Nazis and Islamists

By Paul Belien

During the Second World War, the Nazis worked on plans to build the “Amerikabomber,” an airplane specially devised to fly suicide missions into Manhattan’s skyscrapers.

Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister for Armaments, recalled in his diary: “It was almost as if [Hitler] was in a delirium when he described to us how New York would go up in flames. He imagined how the skyscrapers would turn into huge blazing torches. How they would crumble while the reflection of the flames would light the skyline against the dark sky.” Hitler hated Manhattan. It was, he said, “the center of world Jewry.”

Less than 60 years later, Hitler’s plans were executed by Muslim immigrants living in Germany. At the 2003 trial of the network around Mohammed Atta (the pilot who flew into the World Trade Center), Shahid Nickels, a German convert to Islam and a friend of Atta’s, said that the Islamists had targeted Manhattan because it is “the center of world Jewry, and the world of finance and commerce controlled by it.”

The parallels between Nazism and Islamism are overwhelming. Yet the subject is a taboo. When last March the German historian Matthias Kuentzel, author of “Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11,” was to give a lecture at the University of Leeds (Britain), the university authorities cancelled the lecture after threats from Muslim students.

There is a war going on between the Jihadists and the West. We are losing the battle because, as so often in man’s history, our political leaders think that they are still fighting the previous war. Europeans who warn against the danger of Islamism are considered – and sometimes even prosecuted – as xenophobes, racists, even neo-Nazis.

The European Left, in league with the Islamists, is constantly reminding the Europeans of Hitler and the Nazis, accusing Europe’s identity, the very core of its being, of being intrinsically evil. Hence, attempts to rob Europe of its identity are seen as “good,” even when those eager to eradicate this identity leave no doubt that they will eradicate the Jews first.

Unfortunately, some American “conservatives” are also blind. Last year, Ralph Peters wrote in the New York Post that Europe’s identity is stained by “ineradicable viciousness.” He said that the Europeans are “world-champion haters,” who have “perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing.” Mr. Peters’ message is similar to that of Ayyub Axel Koehler. Last June, Mr. Koehler, a convert to Islam and the chairman of the German Council of Muslims, told German church leaders that Europe should be ashamed of the “trail of blood” that it had left throughout the world down the centuries.

To some, defending Europe’s identity is seen as a characteristic of neo-Nazism, while they fail to realize that Hitler’s real successors are the Jihadists. To many Europeans it now seems that the only way in which Europe can atone for the crimes of the holocaust is by looking on passively while others prepare a new holocaust.

And so, ironically, Hitler will get his way and win the war after all. Contrary to what is generally acknowledged, the Fuehrer did not care about Europe’s or even Germany’s identity. Those European nationalists who today take their inspiration from Charles Martel, the Germanic leader who beat the Arabs in 732 at the Battle of Tours, cannot be neo-Nazis for the simple reason that Hitler explicitly wished Martel had lost the battle.

“Had Charles Martel not been victorious,” Hitler told his inner crowd in August 1942, “then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world.” Hitler told Albert Speer that Islam is “perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.” If the Muslims had won in Tours, the whole of Europe would have become Muslim in the 8th century and “the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of [Europe]. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.”

Today, Germany, like the rest of Western Europe, is rapidly turning Islamic. In addition to the many Muslim immigrants, 4,000 Germans convert to Islam each year. As always the converts are among the most radical. Last September, Fritz Gelowicz and Daniel Schneider, two young German converts to Islam, were arrested as they were preparing to bomb Frankfurt International Airport. Hitler would have been proud of them. And he would have loathed the so-called “racists” who worry about their country losing its national identity.

This piece was originally published in The Washington Times on November 7, 2007 .