Ba'ath Arab Party - Nazi Axis

[humus_sapiens]

This was an eye-opener for me. The goals and the rhetoric are still the same.
-hs

Quote from: The Middle East. The Brief History of the Last 2000 Years. By Bernard Lewis (Scribner 1995) pp. 348-9

As far back as 1933, immediately after Hitler's accession to power, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, made contact with the German consul to declare his support and offer his help. After years of uncompromising struggle against the British and the Jews, the Mufti left Palestine, and with stops in Beirut, Baghdad and Tehran en route, reached Berlin in 1941. The most important of these stops was Baghdad, where in April 1941, an Iraqi politician called Rashid 'Ali al-Gaylani, with military support, seized power and established a pro-Axis regime. Despite some help from Syria, at that time still controlled by the Vichy authorities, the Axis powers were too far away to save him, and his regime was overthrown by British and British-led forces. In Syria a committee was formed to mobilize support for the Rashid 'Ali regime. This was the nucleus of what later became the Ba'ath party, rival branches of which came to govern both Syria and Iraq.

Rashid Ali fled and later joined the Mufti in Berlin. Among the many who supported or sympathized with the Axis during the war years were some who later became famous. Nasser recorded his sympathy and his disappointment at Germany's defeat; Sadat according to his own memoirs, was a willing co-operator in German espionage. Even Rashid 'Ali has been resuscitated as a hero in Saddam Husayn's Iraq.

At first sight, this enthusiasm for the Nazi cause seems very strange. Nazi racism cannot have had much appeal for a people who, according to Nazi pseudo-science, were themselves racial inferiors. Nazi propaganda, in so far as it was specifically anti-Jewish rather than generally anti-Semitic, had considerable support. But it was, after all, the persecution of Jews by the Nazis in Germany and their imitators elsewhere that was the driving force of Jewish migration to Palestine and the consequent strengthening of the Jewish community in that country. The Nazis not only caused this migration; they even encouraged and facilitated it until the outbreak of war, while the British, in the forlorn hope of winning Arab good will, imposed increasing restrictions. Nevertheless, significant numbers of Arabs favoured the Germans, who sent the Jews to Palestine, rather than the British, who tried to keep them out.

The Axis powers tried in different ways to profit from this mood. First Fascist Italy and later Nazi Germany launched massive programmes of propaganda and penetration in the Arab world, with considerable impact on the new generation of political thinkers and activists. The Nazis in particular, by preaching hatred of Jews, were able to exploit a problem which they themselves had in large measure created.

[Am Yisrael]

Have you heard about the raging mobs of Iraq that were inflicted by Nazi propoganda, and terrorised Jews? These are facts often ignored by many people that Sephardic Jews also had it tough. Nazi Germany HAS had a large effect on the arab world by managing to create regional anti-jewish (not anti-semitic because arabs are semites) hatred among people. Also topped off with the continual propoganda of Israel, arabs now have a deep hatred of Jews.

Hopefully if western culture and democracy become enforced in arab countries now, than maybe in a couple of generations time Israel will be able to live in peace with the arab neighbours.

[humus_sapiens]

Originally posted by Am Yisrael
Have you heard about the raging mobs of Iraq that were inflicted by Nazi propoganda, and terrorised Jews? These are facts often ignored by many people that Sephardic Jews also had it tough.

Check out www.jimena-justice.org

[humus_sapiens]

The Nazi background of Saddam Hussein
By Charles A. Morse
www.chuckmorse.com

Kharaillah Tulfah, Saddam Hussein's uncle and future father in law, along
with Gen. Rashid Ali and the so-called "golden square" cabal of pro-Nazi
officers, participated in a failed coup against the pro-British government of
Iraq in 1941. Operating behind the scenes in Baghdad at the time, and
arranging for Nazi weapons and assistance was the notorious pro-Nazi Haj Amin
al-Husseini the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti had been on the Nazi
payroll, according to testimony at the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, since
1937 when he had met with Adolf Eichmann during Eichmann's brief visit to
Palestine. Saddam Hussein was born in 1937.

The Mufti, after instigating a pogrom against Jews in Palestine in 1920, the
first such pogrom against Jews in the Arab world in hundreds of years, went
on to inspire the development of pro-Nazi parties throughout the Arab world
including Young Egypt, led by Gamal Abdul Nasser, and the Social Nationalist
Party of Syria led by Anton Sa'ada. After the failure of the 1941 pro-Nazi
coup in Iraq, the Mufti fled to Berlin where he spent the war years heading a
Nazi-Muslim government in exile and using confiscated Jewish funds in a
largely successful effort to further pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic propaganda in
the Arab world. While in Berlin, the Mufti also helped form pro-Nazi Muslim
Hanschar brigades in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

Kharaillah Tulfah, participant in the 1941 pro-Nazi coup and an advocate of a
pan-Islamic Nazi alliance along with the Mufti, raised and educated his
nephew Saddam Hussein from age 10. In 1959, the 22-year-old Saddam failed in
an attempt to assassinate Iraqi leader Abdel Karim Qassim. He subsequently
fled to Egypt where he received refuge from fellow Mufti disciple Nasser. At
the time, Nasser, along with the Mufti himself, who resided in Cairo after
the war and his conviction by the Nuremberg Tribunal of war crimes, was
spearheading what was known as the Odessa Network, which facilitated the
settlement of thousands of Nazi criminals in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab
world. In 1962, Saddam married Sajidah Tuffah, the daughter of his uncle and
mentor.

[humus_sapiens]

Arab Nazism: Then and Now
By Michael J. Martin

FrontPageMagazine.com | February 24, 2003

Many contemporary Muslim rulers have troubling ties with National Socialism, an ideology known for its dangerous and fanatical extremes. While mainstream Muslims have tended to distance themselves from their extremist counterparts, fanaticism threatens to push the entire Muslim world into the arms of its Fascist fringe. This situation begs examination of both present day and historical intersections between Muslim ideologies and the virulent components of National Socialist extremism: racism,
anti-Semitism, death, and destiny.

National Socialism and the Baath Party

Saddam Hussein embraces the Baath Party -- formally the Baath Arab Socialist Party -- a nationalist movement especially prominent in Syria and Iraq, borne of the Arab world's perceived need to "produce a means of reasserting the Arab spirit in the face of foreign domination," claims Al-Baath, the daily party newspaper. "Articulated as the principle of Arab nationalism, the Baath movement was one of several political groups that drew legitimacy from an essentially reactive ideology."

Similar reactionary principles guided Adolf Hitler's vision of a people united in the face of foreign (particularly Western) dominance after Germany's crushing defeat during World War I. The motives of both parties seem frighteningly interchangeable, as this passage from Al-Baath, with editorial insertions, illustrates: "Moral and cultural deterioration, it was felt, had so weakened the Arabs [Germans] that Western supremacy had spread throughout the Middle East [Germany]. Arabs [Germans] needed a regeneration of the common heritage of people in the region to drive off debilitating external influences." Similarities between German and Arab nationalist extremes are not lost on political analysts. "The Baathists," writes National Review editor Jonah Goldberg "see the destiny of Arabs in very similar terms as the Nazis understood the destiny of Aryans."

The Nazi party and the Baath party express concepts of destiny with a common theme: the superiority of their respective racial demographic over others, particularly Jews, a circumstance that invites comparisons between Saddam Hussein, a notorious Baathist, and Adolf Hitler, a notorious Nazi.

"Saddam's ambitions are very similar to Hitler's," Goldberg continues. "Saddam uses the Palestinians the way Hitler used the Sudeten Germans. Saddam sees hostile domestic populations as little more than vermin." Saddam, however, "is a much bigger admirer of Stalin," Goldberg offers, in a note of little comfort.

Blood Baath

Fanatical Baath and Fascist ideologues embrace more than just an ideology -- they embrace its ultimate, physical expression: death. Hitler wrapped his party's death wish in the epic operas of Wagner inspired by the medieval German Nibelung saga of Teutonic gods, funeral pyres, Valkyries, and the fiery destruction of Valhalla, the great Norse hall of deceased nationalist heroes. Sinbad, the Arabian Knights, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam similarly populate Arab lore with outsized warriors and god-defying mortals who seek glory through death over defeat through submission.

"The Nazi wish of death or education for death can be compared to the brand of (quite new) Moslem fundamentalism that sees death as the highest goal of life, if it is related to martyrdom," said Omer Bartov, the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. "This suicidal urge, in which one first must destroy one's own natural survival instincts and then justify one's death by the extermination of others, is related to extremes of Nazism and Fascism, both in personal psychology and a theological or ideological system," Bartov told FrontPage Magazine.

Unfortunately, fanatical adherence to the National Socialist death wish is hardly confined to mythology. Recent history has recorded two potent and alarming real-life incidents: the suicide of Adolf Hitler, accompanied by the deaths of millions of innocent civilians; and the suicides of the September 11th hijackers -- accompanied by the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.

When Worlds Collude

History has also recorded the physical intersection of the Muslim and the Nazi, where a shared disdain of Jews forged a queer cooperation between Muslim soldiers in Eastern Europe and Hitler's SS during the liquidation of Jewish ghettoes in Poland and the operation of concentration camps.

"There were Muslims, especially in the later phases of World War II, in the service of the SS, such as those recruited in Bosnia and in the Caucasus," explained Bartov, who is also a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. "I believe there was an entire Waffen-SS division made primarily of Muslims in 1944," Bartov told Front Page.

The SS indoctrinated these Muslim fighters, variously called Trawniki men, Hilfswillige, Hiwis, or Askaris, at training camps or "Ausbildungslager" in towns such as Trawniki, Poland. The Askaris, who generally hailed from the Ukraine and the Baltic states, shared with the Nazis a rapacious anti-Semitism that may have eased their transition from mediocre combat warriors to soldiers specifically trained for the ugly task of genocide. "The Askaris were native soldiers (Muslims) in former German colonies,
mostly Lithuanians, Latvians, White Russians and Ukrainians," writes Halina Gorcewicz, a Warsaw Jew who penned an exhaustive and hard-bitten account of life in the ghetto under Nazi occupation. "Not the best of soldiers in the eyes of the Germans, the most important thing for the SS was the fact that they were great anti-Semites."

Muslim fighters from Eastern Europe were not forced to fight alongside the Nazis, but rather "the 'Askaris' were volunteers in auxiliary service to the SS, recruited from the indigenous population of conquered territories in Eastern Europe," Gorcewicz explains. The Askaris functioned as "police auxiliaries who were employed in Operation Reinhard, particularly in carrying out deportations and in guarding the killing centers," writes Elizabeth White in "Majdanek: Cornerstone of Himmler's SS Empire in the East." Named for Reinhard Heydrich, the father of the eastern front death camps, Operation Reinhard referred to the systematic extermination of Jews and other "undesirables" throughout Poland, particularly at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The Germans accorded these non-Aryan volunteers little respect, viewing them more as human cannon fodder than trained enlistees, a circumstance that reminds of Hussein's Palestinian perspective. The name "Askaris" is a "contemptuous reference to the black troops who had helped defend Imperial Germany's African colonies before and during World War I," says Jon Guttman, editor of World War II Magazine and a research director for Primedia Enthusiast Publications.

Muslim fighters populated the first Nazi detachments dispatched in the spring of 1943 to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, a hellhole decimated by nearly four years of privation, combat, and unfathomable brutality. "Thus came April 18th -- Palm Sunday -- when the Germans brought in reinforcing detachments of 'Askaris,' who surrounded the whole of the ghetto," Gorcewicz writes.

"The Germans and the Askaris (Ukrainian and Latvian auxiliaries)
surrounded individual houses and dragged everyone out to deport them," Holocaust survivor Eugene Bergman explained in Gallaudet Today. "They broke open doors of apartments and shot everyone who would not go down to the courtyard. Sick people, cripples -- they were shot dead in their homes."

Muslim and Fascist stood as one in the Askaris, says Guttman, ready to serve the architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler.
"By April 16, Himmler had arrived in Warsaw for a series of secret
conferences" Guttman writes. "The forces at his disposal were comprised of the following: 2,000 officers and men of the Waffen SS; three Wehrmacht divisions; two battalions of German police; 360 Polish police; about 35 security police; and a 337-man battalion of Ukrainian and Lithuanian Fascist auxiliaries called 'Askaris.'"

The Lessons of History

The outrage of Muslims openly cooperating with Nazis in the single greatest incidence of genocide -- the Holocaust -- is not widely known, ignored perhaps in favor of similar -- but probably lesser -- outrages. The press has lavished much attention on the "see no evil, hear no evil" indifference many Christians allegedly embraced during the same period. Holocaust survivors have accused Swiss banks of sheltering Nazi plunder. German corporations fight lawsuits over profiting from the Nazi war machine.

Ignorance is hardly bliss in matters of national security. We can wait -- as we did in the case of Adolf Hitler -- to take appropriate action against fanatics who would see history repeat. However, "if we wait forever," says Jonah Goldberg, "Saddam will certainly do his best to replace Hitler in our imaginations as the gold standard in questions of evil."