Saturday, October 31, 2015

Hitler and the Arabs

The other things you need to be bear in mind: 1) Hitler was obviously a racist hateful anti-Arabs who described Arabs as "lacquered half-apes who ought to be whipped".  Hajj Amin and other Arab idiots who met with Nazi officials should have known that the Nazi regimes hated Jews and Arabs alike.  2) Hitler was never ever interested in Arab affairs and it never featured in his mind and conversation much.  To be sure, only when he invaded Czechoslovakia he remembered that Britain is in occupation of Palestine. 3) As a racist, Hitler preferred British control of the Middle East. 4) Hitler still for much of the 1930s aimed at achieving British neutrality or even alliance. 5) The talk of Hitler's preference for Islam is based on the conversation cited by Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich: his invocation of the Nietzschian critique of Christianity and he said some things that Islam is a strong and forceful religion or words to that effect.  It did not amount to sympathy for Islam or Muslims.  Hitler was ignorant of Islamic and Arab affairs.  In fact, there was one conversation in which Hitler imagined Muslim victories in Europe and speculated that Germans would have wound up dominating the world anyways because Arabs are too incapable (it reminds me of Charlie Manson's theory of race wars in the US).  6) the knowledgeable German government expert on the Middle East, F. Grobba, succeeded in camouflaging or suppressing in Arabic the racist anti-Arab discourse of the Nazi regime.  7) Hajj Amin did read whatever trash that was written to him by Nazi officials in German broadcasts to the Arab world but it is significant that Hajj Amin did not engage in Nazi genocidal anti-Semitic rhetoric when he wrote or spoke to Arabs directly--I think that the Islamic stance about people of the book would have put him in an embarrassing position despite Nazi propaganda efforts to cite (often out of context) the anti-Jewish references in Islamic texts.