Allies of Jihad

The Common Strategies of Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini and Hitler

by Norman Berdichevsky (April 2008)

  This proved to be the case even though it meant a humiliating subservience of Muslims to European authoritarian and dictatorial leaders and even ideologies that had claimed to be leading a Christian religious crusade or preached a racist ideology in which Nordic or “Aryan” supremacy was a fundamental tenet.  

Louis XV was advised as early as 1769 to replace the French colonial efforts in the Americas with the conquest of Egypt and the French Foreign Office sent agents on a secret mission to explore the possible advantages of placing Egypt under colonial rule. The Directory appointed Bonaparte as the leader of an expedition to invade Egypt, defeat the English in the Eastern Mediterranean and explore the possibility of building a canal through the isthmus of Suez.

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The Ottoman Empire on the Eve of World War I

The Hijaz Railway, begun in 1900 and linking Damascus ultimately with Mecca was a project designed to fully merge the temporal power of the Ottoman throne with the spiritual seat of the Caliphate and the holy places of Mecca and Medina in Arabia. Such a strategy would pose the greatest threat to British imperial power in Egypt and India and inevitably attract German support. It was envisioned by German strategists as the link to the East bypassing the Suez Canal and creating a German-Austro-Hungarian-Turkish alliance dominating Europe and the Middle East.

made Germany the natural focus of Turkish hopes to recover the territories lost to the Russians, Greeks, Slavs and the growing extent of British and French influence in traditional Muslim areas in what is today India and much of North and East Africa. 

In particular, the British feared the Sultan would use his authority and religious title to create unrest and disloyalty among Muslims under British rule, numbering then approximately 100 million, out of the global Muslim population of nearly 300 million.

The Young Turks

Sharia” (Islamic religious law). Ironically, when Turkey committed itself to war, the Young Turks drew increasingly upon Islamic religious fervor to martial the resources of the Empire’s Muslim majority and even encouraged the genocidal slaughter of the Armenians and Greeks, traditional allies of the hated Russians and perceived as the traditional infidels.

, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Middle East

in a meeting in July 1911 with the German ambassador to Constantinople  Freiherr von Wangenheim, told him on the eve of the war, that “90% of world Jewry spoke Yiddish, a German dialect, had a natural friendly inclination towards Germany, and would be invaluable allies in furthering German economic and cultural interests.” Yet these expressions of good will and a friendly disposition of some of the “Young Turk” leaders towards Zionism proved to be of little value and were shunted aside as German policy to back its Turkish allies exploited the jihad issue to mobilize Muslim support of the war against the British, French and Russians.

 

Until the Lateran Treaty (1929) that recognized the sovereignty of the Vatican City State, relations between the Catholic Church and Mussolini’s Fascist regime were cold and relations with Nazi Germany reached a low point in 1934 that brought Mussolini into direct confrontation with Hitler over the question of Austria’s independence. 

The Islamic world, in accordance with its traditions, loves in the Duce, the wisdom of the statesmen united to the action of the warrior.” These statements dashed the hopes of Italian Jews convincing them that Fascism had taken a dramatic turn for the worse and indeed, not long afterward, the Italian leader bowed to Hitler’s will and paid the price for an alliance with Germany by instituting anti-Semitic laws.

Tigre peoples.

When the British quelled an Arab revolt in Palestine in 1938-39, Al-Husseini fled to Iraq where he helped orchestrate a pro-Axis coup and pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad. Thanks to the counteroffensive of the Red Army in front of Moscow in 1941/1942, at Stalingrad in 1942/1943, and the defeat of the German Africa Corps at El Alamein, the Germans never managed to actively intervene militarily in the Middle East. Many Bosnian Muslims were nevertheless recruited by the mufti and served in a special SS division. For this, he was sentenced to death in absentia after the war by a court in Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito.

The Naive European and American Patrons of Islam

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