by Daniel Pipes
The 7/7 bombings in
However, rather than turn to anti-Islamist Muslims who reject the triumphalist goal of applying Islamic law in Europe, they promoted non-violent Islamists, hoping these would persuade coreligionists to express their hatred of the West in lawful ways. This effort featured Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962), a prominent Islamist intellectual. For example,
Deploying an Islamist may have seemed like a original and clever idea but it was neither. Western governments have been allying without success with Islamists for decades. Indeed, they have been allying with Ramadan's own family.
In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower hosted a group of foreign Muslims that included Said Ramadan (1926-95), a leader of arguably the most influential Islamist organization of the twentieth century, the rabidly anti-West Muslim Brotherhood – and also Tariq's father. The Eisenhower-Ramadan meeting took place in the context of sustained
Then there was Hasan al-Banna (1906-49), Tariq's grandfather, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and recipient of Nazi funding, American diplomats in
In other words, Western governments have a history of ignoring the Islamists' repulsive ideology and working with them, even strengthening them.
In a stunning piece of investigative historical research, Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly with the Wall Street Journal, reveals new twists and turns of this drama in his just-released book, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27).
Johnson opens with a review of the systematic Nazi efforts to recruit Soviet Muslims from among their prisoners of war. Many Muslims loathed Stalin; and between 150,000 and 300,000 of them fought for the Axis in World War II. In other words, over and above their unfulfilled propaganda effort directed at Arabs, the Nazis actually fielded a substantial force of mainly Turkic Muslims under the leadership of a scholarly Nazi enthusiast named Gerhard von Mende.
After the German defeat in 1945, Johnson follows von Mende as he continued his anti-communist work with ex-Soviet Muslims, now in a Cold War context. But his network of former soldiers proved not very competent at the task of arousing Muslim hostility against the
The heart of his fascinating study lies in tracing the evolution, much of it in
Johnson shows how, without anyone quite planning it, the Americans usurped von Mende's network and handed it over to Said Ramadan. This early
Thus did the Islamist domination of European Muslims have two hidden facilitators, Nazi and American. Its origins in Operation Barbarossa reveals the ugly pedigree of today's Islamist strength. Hitler and his thugs could not have foreseen it, but they helped set the stage for Eurabia.
American backing for Islamists prompts Johnson to warn against the futility of allying with the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk – as Tony Blair once again recently attempted. However tempting, it invariably harms the West. The lesson is simple: be cognizant of history and do not assist the Islamists.
Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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