DR.ANDREW BOSTOM: WAS BIBI RIGHT IN SAYING ISLAM CHANGED NAZISM NOT VICE-VERSA……?

Islamic Jew-hatred came before Nazism and Israel: meet “Omar Amin” von Leers.

During a recent speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appropriately decried the “apologetics” which have minimized the role played by ex-Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin el-Husseini (1895-1974) — founder of the modern Palestinian Muslim movement — in fomenting genocidal Islamic Jew-hatred. Netanyahu made these simple, irrefragable points, demonstrating how from the 1920s through (in particular) the World War II era:

… the father of the Palestinians at that time, with no [Jewish] state and no so-called “occupation,” no territories and no settlements, already sought, through systematic incitement, to annihilate the Jews. Regrettably, Hajj Amin el-Husseini is still a venerated figure in Palestinian society, he appears in study books and is exalted as the father of the nation, and this incitement that began then, incitement to kill Jews, continues.

As I noted in what was the first full English translation and detailed analysis (here, here) of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 fatwa on the Jews — which re-affirms canonical Islam’s Jew-hating motifs used to foment murderous violence against them by Muhammad himself, since the advent of Islam, till now — this seminal proclamation of incitement by the “Godfather” of the Palestinian Muslim movement was pure Islamic dogma devoid of any themes from the writings of Nazi racial theorists, epitomized by Johan (aka, Johann, Johannes) von Leers. (See Foreword by Julian Huxley,History on a Racial Basis, an abridged translation ofGeschichte auf Rassicher Grundlage, London, 1936.)

Leers is a fascinating case study. By any objective standard, his career trajectory — as a favored contributor in Goebbels’s propa­ganda ministry, to his eventual adoption of Islam (as Omar Amin von Leers) while working as an anti-Western and anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist propagandist under Nasser’s regime from the mid-1950s until his death in 1965 — represents the “Islamification of Nazism,” rather than a “Nazification of Islam.” (The discussion which follows is drawn from, and referenced in, my The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, pp. 168-169, 204-205, 619-625; and Sharia Versus Freedom, Amherst, N.Y., 2012,  pp. 252-259, 610-614.)

None of the important data summarized below have been described by Jeffrey Herf, an avatar of the “Nazification of Islam” hypothesis. In his The Jewish Enemy — Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 180–81, Herf included a very limited English translation extract of von Leers’ conclusions from the 1942 essay “Judentum und Islam als Gegensatze” (in Die Judenfrage in Politik, Recht, and Wirtschaft 6, no. 24, December 24, 1942): 275–78), whose fully annotated  translation (as “Judaism and Islam as Opposites”) I provided in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (pp. 619-625). Herf even failed to mention von Leers’ subsequent conversion to Islam, and was also oblivious to the Nazi author’s thorough grounding in, and accurate representation of, the pious Muslim sources (i.e., Koran, hadith, and sira). This negationist approach of German-fluent “Nazification of Islam” historians such as Herf compounds their failure to deal with the quintessential, canonical Islamic motifs of el-Husseini’s 1937 Islamic fatwa—available in German since 1938—in an informed, intellectually honest manner.

Upon his arrival in Egypt in 1956, it was Hajj Amin el-Husseini who oversaw von Leers’ formal conversion to Islam, and remained one of his confidants. Leers described the origins of the Muslim “forename” Omar Amin, which he adopted as part of his conversion to Islam in a November, 1957 letter to American Nazi H. Keith Thompson:

I myself have embraced Islam and accepted the new forename Omar Amin, Omar according to the great Caliph Omar who was a grim enemy of the Jews, Amin in honor of my friend Hajj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti.

More here.