The article in the Policy Review is by John Rosenthal, who writes on European politics. The books in question are Jihad and Jew-Hatred by Mattias Kuntzel, whose thesis is that the Mufti learned anti-Semitism from the Nazis, and The Mufti from Jerusalem and National Socialism by Klaus Gensicke, who says that, if anyone learned anything from anybody, it was the Nazis who learned from the Mufti.
The debate itself is probably not worth very much. I don’t think either had anything to teach the other about anti-Semitism; perhaps the Nazis had something to teach about practice and methodology.
But it is interesting to tie it into the reading I have been doing in the 1915 American Jewish Yearbook. Forgetting Nazis and Islamists, remember the Russians – the recapitulation of anti-Semitic incidences in Russia is equally as frightening, including a large number of blood libel accusations (!!!!).
What now with Hamas and Hezbollah, isn’t it all getting a little ridiculous?
Arthur Thinks (He Thinks) 