the arrival of a million refugees, mostly from Syria, who came to Germany in 2015. Küntzel notes that scholars at research institutions, such as the Center for Research on Antisemitism (Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung) at the Technical University of Berlin, have been reluctant to address the issue of Islamic or Islamist antisemitism or argue that doing so is either unjustified or counterproductive as it exacerbates radicalization of young Muslims. Right-wing populists in the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party gladly denounce Islamists—and Islam—but Küntzel writes that the racism of the AfD damages the "fight against Islamist antisemitism" (15). Mainstream parties have been reluctant to speak more frankly about the connections between Islamism and antisemitism, to acknowledge that antisemitism in Germany is coming increasingly from Muslim immigrants, and to ban the activities of Hezbollah in Germany. With Nazis und der Nahe Osten Küntzel proposes a "differentiated" perspective that avoids the apologias that suggest Islam and its interpretations have nothing to do with antisemitism or conversely that it is its inherent cause. This book, he writes, was made necessary in part "because for decades the...