European Leaders Brought Islamists to Europe To Counter Communism
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
18 October
2023
Anti-Jew
Violence May Spread To Europe As Muslim Population Is Rising In Europe.
Main
Points:
1. Jews
suffered 55 per cent of attacks in 2019 in France and UK.
2. Pew survey
anticipates around 14 per cent Muslims in Europe by 2050.
1. 3.Europe
could turn out to be one of the battle fields.
3. A quarter of
Germans harbour anti-Semitic attitudes.
4. Neo-Nazi
groups have proliferated in France.
-----
Representational
image | A rocket launched from the Gaza strip strikes an area near Sderot,
southern Israel, on 9 October | Photo: Reuters
------
The
persecution of Palestinians and Israel's bombing of civilian areas and
hospitals in Gaza have added fuel to the fire of hatred of Jews across Europe
where Muslims form 4 to 5 per cent of population as compared to one to two per
cent of the Jews.
In recent
times, a number of attacks on Jews in Europe by Muslims having sympathy with
Palestinians have been reported and the ongoing bombing of Gaza by Israel has
intensified that hatred.
In France,
Germany and UK, hatred of Jews not only among the Muslims but also among the
native Christians is a growing phenomenon and in France many neo-Nazi groups
have proliferated. In Germany too, a quarter of the population harbours anti-Semitic
sentiments.
A Pew
survey has indicated that by 2050 the Muslim population in Europe will be
around 7 to 14 per cent as compared to one per cent of Jewish population. This
will turn Europe into a new battle ground where Islamists will put challenges
before Europe's multicultural ethos.
The inflow
of Islamists into Europe can be traced back to 1930s when Islamic preachers and
ideologues were brought to counter communism.
One of the
ideologues was Haji Amin al Husseini who met with the German diplomat Heinrich
Wolff and advised him to send the Jews to Palestine.
Syed Qutb,
the teacher of Osama bin Laden got a scholarship to study in Europe.
Muslim
Brotherhood also got a foothold in Europe in later years.
After the
Bangladesh war of independence and a crackdown on Jamat Islami, many Jamat
Islami ideologues migrated to Europe to avoid execution or imprisonment in
Bangladesh.
The twin
organisations flourished in Europe and spread their extremist ideas about the
establishment of Shariah rule in the world. Today, Europe finds it hard to
control the Islamists and violence in the name of Islam.
These
organisations have set up Islamic centres in Europe where extremist ideas are
propagated. In recent years, the Friday sermons have been started in Urdu as
extremist preachers from Pakistan have been appointed in the mosques. Praveen
Swami's article, therefore, delves deep into the silent march of Islamism and
anti-Semitism in Europe that may turn it into another battle ground of ethnic
and religious war.
-----
The Next Front In The Israel-Hamas War Will Be Europe
By
Praveen Swami
15 October,
2023
Eighty-five
years old, Mireille Knoll had escaped the notorious Nazi round-up of Paris Jews
in 1942 and survived Parkinson’s disease. Finally, in 2018, she died of 11 stab
wounds delivered inside her home by a neighbour she thought of as a son. “She’s
a Jew,” one of the two men who killed her allegedly told his friend, “she must
have money.” Then, 27-year-old Yacine Mihoub and Alex Carrimbacus, 21, set fire
to her apartment. “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), Mihoub had shouted while
stabbing her.
Following
the brutal Hamas attack on Israel, police forces across Europe have been on
high alert: Anti-Semitic incidents have quadrupled in the United Kingdom, and
Germany has banned the pro-Hamas organisation Samidoun.
The
heightened security isn’t driven by baseless panic. Last week, Mohammed
Moguchkov—a Chechen-origin asylum seeker already under surveillance by French
authorities for pro-jihadist sympathies, and brother to a jailed
terrorist—stabbed schoolteacher Dominique Bernard to death in a killing
authorities said was linked to Gaza. Another attack, authorities said, was
foiled.
As the
Israel-Hamas war escalates, Europe could turn out to be one of the battlefields
on which its impacts are felt. Fuelled by refugee flows from the Middle East, a
Pew survey records, Muslims will make up between 7.4 per cent and 14 per cent
of the region’s population by 2050.
The import
of hatred is evident: French Jews, who made up less than 1 per cent of the
population, suffered 55 per cent of recorded racist attacks in 2019. The story
is much the same in the UK.
Finding
solutions is more complex than it seems, though, because the conflict isn’t
just about the inherited beliefs of immigrant Muslims. Both the privileged
position granted to Islamists as instruments of State control over immigrant
Muslims and the survival of antisemitism as a powerful cultural trope in white
Europe need to be examined.
Antisemitism
in Europe
Europe’s
coming to terms with its complicity in the centuries-old anti-Semitic violence
that led up to the holocaust—of discrimination, pogroms and massacres—is a
curious thing. Germany has tough laws that criminalise hate speech and holocaust
denial. Even then, statues of the 16th-century theologian and reformer Martin
Luther—author, among other things, of the anti-Semitic diatribe, On The Jews
and Their Lies, are common across the country.
Luther’s
vicious words about Jews—which came, historian Alice Ekcardt reminds us, in the
middle of brutal real-world persecution—place him in the front rows of the
ideological precursors of Auschwitz.
Antisemitism
among Muslim immigrants, therefore, exists in a culture from which the hatred
of Jews is far from being eliminated.
The scholar
Susanne Urban has pointed to a number of studies showing up to a quarter of
Germans harbour anti-Semitic attitudes—on the Left, sometimes dressed up in
anti-imperialist and anti-Israel language.
Although
the country is rightly proud of an educational system that centres learning
about the holocaust and stigmatises ethnic violence, a new generation of
historical writing casts Germans as victims, not perpetrators, of the Second
World War.
France has
moved to ban the ultra-traditionalist Catholic organisation Civitas, but
there’s evidence of the proliferation of neo-Nazi groups, which have defaced
graveyards and places of worship.
Left-wing
working-class groups, too, have demonstrated deep hatred: Yellow Vest
protesters against Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron’s economic policies turned on
the Jewish writer Alain Finkielkraut: “Dirty Jew”, they shouted, “Go back to
Tel Aviv.”
To
understand how this kind of European antisemitism embedded itself among Muslims
in the Middle East, understanding what happened in the Second World War is key.
The
Nazis and the Muslims
“A decadent
people composed of cripples”: Adolf Hitler’s poisonous autobiography, Mein
Kampf, made no secret of what he thought of Arabs in general and Egyptians in
particular. “I am prevented by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of
these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ from linking the destiny of my own people
with theirs.” The delicate problem of editing Hitler for an Arab audience,
historian Jeffrey Hirf writes, was never quite resolved.
Early in
1933, though, Haji Amin el-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, met with German
diplomat Heinrich Wolff to discuss European Jewish immigration into Palestine.
The Grand Mufti, Wolff recorded, said that
“Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime in Germany
and hope for the spread of fascist, anti-democratic State leadership to other
countries.”
The new
political context led Germany to reinstate Johannes Ruppert, who was removed
from the Hitler Youth because his father was half-Turkish. Turkish citizens
were granted the same status as members of other European races. Later, the
same rights were extended to Persians and Arabs.
Fury over
European Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1936-1939 had begun to build among
the Arabs, and Germany took the opportunity to cash in. The Jews were a common
enemy; Arabs and Nazis could thus be friends.
German
troops also received an enthusiastic welcome from Muslims in Yugoslavia, who
saw them as allies in their historic struggle against the Serbs, historian
David Motadel has recorded. According to Motadel, Heinrich Himmler, a senior
leader of the Nazi Party, set up several elite formations of Turkic Muslims who
fought with German troops on all fronts against the Soviets.
Bringing
the Brotherhood West
Following
the Second World War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) collaborated with
the Nazi war criminal General Richard Gehlen to bring these Muslim allies West,
seeing them as reliable anti-communists. Former US President Dwight Eisenhower even met with the
Muslim Brotherhood’s roving ambassador, Said Ramadan, as part of a delegation
of anti-communist clerics from India, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi
Arabia.
The US
Department of State recorded, in an internal document, that it saw the visit as
a chance to assess the “impetus and direction that may be given to the
renaissance movement within Islam”.
Hassan
al-Banna, the Brotherhood’s founder, had tasked Ramadan with building networks
for this “renaissance”. He found his first successes in Pakistan, which he
visited in 1949 and 1951. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan wrote the preface to
one of Ramadan’s books and gave him a slot on national radio.
The
Brotherhood ideologue also worked closely with Abul A’la Maududi, the founder
of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan and India. Maududi saw Islam not as a
“hotchpotch of beliefs, prayers and rituals” but “a revolutionary ideology
which seeks to alter the social order of the entire world”.
Even Sayyid
Qutb—whose Islamist manifesto, Ma’alim fil’ Tariq, or Milestones, fired the
minds of three generations of jihadists, including Osama Bin Laden—was among
those given a fellowship to study in the US. The Islamist’s subsequent writing
on the visit shows he later developed an almost neurotic hatred of the West,
driven by his dislike of African-American culture and the independence of
women.
Yet,
Islamist-led institutions emerged at the vanguard of Muslim communities in
Europe because of official patronage.
France’s
government, since 2003, has chosen to engage, Gunther Jikeli writes in his
book, with the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (French Council of the Muslim
Faith), accused by its critics of supporting religious extremism. This, even
though only one in four French Muslims visit mosques. The Muslim Council of
Britain, linked to the Jamaat-e-Islami and Muslim Brotherhood has similarly
become a quasi-official interlocutor on issues of Islam.
Germany
finally began a push to free itself of Turkey’s influence over its mosques and
train clerics locally in 2003. The move followed criticism over the involvement
of the Muslim Brotherhood in German mosques.
In essence,
European States privileged the religious identity of Muslims over their economic
and social grievances—hoping clerics could be recruited to control the
communities.
Things
haven’t worked out that way: Engaging cleric-entrenched ghettos instead of
securing integration. Islamists, capitalising on European governments’ failures
to genuinely open their societies to immigrants, have given shape to youth
rage. It should be no surprise that prisons—filled with immigrant youth drawn
to gang culture and drugs—are the biggest source of European jihadist
radicalisation. Government is the God that failed Europe’s Muslim immigrants;
some are choosing a more violent cult instead.
Fighting
the toxic hatred from Gaza needs European governments to deliver on their own
democratic ideals.
----
Praveen Swami is National Security Editor,
ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited
by Zoya Bhatti)
Source: The Next Front In The Israel-Hamas
War Will Be Europe
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/european-islamists-europe-counter-communism/d/130924
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism