The Oct 7 Hamas butchery of men, women, children, and the elderly, was not only ‘Nazi-like’, it was in some ways the most recent act of a Nazi crime nearly eight decades in the making.
This from frontpagemag.com.
In 1946, the Muslim Brotherhood held its founding conference in Gaza at the Samer Cinema.
[Representing] the secular Western culture that the Islamic organization wanted to destroy, [t]he movie theater which had opened two years earlier would be shut down, along with much of Gaza’s movie theaters as the Islamist movement strengthened its grip over the area.
It was a modest beginning for the group that would eventually become known as Hamas.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s expansion into Israel began a year earlier in 1945.
The Brotherhood’s foreign backers, the Nazis, had surrendered earlier that year. The thousand pound checks which had helped take the Brotherhood from just another fringe Islamist theocratic movement to a dominant force in Egyptian political culture would no longer be coming. And Nazi Germany’s armies would not be arriving to help them kill all the Jews.
By 1948, Egypt had banned the Brotherhood and Hassan al-Banna, its charismatic leader, had been shot dead in the street a year later.
Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had admired Nazi organizations and methods as noted in a British report.
The Muslim Brotherhood from which Hamas sprang had been built in imitation of the Nazis.
Hitler’s Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, had helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood together with the Nazis. And it was Husseini, who after their defeat, provided the focus for the Brotherhood.
Hajj Amīn al-Husseini had met with Hitler, urged him to exterminate the Jews of Israel, and recruited moslems to fight for the Nazis. Al-Banna praised Hitler’s Mufti as the “hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany.” Germany and Hitler were gone, but Amin Al-Husseini intended to continue the struggle.
The Brotherhood replicated the Nazi model, building a political organization with a paramilitary arm that would seize power in Egypt, Gaza, and across the moslem world—they set up cells across Israel beginning in Jerusalem.
Al-Banna turned over this mission to Said Ramadan, his son-in-law and a key Brotherhood figure who would later usher in an alliance with the Saudis that would allow the organization to bring in new wealth and expand worldwide. In Europe. Ramadan would direct the rise of the central Muslim Brotherhood operation in Munich, at a mosque set up by ex-Nazi Muslim soldiers who had defected to the Third Reich during WWII.
Setting up Brotherhood organizations across Israel was more than an expansion, it was a mission. With the Nazis gone, invading Israel was a way to allow the Brotherhood to build up its military capabilities without triggering an immediate crackdown by the authorities.
One example of this build up:
The Scouting movement had struck a different chord in the Muslim world than it did the UK. Islamic scouting was explicitly meant to prepare young boys for Jihad. Some Islamic scouting movements were Nazi inspired. Al-Husseini’s scouting movement in Israel called themselves the ‘Nazi Scouts’ and dressed in Hitler Youth outfits. The Muslim Brotherhood had founded its own scout group ‘based on the concept of Jihad’ and also modeled on the Hitler Youth.
In the months before Israel’s declaration of independence, Hassan al-Banna arrived in Gaza to witness the first wave of assaults by Brotherhood forces against Jewish communities.
After months of siege, the Muslim Brotherhood’s battalion attacked the village of Kfar Darom where dozens of Israeli militia members protected 400 men, women and children. The Brotherhood’s attacks were beaten back with determined resistance until its Jihadists were forced to retreat leaving behind seventy of their dead. Among the Jihadi attackers was an Egyptian named Yasser Arafat.
The Brotherhood’s mobs had paved the way for a military coup by destroying Egypt’s westernized nightlife, including its theaters. In Gaza, they were once again tasked with doing the military’s dirty work by attacking Israel, but once again the core purpose of the Brotherhood was to ‘Islamize’ Gaza, and eventually Egypt and the whole world, through its terror campaign.
Long before the Six Day War, during which Israel reclaimed Gaza, Muslim terrorists known as ‘Fedayeen’ or ‘those who die for Allah’ struck across the border with the aim of murdering Jews. Terrorist atrocities included the Massacre at Scorpions’ Pass during which the men, women and children on a bus coming back from a beach town were massacred.
Seventy years later, this is still the role that Hamas plays for Iran and Qatar among others.
In exchange for waging war on Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood received financing, training, and the authority to maintain control over those areas that it used for its operations. Under the umbrella of a Jihad against the Jews, it was able to enforce Islamic law and maintain a ruling class made up of its members and influential families allied with the Brotherhood.
Israel’s defeat of Egypt in the Six Day War and subsequent liberation of Gaza left the Brotherhood and other terrorist groups adrift. Deprived of secure bases in Gaza, a new generation of ‘Palestinian’ terrorist groups was launched under the Soviet umbrella, most famously the PLO, claiming to pursue a ‘Palestinian’ state through international terrorist attacks like airplane hijackings and the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympics.
The Muslim Brotherhood today dominates Islamic groups in America and Europe because of these efforts, but at the time its terrorism lacked the scope that the Communist alliance provided the ‘Palestinians’. And yet while Arafat became an international star, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza was busily digging in and building an Islamic infrastructure that would outlast him.
The Israeli authorities, like the Americans and Europeans, paid little attention to the Brotherhood. Religious violence seemed outmoded in the era of Marxist terrorism.
The Israeli tolerance for the Brotherhood led the PLO to accuse it of being an Israeli creation. Hamas and the PLO would later spend years accusing each other of this, the worst thing imaginable, working for the Jews. The PLO’s insults would then be repeated by leftist and fringe right politicians and activists who would claim that Israel had “created” Hamas.
Hamas had technically predated the official rebirth of the State of Israel. It had always been there under various names as part of the Gaza Muslim Brotherhood. Israel had not created it, but much like most Western nations, the Israelis were guilty of tolerating it, providing it with the permission it needed to operate and acceding to what seemed like religious requests.
Instead of suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, the Israelis viewed its mosques and religious schools as a benign alternative to the PLO. They were looking for radical students planting bombs, not men praying in mosques. And the Brotherhood, as it did in America and Europe, and in the two years until the Oct 7 massacres, had a knack for appearing benign.
In the 1970s, Islamic terrorism had not yet become a commonplace concept. Few understood that Islam would become the next great threat after Communism. And while the Israelis chased the PLO, the Gaza Muslim Brotherhood built up its infrastructure that would emerge as Hamas.
Hamas was a charity before it was a terrorist group. And it was a terrorist group before it was a charity. This is typical of Muslim Brotherhood organizations and owes something to the Nazis. Hamas terrorism is theologically Islamic, but it had learned from the Nazis and the Marxists, two movements that had profoundly shaped the modern Arab Muslim world, how to develop and build secret societies in the form of political organizations and how to use them to seize power.
NOTE: The Islamic mass murder of Jews goes back to the days of Mohammed. The Muslim Brotherhood’s members did not need the Nazis to tell them to kill Jews.
But the Nazis helped finance the Muslim Brotherhood with the specific aim, among others, of killing Jews. The Nazis helped show the Muslim Brotherhood new ways of organizing, distributing propaganda and waging war. And that changed the history of the world.
The Nazis were defeated, but they helped build a successor movement that is waging war, politically and militarily, around the world. Hamas is just one of the many organizations birthed by the Brotherhood, but it is one of the few in whose origin story the Nazis had a significant role.
