Author: Martin A. Lee
Publication: www.splcenter.org
Date:
URL: http://www.splcenter.org/cgi-bin/goframe.pl?refname=/intelligenceproject/ip-4u3.html
In the wake of Sept. 11, new light
is thrown on the international ties increasingly linking Muslim and neo-Nazi
extremists
As Germany's defeat loomed during
the finals months of World War II, Adolf Hitler increasingly lapsed into
delusional fits of fantasy. Albert Speer, in his prison writings, recounts
an episode in which a maniacal Hitler "pictured for himself and for us
the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire." The Nazi fuehrer described
skyscrapers turning into "gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one
another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the dark sky."
An approximation of Hitler's hellish
vision came true on Sept. 11, when terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers
in New York, killing nearly 3,000 people. But it was not Nazis or even
neo-Nazis who carried out the attack the deadliest terror strike in history
allegedly came at the hands of foreign Muslim extremists.
Still, in the aftermath of the slaughter,
white supremacists in America and Europe applauded the suicide attacks
and praised Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the massacre. An official
of America's premier neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance, said he wished
his own members had "half as much testicular fortitude." The awestruck
leader of another U.S. Nazi group called the terrorists "VERY BRAVE PEOPLE."
Neo-fascist youth in France celebrated the event that evening with champagne
at the headquarters of the extreme right Front National. German neo-Nazis,
some wearing checkered Palestinian headscarves, rejoiced at street demonstrations
while burning an American flag. Jan Kopal, head of the Czech National Social
Bloc, declared at a rally in Prague that bin Laden was "an example for
our children." Horst Mahler, a former left-wing terrorist and prominent
member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany, proclaimed
his solidarity with the terrorists and said America had gotten what it
deserved.
What's going on here? For decades,
American extremists have lumped Arabs in with dark-skinned "mud people."
In Europe, neo-Nazis have been implicated in countless xenophobic attacks
on Arabs, Turks and other Muslims. Extremist parties on both sides of the
Atlantic hope to bar entrance to non- white immigrants.
The peculiar bond between white
nationalist groups and certain Muslim extremists derives in part from a
shared set of enemies Jews, the United States, race-mixing, ethnic diversity.
It is also very much a function of the shared belief that they must shield
their own peoples from the corrupting influence of foreign cultures and
the homogenizing juggernaut of globalization. Both sets of groups also
have a penchant for far-flung conspiracy theories that caricature Jewish
power.
But there is more. Even before World
War II, Western fascists began to forge ideological and operational ties
to Islamic extremists. Over the years, these contacts between Nazis and
Muslim nationalists developed into dangerous networks that have been implicated
in a number of bloody terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East.
Wealthy Arab regimes have financed extremists in Europe and the United
States, just as Western neo-Nazis have helped to build Holocaust denial
machinery in the Arab world. In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia hired an American
neo-Nazi as a lobbyist in the United States. In the 1980s, U.S. neo-Nazi
strategist Louis Beam openly called for a linkup of America's far right
with the "liberation movements" of Libya, Syria, Iran and Palestine. In
the 1990s, an American Black Muslim was convicted in a plot to bomb the
United Nations and other New York landmarks that was masterminded by a
blind Egyptian cleric (see story on Black Muslims at bottom of this article).
Just last year, a meeting sponsored by a U.S. Holocaust denial group brought
together Arab and Western extremists in Jordan (see story on Holocaust
denial, also at bottom of this page). And after the Sept. 11 attacks, a
spate of articles by American neo-Nazis and white supremacists appeared
in Islamic publications and Web sites.
Although links like these illustrate
the ties between Muslim extremists and Americans, such ties are far more
developed in Europe. But since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, there
are a number of signs including a spate of articles by American neo-Nazis
that have appeared in Islamic publications and Web sites that an operational
alliance may be taking shape in the United States as well.
Banking for Allah
Perhaps the best contemporary snapshot
of this Nazi-Islamist extremist axis comes in the person of one Ahmed Huber,
a neo-Nazi whose home in a suburb of Berne was raided by Swiss police on
Nov. 8, after U.S. officials identified him as a linchpin in the financial
machinations of Osama bin Laden. The raid was part of a coordinated law
enforcement dragnet that seized records from the offices of Al Taqwa, an
international banking group. Al Taqwa, which literally means "Fear of God,"
had been channeling funds to Muslim extremist organizations around the
world, including Hamas, a group active in the Israeli-occupied territories.
Huber, a former journalist who converted
to Islam and changed his first name from Albert, served on the board of
Nada Management, a component of Al Taqwa. After Swiss authorities froze
the firm's assets and questioned Huber, the 74-year-old denounced Washington
for doing the bidding of "Jew Zionists" who "rule America." In January,
Nada Management announced that it had gone into liquidation.
A well-known figure in European
neofascist circles, Huber "sees himself as a mediator between Islam and
right-wing groups," according to Germany's Office for the Protection of
the Constitution. Portraits of Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler adorn
the walls of Huber's office, alongside photos of Islamic political leaders
and a picture of Jean- Marie Le Pen, the present-day boss of the French
Front National.
In accordance with his self-proclaimed
mission to unite Muslim fundamentalists and extreme right-wing forces in
Europe and North America, Huber has traveled widely and proselytized at
numerous gatherings. In Germany, he speaks often at events hosted by the
neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, which publicly welcomed the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks. Huber also befriended British author David Irving and
other Holocaust deniers while frequenting "revisionist" conclaves.
A Bin Laden Fan in Chicago
At the same time, Huber made the
rounds of the radical Islamic circuit in Western countries. In June 1994,
he spoke about the "evils of the Jews" at a mosque in Potomac, Md. (just
outside Washington, D.C.), where videotapes of Huber's speeches are reportedly
on sale. During a subsequent visit to Chicago, he attended a private assembly
that brought together, in Huber's words, "the authentic Right and the fighters
for Islam." Huber told journalist Richard Labeviere that "major decisions
were taken [in Chicago]. . [T]he reunification is under way."
Huber acknowledges meeting al-Qaeda
operatives on several occasions at Muslim conferences in Beirut, Brussels
and London. He has been quoted in the Swiss media as saying that bin Laden's
associates "are very discreet, well- educated and highly intelligent people."
The U.S. government claims that Huber's banking firm helped bin Laden shift
financial assets around the world. But Huber denies any involvement in
terrorist activities. He insists Al Taqwa was engaged in charitable work,
providing aid for social services that benefited needy Muslims.
Described as "the financial heart
of the Islamist economic apparatus," Al Taqwa is intertwined with the Muslim
Brotherhood, a longstanding, far-right cult whose emblem is a Koran crossed
by a sword. The influence of the Brotherhood extends throughout the Muslim
world, where it vigorously, and often violently, opposes secular Arab regimes.
In 1981, partisans of the Muslim Brotherhood were implicated in the assassination
of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Several members of Islamic Jihad, an
extremist sect closely associated with the Brotherhood, were also involved
in the Sadat assassination. By the early 1990s, Islamic Jihad would closely
ally itself with bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Back to the Beginning
The roots of the Muslim Brotherhood
and, in many ways, the Nazi-Muslim axis go back to the organization's formation
in Egypt in 1928. Marking the start of modern political Islam, or what
is often referred to as "Islamic fundamentalism," the Brotherhood from
the outset envisioned a time when an Islamic state would prevail in Egypt
and other Arab countries, where the organization quickly established local
branches. The growth of the Muslim Brotherhood coincided with the rise
of fascist movements in Europe - a parallel noted by Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawy,
former chief justice of Egypt's High Criminal Court, who decried "the perversion
of Islam" and "the fascistic ideology" that infuses the world view of the
Brothers, "their total (if not totalitarian) way of life . . . [and] their
fantastical reading of the Koran."
Youssef Nada, current board chairman
of Al Taqwa, had joined the armed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as a
young man in Egypt during World War II. Nada and several of his cohorts
in the Sunni Muslim fraternity were recruited by German military intelligence,
which sought to undermine British colonial rule in the land of the sphinx.
Hassan al- Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood,
also collaborated with spies of the Third Reich.
Advocating a pan-Islamic insurgency
in British-controlled Palestine, the Brotherhood proclaimed their support
for the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, in the late 1930s.
The Grand Mufti, the preeminent religious figure among Palestinian Muslims,
was the most notable Arab leader to seek an alliance with Nazi Germany,
which was eager to extend its influence in the Middle East.
Although he loathed Arabs (he once
described them as "lacquered half-apes who ought to be whipped"), Hitler
understood that he and the Mufti shared the same rivals - the British,
the Jews and the Communists. Indicative of the old Arab adage, "The enemy
of my enemy is my friend," they met in Berlin, where the Mufti lived in
exile during the war. The Mufti agreed to help organize a special Muslim
division of the Waffen SS. Powerful radio transmitters were put at the
Mufti's disposal so that his pro-Axis propaganda could be heard throughout
the Arab world.
A Mecca for Fascists
After the defeat of Nazi Germany,
the Grand Mufti fled to Egypt. His arrival in 1946 was a precursor to a
steady stream of Third Reich veterans who chose Cairo as a postwar hideout.
The Egyptian capital became a safe haven for several thousand Nazi fugitives,
including former SS Captain Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's chief deputy.
Convicted in absentia for war crimes, Brunner would later reside in Damascus,
where he served as a security advisor for the Syrian government.
Several American fascists visited
the Middle East during this period, including Francis Parker Yockey, who
made his way to Cairo in the summer of 1953, a year after the corrupt Egyptian
monarchy was overthrown by a military coup. The Brotherhood had played
a major role in instigating the popular uprising that set the stage for
the emergence of Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser as Egypt's new leader. But Nasser,
who had little interest in mixing politics and religion, would subsequently
have a falling out with the Islamic fundamentalist sect.
When Nasser wanted to overhaul Egypt's
secret service, he asked the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for assistance.
But the U.S. government "found it highly impolitic to help him directly,"
cia agent Miles Copeland recalled in a memoir, so the cia instead secretly
bankrolled more than 100 German espionage and military experts who trained
Egyptian police and army units in the mid-1950s.
An American Reaches Out
During this period, the Grand Mufti
maintained close relations with the burgeoning Nazi exile community in
Cairo, while cultivating ties to right- wing extremists in the United States
and other countries. H. Keith Thompson, a New York-based businessman and
Nazi activist, was a confidant of the Mufti. "I did a couple of jobs for
him, getting some documents from files that were otherwise unavailable,"
Thompson acknowledged in an interview.
Thompson also carried on a lively
correspondence with Johannes von Leers, one of the Third Reich's most prolific
Jew-baiters, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Omar Amin after
he took up residence in Cairo in 1955. "If there is any hope to free the
world from Jewish tyranny," Amin wrote Thompson, "it is with the Moslems,
who stand steadfastly against Zionism, Colonialism and Imperialism." Formerly
Goebbels' right-hand man, Amin became a top official in the Egyptian Information
Ministry, which employed several European fascists who churned out hate
literature and anti-Jewish broadcasts. Another German expatriate, Louis
Heiden, alias Louis Al-Hadj, translated Hitler's Mein Kampf into Arabic.
The Egyptian government also published
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic forgery
that purports to reveal a Jewish master plan for taking over the world.
A staple of Nazi propaganda, the Protocols also are quoted in Article 32
of the charter of Hamas, the hard-line Palestinian fundamentalist group
that is supported by the Muslim Brotherhood even though Muslim scholars
say such views are an anathema to mainstream Islam. "There are no historic
roots for anti-Semitism in Islam," says Hasem Saghiyeh, a columnist at
Al Hayat, a London-based Arab newspaper. "The process of translating books
like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on a popular scale started in
Nasser's Egypt, but only the Islamic fundamentalist movement incorporated
them into its literature."
Mercenaries for Palestine
After Israel's overwhelming victory
in the Six Day War in June 1967, a mood of desperate militancy engulfed
the Palestinian refugee camps. Deprived of a homeland, the leaders of the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) apparently felt that they couldn't
afford to turn down offers of help, no matter how unsavory the donors.
Karl von Kyna, a West German neo-Nazi mercenary, died during a Palestinian
commando raid in September 1967. Eager to continue their vendetta against
the Jews, several right-wing extremists subsequently joined the Hilfskorp
Arabien ("Auxiliary Corps Arabia"), which was advertised in the Munich-
based Deutsche National-Zeitung, a pro- Nazi newspaper, in 1968.
The following year, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked several commercial
airplanes. When three PFLP members stood trial after blowing up an Israeli
jet in Zurich, the legal costs for their defense were paid by Francois
Genoud, an elusive Swiss banker described by the London Observer as "one
of the world's leading Nazis." Genoud had previously picked up the tab
for Adolf Eichmann's legal defense, and a number of other Nazi war criminals
and Arab terrorists would also benefit from his largesse. Where did the
money come from? According to European press accounts, Genoud was managing
the hidden Swiss treasure of the Third Reich, most of which had been stolen
from Jews. "Security services claim he transferred the defeated Nazis'
gold into Swiss bank accounts," reports Gitta Sereny, who called Genoud
"the most mysterious man in Europe."
After World War II, Genoud served
as the financial advisor to the Grand Mufti. In 1958, the Swiss Nazi set
up the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva to manage the war chest of the Algerian
National Liberation Front, whose partisans were fighting to free their
country from French colonial rule. Several Third Reich veterans, including
Maj. Gen. Otto Ernst Remer, who had served as Hitler's bodyguard, smuggled
weapons to the Algerian rebels, while other German advisors provided military
instruction. Under the guise of supporting the Arabs' struggle against
French colonialism, Genoud and his Nazi cohorts were following the same
geopolitical strategy that Hitler had pursued in the Middle East.
Europeans and Pro-Palestinian Terror
In addition to brokering arms sales
to Arab militants, Genoud helped subsidize terrorist networks in Europe
and the Arab world. This financier of fascism waited until the statue of
limitations ran out before admitting that he had personally written and
sent ransom notes demanding $5 million to the German airline Lufthansa
and several news services after PFLP terrorists hijacked another jet in
1972. That same year, the Black September organization murdered nine Israeli
athletes at the Munich Olympics. When Black September leader Hassan Salameh
needed medical attention, Genoud arranged for him to be treated at a private
clinic in Lausanne.
In 1974, PLO chief Yasser Arafat
publicly indicated a willingness to renounce international terrorism and
declared his interest in a settlement that would finally establish a Palestinian
homeland in the Israeli-occupied territories. These steps toward moderation
angered Arab hardliners, who ruled out any compromise with Israel. Not
surprisingly, Genoud and other neofascists favored the most belligerent
factions that kept calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state.
After bombing four U.S. Army bases
in West Germany in 1982, Odfried Hepp, a young neo-Nazi renegade, went
underground and joined the Tunis-based Palestine Liberation Front (PLF).
Hepp, one of West Germany's most wanted terrorists, was arrested in June
1985 while entering the apartment of a PLF member in Paris. Four months
later, PLF commandos seized the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murdered
Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound Jewish American. Included on the PLF's
list of prisoners to be exchanged for the Achille Lauro hostages was the
name of Odfried Hepp.
Fundamentalism and the Iranian Revolution
Islamic fundamentalism got a tremendous
boost when the Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the Shah during the 1979 Iranian
revolution. The Ayatollah's description of the United States and the Soviet
Union as "the twin Satans" dovetailed neatly with the "Third Position"
politics of many European and American neofascists, an ideology that rejects
both American capitalism and Soviet Communism. Some white supremacists
also shared Khomeini's dream of launching a "holy war" against what was
seen as decadent, Western-style democracy. When Iran issued a call for
the assassination of author Salmon Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses,
several neo-Nazi groups supported the Iranian fatwa.
Far-right fanatics also hailed the
1983 suicide car-bombing by Iranian-backed Shiite terrorists that killed
271 U.S. Marines in Beirut. The British National Front had nothing but
praise for Khomeini's Islamic Revolutionary Guards: "Their belief in their
cause is so strong that they will run through mine fields unarmed to attack
enemy positions; their ideals are so all- consuming that they will drive
truck bombs into enemy camps knowing full well their [own] death is inevitable.
. This power, this contempt for death, is the stuff of which victories
are made."
In 1987, French police cordoned
off the Iranian embassy in Paris and demanded that a magistrate be allowed
to interrogate Wahid Gordji, an Iranian official suspected of orchestrating
a series of bombings that rocked the French capital during the previous
a year. French investigators got on to Gordji's trail after they discovered
a check for 120,000 francs (about $20,000) that he had written to Ogmios,
a neo-Nazi publisher and bookstore in Paris. The money was used to underwrite
a slick catalogue promoting The Myth of the Jewish Holocaust and similar
titles. But the Iranian government rebuffed the French authorities who
wanted to question Gordji, causing a rupture in diplomatic relations between
Paris and Tehran. The six-month embassy stand-off was finally resolved
after French officials met with representatives of a group called "The
Friends of Wahid Gordji" a group which included the redoubtable Nazi banker
Francois Genoud.
Nazis in Baghdad
Links between white supremacists
and the Iranian government continued after Khomeini's death in 1989. On
several occasions in recent years, American neo- Nazi chieftain William
Pierce has been interviewed by Radio Tehran. U.S. white supremacists have
also snuggled up to Iran's archenemy, Saddam Hussein. In 1990, Gene Schroder,
an ideologue of the far-right "common-law court" movement, joined a delegation
of Midwest farmers to Washington for a meeting in the Iraqi embassy, where
Iraqi officials were trying to drum up opposition to the impending Persian
Gulf War. During that 1991 war, Oklahoma Klan leader Dennis Mahon organized
a small rally in Tulsa in support of Saddam. Mahon says he later received
a couple of hundred dollars in an unmarked envelope from the Iraqi government.
In addition, shortly before the
war, German neo-Nazis solicited support from Iraq for an anti-Zionist legion
composed of far-right mercenaries from several European countries. The
members of this so-called international "Freedom Corps" pretentiously strutted
around Baghdad in SS uniforms. But as soon as bombs started to fall on
the Iraqi capital, the neo-Nazi volunteers scurried back to Europe.
A number of prominent neo-fascists
have expressed support for Saddam, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the
Russian demagogue, who visited Iraq after the Gulf War. Jean-Marie Le Pen
of the French Front National also got the red- carpet treatment when he
met Saddam in Baghdad. Although he built his political career by disparaging
Arab immigrants, Le Pen now claims that he is deeply concerned about the
plight of Iraqi children who have suffered under sanctions imposed by the
United Nations. His wife, Jany, who heads a group called SOS Children of
Iraq, has joined Le Pen on several trips to Baghdad. Thus far, however,
Arab children in France have yet to benefit from the supposed good Samaritan
act of the Le Pens.
The Libyan Connection
On June 28, 2000, the Times of London
reported that Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi had ordered the deposit of
$25 million into a bank in Carinthia, the Austrian province governed by
Jorg Haider, de facto leader of the far-right Freedom Party. (The Freedom
Party is an immigrant-bashing organization that is home to many neo-Nazis
and former Nazis and has downplayed German war atrocities.) Col. Ghaddafi's
cash gift - which Haider described as "Christmas for Austria" - was meant
to ease the strain of sanctions imposed on Austria by the European Union
after the Freedom Party joined Austria's national governing coalition.
This was the second rabbit Haider
pulled from his hat as a result of two private forays to Tripoli, where
he met Ghaddafi. After his first Libyan excursion, Haider announced he
was tackling Austria's high gas prices by arranging for Libyan gasoline
to be sold in Carinthia at a discount. News photos showed Haider, the Porsche-driving
populist, beaming as he pumped gas for motorists.
Over the years, Ghaddafi has been
wooed by several neofascist leaders, including Italian fugitive Stefano
delle Chiaie, who was accused of masterminding a series of bomb attacks
in Rome and Milan. Described in a 1982 cia report as "the most prominent
rightist terrorist . still at large," delle Chiaie wrote a letter to Ghadaffi,
inviting him to join in a common struggle against "atheistic Soviet Marxism
and American capitalist materialism," both of which were supposedly controlled
by "international Zionism." Delle Chiaie added: "Libya can, if it wants,
be the active focus, the center of national socialist renovation [that
will] break the chains which enslave people and nations."
Ghaddafi, the Green Book and Western
Extremism
Links between Libya and the European
far right have been scrutinized in several parliamentary and judicial probes
in Italy. One Italian judicial inquiry found that the Libyan embassy in
Rome had provided money to aid the escape of Italian terrorist suspect
Mario Tuti shortly after the bombing of an express train near Florence
in 1974. Tuti was later captured and sentenced to a lengthy prison term
for orchestrating the attack, which killed 12 people and injured 44 others.
Ghadaffi's financial largesse and
his militant anti-Zionism has generated support for the Libyan regime among
right-wing extremists around the world, including in Great Britain, where
the Green Book, Ghaddafi's political manifesto, was promoted by the neo-
Nazi National Front. In 1984, according to former British Nazi leader Ray
Hill (who later renounced racism and worked with antiracists), the Libyan
People's Bureau put up money for a special anti- Semitic supplement to
the National Front's monthly magazine. In addition, Ghadaffi's government
picked up the tab for several junkets so that neofascists from England,
France, Canada, the Netherlands and several other countries could visit
the Libyan capital.
Col. Ghaddafi is also widely admired
by white supremacists in the United States. The Green Book has been featured
as the top online book on the Web site of the American Front, whose professed
aim is "to secure National Freedom and Social Justice for the White people
of North America." Asserting that he is "against race mixing," American
Front leader James Porazzo praises Libya and says that his group has much
in common ideologically with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, which has
its own links to Ghaddafi (see "Strange Bedfellows" below). Porazzo also
says he has "great respect for the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah," two
radical Islamist groups involved in suicide bombings, as long as they "see
that their home is in the Mideast and that their religion is great for
their people but not intended for all mankind."
'Working for Their Races'
The Philadelphia-based American
Front thinks highly of Osama bin Laden, too, describing him as "one of
ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government, the name many extremists give to the
federal government, which they believe is run by Jews] and the New World
Order's biggest enemies." And it is not alone. Wolfgang Droege, one of
17 Canadian racists who traveled on a "fact-finding mission" to Libya in
1989, is similarly enamored of bin Laden, seeing parallels between bin
Laden's struggle and others supporting "racial nationalism" in North America.
"I've had dealings with Black Muslims, I've had dealings with Arabs, I've
had dealings with people of various races, and I realize that some of these
people are as motivated as I am in working for the interest of their race,"
Droege told MacLean's magazine.
While they wouldn't want bin Laden,
or anyone of non-European descent, living next door, leaders of the hard-core
racist movement in the United States have seized upon the Sept. 11 attacks
as an opportunity to expand their strategic alliance with Islamic radicals
under the pretext of supporting Palestinian rights. After hijacked airplanes
demolished the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, a number of
Muslim newspapers published a flurry of articles by American white supremacists
ranting against Israel and the Jews. Anti-Zionist commentary by neo-Nazi
David Duke appeared on the front page of the Oman Times, for instance,
and on an extremist Web site based in Pakistan (www.tanzeen.com). Another
opinion piece by Duke ran in Muslims, a New York-based English-language
weekly, which also featured a lengthy critique of U.S. foreign policy by
William Pierce, head of the rabidly racist National Alliance. In the wake
of Sept. 11, several American neo-Nazi web sites also started to offer
links to Islamic Web sites.
The psychological dynamics that
propel the actions of Islamic terrorists have much in common with the mental
outlook of neo-Nazis. Both glorify violence as a regenerative force and
both are willing to slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new social
order. The potential for an alliance between American neo-Nazis and Islamic
terrorists an alliance that could develop into strong operational ties
cannot be ruled out given the long and sordid history of fascist links
to the Muslim world.
Martin A. Lee is the author of The
Beast Reawakens, a book about neo-fascism.
Intelligence Report
Spring 2002
Issue 105
Strange Bedfellows
Some American Black Muslims make
common cause with domestic neo-Nazis and foreign Muslim extremists
In 1961, Elijah Muhammad, founder
of the black supremacist Nation of Islam, met with Ku Klux Klan leaders
at the Magnolia Hall in Atlanta. Although they had different ideas about
the skin color of the master race, they shared the belief that blacks and
whites should stay separate. The following year, Muhammad invited American
Nazi Party chief George Lincoln Rockwell to address a Nation convention
in Chicago, even though Rockwell had often called blacks "the lowest scum
of humanity." Flanked by a dozen storm troopers in swastika armbands, Rockwell
told an audience of 5,000 Nation devotees that he was "proud to stand here
before black men. . Elijah Muhammad is the Adolf Hitler of the black man."
Sporadic contacts between Black
Muslims and white supremacists continued after Louis Farrakhan set up his
own branch of the Nation of Islam in 1975. Klan leader Tom Metzger was
so impressed with Farrakhan's anti-Semitic bombast that he donated $100
to the Nation after a Farrakhan rally in Los Angeles in September 1985.
A month later, Metzger and 200 other white supremacists from the United
States and Canada gathered on a farm about 50 miles west of Detroit, where
they pledged their support for the Nation of Islam. "The enemy of my enemy
is my friend," explained Art Jones, a neo-Nazi militant from Chicago. "I
salute Louis Farrakhan and anyone else who stands up against the Jews."
The Nation's contacts with non-black
extremists has not been limited to domestic neo-Nazis and Klansmen. During
his international travels, Farrakhan has been officially welcomed in a
number of countries, including several repressive Arab states. The Final
Call, Farrakhan's newspaper, describes one such globetrotting expedition
in 1986, when he visited Libya for discussions with Col. Muammar Ghaddafi,
who had given Farrakhan a $5 million interest-free loan the previous year.
After Libya, Farrakhan ventured to Jeddah, where he conferred with top
Saudi Arabian officials before paying a courtesy call to Idi Amin, the
exiled Ugandan despot. Farrakhan was also warmly received by General Zia-ul-Huq,
the military dictator of Pakistan, whose abysmal human rights record coincided
with efforts to impose a harsh Islamic fundamentalist regime in his country.
An American Takes Up the Cause
During the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan played a crucial role in supporting the U.S.-backed mujahedeen
resistance forces that were fighting to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.
Islamic volunteers from all over the world flocked to mujahedeen training
camps in Pakistan to help win this holy war against godless Communism.
They were joined by scores of combatants from the United States, including
Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an American Black Muslim unaffiliated with the
Nation, who suffered arm and leg wounds in Afghanistan.
After returning to Brooklyn, Hampton-
El worked closely with a shadowy splinter group called al-Fuqra, whose
followers in the United States and Canada are predominantly Black Muslims.
Several other al-Fuqra initiates had also trained in Pakistan as part of
the effort to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Founded in 1980 by
a Pakistani mystic named Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani, al-Fuqra was organized
into independent terrorist cells. An avowed enemy of the Nation of Islam,
al-Fuqra has been linked by U.S. officials to 17 homicides and 13 firebombings
in the United States. Its targets were usually other minorities or rival
Muslim leaders.
In 1995, Hampton-El was sentenced
to 35 years in prison for his involvement in a failed plot to bomb the
United Nations and other New York City landmarks. Nine other Muslim extremists
were convicted as co-conspirators in this case, including Sheik Omar Abdel
Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric, who is serving a life sentence for his
role as ringleader of the plot. The blind sheik has also been linked to
the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people
and injuring more than 1,000. Hampton-El told an FBI informant that he
had participated in a test explosion for the first attack on the World
Trade Center.
According to recent reports, the
Justice Department is probing possible links between al-Fuqra and Osama
bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. American officials have obtained a videotape
of a December 1993 meeting in Sudan, then a nerve center for the bin Laden
organization, where al-Fuqra leader Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani met with members
of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups. Representatives
of al-Qaeda are also believed to have been present at this meeting. Federal
officials also believe that al-Fuqra members collaborated with Wadih El-Hage,
who was sentenced to life in prison this year for conspiring with Osama
bin Laden in the bombings of two American embassies in Africa in 1998.
Martin A. Lee
Intelligence Report
Spring 2002
Issue 105
Between Friends
U.S. Holocaust deniers help unite
neo-Nazis, Arab extremists
American extremists who claim that
Jews fabricated the Holocaust to discredit Hitler and to justify the dispossession
of Palestinians have made common cause on the propaganda front with jihadists
from the Middle East. At the forefront of this collaborative effort is
the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the leading promoter of Holocaust
denial in the United States.
Founded in 1978, the Southern California-based
IHR distributes books, pamphlets, audio and videotapes that purport to
prove the Holocaust never happened. These "assassins of memory," as French
literary historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet calls the Holo-hoaxers, also publish
the Journal of Historical Review, which tries mightily to impress its readers
with footnotes and other scholarly trappings. A recent issue spoke breathlessly
of a "white-hot trend: the rapid growth of Holocaust revisionism, fueled
by increasing cooperation between Muslims and Western revisionists, across
the Islamic world."
Early last year, the IHR organized
a conference on "Zionism and Revisionism" that was set for Beirut that
March. Billed as an opportunity for North American and European extremists
to meet their counterparts in the Islamic world, the event was delayed
and relocated due to complaints by Jewish groups and diplomatic pressure
from the United States and Europe. An open letter signed by 14 leading
Arab intellectuals also denounced the conference, which was eventually
held in Amman, Jordan. The featured speaker at this scaled-down meeting,
hosted locally by the Jordanian Writers' Federation, was French negationist
Robert Faurisson, a longtime IHR advisor, who told a sympathetic audience
that "Hitler never ordered or allowed the killing of anyone on account
of his or her race or religion" and that "the Germans suffered, in reality,
a fate far worse than that of the Jews."
Feeding the Propaganda Machine
Driven by the proliferation of neo-Nazi
propaganda and antagonism toward Israel, Holocaust denial has gained widespread
acceptance across the Arab world in recent years. It's no coincidence that
commentary on the IHR Web site is translated and posted in Arabic, as well
as in German and English. IHR director Mark Weber takes pride in the fact
that he and other "revisionists," as they like to call themselves, have
been interviewed on Iranian state radio. Iran's Islamic fundamentalist
regime has granted refuge to several European Holocaust-deniers, who were
convicted of hate speech crimes in their home countries. Jürgen Graf,
an IHR editorial advisor, fled to Tehran rather than serve a 15-month sentence
in a Swiss prison.
A key IHR ally among Muslim extremists
is Ahmed Rami, a former Moroccan army officer who fled his native country
after joining a failed coup attempt against King Hassan in 1972. Today
Rami runs Radio Islam, a Stockholm-based neo-Nazi propaganda outfit. In
addition to articles such as "USA's Rulers: They are all Jews," the Web
site of Radio Islam carries the full text of The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, one of the vilest forgeries in modern history.
For many Palestinians, denying the
Holocaust is an effective way to reject any Jewish claim to Israel. Columbia
University professor Edward Said, a Palestinian American, laments the proliferation
of this tendency among Arabs. "If we expect Israeli Jews not to use the
Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the Palestinian people,"
Said says, "we too have to go beyond such idiocies as saying that the Holocaust
never took place."
Holocaust denial has become increasingly
common in leading newspapers in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and
other Arab countries, where official thinking is reflected in tightly controlled
national media. Support for denial enables corrupt Arab governments to
deflect attention from their own failures, including their own exploitation
of Muslim populations and brutal repression of many peoples, including
Kurds, Berbers, Egyptian Copts and Maronite Lebanese.
Saudi Arabia at the Forefront
Of all the Arab nations involved
in promoting anti-Semitic propaganda, Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most
egregious offender. In the late 1970s, for instance, the Saudi government
retained the services of American neo-Nazi William Grimstead as a Washington
lobbyist. During this period, the Saudi royal family lavished funds on
numerous Sunni fundamentalist organizations, including the Pakistan-based
World Muslim Congress (WMC), which was headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,
an anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator, until his death in 1974.
A few years later, the WMC mailed
Holocaust denial literature to every member of the U.S. Congress and the
British parliament. Issah Nakleh, a Palestinian writer affiliated with
the WMC, became a fixture at IHR conferences in the United States and a
regular contributor to the Journal of Historical Review. Nakleh was also
well known to readers of The Spotlight, the anti-Semitic weekly published
by the IHR's now-defunct parent organization, the Liberty Lobby. Acknowledging
their political kinship, WMC secretary-general Dr. Inamullah Khan, a trusted
advisor to the Saudi royal family, sent a letter to The Spotlight, praising
its "superb in-depth analysis" and stating that the paper deserved "the
thanks of all right-minded people."
Like many American and European
neo-fascist groups, the WMC espoused a "Third Position" ideology critical
of both Cold War superpowers, as underscored by this headline from Muslim
World, the WMC's official mouthpiece: "U.S. and USSR Both Serve Zionist
Interests." But the WMC tempered its anti-American tirades when the Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Working closely with Saudi and U.S.
intelligence, the WMC supported the Afghan mujahedeen in their struggle
against the Soviet-backed rulers in Kabul. During this period, WMC chief
Inamullah Khan also served as head of the Pakistani section of the World
Anti-Communist League, an international umbrella organization that included
fascist collaborators from Europe, Latin American death squad bosses, and
right-wing extremists from Asia and North America. After the Soviets abandoned
Afghanistan, the World Muslim Congress and several other Islamic extremist
groups once again turned their fundamentalist wrath against the United
States.
(Intelligence Report, Spring 2002,
Issue 105)