He, like a growing numbers of Germans, is astonished that reporters and commentators along with policy-makers have made so little of the Islamist rhetoric that links Islamism with Nazism in both ideology and strategy. "After World War II, it became apparent that the center of global Jew-hatred was shifting from Nazi Germany to the Arab World," he writes.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which may have begun as a rebellious group against British colonialism before the war, aimed violence directly against Jews and Zionism when the war was over. They took the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as their own, drawing on "Mein Kampf" and the infamous czarist fiction, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." They borrowed rhetoric from the German and Italian radio broadcasts that inflamed Arab anti-Semitism during the war.
A major figure connecting Nazi and Islamist ideologies was Amin al-Husseini, a self-styled "grand mufti" of Jerusalem who fomented riots against the Jews in the 1920s and ordered the murder of any Muslim who traded with Jewish settlers. Adolf Eichmann visited him in Palestine in the 1930s; he was a friend of Heinrich Himmler. He was a guest of Hitler in Berlin from 1941 until the end of the war in 1945 and directed the Muslim SS in the Balkans. He was responsible for stopping the Bulgarian government from releasing thousands of Bulgarian Jewish children to travel to Palestine. "It was he," says historian Paul Johnson, "who first recruited Wahabi fanatics from Saudi Arabia, transforming them into killers of Jews -- another tradition that continues to this day."
What's important about the Nazi-Islamist connection is the way it inspires terrorists today. It's fashionable to say that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, but that's misleading. In its charter, the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, which has morphed into the terrorist organization Hamas, lists conspiracy theories blaming the Jews for everything from the French Revolution to the communist revolution.
Hitler dreamed of building a huge warplane able to fly from Berlin to Manhattan and back to launch a small, light suicide-like bomber into the skyscrapers of Wall Street, which he believed was the "center of Jewry." Mohammed Atta, the 20th conspirator of 9/11, regarded Wall Street as a nest of Jews as well. Matthias Kuntzel describes Hitler's obsession as the fantasy foreshadowing 9/11. Hitler's fantasy bomber, meant to be shoved into the belly of Wall Street, foreshadowed the knife shoved into the belly of a rabbi in Frankfurt.