Dr. Matthias Kuentzel, author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press Publishing, 2007), traces the origins of the virulent anti-Semitism that permeates Jihadi Islam not to the Koran but to Nazism. Kuentzel, a member of Germany’s Green Party and a Research Associate at the Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Hebrew University, addressed a group of 60 JINSA members and supporters at a Europe Project Forum on March 19 in Washington, DC.

Kuentzel contends that at the beginning of the 20th century, anti-Semitism among Arab populations was on the wane only to explode during the late 1920s and early 1930s. This coincided with a period during which Nazi expatriates in the Arab world began promulgating Nazi ideology, including anti-Semitism, to their host populations. Kuentzel cited as evidence a timeline that demonstrates that Nazism and Islamism experienced a simultaneous rise and that both relied on hatred of Jews to mobilize their followers. Kuentzel also discussed the links between the Nazis and the Mufti of Jerusalem.

Since then, anti-Semitism has become an integral part of the philosophy of Jihadi Islam. Kuentzel made the point that to ignore the inseparability of Jew-hatred from Islamism is an error that prevents an adequate response to the global Jihad challenge. Muslim anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist sentiments cannot be attributed to strife between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because the Jew-hatred that underpins the anti-Zionist impulses began well before Israel’s founding, Kuentzel said. Muslims have viewed the world through two “distorting filters” of early Islamic Jew-hatred and modern anti-Semitism irrespective of Zionism. This, Kuentzel declared, explains Hamas’s prioritization of weapons over the welfare of the Palestinian people.

Following the presentation, attendee and JINSA Board member Marilyn Stern observed that Kuentzel’s argument demonstrates that the “same Islamist forces that are targeting Israel, target the West as a whole” and that America “ignores this warning at our own peril.” JINSA extends many thanks to JINSA Board Member Carol Greenwald and Holocaust Museum Watch for co-sponsoring Dr. Kuentzel’s presentation.

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