Who gets the credit for Muslim anti-Semitism: Hitler or Muhammad? Answer to Dr Matthias Küntzel (Part 1)

On 13 July 2023,  Israel Academia Monitor (IAM) introduced its readers[1] to the work of German historian and political scientist, Dr Matthias Küntzel, centred on his book The 1948 War and the Iranian and Arab Nazi Propaganda. The editor of IAM deserves to be commended twice over: firstly, for recognising a serious gap in scholarship on “topics of Arab and Iranian antisemitism,” the cause of which the editor identifies as follows:

Western scholarship has, by and large, avoided topics that could upset Arabs and Iranians. A substantial academic industry decries Islamophobia, the purported Western fear and loathing of Islam and Muslims. …To avoid …inflaming Islamophobia, the famously self-censoring academic community has threaded (sic) very lightly on topics of Arab and Iranian antisemitism.

The editor further deserves commendation for doing something about closing that gap in scholarship. Hence IAM “has taken the initiative to highlight scholars researching Middle East antisemitism,” the first of whom is Dr Matthias Küntzel.

Both the editor’s identification-explanation of the gap in scholarship, as well as his or her highlighting “scholars researching Middle East antisemitism” as “beginning to close the gap” are true, but they are also limiting, though this does not indicate any intention on the part of the editor. They are limiting because they confine the problem causing the gap to what is only a part of a symptom of the problem, and seek scholarly solutions, valuable in their own right as they may be, that address only the partial symptom, rather than the problem itself.

Expressed more fully, fear of charges of “Islamophobia” not only discourages “topics of Arab and Iranian antisemitism,” but all topics critical of Islam and Muslims, including Muslim anti-Semitism. The IAM, therefore, runs the risk of mischaracterising the problem for taking too narrow a view. Aversion to criticising Islam, manifesting as self-censorship in order to “avoid inflaming Islamophobia,” is itself a form of submission to Muslim intimidation. This problem is particularly acute in Israel, where additional factors are in play and the consequences are the most dire.

The “gap” that needs to be closed is far wider than the IAM editor seems to realise. Looking only at Middle Eastern anti-Semitism is not sufficient to discern whether Dr Matthias Küntzel has a wider aim than “closing the gap” on Middle Eastern antisemitism. Dr Küntzel sets out to make specific points about Islam as a precondition for deflecting attention away from Islamic doctrinal anti-Semitism, and onto Nazi anti-Semitism, thereby to posit the Nazis as the origin of Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism. This is neither an oversight, nor an error on Küntzel’s part, but a deliberate attempt to break the link between Islam and anti-Semitism in order to reduce Arab and Iranian culpability for their own anti-Semitism. This is, therefor, much more than simply “avoid[ing] topics that could upset Arabs and Iranians.” It is positively propagandising for Arabs and Iranians, or more to the point,  for Islam, and so for Muslims.

My aim with this essay is neither to polemicise against Dr Küntzel, nor to counter his argument in every detail. Rather, my aim is to identify the most consequential flaws in Küntzel’s argument, and to show that these flaws are not errors, but necessary misconstructs in service of Küntzel’s wider objective: to absolve Islam and Muslims of anti-Semitism. I also suggest that the IAM editor has reason to ignore Küntzel’s flaws.

In a 4 July 2023 speech in Hamburg,[2] Dr Küntzel said that he wanted to research the “ideology of Islamism and its connection to antisemitism,” (my emphasis) and to this end he studied “Jew-hatred in Islamic societies” rather than in Islam itself, thereby effecting a double misdirection: one, away from Islam and onto Islamic societies; and two, away from Islam and onto “Islamism.” Before Küntzel got around to introducing Nazi anti-Semitism, he had already twice distanced Islam from its inherent Jew-hatred.

It is perfectly legitimate to be especially interested in the influence Nazi Germany might have had in strengthening Jew-hatred in Iran. But when Küntzel’s special interest is in “the influence that Nazi Germany had taken to create and strengthen this hatred,” then the exercise is no longer legitimate, for Küntzel has prejudiced his findings in favour of his a priori choice to search for anti-Semitism in “Islamism,” rather than in Islam. This the Muslim “scholars” protocol: you can discover anything about Islam, provided you never discover anything bad about it. There is no danger of Küntzel breaking that protocol. Since there is no such thing as “Islamism,” Küntzel should have no difficulty in establishing that there is no anti-Semitism in it, leaving the way clear for Nazi anti-Semitism to be the origin of Arab and Iranian (and Muslim) anti-Semitism, and the “roots of the Iranian regime’s hatred of Israel.”

Unsurprisingly, therefor, Küntzel tells us nothing about the “ideology of Islamism and its connection to antisemitism,” but tells us instead about how egregious Nazi propaganda and Nazi anti-Semitism were, the very safest of safe scholarly endeavours. No one in their right mind is going to challenge that. Even Hitler’s popularity amongst Arabs, and the numerous formal Arab Nazi groups, are no longer obscure knowledge. Küntzel tries to build a case that Arab anti-semitism arises only after the publication of Amin Al-Husseini’s pamphlet, Islam and Judaism, in 1937, and Iranian anti-Semitism twenty years after Ruhollah Khomeini had immersed himself in Nazi radio broadcasts. The latter case is even more spurious than the former.

The IAM editor, unfortunately, approaches Matthias Küntzel completely uncritically, taking his word for everything he says, including his claim that he is researching “Islamism”. The end result is that the IAM’s laudable initiative ends up misleading its readers by deflecting their attention first away from Islam onto “Islamism,” and then away from “Islamism” onto Nazism, where Dr Matthias Küntzel attempts to hold them fast. Contrary to the IAM’s expectations, Küntzel does nothing to fill any gap left by Western scholarship avoided topics that could upset Arabs and Iranians. Far from upsetting Arabs and Iranians, Küntzel whitewashes them by scapegoating Nazism as the origin of their anti-Semitism, thereby shielding their religion, Islam, from its inherent iniquity.

The editor is correct in pointing out that “Islamophobia” is about “avoid[ing] topics that could upset Arabs and Iranians,” or Muslims in general, for that matter. This is as far as the editor goes. Yet the “Islamophobia” device is much more serious than this. It intimidates by imposing arbitrary control over private citizens, the media, civil society, the government and the state. Those who fail to understand totalitarianism complain that “Islamophobia” is legally indefinable. But its very indefinability is its point. It has no defined limits so that its imposition can be arbitrary, and cause everyone to restrain themselves on the side of caution.

The final section of Dr Matthias Küntzel’s February 2023 Fathom article, “The 1948 Arab war against Israel: An aftershock of World War II?” is titled, “Why the Ignorance?” So many instances of ignorance will have been encountered by this point that the reader will need to be reminded of which ignorance Küntzel has in mind. He immediately clarifies, “So why then is the role of Nazi propaganda and Nazi policies largely ignored in debates on the roots of antisemitism in the Middle East?” But, to borrow the words of Sportin’ Life, it ain’t necessarily so. Just because “the role of Nazi propaganda and Nazi policies [are] largely ignored in debates on the roots of antisemitism in the Middle East,” does not mean that scholars are ignorant of such a role. It could mean that no such role exists. It could also mean that, even though such a role does exist, that the role is not significant. It could even mean that the role is significant, but not in the way that Küntzel suggests it to be. There are further possibilities, but I have made my point. Küntzel privileges his preferred interpretation without justification and without mentioning alternatives.

Küntzel is also going to have to do better than setting up the incredibly weak “Islamic antisemitism developed as a response to alleged Israeli misdeeds,” argument of others as a surrogate straw man (or, “The spread of antisemitism in the Arab-Islamic world is the consequence of the Palestine conflict”). These arguments are too non-sensical and self-defeating to warrant long hours of painstaking archival work to boast about. A simple observation that anti-Semitism exists all over not just the Arab, but the entire Muslim world, not just post-1948, but for more than a thousand years prior to 1948, would have sufficed. But Küntzel foregoes this step, while his best trick still awaits.

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Notes:

1. “The 1948 War and the Iranian and Arab Nazi Propaganda,” Israel Academia Monitor, 16 July 2023. https://israel-academia-monitor.com/2023/07/16/the-1948-war-and-the-iranian-and-arab-nazi-propaganda/
2. http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/broadcasting-as-a-weapon-the-persian-language-nazi-propaganda-and-its-consequences

Cross-posted with the author’s permission from Murtadd to Human.