Islam and Nazism

Submitted by Prof. Paul Eidelberg (Israel), Apr 15, 2010 at 09:58

Seven years ago my colleague Professor Will Morrisey and I published a 4,200-word essay in the Israeli journal Nativ: A Journal of Politics and the Arts—an essay entitled "Islam and Nazism: What Are the Connections?" Here I shall only cite four paragraphs.

(1) "Winston Churchill defined Mein Kampf as "the new Koran of faith and war." Consistent herewith, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the notorious former Mufti of Jerusalem, declared, "There is a definite similarity between the principles of Islam and the principles of Nazism."

(2) "What links Islam to Nazism is the ethos of jihad. For both Islam and Nazism war is not merely a means to an end: mere conquest. War for both is a moral imperative: for the Nazi, to purge the world of racial impurity, for the Muslim, to purge the world of religious impurity. Both have or require an enemy: for the Muslim the 'infidel,' for the Nazi the 'Jew,' Accordingly, both Islam and Nazism aim at purifying i.e. conquering the world, and there is no limit to the violence that may be used to achieve that aim. The genocide perpetrated by Muslims against the Armenians preceded the genocide the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews."

(3) "The Nazis regarded the Jews as a virus infecting mankind, something that had to be eradicated. Although Muslims reject this racism—for a Jew could convert to Islam—Islam's contempt for non-believers has much in common with the Nazi's contempt for non-Aryans, Jews in particular. As in Nazism, Islam has never respected the sanctity of human life; it has always regarded infidels, Jews or Christians, as devoid of human rights—as subhuman. Bat Ye'or has documented fourteen centuries of dhimmitude—the degradation and dehumanization of countless Jews and Christians. Dhimmitude is inherent in the ethos of jihad—the most distinctive principle of Islam."

(4) "The ethos of jihad has an ethics which is quite pragmatic, as one may expect from a militaristic religion. One might go so far as to say that Nazi militarism is jihad secularized—jihad without religious pretensions and obfuscations. Although literary Islam and Nazism have profound differences, these are of little significance to the victims of these militant doctrines. The one reduces human beings to dhimmis, the other to slaves. Militarism in a religious as well as in an atheistic creed means expansionism, murder, and degradation."

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