The news put into perspective every Saturday, thanks to the historian Fabrice d’Almeida.
A song sung in the Paris metro and broadcast on social networks on October 31 particularly shocked public opinion this week. His words said: “Fuck the Jews and fuck your mother / Long live Palestine / Yeah Yeah / Fuck the Jews and the grandmothers / We are Nazis and proud”.
In fact, this is not the first time that minorities have made the connection between the Palestinian cause and the celebration of Nazism. The best known case is that of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohamed Amin Al Husseini. He did not hesitate to call for Hitler’s support against the Jews, in the middle of the Second World War. His visit to the Grand Chancellery of the Third Reich was even filmed on November 28, 1941. Al Husseini, political and religious leader, wanted to make the fight against the Jews not only a religious fight, but above all a racial, racist one. He got some help from the Nazis, including weapons. But he was very much in the minority.
Most of the Muslims who engaged in the Second World War were on the side of the Allies, like the Moroccan goumiers of the Delattre army or the spahis who followed General Leclerc. All contributed to the fight against Nazism.
After 1945, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism
However, after the Second World War, the young Arab states, notably Syria and Egypt, called on former Nazi fighters to fight against Israel, such as Aloïs Bruner or the former concentration camp director Franz Stangl. . Their leaders adopt part of the anti-Semitic argument. But this discourse is not religious, rather political and territorial.
It is the extreme left, with figures like Pierre Guillaume and the editions of the old taupe or Roger Garaudy, converted to Islam, who bring negationism into the arguments of the Islamists they meet and who inspired their thinking, in the 1990s, to attack Jews and Christians both as colonialists and as capitalists. These preachers thus find part of the oldest anti-Semitic conspiracy argument, about the Jews who are supposed to dominate the world.
This Islamist, anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial vision was soon taken up by the Iranians. The mullahs’ regime wants to weaken the legitimacy of Israel and the West by denying and relativizing the Holocaust. President Ahmadinejad played a major role in this strategy. He organized negationist conferences and celebrated the thirty years of the Republic with a speech on this theme in 2009.
Today’s anti-Semites are an extension of this logic. They use the rehabilitation of Nazism as a tool to attack Western humanism and to justify violence against Jews. Ultra-minority, they play provocation and seek to make noise. These harsh words, this desire to shock, however, degrade the cause they claim to support: that of the rights of the Palestinian people.