An explicit debt
by Daniel Johnson, New York Sun
This is the first Middle East war in which the main threat to Israel comes, not from secular Arab nationalism, but from Islamism. Both Hezbollah and Hamas draw their main inspiration, armaments, and funding from Islamist sources, ranging from the Sunni ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Shiite demagogues of Iran. What unites them all is a fanatical dedication to the destruction of Israel.
There are, however, parallels between the present war and previous campaigns waged against Israel by Arab nationalists. One thing that Arab nationalists and Islamists clearly have in common, though it is usually ignored in the Western media, is their explicit debt to the Nazis.
This extends even to overt Nazi symbolism. I am indebted to one of the most seasoned observers of the Middle East, Tom Gross, for a photograph of a Hezbollah rally on the Lebanese side of the border fence, shortly before the present conflict. With houses in the Israeli town of Metullah in the background, hundreds of uniformed Hezbollah terrorists are raising their arms in a Nazi-style salute. This obscene ceremony, complete with yellow standards and mullah commanders taking the salute, was happening in full view of Israeli civilians. Mr. Gross asks pointedly, “Are all those now attacking Israel around the world even capable of imagining what an elderly Holocaust survivor who happened to glance across the fence might have felt?”
Hezbollah’s Nazi salute is not just a historical curiosity, though it evokes memories of Hitler’s support for Arab agitators such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem or the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq. Today the Nazi legacy manifests itself in Holocaust denial, an obsession that unites the most extreme Islamists, such as President Ahmadinejad with “moderate” secularists like the President Mahmoud Abbas.
