For the impartial reader, this book is doubly disagreeable. An account of National Socialist short-wave radio broadcasts to the Arab world in the second world war, it prints pages of anti-Jewish propaganda as monotonous as it is vile. The author then shows no sympathy at all for Arab grievances, which makes the brew no more palatable.
Jeffrey Herf, who is a professor at the University of Maryland, contends that Nazi anti-Semitism broadcast across the Middle East from Berlin and Bari between 1939 and 1945 has borne fruit. Hatred of the Jews, discredited in mainstream politics in Europe by the Holocaust, has found ‘renewed life’ in the Arab world and Iran.
That the anti-Jewish statements of an Ahmadinejad or a bin Laden might owe something to European influence is an interesting question, but not one that Herf, knowing no Arabic or Persian, can answer. With the exception of the outright collaborators with Nazism in Berlin — the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini and the Iraqi nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gailani — the Arabs and Iranians of this story might be on the moon. The book’s cover art, in which ‘Nazi’ and ‘Arab World’ are printed in blood-red type under a picture of Hitler with Haj Amin, is beneath the dignity of a university press.
The Arab world and Iran had deep grievances against the British empire and, in Iran’s case, Russia, which Germany exploited with sometimes brilliant success in the first world war. A quarter-century later, in the words of a report to the US War Department of August, 1942, ‘upwards of three-fourths of the Moslem world are in favour of the Axis’.
Though less systematic than Christians, the Arab countries and Iran have discriminated against Jews since at least the Prophet’s years in Medina.
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