Who gets the credit for Muslim anti-Semitism: Hitler or Muhammad? Answer to Dr Matthias Küntzel (Part 2)

Part 1.

One section of Küntzel’s Fathom article in headed, “1947/1948: Arab hesitation, Islamist mobilization.” Yet the word “Islamism” does not appear anywhere in this section. He describes various inter- and intra-Arab manoeuvring without any understanding of the conflicting pressures (state-formation, nationalism, pan-Arabism, Muslim greed for the wealth the Jews had created in Palestine, tribalism, Islamic revivalism, class formation, potentate vanity, and so forth), that bore down on the Arabs at the time. Even the claim that Amin Al-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood called for jihad from the start, according to Küntzel, definitely a hangover from Nazi propaganda, is not explicitly presented as “Islamist.” I think Küntzel avoids identifying the “Islamists” because he is relying on the reader taking it as too self-evident for Küntzel to have to spell out. And while the reader is thus distracted, Küntzel slips in that the Arabs launched their 1948 war against Israel, “because the Nazis’ antisemitic Arabic-language propaganda had shaped the postwar political climate.” From here, it becomes easy for Küntzel to shape his narrative of the present as that of an intrepid scholar.

Numerous Middle East experts derive mitigating circumstances for Arab antisemitism. “Is the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists … the equivalent of the hatred felt by Arabs enraged by the occupation and/or destruction of Arab lands?”, is the rhetorical question of the British-Lebanese anti-Zionist Gilbert Achcar. “Arab antisemitism, in contrast to European anti-Semitism, is at least based on a real problem, namely the marginalization of the Palestinians,” insists German Islam researcher Jochen Müller.

This paradigm, which distinguishes between a Nazi-like European antisemitism and an “at least” understandable hatred of Jews in the Middle East, hides the Nazi influence on the image of Jews held by many Muslims in the Middle East.” (My emphasis).

Indeed, it might well hide the Nazi influence on Muslim anti-Semitism, but it also hides the Qur’anic origin of Muslim anti-Semitism. But Küntzel has already made his choice: he will direct his reader’s attention firmly towards the Nazi role in Muslim anti-Semitism and deny the Islamic role, and where he has no choice but to acknowledge Islam’s role, he will mitigate it.

I have no reason to doubt Küntzel’s archival discoveries concerning Nazi propaganda radio broadcasts to the Middle East; all credit to him. If he has thrown light on a difficult chapter in history, then the world owes him a debt of gratitude for having done so. My contention here is with Küntzel’s intellectual dishonesty. Firstly, he does not tell us what has already been discovered and how his discoveries add to the existing body of knowledge. We are, therefore, left unable to judge whether his discoveries are as ground-breaking as he makes them out to be, or indeed, whether they are discoveries at all.

Secondly, Küntzel makes a number of eyebrow-raising claims for his book that are difficult to reconcile with what he does not mention in the Fathom article, which is about his book. He says, for example, “My book shows that in retrospect, those six years of daily radio propaganda marked a turning point dividing Middle Eastern history into a before and an after.” (My emphasis) That is an incredibly bold claim. If Küntzel discussed the “before” in his book, then he clearly does not think it important enough to mention in his article. Yet, how is the “after” to be evaluated and appreciated without any discussion of the “before”? If anything, Küntzel goes out of his way to obscure the “before,” and ends up simply asserting the “after” without comparing it to anything. He says, for example, “These years worsened the image of the Jews in the Arab world.” Undoubtedly it did, but there will have had to be an image to be worsened in the first place. Without knowing how bad that image was to begin with, there is no way of knowing whether the “worsening” was cataclysmic or a mere blip.

Küntzel asserts that, the Nazi broadcasts to the Middle East, “fostered an exclusively anti-Jewish reading of the Qur’an.” This is Küntzel’s most absurd claim. The Qur’an verses in question mention Jews both explicitly and implicitly. It is true that some of these verses are simultaneously both anti-Jewish and anti-Christian, but no less anti-Jewish for that.

In his June 2023 Fathom article, Küntzel addresses the significance of Amin Al-Husseini’s pamphlet, Islam and Judaism. The pamphlet discusses eight of the Qur’an’s anti-Semitic verses. Robert Spencer, in his book, The Palestinian Delusion, identifies and dissects no fewer than sixty-nine of these anti-Jewish verses in the Qur’an.[1] If Küntzel objects to the “exclusively anti-Jewish reading” of these verses, then at the very least, he owes it to his readers to show how these verses may be read in a non-anti-Jewish manner, but on this he is silent. If he does deal with this central issue in his book, then it is a curious omission from his article.

Küntzel claims to have discovered that, “They [the Nazis] shaped a genocidal rhetoric towards Zionism.” (My emphasis) Yet, Küntzel has to manipulate Al-Husseini’s Islam and Judaism in order to constructs this claim. We read:

Islam and Judaism concludes with the following words:

“[T]he verses from the Qur’an and hadith prove to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. Do not believe them, they only know hypocrisy and cunning. Hold together, fight for the Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.”

Because Küntzel provides no reference for the above quotation, it is difficult to verify. My copy of Islam and Judaism[2] does not end with the words Küntzel quotes above. Instead, it ends with the notorious genocide hadith, which reads:

Said the Prophet, on whom be peace: the hour of the Resurrection will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, until the Jews hide behind the stones and trees, and then the trees and stones will say: Oh Muslim! Oh Abdallah! Here is a Jew behind me, come and kill him! Apart from the gharqad, for it is one of the Jews’ trees.

There was no “genocidal rhetoric towards Zionism” for the Nazis to shape. Muslims had it shaped that way long before they encountered the Nazis. This leaves one wondering about the convenience of the expression, “free of the Jews” at the end of Küntzel’s quotation, to which he pointedly draws attention:

“Free of the Jews” – “Judenfrei” – is a typical Nazi expression which we do not find in early Islamic writing. (My emphasis)

This is a curious claim, and if also false, then a particularly egregious one. The precise expression “Judenfrei” (or even “Judenrein”) might not occur in early Islamic writing—why should it?—but the concept is certainly there, as in the genocide hadith at the end of the Havel translation of Islam and Judaism. But things are about to get curiouser and curiouser. While the genocide hadith goes unmentioned in Küntzel’s Fathom article discussion of Islam and Judaism, he is well familiar with it. My quotation of the hadith, above, is from Küntzel’s website [3]

Discussing Yehoshafat Harkabi’s treatment of the genocide hadith, Küntzel starts with this line: “He [Harkabi] quoted the following hadith from the 1937 pamphlet Islam and Jewry:” Note that Küntzel does not deny that the hadith appears in Islam and Jewry (Islam and Judaism). The mystery of why he remains silent about it in his Fathom article soon becomes clear: it is a dripping knife (the ‘smoking gun’ metaphor doesn’t quite work here). On his website, far from ignoring the genocide hadith, Küntzel quotes it, but only to immediately deny that it is what it is. He says of the hadith:

This is a particularly cruel hadith. It not only makes the killing of the Jews essential to the Muslims’ final salvation but also makes even the tree – symbol of living nature – and the stone – symbol of dead nature – demand that the Jews be killed, as if the whole universe were condemning them to death. It is a sadistic hadith because it shows the Jew not as a dangerous, but as a frightened and trembling figure who tries to hide but is nevertheless dragged out of his concealment and relentlessly killed.

Here Küntzel is exactly right. But the unbearable truth is that the hadith tells him about the original cruelty and sadism essential to the Muslims’ attitude to Jews. He tries to escape this snag by seeking refuge in the authority of Harkabi’s dismissal of the hadith:

Such expressions, continues Harkabi, “cannot be said to be an essential part of Islam; they are dormant, even unknown to its adherents … so long as they are not repeated with some frequency.”

In other words, if we don’t talk about it, then it isn’t there. Distancing Muslims from their own hadith is a higher priority for Küntzel than faithfulness towards his own insight. Yehoshafat Harkabi’s book, Arab Attitudes to Israel, was published in 1972, and this gives Küntzel the opening he needs to appear to be opposing Harkabi, while, in fact, relying on him. Küntzel continues:

But that is exactly what has happened. In 1937 began the popularization of this cruel hadith, which today is certainly, at least in the Arab world, one of the best known and most quoted hadiths.

Küntzel does not care to refute Harkabi’s assertion that “such expressions … are dormant, even unknown to its adherents …cannot be said to be an essential part of Islam.” This sweeping claim suits Küntzel just fine as it allows him to “oppose” Harkabi and say, yes, they were dormant and unknown to Muslims, but that all changed in 1937, as I discovered.

Just to recapitulate: Firstly, Küntzel provides no evidence that the genocide hadith was “dormant, even unknown to its adherents,” prior to 1937, relying solely on the fact that someone else had said so. Secondly, just because a hadith (or verse) is not popularly known, does not mean it is not an essential part of Islam. That something is essential to a religion does not depend on the devoutness of its adherents. Thirdly, even if it were “unknown to its adherents,” it is the job of the religion’s clergy to bring their charges closer to the essence of their religion (even Christian clergy do that). It is absurd to suggest, as Harkabi and Küntzel do, that the Muslim clergy had neglected this essential part of their role for 1300 years until some Teutonic Bad Boys turned up to show them how it’s done. Fourthly, and most importantly, Küntzel’s description of the genocide hadith as “particularly cruel” and “sadistic” are accurate, but as with so many of his statements, there is a wider significance here. Küntzel complains that this hadith, “makes the killing of the Jews essential to the Muslims’ final salvation …as if the whole universe were condemning them to death” and “shows the Jew not as a dangerous, but as a frightened and trembling figure who tries to hide.” By highlighting these cruelties, and in a tone of moral outrage, Küntzel wishes to imply that this hadith is unfit to be Islamic, that by its cruelty and sadism it disqualifies itself. The implication, of course, is that anything in Islam that is cruel and sadistic could not possibly be Islamic.

The problem Küntzel faces here is that the remainder of hadiths inculcating hatred of Jews, all the sixty-nine plus Jew-denouncing verses of the Qur’an and the many excellent examples from Muhammad’s life on exactly how to handle Jews, all culminate in the genocide hadith, the ethical culmination of all that has gone before, the final righteous slaughter of all the sons of apes and pigs, the final reckoning for all the evil and injustice that the Jews have perpetrated on the Muslims.

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Notes:

1. Robert Spencer, The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, 2019, Bombardier Books, New York. Chapter Two: ‘The Roots of the Hatred of Israel,’ includes the subheading, ‘Qur’anic Anti-semitism.’
2. Amin Al-Husseini, “Islam and Judaism”, Boris Havel’s English translation from the Croatian 1943 edition, available at https://myislam.dk/articles/en/al-husseini%20islam-and-judaism.php
3. http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/islamic-antisemitism-how-it-originated-and-spread The original hadith reference is Sahih Muslim 6985.

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