Well, sooner or later, they were bound to be this shameless.
Haven’t you wondered who had the idea first to destroy the World Trade Center? Where that idea first was conceived, and how that idea got to the nineteen hijackers who actually conducted the attacks of six years ago?
Well, here’s your answer: it was Hitler! Who else could it have been?
That’s right, for those of you who didn’t already know (even when it was teh bears, I knew it was dem), none other than Adolf Hitler, who died sixteen years before the first plans for the World Trade Center were ever made public, was the man with the plan. And how do I know?
Because Matthias Küntzel, who is many things but most hilariously a research associate with the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (best name for such a thing ever) tells me so in a piece for The Weekly Standard, called Jew-hatred and Jihad: The Nazi Roots of the 9/11 Attack. I fear I cannot do it justice, so I quote:
"In the latter stages of the war, I never saw Hitler so beside himself as when, as if in a delirium, he was picturing to himself and to us the downfall of New York in towers of flame," wrote Albert Speer in his diary. "He described the skyscrapers turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and thither, and the reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky."
Not only Hitler's fantasy but also his plan of action foreshadowed September 11: He envisioned having kamikaze pilots fly light aircraft packed with explosives and with no landing gear into Manhattan skyscrapers. The drawings for the Daimler-Benz Amerikabomber from the spring of 1944 show giant four-engine planes with raised undercarriages for transporting small bombers. The bombers would be released shortly before the planes reached the East Coast, after which the mother plane would return to Europe.
And he waited until now to tell us!
Of course, that isn’t all there is to the article. No, from there he goes on to point out that the 9/11 hijackers spent a lot of time in Germany, because clearly Naziism is something they have in the water supply there. He even can name one participant in the Koran circle meetings run by Mohammed Atta, Shahid Nickels, who said "Atta's Weltanschauung was based on a ‘National Socialist way of thinking.’" For those of you who don’t know, weltanshauung means "worldview" – but doesn’t it just sound much more sinister if that is the only word untranslated? Kind of Nazi-rific?
But, even more sinister, according to Küntzel, no one bothered to mention that Atta or Osama bin Laden hated Jews! Never even mentioned it! Well, okay, President Bush mentioned something about "The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics -- a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam. The terrorists' directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews" but he waited until September 20, 2001 to say so! And Howard Kurtz got really angry at the New York Times for a story on its website that described the "fire-and-brimstone" declarations of bin Laden, who "declares his purpose -- killing Americans and Jews -- more starkly than ever". Why is Kurtz mad? Because it was only published on their website on September 8, 2001 - the story didn't hit the dead tree paper until September 12th. But I'm sure no one read the NY Times on September 12, 2001. The day before was kind of a slow news day. And a few people, like Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic Studies for American University, were invited on CNN to say things like:
I think the way bin Laden would look at it is like this: He would say, our enemies -- that is, the enemies of the Muslims -- are basically the Jews and the Christians. He targets the Jews and the Christians. He mentions them in his speeches, and he mentions them because, he says, of the plight of the people of the Middle East. He mentions the Palestinians, the people of Iraq, and the stationing of foreign troops in Saudi Arabia. So he believes that those Muslims who do not support his call for a war against Jews and Christians are not loyal or good Muslims.
But so what? How many Americans could possibly have been interested in CNN reports about al-Qaeda on December 21, 2001?
But that isn’t all. Not only were people keeping the fact that al-Qaeda and its leaders didn’t like Jews secret, but they were concealing the actual origins of "Islamism" secret!
Despite common misconceptions, Islamism was born not during the 1960s but during the 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasserism but by the rise of Nazism, and prior to 1951 all its campaigns were directed not against colonialism but against the Jews. It was the Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, that established Islamism as a mass movement. The 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.
It is true that British colonial policy produced Islamism, insofar as Islamism viewed itself as a resistance movement against "cultural modernity." The Islamists' solution was the call for a new order based on sharia.
Well, lets look at this one historically. The Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 when six workers from the British military camp at Isma'iliyya came to visit a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna and told him that "Arabs and Muslims have no status and no dignity. They are no more than mere hirelings belonging to the foreigners.... We are unable to perceive the road to action as you perceive it...." And the Brotherhood was born.
For the first few years, all the Muslim Brotherhood did was teach night classes with an emphasis on teaching students how to implement an ethos of solidarity and altruism in their daily lives, rather than on theoretical issues. Then in 1931, they completed their first major project (the construction of a mosque) and opened a branch in Cairo.
But, of course, you can’t tell something that is true without a big lie to go with it, so it is important that you believe here is where the "new order based on sharia" comes in. Only, it isn’t true. In The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt by Brynjar Lia, the following statement made by al-Banna in 1938 is laid out on page 201:
When one considers the principles that guide the constitutional system of government, one finds that such principles aim to preserve in all its forms the freedom of the individual citizen, to make the rulers accountable for their actions to the people and finally, to delimit the prerogatives of every single authoritative body. It will be clear to everyone that such basic principles correspond perfectly to the teaching of Islam concerning the system of government. For this reason, the Muslim Brothers consider that of all the existing systems of government, the constitutional system is the form that best suits Islam and Muslims.
Hassan al-Banna described to others that this system of constitutional government should have elections, but not political parties. But that isn’t important, because Küntzel is ready to talk about something else!
Membership in the Brotherhood shot up from 800 to 200,000 between 1936 and 1938, according to the research of Abd Al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi for his book The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question 1928-1947. In those two years the Brotherhood conducted only one major campaign in Egypt, and it was against Zionism and the Jews.
This campaign, which established the Brotherhood as a mass movement, was set off by a rebellion in Palestine directed against Jewish immigration and initiated by the notorious grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al--Husseini. The Brotherhood organized mass demonstrations in Egyptian cities under the slogans "Down With the Jews!" and "Jews Get Out of Egypt and Palestine!" Leaflets called for a boycott of Jewish goods and Jewish shops, and the Brotherhood's newspaper, al-Nadhir, carried a regular column on "The Danger of the Jews of Egypt," which published the names and addresses of Jewish businessmen and allegedly Jewish newspaper publishers all over the world, attributing every evil, from communism to brothels, to the "Jewish danger."
Well, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni was a Nazi. He was the Mufti of Jerusalem starting in 1922, and he first contacted the Nazi party in 1933, and officially began receiving aid and directions from Germany in August 1938. Of course, he began actions against the Jews earlier than that; he was behind the false rumor planted in 1929 that the Jews were about to storm the al-Asqa mosque that led to widespread riots and the Hebron Massacre. By November, 1941, when he had a private audience with Adolf Hitler, al-Husayni was in Europe.
Where he remains until 1946, spending 1945 and 1946 in various custodies, mainly French, where he was under house arrest due to a conviction for war crimes by a Yugoslav court. In June, 1946, he escapes and is given asylum in Egypt, from where he forms Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas - the "Army of the Holy War", which is not affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in any way. The Army of the Holy War is dissolved for various reasons, notably ineffectiveness, during the 1948 war against Israel.
But, while the Nazi al-Husayni was up to all that, what of the Muslim Brotherhood? Well, they still are renouncing violence. In 1939, when al-Husayni is in Europe (supposedly helping plan the Final Solution with Adolf Eichmann) al-Banna’s refusal to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to use violence to resist the British occupation leads to a major split, with several cadres leaving the Brotherhood to form a group called "Muhammed’s Youth". After that, the Brotherhood begins to form military cadres, but before they take any action, al-Banna is arrested in 1941 and the Brotherhood banned. Then, in 1942, the government of Egypt resigns and the British place the loyal Wafd Party in control of the government. Prime Minister Nahhas Pasha cuts a deal with al-Banna to not run for office in exchange for the banning of prostitution and alcoholic beverages, which the Wafd government does ban. Finally, al-Banna and several other Muslim Brotherhood leaders run for office in the rigged elections of 1945, lose badly, and only then does the Brotherhood begin to engage in violence, directed against both the Wafd (who are by now also out of power) and when Prime Minister Sidqi Pasha in 1946 causes student riots after proposing a draft treaty to the Wafd and the Brotherhood. In 1947, the Brotherhood begins to take direct action against Egpytian Jews following the UN Draft Resolution on the Partition of Palestine.
Around this time, the actual intellectual founder of Islamic fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb, is getting a scholarship to study education at Colorado State University. Around the same time he left Egypt, al-Banna is killed in Cairo. There is no evidence the two men ever met, but we know that Qutb joins the Muslim Brotherhood when he returns to Egypt, in (accounts differ) either 1951 or 1953. But Qutb never interacted with the Mufti of Jerusalem during the Nazi era, nor was he a member of the Brotherhood in the 1930s. So Küntzel isn’t interested in him, even though he mentions that Qutb was who bin Laden actually read.
Of course, one would expect that such a luminary as he, as one of the board of directors for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East would be able to know more about the actual history of the Middle East than I would. Which means that he knows all of this. He’s just selling something else entirely. Qutb isn’t quite as sexy as images of Hitler and the Amerikabomber.