Karin McQuillan has a fascinating article at American Thinker regarding the instrumental role the Muslim Brotherhood played in closing the doors of pre-state Israel to Europe’s Jews and radicalizing Middle East populations against their own Jewish citizens.
Particularly poignant is her account of a post-colonial Egypt that in 1919 united around the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood” for Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike; a sentiment that was quashed over the next decades as Hitler bolstered the Muslim Brotherhood cause.
This is history we cannot afford to ignore in light of the current revolution in Egypt and the potentially grievous consequences if it is misdirected:
As we follow the unfolding story in Egypt, we are torn between hope and fear — hope that democracy will gain a toehold and fear that the fundamentalist Moslem Brothers could take control of Egypt. Perhaps you have heard the Moslem Brothers are the oldest and largest radical Islamic group, the grandfather of Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda.
What you haven’t been told is this: the Moslem Brothers were a small, unpopular group of anti-modern fanatics unable to attract members, until they were adopted by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich beginning in the 1930s.
Under the tutelage of the Third Reich, the Brothers started the modern jihadi movement, complete with a genocidal program against Jews. In the words of Matthias Kuntzel, “[t]he significance of the Brotherhood to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas.”
What is equally ominous for Jews and Israel is that despite Mubarak’s pragmatic coexistence with Israel for the last thirty years, every Egyptian leader from Nasser through Sadat to Mubarak has enshrined Nazi Jew-hatred in mainstream Egyptian culture out of both conviction and political calculation. Nasser, trained by Nazis as a youth, spread the genocidal conspiracy theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, making it a bestseller throughout the Arab world. On the Ramadan following 9/11, Mubarak presided over a thirty-week-long TV series dramatizing Elders and its genocidal message.
It is impossible to assess the danger posed by a takeover of Egypt today by the Moslem Brothers without knowing that Nazism launched the Brothers and is still at their core. This response to modernity and to Jews was not predetermined by Egyptian history or culture. It was Germany under Hitler that changed the course of history for Egypt and the Middle East.
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