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: Antisemitic 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.
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Antisemitism in Europe
Europe’s coming to terms with its complicity in the centuries-old antisemitic 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.
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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.
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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.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)