Following in the Footsteps of the Nazis

After reading Benjamin Weinthal’s article entitled “Germany delays selling weapons to Israel but continues sales to Qatar, sparking criticism,” Mr. Weinthal wondered what prompted Germany to “ignore Israeli requests to purchase weapons, according to a Sunday report in the German mass circulation daily Bild.” Mr. Weinthal further questioned: hadn’t German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made a pledge of unconditional solidarity with Jerusalem after October 7?  Were the Germans leaving off where their forebears started or was this just a temporary aberration?

Germany has a moral responsibility for the murder of six million Jews, and for its vital role in transmitting its anti-Jewish genocidal hatred to the Arab world, parts of which have now embraced a virulent strain of anti-Americanism.

In Jihad and Jew-Hatred, Matthias Küntzel, a German political scientist and historian, contends that antisemitism is part of the ideological center of modern jihadism, and not simply an additional component. He argues that “during and after the World War II, the center of global antisemitism shifted from Nazi Germany to the Arab world, above all to the radical Islamist currents in and around the Moslem Brotherhood of Egypt.” This shift did not occur only because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Quite the reverse. The “ideology of and policy of radical Islamists” actually made the clash worse.

Küntzel points out he was not alone in recognizing the parallels between German antisemitism and that found in the Middle East. Thirty years before, Bernard Lewis, an expert on the history of Islam and Islam’s interaction with the West, said, “Since 1945, certain Arab countries have been the only places in the world where hard-core, Nazi style antisemitism is publicly endorsed and propagated.”

This profound German influence can be seen in a number of areas: the similarities between the Arab anti-Jewish caricatures and those found in Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer; the millions of copies in Arabic of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; many editions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the pro-Hitler attitude among Arab youth. Israeli soldiers came across the Arabic Mein Kampf in many homes that were raided this past year in Gaza.

Küntzel rejects the claim advanced by many Arab writers that after 1945 the Arabs were forced to pay the price for Nazi anti-Jewish policies. He says Palestinian Arabs must share “at least indirect responsibility for the Holocaust.” It was their anti-Zionist campaigns that compelled Britain to limit the number of Jews permitted to enter Palestine. Without a place to seek refuge, Jews remained vulnerable to the Germans’ decision to annihilate the Jewish people throughout occupied Europe. Thus, a significant number of Arabs living in Palestine at the time “bore some responsibility for the impending tragedy.”

In discussing why were Jews singled out for annihilation, historian Yehuda Bauer points out the Jews were not merely victims. They are a people, a community and a nation, “which was in some significant ways, central to the self-understanding of European and not just German society.” There were key intrinsic racial evil traits that the Nazis sought to destroy in this people and nation – what they termed a “bacillus”. This is why the Jews became the focus of an unprecedented assault that has transformed the Western, and progressively also the non-Western world’s “perception” of itself. The essence of National Socialism is not its bureaucratic culture or “modernistic structures”—which clearly contributed—but an ideological commitment to abolish not just a government or a political system, “but the basic order of the world”, as composed of and influenced by the Jew.

The Holocaust is the first example where murdering “was not an end in itself, but a means to an end, even though the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders differed on whether those ends were good or evil,” opined historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz. With the annihilation of European Jewry, the ends and the means were the same – the eradication of the perceived threat of the Jewish nation. The Germans presumed the right to determine who should live and who should die. As a result, the “parameters of the Holocaust have defined the universe of evil and of good, have marked the limits of human bestiality and human arrogance, set the measure of human endurance and courage.”

Hamas, taking the same page out of the German Nazi playbook, of labeling Jews as the source of evil in this world, unleashed the most savage attack on a Jewish population since the Hitlerian attacks on the Jews of Europe.

“The sensational fact, the truly horrifying feature, of the annihilation of the Jews,” declared German historian Heinz Höhne, “was that thousands of respectable fathers of families made murder their official business and yet, when off duty, still regarded themselves as ordinary law-biding citizens who were incapable even of thinking of straying from the strict path of virtue.” Himmler expected the mass massacres had to be implemented “coolly and cleanly” Höhne said; “even while obeying the official order to commit murder, the SS man must remain ‘decent.’”

When the soldiers returned to their homes, they took with them “the images and horrors of the war, the perverted morality which had formed its basis, and the distorted perception which made living through it bearable.” Each family had at least one soldier who served at the front. These young men then went on to become laborers, bureaucrats, lawyers, physicians, psychologists, politicians, teachers, bankers, judges, professors and journalists.

Hamas terrorists were recorded calling their parents with glee, exclaiming their excitement at having murdered Jewish men and women, as well as enthusiasm that they were bringing home Jewish captives back to be shared with their Arab families. The similarity of murder cultures normalizing Jew-hatred and elimination run along the same lines of living an “ordinary” existence while performing the most heinous crimes against Jews and humanity.

Is the German Chancellor interested in harkening back to the times when rape, torture and murder of Jews was a “norm” of parts of the German society by taking exception to the Jews right to defend themselves in their homeland and that is the reason for withholding arms? We certainly hope not.