Herman Deparice-Okomba, CPRLV’s Executive Director, in the upper left corner and, from left to right, Youssef Qaradawi, the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, an important ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Adolf Hitler.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART 1 – Highlights
PART 2 – Introduction
PART 3 – The CPRLV collaborates with Islamist leaders and organizations whose ideologues praise Hitler
PART 4 – Hitler and other Nazi leaders’ admiration for Islam
PART 5 – Jean-François Revel recalls the accusations of ‘fascism’ levelled by communists in lieu of replies against their critics
PART 1 – Highlights
The Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence (CPRLV) and its Executive Director Herman Deparice-Okomba are accusing critics of the Islamist threat in Quebec of holding ‘fascist,’ ‘neo-fascist,’ and ‘neo-Nazi’ views. However, until now the Centre’s claims have remained unsubstantiated.
However, for its part, the CPRLV has collaborated with at least two Islamist organizations and one leader whose ideologues openly praise the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, very often for his extermination campaign against the Jews, sometimes out of other motives.
On at least three occasions in 2015-2016, the CPRLV has collaborated with the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC), the main Muslim Brotherhood representative in Canada. On January 5, 2016, Herman Deparice-Okomba went to get advice from MAC’s Imam, Hussein Amer. On its website, the MAC presents itself as a disciple of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan Al-Banna, and it vows to apply his doctrine in Canada. Yet, at the end of the Second World War, when Amin Al-Husseini succeeded in reaching Egypt after escaping from France where he was detained for his collaboration with the Nazis during the war, Hassan Al-Banna praised him as a hero for having been an ally of Hitler. During the Second World War, Al-Husseini even met Hitler in person in 1941 to talk about the extermination campaign against the Jews, among other things. Al-Husseini worked closely with the Nazis, first as a propagandist for the Reich during his radio broadcasts directed at the Muslim world from Berlin, and as a key recruiter of young Muslims to set up an SS division in the Balkans. Hassan Al-Banna also positively referred to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in at least two essays.
On June 15, 2016, during the International Economic Forum of the Americas held in Montreal, Alan Shepard, a board member of the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, moderated a roundtable featuring Stavros Yiannouka, the CEO of WISE, a Qatar Foundation organization. The Qatar Foundation financially supports a centre for the study of sharia named after the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide, Youssef Qaradawi, and of which he is the main scholar. In 2009, on the Al-Jazeera Qatari network, Youssef Qaradawi claimed that Hitler was sent by Allah to punish the Jews and that he hopes the next massacre of Jews will be at the hands of Muslims.
On January 30, 2016, CPRLV Executive Director, Herman Deparice-Okomba, accepted an invitation to take part in a roundtable with Abdelaziz (Aziz) Djaout. In the past, Aziz Djaout worked as an advisor to the MAC and he collaborated on one of its publications. Djaout also collaborates with Adil Charkaoui. In a text published in 2006 (pp.15-16), Aziz Djaout endorsed Sayyid Qutb, an important Muslim Brotherhood’s ideologue and, in June 2017, he praised Youssef Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide, as “the very honorable sheik Youssef Qaradawi.” Both Qutb and Qaradawi praised Hitler for his extermination campaign against the Jews. In his text Our struggle with the Jews (p.361), Sayyid Qutb presents Hitler as an envoy of Allah who came to rule over the Jews.
PART 2 – Introduction
For many years, Islamists and their fellow travellers have tried to intimidate and silence those who warn against the Islamist threat by calling us ‘Islamophobic,’ ‘racist,’ and ‘far-right’ extremists.
This already overwrought terminology was not enough for the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence (CPRLV) and its Executive Director Herman Deparice-Okomba. They are now invoking the ‘fascist,’ ‘neo-fascist,’ and ‘neo-Nazi’ motives of those opposing the Islamist threat in Quebec.
Herman Deparice-Okomba invoked the ‘neo-Nazi’ threat posed by anti-Islamists in reply to a question by Mohamed Kaci on TV5 Monde on February 13, 2017. View the video and its presentation.
VIDEO 2:46 Herman Deparice-Okomba (CPRLV): [Translation] Today in Quebec, 20, 25 far right groups have been identified having approximately 150, 200 members. For the most part, these groups profess anti-immigration views, and have a more or less neo-Nazi and religious discourse, I would say. In fact, their discourse is nationalist [‘identitaire’] and is mostly concerned with immigration issues. Certain people use the vulnerability of some of our fellow citizens to polarize the debate on immigration. They claim that unemployment in Quebec is caused by immigration, that the Quebec identity is threatened by immigration, etc. This is the same discourse that neo-fascist groups had in Quebec in 1989-90, except that, at that time, they were targeting the Jewish community and the Black community. Today, the ideology remains the same but the target has changed: it is now the Arab Muslim community.
The CPRLV’s website also mentions that ‘fascism’ lures those opposed to the Islamist threat. Open the window below Right-Wing Extremism on the CPRLV’s website for the full description.
The opposition to Islamist totalitarianism does not make an individual a ‘fascist’ or a ‘neo-Nazi.’ Quite the opposite. Fascism and Nazism are very specific political ideologies associated with the names Hitler, Mussolini, Salazar, Gentile, etc.
Texts and speeches celebrating the memory and the program of Hitler, in particular, do not come from anti-Islamists but from ideologues endorsed by Islamist leaders and organizations collaborating with the CPRLV. These Islamist ideologues very often praise Hitler for his extermination campaign against the Jews, sometimes for other motives.
In 2004, the American neo-Nazi William W. Baker was invited to address the annual Islamist RIS convention that takes place in Toronto. Over the years, the RIS convention has become the largest event organized by the Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure in Canada. The presence of the neo-Nazi leader at the Islamist convention was covered by the Ottawa Citizen on January 12, 2004 but it is mostly in 2012 that it was highlighted by several media after Justin Trudeau agreed to address the same convention that year. In 2012, the RIS convention was sponsored by IRFAN-Canada, the fund collector of the terrorist organization Hamas, until the bad publicity forced it to withdraw its sponsorship. In 2014, IRFAN itself was designated as a ‘terrorist entity’ by the Government of Canada.
According to the Orange County Weekly published in California (OC Weekly), during William W. Baker’s term as president of the Populist Party, his party’s program advocated the enactment of laws based on those of Nuremberg (1935), in the Nazi era, to prevent racial minorities from influencing media and the culture: “The Populist Party will not permit any racial minority, through control of the media, culture distortion or revolutionary political activity, to divide or factionalize [sic] the majority of the society-nation in which the minority lives.”
In recent years, Point de Bascule has highlighted endorsements given to racists by our professional antiracists:
Point de Bascule (April 7, 2017): During his visit to Montreal, former Tunisian President Marzouki justifies limiting constitutional rights of “Jews, Berbers, Blacks, and others” in Tunisia (Article in French / (Haroun Bouazzi and Sol Zanetti met with Mr. Marzouki during his visit in Montreal.)
Abdelghani Dades (Atlas.Mtl – September 30, 2010): “We bring thinker Ibn Khaldun’s timeless ideas in our luggage” (Abdelghani Dades is the editor of the Montreal-based bi-weekly Atlas.Mtl and a member of the Council of the Moroccan Community living abroad / CCME, a substructure of the Government of Morocco.)
Ibn Khaldun: “Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little that is [essentially] human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.” (Part 1 – p.309 Google Books) Elsewhere, Ibn Khaldun compared black people to “fierce animals.” (p.169)
PART 3 – The CPRLV collaborates with Islamist leaders and organizations whose ideologues praise Hitler
While it criticizes anti-Islamist organizations in Quebec for their fascist and neo-Nazi leanings, the CPRLV collaborates with Islamist leaders and organizations whose ideologues openly endorse the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Here are three cases that we have noticed.
QATAR FOUNDATION
The Qatar Foundation / Archive.Today and the Qatari newspaper Gulf Times / Archive.Today reported that, on June 15, 2016, during the International Economic Forum of the Americas held in Montreal, Alan Shepard, a board member of the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, moderated a roundtable featuring Stavros Yiannouka, the CEO of WISE, a Qatar Foundation organization.
The Qatar Foundation was founded by the Emir of Qatar and his second wife in 1995. Qatar is recognized as a sponsor of international terrorism. The foundation financially supports a centre for the study of sharia named after the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide, Youssef Qaradawi, and of which he is the main scholar. Qaradawi promotes the Islamic conquest of the West; he has justified suicide operations, the murder of Muslims who abandon Islam and other acts of violence that conform to sharia law.
As for the support for Hitler that is the main concern of this article, in 2009, on the Al-Jazeera Qatari network, Youssef Qaradawi claimed that Hitler was sent by Allah to punish the Jews and that he hopes the next massacre of Jews will be at the hands of Muslims.
Point de Bascule provided more information about the Qatar Foundation’s organizational chart and other totalitarian positions of its main scholar Qaradawi in a recent article entitled: In 2016, the Montreal-based Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization’s Board member Alan Shepard moderated a roundtable featuring the CEO of a Qatar Foundation organization.
On October 30, 2015, the Qatar Foundation invited Tariq Al-Hawwas to give a sermon at the organization’s main mosque in Doha (Qatar). The Qatar Foundation made the announcement on its Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. Tariq al-Hawwas has delivered several televised diatribes against Jews, saying in 2013: “if only Hitler had finished them off, thus relieving humanity of them.”
MUSLIM ASSOCIATION OF CANADA
The CPRLV has also collaborated with leaders of the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC). The MAC is the main Muslim Brotherhood representative in Canada. In 2014, the Director of its Education Department, Chiheb Battikh, was sentenced to six years in jail for the kidnapping for ransom ($500,000) of a rich businessman’s grandson in a Montreal park
Here are three examples of collaboration between MAC’s leaders and the CPRLV:
NOVEMBER 22, 2015 – The president of the Canadian Muslim Forum (CMF), Samer Majzoub, and the organization’s spokesperson took part in the launch of the CPRLV. After Samer Majzoub criticized Quebec Premier Couillard for highlighting the connection between Islam and terrorism after a resident of Montreal attacked a police officer in Michigan while shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ in June 2017, Point de Bascule dedicated an article to highlighting Majzoub’s links with the MAC and the CMF and listed several of MAC’s past public positions.
JANUARY 5, 2016 – Herman Deparice-Okomba went to get advice from the Quebec Council of Imams. MAC’s Imam, Hussein Amer, was present at the meeting, as confirmed by a picture of the event. Among the other Imams at the meeting, there were Ahmed Kandil, who justifies the killing of Muslims who abandon Islam and Said Fawaz, a representative of the Muslim World League under Saudi influence. The Muslim World League actively promotes armed jihad in order to enforce the principles of Islam.
MARCH 5, 2016 – The CPRLV’s Research Team Leader, Benjamin Ducol, took part in a roundtable with Samer Majzoub from the MAC and the Canadian Muslim Forum. Samer Majzoub and the Canadian Muslim Forum reported the information on their Twitter accounts.
The MAC endorses Syed Maududi, a key ideologue of the Islamic State, who justifies the rape of female prisoners of war and who describes the mission of Islam as being “to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam regardless of the country or the Nation that rules it.”
On its website, the MAC presents itself as a disciple of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan Al-Banna, and it vows to apply his doctrine in Canada.
Muslim Association of Canada: “MAC’s […] modern roots can be traced to the Islamic revival of the early twentieth century, culminating in the movement of the Muslim Brotherhood. […] MAC adopts and strives to implement Islam, as embodied in the Qur’an, and the teachings of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and as understood in its contemporary context by the late Imam, Hassan Albanna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. MAC regards this ideology as the best representation of Islam as delivered by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).”
In his writings, Hassan Al-Banna endorsed Hitler and he collaborated with Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who closely worked with the Nazis, first as a propagandist for the Reich during his radio broadcasts directed at the Muslim world from Berlin, and as a key recruiter of young Muslims to set up an SS division in the Balkans. Amin Al-Husseini and Hitler met on November 28, 1941 to discuss the program for the extermination of the Jews, among other subjects.
Official accounts of two meetings that took place on November 28, 1941 between Amin Al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler and Amin Husseini and Joachim Ribbentrop, the Reich’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, are available on Point de Bascule. They were translated and published by a U.S. government agency in 1964.
In his exchange with Al-Husseini in 1941, Hitler assured him that Germany “stood for uncompromising war against the Jews.” (p.882)
Watch the video in French of the November 28, 1941 meeting between Amin Al-Husseini and Hitler that was broadcast by the collaborationist regime in Vichy (France).
In his radio broadcasts directed at Arab countries during the war, Al-Husseini made many calls in favor of a genocide against the Jews. On March 1st, 1944, Al-Husseini made the following call: ”Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.”
At the end of the war, after Switzerland refused his request for asylum, French authorities arrested Al-Husseini and transferred him to Paris. France refused to extradite him to Great Britain or Yugoslavia, which wanted to sue him for his collaboration with the Nazis. After one year in France, Al-Husseini managed to escape and reached Cairo.
According to a document published by the American National Archives (Hitlers Shadow / p.22), France was an accomplice in Husseini’s escape to Egypt.
Upon his arrival in Egypt, Al-Husseini was greeted by Hassan Al-Banna, the Muslim leader presented by the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) as its mentor. Al-Banna’s message was reported by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA, on July 23, 1946. It is reproduced by Jeffrey Herf in his book about the Nazi propaganda aimed at the Arab world during the Second World War. Click on the image to your right to enlarge it.
Hassan Al-Banna: “It is said that Al-Sayed Amin Al-Husseini has left France and has arrived in an Arab country. Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimin [The Muslim Brotherhood] and all Arabs request the Arab League on which Arab hopes are pinned, to declare that the Mufti is welcome to stay in any Arab country he may choose and that great welcome should be extended to him wherever he goes, as a sign of appreciation for his great services for the glory of Islam and the Arabs.
[…] Oh Amin! What a great, stubborn, terrific, wonderful man you are! […] Hitler’s and Mussolini’s defeat did not frighten you. Your hair did not turn grey of fright and you are still full of life and fight.What a hero, what a miracle of a man. We wish to know what the Arab youth, Cabinet Ministers, rich men, and princes of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli are doing to be worthy of this hero. Yes, this hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle.
[…] The armies of colonization occupied Germany and hoped to catch Amin, but he was too clever for them. He managed to escape to France and now he returns to his people to resume the struggle against the criminal British and against Zionism.”
By praising Al-Husseini’s struggle alongside Hitler and Nazi Germany and his decision “to continue the struggle” at the end of the Second World War, Hassan Al-Banna announced that Al-Husseini’s struggle was also his own. This conclusion is all the more justified given that Al-Banna asked what the Arab world could do to be “worthy of” Amin Al-Husseini. In 1946, when Al-Banna praised Al-Husseini, the latter’s reputation was attributable, for the large part at the time, to his collaboration with the Nazi regime.
In at least two essays, Al-Banna positively referred to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
In his text To what do we invite humanity?, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna, presented Adolf Hitler as a model to Muslims looking for “success and fortune.” The other personalities praised by Al-Banna in this essay are all Muslim war leaders.
In his Epistle to the Youth, Al-Banna compared the role of Hitler’s Reich vis-à-vis German citizens to the role of Islam vis-à-vis Muslims.
Tariq Ramadan mentioned the collaboration between Hassan Al-Banna and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler’s ally, in a video (0:53) dedicated to the life of his grandfather Al-Banna. In a book published in 2002, Tariq Ramadan gave an unconditional support to the ideas of his grandfather Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Avedis Derounian (alias John Roy Carlson / 1909 – 1991) went to the Middle East as a journalist in 1948 and he met many key personalities including Hassan Al-Banna and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al-Husseini. In his book Cairo to Damascus [Read Books, 2008, p.112), he points out that, during the war, Egyptians who were favorable towards Hitler chanted a slogan associating him with Allah: «Bissama Allah, ala’ alaid Hitler» (Allah in heaven, Hitler on earth).
Amin Al-Husseini and Hitler met on November 28, 1941. The Vichy regime publicized this meeting in a short newsreel report in French. The video is available (left picture). Recently, pictures of Al-Husseini visiting Nazis camps were auctioned in Israel (right picture).
PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION
In 2010, the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) that collaborates with the CPRLV, invited Salah Sultan to take part in the activities of its ‘family camp’ in Hérouxville (Quebec). In the past, Salah Sultan predicted the ruin and the destruction of the United States on Egyptian television and he quoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a proof that Jews want “to rule and corrupt the entire world” (video – transcript). Salah Sultan is an important Muslim Brotherhood leader from Egypt who lived in the U.S. between 1998 and 2007 and belongs to the International Union of Muslim Scholars led by the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual guide Youssef Qaradawi.
The reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as if it were an authentic document constitutes another convergence point for Nazis and Islamists. The Protocols are mentioned by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (p.228) that was published in two parts in 1925-26, after the inauthenticity of the Protocols’ inauthenticity had been demonstrated in 1921. Article 32 in the Hamas’ Charter (1988) also refers to it as an authentic document. Closer to home, in 2014, Quebec-based Imam Hamza Chaoui condemned the World Soccer Cup as part of a Jewish plan of world domination based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The Encyclopædia Britannica / Archive.Today reports that “The spurious character of the Protocols was first revealed in 1921 by Philip Graves of The Times (London), who demonstrated their obvious resemblance to a satire by the French lawyer Maurice Joly on Napoleon III published in 1864 and entitled Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu).”
The three articles published by the Times (London) in 1921 on the fraudulent nature of the Protocols are available on the internet / Archive.Today.
ABDELAZIZ (AZIZ) DJAOUT
On January 30, 2016, CPRLV Executive Director, Herman Deparice-Okomba, agreed to take part in a roundtable with Abdelaziz (Aziz) Djaout. The latter took part in the event as member of the University of Montreal’s Research Chair in management of the cultural and religious diversity. Solange Lefebvre, who holds the Chair, also took part in the meeting. In 2007-2008, she was a member of the Advisory Committee to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodations (p.302). Click to view the announcement of the 2016 roundtable and a report on the meeting.
Aziz Djaout gave his support to at least two Islamist ideologues who endorsed Hitler in the past. In a chapter that he signed in a book published in 2006 (pp.15-16), Djaout defends Sayyid Qutb, an important Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, by stating that his conception of Islam never led him to advocate violence. Djaout wrote: “[Translation] Without ever advocating violence, the logic of Qutb…” However, there are several justifications for the use of violence against non-Muslims in Qutb’s writings.
In his Koranic commentary (Tafsir / pp.351-353), Qutb gives an elaborate justification for resorting to violence, not to convert non-Muslims to Islam but to impose an Islamic social order.
In Chapter 4 of his book Milestones, Qutb gives the following reply to those who exclude the use of violence to ensure the triumph of Islam and who present jihad as an exclusively defensive war:
Sayyid Qutb: As to persons who attempt to defend the concept of Islamic Jihad by interpreting it in the narrow sense of the current concept of defensive war, and who do research to prove that the battles fought in Islamic Jihad were all for the defense of the homeland of Islam – some of them considering the homeland of Islam to be just the Arabian peninsula against the aggression of neighboring powers – they lack understanding of the nature of Islam and its primary aim. Such an attempt is nothing but a product of a mind defeated by the present difficult conditions and by the attacks of the treacherous orientalists on the Islamic Jihad.
[…] It would be naive to assume that a call is raised to free the whole of humankind throughout the earth, and it is confined to preaching and exposition.
In his text Our struggle with the Jews (p.361), Sayyid Qutb presents Hitler as an envoy of Allah who came to rule over the Jews:
Sayyid Qutb: Whenever the Children of Israel reverted to evildoing in the land, punishment awaited them. The Sunna is resolute here: “If you return, then We return.”
And the Jews did indeed return to evildoing so Allah gave the Muslims power over them. The Muslims then expelled them from the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. […] Then the Jews again returned to evildoing and consequently Allah sent against them others of his servants, until the modern period. Then Allah brought Hitler to rule over them.
Aziz Djaout also collaborates with Adil Charkaoui (jointly signed text – video – photo), another supporter of the Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Adil Charkaoui gave a lecture entitled “Sayyid Qutb: the reformer Imam” in July 2016. As we have already mentioned in a commentary on this lecture, when Islamists use the term ‘reformer,’ they do not mean a person who wants to reform Islam in order to adapt it to a new reality but rather a person who wants to reform the approach used at a given time to apply the principles of Islam that they consider timeless.
In 2015, in Niger, Tariq Ramadan stated that “What I want to reform is your head, not Islam! Islam does not need reforms.” In his book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (p.26), Tariq Ramadan describes Sayyid Qutb as one of the main representatives of the ‘Salafi reformism’ trend of Islam to which he belongs himself.
On June 5, 2017, Aziz Djaout also endorsed the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide Youssef Qaradawi by describing him as “the very honorable sheikh Youssef Qaradawi” on Facebook. As a collaborator of Le Rappel (Look for ‘Rédaction’) published by the Muslim Association of Canada for young French-speaking Muslims, he took part in the September 2007 edition that described Qaradawi’s book The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam as “a work of extraordinary shrewdness” («un ouvrage d’une extraordinaire finesse»). In this book, Qaradawi states that the hijab serves to distinguish women who must not be molested from others (“and not be molested”).
The positive description of Hitler given by Qaradawi and his wish that the next massacre of Jews will be at the hands of Muslims has been covered in a previous section of this article dedicated to the participation of a CPRLV board member at a roundtable with the CEO of a Qatar Foundation’s organization.
In January 2016, Aziz Djaout called Point de Bascule a “notoriously Islamophobic website” («site notoirement islamophobe») and, in January 2017, an anti-Islamophobic Foundation which he set up included Point de Bascule in a list of «well organized far right groups» (pp.3-4).
Nowhere has Aziz Djaout explained how Point de Bascule’s and others’ fear regarding, among others, the justifications for the genocide of Jews brought by ideologues whom he promotes, such as Qaradawi and Qutb is unfounded (irrational). Yet, it is the very characteristic of a ‘phobia’ and of Islamophobia, in particular, to be an unfounded (irrational) fear as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) highlighted. Look for ‘unfounded fear’.
PART 4 – Hitler and other Nazi leaders’ admiration for Islam
Hitler’s meetings with Amin Al-Husseini and other Muslim leaders led him to develop an admiration for Islam according to what Albert Speer wrote in his Memoirs. Speer was the Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany.
Albert Speer: Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. The Germanic peoples would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. […] Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking: ‘You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?’
Other high-ranking Nazi personalities expressed their admiration for Islam.
Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi leader responsible for the extermination camps, presented Islam as “a masculine, soldierly religion.” His doctor and therapist Felix Kersten mentioned it in a chapter of his memoirs specifically dedicated to the enthusiasm of his patient for Islam. David Motadel quotes the doctor in his book entitled Islam and Nazi Germany’s war.
At the end of the war, many Nazi leaders’ fascination for Islam led them to seek refuge in Arab countries. Among them was Johann von Leers, one of the main ideologues of the Nazi regime. After escaping to Italy and having lived in Argentina for a few years, he was greeted in Egypt in 1956 by Amin Al-Husseini. Under Al-Husseini’s supervision, Von Leers converted to Islam, changed his name to Omar Amin (Amin as a tribute to Amin Al-Husseini) and became an advisor to the Egyptian government.
PART 5 – Jean-François Revel recalls the accusations of ‘fascism’ levelled by communists in lieu of replies against their critics
Resorting to the label ‘fascist’ to discredit political opponents is nothing new. For decades, communists have used this procedure to discredit their critics. In his essay Last exit to utopia, originally published in French in 2000, the French author Jean-François Revel traced the origin of this phenomenon.
A philosopher by training, Jean-François Revel (1924-2006) was a prolific writer and a perceptive commentator of French and international events. During World War II he joined the Resistance in Paris. After teaching for a few years, he became an author and a journalist. He headed the French magazine L’Express in the seventies and became a columnist at Le Point in the eighties. He was elected to l’Académie française in 1997.
Aside from the short excerpt below on the accusations of fascism levelled by communists in lieu of replies to their critics, we have reproduced a longer excerpt from Revel’s book on this theme. Click on the image to your right to view it.
Jean-François Revel: [Author François] Furet exposes the Comintern’s strategy of “exploiting the accusation of fascism against all enemies, whether from the left or the right.” Before 1934, the Communists had been labeling as “fascists” not only Italian and German ideologues but also liberals and socialists of the democratic countries. Subsequently, they made a concession: you could be sincerely antifascist even without being a Communist. But to qualify as an antifascist, you could not be tainted with anticommunism.
The ultimatum delivered to the left, and to all democrats, came in these terms: “You don’t have the right to criticize Hitler unless you stop criticizing Stalin.” Which reduces to this: Being anticommunist makes you a fascist, or at the very least a reactionary. With this rule of thumb, the Communists handcuffed the entire left, and every democrat, right up to and beyond the 1939 Nonaggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin. This rule crystallized into a lasting taboo. Twenty years later it would find memorable expression in Jean-Paul Sartre’s shattering assertion: “Every anticommunist is a dog.”
In 2010, Point de Bascule reproduced an excerpt of How Democracies Perish, originally dedicated by Revel to the communist threat, to draw a parallel with the threat posed by Islamists to open and democratic societies.
Jean-François Revel: Totalitarianism liquidates its internal enemies or opposition as soon as it arises; it uses methods that are simple and infallible because they are undemocratic. Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them. It awakens only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, evident. By then, either there is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has become crushingly high.
Point de Bascule (May 17, 2017): Historia TV series on Soviet spying in Canada rehabilitates the notions of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘infiltration’ [Article in French]
Further reading
Point de Bascule (October 14, 2016): #confqcunesco – Herman Deparice-Okomba of the Quebec-UNESCO radicalization conference expert committee greeted by the Muslim Brotherhood-linked CSID in Tunisia
Point de Bascule (November 16, 2015): Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard drew an opportune parallel between the Islamic State and Nazism on Remembrance Day