Antisemitism as it
emerged in the early nineteenth century was nationalist, and right
wing-populist in inspiration. This was the age of nationalism and of the Volk. The
Jews, as the antisemites saw it, didn't just belong
to another religion; their character and mentality were essentially different,
alien to the values and traditions of the French, Germans, Poles, Russians, and
other European peoples. In particular the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were
the main text and the basis of modem anti semitic
propaganda and have remained so with countless modifications to this day. Thus antisemites claimed that the Jews wanted to conspire and
dominate, and constituted a major, perhaps mortal, danger to the normal
development of other nations.
The Protocols and
kindred literature belong to the species of conspiracy theory of history, a
genre of political philosophy and literature There are many divergent versions
of the Protocols; sometimes the Jesuits are brought in, very often masonic
lodges as well as various others. That the forgeries were primitive and
unconvincing did not really matter. As one contemporary observer wrote,
"The ignorant believed them because they were ignorant and the
semi-intelligent because it was for the good of the reactionary cause."
But while
anti-Semitism had a history in Russia with waves of anti-Jewish pogroms in
1881 and 1905 following the publication of the Protocols the pogroms of
1918-19 became increasingly violent, for example just in Proskurov alone, a small town in the Ukraine, 1,700
Jews were killed and thousands injured. Pogroms were carried out not only by
the Whites but by Ukrainian nationalist groups, by quasi anarchists, and also
by the Bolsheviks for whom the Jews were capitalists, the class enemy. The high
tide of the pogroms came during the second half of 1919; it is estimated that
about 10 percent of Ukrainian Jewry, between 150,000 and 200,000 people,
perished.
Originally there had
been few if any sympathies for Bolshevism in the Jewish street; the percentage
of Jews among the political emigres from Russia after 1917, far exceeded their
numbers in the general population. But for those who remained, Soviet power,
however unfriendly to specific Jewish concerns, constituted the best hope in a
hostile world. Young Jews were attracted by the most radical groups in Russia
because of traditional Russian oppression of Jews.
The liberals
attracted the Jewish middle class, but the Jewish middle class was weak since
most Jews in the czarist empire had been poor. And although many Jews later
were represented in the Communist leadership, from Trotsky on down, these Jews
had emphatically dissociated themselves from their Jewish communities, yet
nevertheless the Jews now became widely equated with Bolshevism.
While the supreme
leadership of the White armies did not specifically call for pogroms nor did
they oppose them; as General Anton Denikin once said,
if he had done so he would be accused of having sold out to the Jews.
If the Protocols were
widely read and partly believed in the countries that had emerged victorious
from WWI, their success in the camp of the defeated, from the White Russian
emigres to Weimar Germany, is all the more understandable. Who had brought
about the downfall of the czarist empire? Who had stabbed in the back the
German armies previously undefeated on the field of battle? A scapegoat had to
be found. Russian and German right-wingers discovered that they did not have to
blame themselves and their own shortcomings for these traumatic defeats. The
explanation of an outside enemy had psychologically much to recommend.
But the Protocols
offered more than an explanation; they were also a political slogan, a battle
cry. Whether Hitler truly believed in the Protocols is doubtful, but he was
shrewd enough to realize the enormous propagandistic potential of the basic
idea of the Protocols. Some observers have gone further and argued that Nazi
Germany and Stalinist Russia with their dictatorships, propaganda, terror, and
ideas of a totalitarian welfare state owed more than a little to the Protocols.
But whether Hitler was indeed a pupil of the Elders of Zion is a moot point; he
had no need for the Protocols in his struggle against the Jews or as a
blueprint for Europe's future.
Their origins were
intentionally wrapped in ambiguity, and Julius Evola
translator of the Protocols in Italian, undertook to split hairs between
"authenticity" and "truthfulness," arriving in effect at a
tautology. The PSM were "truthful" over and above their
"authenticity," because they mirrored the true nature of Judaism and
its ends which, Protocols or no Protocols, were truly what was shown in the
PSM.
This was the time when Julius Evola (who dreamed of
starting his own SS) was friends with an admirer of Iron Guard founder Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.
The Iron Guard
campaign against Romania's Jews culminated in January 1941 with an orgy of
anti-Semitic violence during a failed attempt to seize power from the Guard's
erstwhile ally General Ion Antonescu. Fighting for
Bucharest, the Greenshirts, as the Iron Guard squads
were known, sacked and burned synagogues, and began a pogrom. As Jews' homes
and businesses burned, their Christian neighbors sought to save their own
property by posting signs such as "Christian Property, Romanian House,
Romanian Owner," but some of these houses and shops too were destroyed. In
perhaps the most infamous scene of slaughter, Romanian fascists killed Jews at
a Bucharest slaughterhouse in what Leigh White described as a "fiendish
parody of kosher methods of butchering."1
Julius Evola wrote in a 1983 book about Codreanu
, that he thought the Iron Guard founder "one of the worthiest and
spiritually best orientated figures that I ever met in the nationalist
movements of the time."2
This type of approval
is nor surprising given Evola’s
intend to start his own SS in 1942, however according to Evola when spoke to Henri Hartung asked about violent
activities (done in Evola’s name) in 1971, only
under the “condition that it was done with proper spiritual preparation” and Evola said he rejected “ activism devoid of any serious
doctrinal preparation.”3
So for example early
on in his “Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social
Order in the Kali Yuga” Julius Evola wrote of
manliness, mystical sovereignty and legitimate authority.-The
counterrevolution, he insisted, must happen first in the mind, with the return
of sanity and traditional wisdom.
However it is also within this context that Ahmed Huber lectured since no later
than 1992 to sub-groups of the Nouvelle Droite in the form of GRECE.
The Nouvelle Droite as we have seen before was inspired by Julius Evola
and his students, starting in May 68 as the rightist students' reaction to the
leftist movement named after that month.
Ahmed Huber
however did not only drew our interest because his claim in 2001 that:
“The new alliance has come. The eleventh of September has brought together [the
two sides] because the new right has reacted positively They say, and I
agree with them 100 percent, what happened on the eleventh of September, if it
is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of
counterterrorism.”4
His name also showed
up in relation a raid was conducted by Swiss law enforcement at the request of
the White House in the initial crackdown on terrorist finances in the immediate
aftermath of 9/11. The target of the raid was Youssef Nada, director of the Al-Taqwa Bank of Lugano, who has had active association with
the Muslim Brotherhood for more than 50 years and who admitted to being one of
the organization’s international leaders. It was this read that yielded the
document of 1982, prepared by Islamic researchers associated with the Muslim
Brotherhood in Switzerland, presented a flexible, multi-phased, long-term
approach to the "cultural invasion" of the West. The 14-page plan
dated December 1, 1982, outlined a 12-point strategy to "establish an
Islamic government on earth." It was drafted by the Muslim Brotherhood as
part of its rechartering process in 1982, a time that marks an upswing in its
organizational expansion internationally.
As can be seen in a
number of examples throughout Europe, including the political recognition of
parallel Islamist government organizations in Sweden, the recent
"cartoon" jihad in Denmark, and the Parisian car-burning intifada
last November. The following tactics and techniques are among the many
recommendations made in the document.
Networking and
coordinating actions between likeminded Islamist organizations;
Avoiding open
alliances with known terrorist organizations and individuals to maintain the
appearance of "moderation";
Infiltrating and
taking over existing Muslim organizations to realign them towards the Muslim
Brotherhood’s collective goals;
Using deception to
mask the intended goals of Islamist actions, as long as it doesn’t conflict
with shari’a law;
Avoiding social
conflicts with Westerners locally, nationally or globally, that might damage
the long-term ability to expand the Islamist powerbase in the West or provoke a
lash back against Muslims;
Establishing
financial networks to fund the work of conversion of the West, including the
support of full-time administrators and workers;
Conducting
surveillance, obtaining data, and establishing collection and data storage
capabilities;
Putting into place a
watchdog system for monitoring Western media to warn Muslims of
"international plots fomented against them";
Cultivating an
Islamist intellectual community, including the establishment of think-tanks and
advocacy groups, and publishing "academic" studies, to legitimize
Islamist positions and to chronicle the history of Islamist movements;
Developing a comprehensive
100-year plan to advance Islamist ideology throughout the world;
Balancing
international objectives with local flexibility;
Building extensive social
networks of schools, hospitals and charitable organizations dedicated to
Islamist ideals so that contact with the movement for Muslims in the West is
constant;
Involving
ideologically committed Muslims in democratically-elected institutions on all levels
in the West, including government, NGOs, private organizations and labor
unions;
Instrumentally using
existing Western institutions until they can be converted and put into service
of Islam;
Drafting Islamic
constitutions, laws and policies for eventual implementation;
Avoiding conflict
within the Islamist movements on all levels, including the development of
processes for conflict resolution;
Instituting alliances
with Western "progressive" organizations that share similar goals;
Creating autonomous
"security forces" to protect Muslims in the West;
Inflaming violence
and keeping Muslims living in the West "in a jihad frame of mind";
Supporting jihad
movements across the Muslim world through preaching, propaganda, personnel,
funding, and technical and operational support;
Making the
Palestinian cause a global wedge issue for Muslims;
Adopting the total
liberation of Palestine from Israel and the creation of an Islamic state as a
keystone in the plan for global Islamic domination;
Instigating a
constant campaign to incite hatred by Muslims against Jews and rejecting any
discussions of conciliation or coexistence with them;
Actively creating
jihad terror cells within Palestine;
Linking the terrorist
activities in Palestine with the global terror movement;
Collecting sufficient
funds to indefinitely perpetuate and support jihad around the world. (*)
The left, on the
other hand, was the heir of the Enlightenment and its ideals were those of the
French Revolution, not only of liberty and were no leading Jewish cadres left
to be purged. Nevertheless, the anti-Jewish propaganda machine continued its
work. Soviet foreign policy, which had initially been neutral in the
Arab-Israeli conflict, sharply turned against Israel after 1967, and Russia
broke off diplomatic relations. But as far as Jews in the Soviet bloc were
concerned, the propaganda campaign was preoccupied only to a limited extent
with the misdeeds of the state of Israel; it followed classical antisemitic
lines. According to the books and pamphlets by various official writers, issued
by the propaganda department of the Communist party or Soviet army intelligence
(there was no certainty about the identity of the sponsors), the teachings of
Judaism inspired inhuman deeds, provided the chauvinistic idea of the Jews as
the chosen people, and led to their notion of ruling over other people of the
world. These teachings were an unsurpassed textbook of bloodthirstiness and
hypocrisy, treason, perfidy, and vile licentiousness. Jews had been Hitler's fifth
column, the propagandists claimed; they had financed the Nazis and they were
instrumental in trying to overthrow the Soviet order. These antisemitic texts
were accompanied by cartoons that resembled and in some cases reproduced Nazi
propaganda.
The crudeness of
these publications caused negative reactions and embarrassment among Communist
party members outside the Soviet Union. From time to time this propaganda was tuned down, but it basically continued up to the last years
of the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was taken up and
intensified by both former Communists and the extreme right, and also by
sections of the Russian Orthodox church, which could now claim that their dire
prophecies about the Jewish cabal had come true.
There were certain
differences in the attitudes toward Jews in the People's Democracies. In East
Germany for the obvious historical reasons-recollections of Nazi ideology and
propaganda-there were fewer instances of openly antisemitic attacks, and few if
any attacks against the Old Testament and the teachings of Judaism. Jews were
denounced as the "class enemy" and the term Zionist was usually
preferred when denouncing Jews. Unlike in the Soviet Union, positions in the
state and party leadership, except for the brief period noted above, were not
barred to Communists of Jewish origin. Furthermore, as East Germany tried to
normalize relations with the United States in the 198os, the anti-Jewish
attacks became far more infrequent. The same is true, to a lesser extent, with
regard to the other Eastern European countries. The decline in openly anti semitic incidents had more to do with the lessening of
the intensity of the Cold War rather than with any profound ideological change.
Seen in retrospect,
there were, of course, other significant differences between Nazi-style
antisemitism and Communist antisemitism. Above all, Communism would
emphatically deny that its repression of Jews as communities or individuals or
its anti-Jewish political indoctrination had anything to do with antisemitism.
It would argue that the Communist system treated all ethnic groups equally and
that ethnic belonging was of no significance-if individuals were attacked or
repressed, this was because they were enemies of peace, or agents of capitalism
or of imperialism, not because they were Jews.
In view of its
ideological tenets, Marxism-Leninism, even in its Stalinist phase, could not be
openly racialist; the Soviet Union, furthermore, was a multinational empire and
a few Jews were always left unmolested even at the worst of times. Marxism,
after all, was the heir of the Enlightenment and the ideals of the French
Revolution, and the concept of a superior master race was unthinkable-even
though Soviet ideology had gone a long way from the early internationalist days
to something akin to National Socialism. Marx had been born a Jew and many
other Jews of an earlier period had been Communists this history could not be
rewritten.
Even in the days of
Marx and Engels, however, not all people had been considered equal-Poles and
Hungarians, for instance, were considered progressive whereas Russians were a
reactionary force in world history, and the South Slavs, unimportant. Later,
there was an official Marxist-Leninist doctrine of absolute equality, but there
was an unwritten party line according to which some groups were more
progressive than others and Jews were considered reactionary. The very least
that was demanded of Jews in order to be accepted as equals was to dissociate
themselves totally from Judaism, not only from the Jewish religion or
sympathies with Zionism but from any identification with other Jews, and to
actively struggle against all national Jewish feelings. Only on these
conditions could these non-Jewish Jews-to use the expression coined by one of
them, Isaac Deutscher-hope to be treated as comrades
in the fight for justice and progress. Even in these circumstances, a residue
of suspicion and hostility remained.
Communist
anti-Judaism is also of interest because of the interchangeable use of the
terms "Zionism" and "Judaism." The Bolsheviks had opposed
Zionism even before the revolution of 1917 (as had leading Social Democrats
such as Kautsky), but the use of the term
"Zionism" as a synonym for Judaism and Jew had been unthinkable. Among
the Jews left in the Soviet empire after the Second World War were no more than
perhaps a handful of Zionists, because the true Zionists had used the
opportunities at the end of the war to emigrate to Palestine. Those attacked as
Zionists under Stalin and his successors were anything but Zionists; most of
them knew little and cared less about the Jewish state that had come into being
in 1948. Hence, it is legitimate to define the Communist attitude toward Jews
during much of the postwar period as anti-Jewish even though this antisemitism
differed in character from previous religious or racialist manifestations.
The influence of the
Communist parties and of Communism greatly declined with the disintegration of
the Soviet Union, but the New Left remained an influential player on the
political scene in many countries. It was among these groups and especially
among the most radical of them that antisemitic views emerged. Again, as in the
case of the Communists, there were emphatic denials on the part of those
charged with antisernitism: this was a base calumny
spread by right-wing nationalist.
*Al-Taqwa was created by four people on July 21, 1988; Yousef
Nada, Ali Ghaleb Himmat, Mohammed Mansour, and Ahmed
Huber. And leading al-Taqwa shareholder was
Alessandro Ghe, who belonged to the Ordine Nuovo (New Order) organization, which as we have seen began to reach out to Muslim radicals in the 1970’s.
After al-Taqwa was forced to shut down in Switzerland in 2001,
elements of the Wahhabi lobby shifted operations to its backup institutions in
the United States. Thus on March 20, 2002, a U.S. Treasury task force
raided connected and the assets of 192 individuals and organizations connected
with al-Taqwa, where frozen. Reportedly, their
financing was significant.5
A socialist early in
life, Huber fell under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood, Haj Amin
al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, that shaped his views, not only on
Islam but also on the Third Reich, and ‘traditionalist’ Johan von Leers. See also:
Von Leers converted
to Islam after his contact with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood when he became
"Omar Amin" and nominated by Nasser, as responsible for anti-Jewish
propaganda in Cairo. It is in his memory that one of the actual ringleaders of
the new pro-Islamist European right, the Italian Claudio Mutti,
has chosen for his name of conversion to Islam that of “Omar Amin."6
By the early 1980s,
however Huber found a new mentor in the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. In
fact he is the only European Muslim to have given a speech before the tomb of
the late Iranian cleric.7 But no doubt Claudio Mutti
was one of Huber ‘s early contacts that gave the latter access to ‘new
right’ avenues like CERCLE where Koenraad Elst reported to have heard Huber speak in 1992.
It should be stressed
however that Groups belonging to the ‘New Right’ in Belgium, Holland, and Germany,
have gone out of their way to stress that they had nothing to do with the ‘far
right’, old or new. Thus France's Alain de Benoist, or Belgium's Jean Francois Thiriart, show no pronounced interest in anti-Semitism.
Some of them express ecological concerns, others favor a third way, combining
ideological elements of the far right with those of the extreme left.
Above all, there is anti-globalism and anti-Americanism as the doctrinal glue;
according to de Benoist, "America is the most evil rogue state and thus
our greatest enemy."
Of course like Nazi
propaganda during WWII has shown, one could argue it is only one step from de
Benoist passionate antiAmericanism, to the
allegation that everything in America belongs to (is run by) the Jews.
Ant racialist legislation concerning both incitement and discrimination in
France, Germany, and other European countries has compelled anti-Semites to use
circumlocutions to describe their purposes. The laws are not too difficult to
circumvent by using coded terms for Jewish people ("East Coast" or
"New York"). And where de Benoist thus may be too cautious to make
this step, other leading sectarians such as Horst Mahler, once a leading
left-wing terrorist, had no such hesitations. Horst Mahler, one of the
cofounders of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, over
the years thus has become a leading ideologist of the German neo-Nazis and
their fellow travelers.
According to Mahler,
the hatred of Jews is natural, and the Auschwitz lie was invented by the Jews
to keep the German people in perpetual servitude. In France, Roger Garaudy, former member of the Politburo of the Communist
party, has gone through a similar shift from extreme left to extreme right
views. For these two men and they are by no means the only ones-anti-Semitism
was certainly a basic ingredient of their new ideology. Jacques Verges, a
well-known lawyer, had been a prominent Maoist sympathizer, but he moved on to
defend Klaus Barbie, one of the leading figures in the execution of the final
solution in wartime France. "Carlos the Jackal," the infamous
terrorist of the 1970’s and 1980’s and the most radical left-winger of them
all, converted to Islamism and his political opinions developed accordingly.
Thus the issue of
contemporary Left-Wing anti-Semitism continues to be a major bone of
contention. Just as Arabs have argued for a long time that they cannot possibly
be anti-Jewish (in contradistinction to being anti-Zionist) because they too
are Semites, left-wing spokesmen and spokesmen of the former ‘nouvelles droites’ have
maintained that allegations of this kind are base calumnies.
But this is only part
of the story, for both the left and anti-Semitism have changed their character
over time. Nor is it true that anti-Jewish attacks emanating from the extreme
left are invariably connected with the policies of the state of Israel and its
close alliance with imperialist America. One group of the German terrorist
left, headed by Dieter Kunzelmann, planned to blow up
a meeting of the leadership of the Berlin Jewish community in 1969, killing as
many as possible. This was a meeting to commemorate Kristallnacht 1938, the
largest Nazi prewar pogrom; it had nothing to do with the state of Israel and
Zionism.
It is one of the
fundamental tenets of belief of the extreme left that while other nations have
the right to have their own state, the Jews have not. They did live after all
for two millennia without a state, and any attempt to turn back the wheels of
history is essentially reactionary. It is bound to conflict with the vital
interests of other people and dispossess them. Hence, the extreme left
concludes that Arab and Muslim enemies of Israel are progressive because they
are anti-American and anticapitalist, however
illiberal their ideology in other respects; that they should be supported,
whereas Israel and those affirming its right of existence are a priori enemies
of progress and peace.
The case of the
extreme left against Israel and the collaboration of the extreme left with
antisemitic groups can be more easily justified on pragmatic than doctrinal
grounds. It has provoked ideological differences among the left in Europe as
well as in America. However, the turn of the extreme left against the Jews is
by no means limited to the misdeeds of the state of Israel and its close
collaboration with the United States. Historically, it goes back to well before
the American-Israeli alliance came into being in the I970’s and it extends to
a great variety of issues. Antiglobalists regard the
Jews as an enemy because of their alleged support of international capitalism;
radical feminists are very critical of the Jews because five thousand years ago
they were instrumental in replacing the matriarchy with the patriarchy. In
Europe, left-wing internationalists regard Jews-a-conflict-causing element-at a
time when national borders are disappearing in Europe, why do the Jews need a
state of their own? (According to a public opinion poll in 2003, 59 percent of
Europeans believed that Israel was the country most dangerous to the
preservation of world peace.) It seemed to follow that but for these
nationalist, indeed atavistic, aspirations, there would be peace and harmony
between the third world and Europe, and the danger of terrorism as well as
other such threats would be much reduced.
Mikis
Theodorakis, famed Greek musician and composer and a hero of the European left,
said in an interview that the Jews were the root of all evil, that they
controlled not only world finance but all orchestras that would not perform his
works. He also noted that there was really no anti-Semitism and that Jews were
simply masochists who liked the role of victims.
When the British
Labor party launched antisemitic attacks against two Conservative leaders
(Michael Howard and Oliver Lettwin) who were of
Jewish extraction, this had nothing to do with Zionism and Israel since these
political figures were in no way involved in pro Israel activities, but simply
with the fact that they are Jews. (About half of the British electorate
indicated that it would not want a Jew as prime minister.) It could well be
that those who launched these attacks were motivated merely by
"practical" considerations. The influence of Muslim communities in
Western Europe is growing and they might well be decisive in dozens of
electoral constituencies.
1. Leigh White, The
Long Balkan Night, 1944, p. 95.
2. Evola, Chemin du
cinabre, 1983, p. 137.
3. Quoted in M.
Sedgwick, Against The Modern World, 2004, p.185.
4. Quoted in Peter
Finn, "Unlikely Allies Bound by a Common Hatred," Washington Post,
April 29, 2002, page A13.
5. Stephen Schwarz,
"Wahhabis in the Old Dominion: What the Federal Raids in Northern Virginia
Uncovered," Weekly Standard 7, no. 29, April 8, 2002.
6. See Claudio Mutti: Gotteskampf di Johann von Leers.
7. Kevin Coogan, The
Mysterious Achmed Huber: Friend to Hitler, Allah and
Ibn. Laden?, HITLIST
April/May 2002.
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