HezbAllah’s Nazi roots

Both Hezbollah and Hamas draw their main inspiration, armaments and funding from Islamist sources, ranging from the Sunni ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Shiite demagogues of Iran. What unites them all is a fanatical dedication to the destruction of Israel.

Sounding like a modern-day Hitler, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week repeated his call for the "elimination" of Israel, home to six million Jews. Hezbollah, Iran's proxy army in Lebanon, shares that objective. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has urged the world's Jews to collect in Israel in order to facilitate the task of exterminating them.

In this regard, there are parallels between the present war and previous campaigns waged against Israel by Arab nationalists. One thing that Arab nationalists and Islamists clearly have in common, though it is usually ignored in the Western media, is their explicit debt to the Nazis.

This extends even to overt Nazi symbolism. I am indebted to one of the most seasoned observers of the Middle East, Tom Gross, for a photograph of a Hezbollah rally on the Lebanese side of the border fence, shortly before the present conflict. With houses in the Israeli town of Metullah in the background, hundreds of uniformed Hezbollah terrorists are raising their arms in a Nazi-style salute. This obscene ceremony, complete with yellow standards and mullah commanders taking the salute, was happening in full view of Israeli civilians. Mr. Gross asks pointedly, "Are all those now attacking Israel around the world even capable of imagining what an elderly Holocaust survivor who happened to glance across the fence might have felt?"

Hezbollah's Nazi salute evokes memories of Hitler's support for Arab agitators such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the leaders of a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq. The Nazi legacy also manifests itself in Holocaust denial or revisionism, a Middle Eastern obsession that unites the most extreme Islamists, including Iran's president, with "moderate" secularists such as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The Arabs appropriated anti-Semitic ideology directly from the Nazis and have recycled it ever since. In the 1950s, the Baathist parties in Syria and Iraq modelled themselves on Hitler's heady brew of nationalism and socialism. Charismatic dictators from Nasser and Gaddafi to Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat turned themselves into little Hitlers, weaving anti-Semitism into their political agendas. However, the Nazi connection is usually mentioned by Arab nationalists and Islamists sotto voce, because they constantly identify Zionism with Nazism in their propaganda.

A second key similarity between today's Islamists and past Arab nationalists relates less to ideology than to geopolitics. As the British historian Efraim Karsh convincingly shows in his new book, Islamic Imperialism, the pursuit of empire through ruthless military conquest has been a constant theme from the time of Muhammad till that of Osama bin Laden, whose jihad is aimed at creating a timeless, universal Caliphate.

Yet the dominant historical narrative stands this on its head, portraying the Arabists and Islamists as anti-imperialist. Even as Gamal Abdel Nasser dreamt of what John Dulles called "an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean," the Egyptian dictator posed as the champion of the "non-aligned" nations, struggling against European colonialism and superpower hegemony.

The whole issue of imperialism is invariably accompanied by much hypocrisy. Today, for example, America is criticized because of its refusal to intervene to stop Israel from retaliating against Hezbollah. America's critics are demanding that a superpower should intervene to prevent a sovereign state from defending its population against bombardment by proxies of a government that has declared its intention of wiping that state off the map. What could be more imperialist than such an intervention?

The classic example of Arab exploitation of the West's confusion over imperialism was the Suez crisis of 1956. Fifty years ago this week, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, thereby precipitating an international crisis. The British prime minister, Anthony Eden, decided it was his duty to reject appeasement and stop Nasser. But President Eisenhower, campaigning for re-election, refused to have anything to do with it. And American and Russian pressure eventually forced the British and their allies to back down.

So Nasser snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and the Arab war against the West began. Fifty years on, it is by no means over. Indeed, if those Nazi-saluting Hezbollah thugs are anything to go by, we may have seen nothing yet.