By Supna Zaidi
Please do not read if you plan to watch "The Reader"
Islamist Nazism
Hannah Schmitz, a Nazi war criminal. Hannah comes from a working class background, starts an affair with a young boy in her town one summer, but leaves abruptly after a promotion to a desk job in their quaint German town. Her illiteracy continues to play a decisive role in her life, leading her eventually to the SS, as a guard for which she is tried and found guilty years later. The film intentionally focuses on her pre-war years. Bright summer days, bike rides, lazy days in bed. The telling of her crimes as a Nazi guard are distant. Limited descriptions presented as trial testimony. The viewer must try to imagine her in an SS uniform, standing over a gaunt child. Thus, sympathy is achieved. Her illiteracy a justification for her inability to understand that one should unlock the doors of a burning church when men, women and children are burning inside. Even if they are Jewish. Yet, as Hannah pounds her fist on the table at trial - arguing it was "my duty" to prevent chaos, or worse, allow them to run away. Hannah was a guard. She could not unlock the doors.
On February 5, 2009, a very neutral New York Times article highlighted the death of a real Nazi war criminal by the name of Dr. Aribert Ferdinand Heim in Egypt. He was a member of Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS and a medical doctor at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps. He spent his post-Nazi retirement as a convert to Islam and was known to local children as "Uncle Tarek." The article seemed as if it were talking of a historical relic. Describing his alleged gasoline injections into otherwise healthy bodies, surgeries without anesthesia, and skull souvenirs as innocuously as references to his chocolate cake purchases for friends in his new home in Egypt in the same article.
It would be naïve if the print or film media truly thinks men like Heim are historic relics, unconnected to the politics of the world today. Or that we are so far removed from anti-Semitic violence that we have the luxury to pause and sympathize with the Hannah’s of the world.
Why?
Simply because yesterday’s Nazi is today’s Islamist. Like Nazism, Islamism reacts to political losses by scapegoating. Germany lost WWI, were forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles and subsequently blamed German Jews for their fall from supremacy. Islamists, unable to cope with the demise of the Ottoman Empire, target Israel as a symbolic and real colonizer in the Middle East. Obviously, forgetting that by their own definition, the Ottoman empire colonized "Palestine" for centuries prior.
Thus, protesters against the Israeli invasion of Gaza invasion in December of 2008 forgot that when Hamas sends rockets into Israeli towns, it is not because of some specific Israeli policy they do not agree with, but because such attacks are in line with its own charter that states Israel should not exist on land that should be governed by Muslims and by Islamic law.
The situation is exacerbated by global Islamist support that organize Muslims against Israel. Organizations like the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), who the media flock to falsely believing they represent American Muslim sentiment. CAIR, and numerous other organizations give speeches against terrorism generically to appear moderate but never criticize Hamas, because they are not terrorists, but "freedom fighters," reinforcing a false colonial rhetoric that finds support in the U.S. by equating Islamophobia with anti-Semitism, and than arguing that the former is worse than the latter.
The reaction to Israel’s defense of its sovereignty and health of its citizenry was criticism internationally. Yet, how much of that criticism focused on a discussion on the reasons for failed negotiations - ie the Islamist belief that if they wait long enough, Israel will be gone. Instead, Jewish communities from France to Venezuela against Israeli "occupation" of Gaza, and angry protests in America, the UK, to the Middle East and Japan fomented chanting invoking Nazi violence. In Florida, one woman in an anti-Israeli protest shouted, "Go back to the ovens."
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to many, especially the media, that there are historical links between Nazism and Islamism. Many in the Muslim Brotherhood, or sympathetic to the movement found an understandable logic in the need that Nazis held to reassert Germany against the forces of Britain, France and the U.S. Britain and France supervised the post-Ottoman mandates. The former Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini visited Hitler in Germany during WWII. In his post-WWII memoirs, he states:
"Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: ‘The Jews are yours.’"
A MEMRI article reports that "an official tenth-grade history textbook published in 2004 by the Palestinian authority includes a chapter on the history of Zionism. The chapter summarizes the resolutions of the first Zionist Congress in Basel. After a section in which the book gives a factual presentation of the main official decisions of the Congress, it goes on to say: "There are a number of secret decisions issued by the Congress known as ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which aim at taking control of the whole world."
Yet, the acts of Hamas, its supporters in the US from CAIR to ISNA, and the global anti-Israeli protests they foment are not recognized for what they are - Islamist Nazism.
Israel needs to use the media the way Islamists do. Military strategy is short-term. P.R. strategy is long-term. Islamists have co-opted western democratic rhetoric. The vocabulary of minority rights and victim hood. Its time Israel started doing the same.
Please do not read if you plan to watch "The Reader"
Islamist Nazism
Hannah Schmitz, a Nazi war criminal. Hannah comes from a working class background, starts an affair with a young boy in her town one summer, but leaves abruptly after a promotion to a desk job in their quaint German town. Her illiteracy continues to play a decisive role in her life, leading her eventually to the SS, as a guard for which she is tried and found guilty years later. The film intentionally focuses on her pre-war years. Bright summer days, bike rides, lazy days in bed. The telling of her crimes as a Nazi guard are distant. Limited descriptions presented as trial testimony. The viewer must try to imagine her in an SS uniform, standing over a gaunt child. Thus, sympathy is achieved. Her illiteracy a justification for her inability to understand that one should unlock the doors of a burning church when men, women and children are burning inside. Even if they are Jewish. Yet, as Hannah pounds her fist on the table at trial - arguing it was "my duty" to prevent chaos, or worse, allow them to run away. Hannah was a guard. She could not unlock the doors.
On February 5, 2009, a very neutral New York Times article highlighted the death of a real Nazi war criminal by the name of Dr. Aribert Ferdinand Heim in Egypt. He was a member of Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS and a medical doctor at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps. He spent his post-Nazi retirement as a convert to Islam and was known to local children as "Uncle Tarek." The article seemed as if it were talking of a historical relic. Describing his alleged gasoline injections into otherwise healthy bodies, surgeries without anesthesia, and skull souvenirs as innocuously as references to his chocolate cake purchases for friends in his new home in Egypt in the same article.
It would be naïve if the print or film media truly thinks men like Heim are historic relics, unconnected to the politics of the world today. Or that we are so far removed from anti-Semitic violence that we have the luxury to pause and sympathize with the Hannah’s of the world.
Why?
Simply because yesterday’s Nazi is today’s Islamist. Like Nazism, Islamism reacts to political losses by scapegoating. Germany lost WWI, were forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles and subsequently blamed German Jews for their fall from supremacy. Islamists, unable to cope with the demise of the Ottoman Empire, target Israel as a symbolic and real colonizer in the Middle East. Obviously, forgetting that by their own definition, the Ottoman empire colonized "Palestine" for centuries prior.
Thus, protesters against the Israeli invasion of Gaza invasion in December of 2008 forgot that when Hamas sends rockets into Israeli towns, it is not because of some specific Israeli policy they do not agree with, but because such attacks are in line with its own charter that states Israel should not exist on land that should be governed by Muslims and by Islamic law.
The situation is exacerbated by global Islamist support that organize Muslims against Israel. Organizations like the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), who the media flock to falsely believing they represent American Muslim sentiment. CAIR, and numerous other organizations give speeches against terrorism generically to appear moderate but never criticize Hamas, because they are not terrorists, but "freedom fighters," reinforcing a false colonial rhetoric that finds support in the U.S. by equating Islamophobia with anti-Semitism, and than arguing that the former is worse than the latter.
The reaction to Israel’s defense of its sovereignty and health of its citizenry was criticism internationally. Yet, how much of that criticism focused on a discussion on the reasons for failed negotiations - ie the Islamist belief that if they wait long enough, Israel will be gone. Instead, Jewish communities from France to Venezuela against Israeli "occupation" of Gaza, and angry protests in America, the UK, to the Middle East and Japan fomented chanting invoking Nazi violence. In Florida, one woman in an anti-Israeli protest shouted, "Go back to the ovens."
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to many, especially the media, that there are historical links between Nazism and Islamism. Many in the Muslim Brotherhood, or sympathetic to the movement found an understandable logic in the need that Nazis held to reassert Germany against the forces of Britain, France and the U.S. Britain and France supervised the post-Ottoman mandates. The former Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini visited Hitler in Germany during WWII. In his post-WWII memoirs, he states:
"Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: ‘The Jews are yours.’"
A MEMRI article reports that "an official tenth-grade history textbook published in 2004 by the Palestinian authority includes a chapter on the history of Zionism. The chapter summarizes the resolutions of the first Zionist Congress in Basel. After a section in which the book gives a factual presentation of the main official decisions of the Congress, it goes on to say: "There are a number of secret decisions issued by the Congress known as ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which aim at taking control of the whole world."
Yet, the acts of Hamas, its supporters in the US from CAIR to ISNA, and the global anti-Israeli protests they foment are not recognized for what they are - Islamist Nazism.
Israel needs to use the media the way Islamists do. Military strategy is short-term. P.R. strategy is long-term. Islamists have co-opted western democratic rhetoric. The vocabulary of minority rights and victim hood. Its time Israel started doing the same.
Source: Muslim World Today
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