FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Hitler’s Muslims

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS

Rant Number 405 27 July 2010

Hitler’s Muslims

Hitler’s Muslim Legions. BBC Radio 4 last night regaled listeners with that. ‘Tells the little-known story of the tens of thousands of Soviet Muslims who fought for Hitler in WWII’ the blurb has it. How naughty. Association with the dreadful Fuhrer’s name gives the religion of the Crescent the kiss of death, you bet. But the BBC is cunning. It feigns innocence & objectivity. Producing chap with the reassuring appellation of Samir Shah is wheeled in to justify the programme. How can Muslim warriors fighting under the swastika ‘be reconciled with Hitler’s Aryan fantasies?’ he asks. Well! The BBC knows all about non-Aryan fantasies. Does it not try to ram down your throat all the day long its tired, obsessive, bankrupt liberal mythologies? As to Islam, listen to what Adolf told Martin Bormann in January 1942:

‘Mark my words, Bormann, I am going to become very religious.’

Bormann: ‘You have always been very religious.’

‘I am going to become a religious figure. Soon I’ll be the great chief of the Tatars. Already Arabs and Moroccans are mingling my name with their prayers. Amongst the Tatars I shall become Khan. The only thing of which I shall be incapable is to share the sheiks’ mutton with them. I am a vegetarian, and they must spare me from their meat. If they don’t wait too long, I’ll fall back on their harems!’

Do I sense wry irony in Hitler’s remarks, rather than seriousness? He can’t have been as naive as that. Regardless, this passage must pose a bit of a challenge for the PC Kommandantur at the Beeb. A vegetarian Fuhrer! How on earth do you attack that? Alas, Adolf got hoist with his own petard via the macho reference to his sexual energy. As a boast, more Italian than German, I must say. Anyway, Hitler was somewhat less than highly sexed. The Fuhrer’s genuine aphrodisiac – not unlike Franco, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and others – was not Eros but Macht, power. In fact, the death instinct probably predominated in him. Thanatos was Hitler’s real ruling passion. In the end, it drove him and National Socialism into the grave.

How can Hitler’s Jihadis be squared with Aryanism, Mr Samir Shah ponderously inquires? Maybe someone ought to tell him that the Albanians, Bosnians, Chechens and Circassians who fought as Waffen-SS actually for the Germans counted as ‘Aryans’, whatever that may mean. They are all peoples of Indo-European stock. I figure even Nazi ideologues would condescend to pragmatism when it came to fighting Bolshevism. Which takes you to the heart of the matter. Hitler’s 70.000 Muslims soldiers were Nazis only per accidens. Fortuitously or somewhat indirectly, that is. That is not true of Muslims alone. Croats against Serbs, Slovaks against Czechs, Finns, Lithuanians and Latvians against Russians did not subscribe to the racial doctrines of Mein Kampf. They were nationalities seeking emancipation from their enemies, real or presumed. Similarly the Albanian, Azeri, Kosovar, Turkish, Tatar and Caucasian Muslims did not fight qua Muslims. They aspired to independence, the settling of old accounts, revenge on their oppressors. Or just detested Communism, Stalin, the Russians and their terror machines and so fought against them - these last being highly laudable aims, the priest would opine.

Was it criminal of those Muslims to have served in the Waffen-SS? Yes, but did not Churchill himself say that to defeat Hitler he would have made a deal with the devil himself? (And of course he did – literally.) The Muslims might well have argued the same. To fight Stalin – the world’s greatest mass murderer – they too allied themselves with Shaytan himself. Which devil was worse? Discuss.

The recurrent piece de resistance or canonical hate figure of this kind of demonology is of course the figure of Muhammad Amin Al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Hitler called him ‘a sly old fox’ and was struck by his fair hair and blue eyes. Obviously,despite his ‘mouse-like countenance’ he was ‘a man with more than one Aryan among his ancestors and one who may well be descended from the best Roman stock’, the Fuhrer pontificated, this time seriously, I fear. However, the BBC assured its listeners that the modern PLO took its distance from Al-Husaini – he has no street named after him or public commemoration in PLO official documents. Quite wise. However, given that Zionist organisations were pouring large number of immigrants into Palestine, with British connivance, it is hardly surprising that an Arab spiritual and political authority should act on the principle of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Which is not to excuse – how could one? Nazi crimes against innocent Jews are indefensible – but to understand.

As to Arab anti-Semitism – that is an oxymoron. Arabs are themselves Semites. They may well harbour prejudice against Jews but that again is per accidens – some Qur’anic passages notwithstanding. As a poor Christians, I must leave Qur’anic exegesis to the ulama, the scholars of Islam.

Islam is not racist. How could it possibly be? It is a universal religion. It embraces peoples and nations of all races, hues and colours. Malcom X, who was at some stage a black racist, after he went on the Mecca pilgrimage had to change his mind. The spectacles of so many believers of different colours coming together cured him of his black suprematist delusions. When I lived in the Gulf I discovered the Qataris are not innocent of racial prejudice against non-Qataris. Especially against the wretched immigrant labourers whose hard work is building Doha into post-modernity. But that attitude finds no justification whatever in the holy texts of Islam, anymore than it would into the teaching of the New Testament.

Hitler’s Muslim Legions bends over backwards not to be seen as Islam-bashing but I suspect that Islamophobes would have relished it. The very title tarnishes, that’s a fact. Like Hitler’s Pope – a nasty hatchet job on that great and holy man, Pope Pius XII. Or like Hitler’s Willing Executioners, an atrocious book that pretended to brand the whole German people as guilty of complicity in genocide.

If that is not racism, what is?

Revd Frank Julian Gelli