THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XII, Issue # 85, May 25, 2010
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
HOW ISLAMISTS CAME TO DOMINATE EUROPEAN ISLAM
By Dr. Daniel Pipes
WHAT GAVE RISE TO THE ISLAMIST FIFTH COLUMN IN EUROPE: HOW THE U.S.A., BRITAIN, & THE NAZIS SET THE
STAGE FOR ISLAMIST DOMINATION OF EUROPEAN MUSLIMS -- THE FUTILITY OF WESTERN GOVERNMENTS ALLYING WITH
THE ISLAMISTS -- WHAT RECENT HISTORY TEACHES, AS REGARDS FACILITATING, ASSISTING, & STRENGTHENING
ISLAMIST GROUPS & NETWORKS
FULL STORY:
The July 7, 2005, London Underground bombings (7-7 bombings), in which Islamists killed 52 and injured 700, prompted
British authorities to work with Muslims to avoid future violence.
However, rather than turn to anti-Islamist Muslims who reject the triumphalist goal of applying Islamic law in Europe, they
promoted non-violent Islamists, hoping these would persuade co-religionists to express their hatred of the West in lawful
ways. This effort featured Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962), a prominent Islamist intellectual. For example, London's Metropolitan
Police partially funded a conference Ramadan addressed and Prime Minister Tony Blair appointed him to an official
"working group on tackling extremism."
Deploying an Islamist may have seemed like an original and clever idea, but it was neither. Western governments have been
allying without success with Islamists for decades. Indeed, they have been allying with Ramadan's own family.
In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower hosted a group of foreign Muslims that included Said Ramadan (1926-1995), a leader of
arguably the most influential Islamist organization of the Twentieth Century, the rabidly anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood
– and also Tariq's father. The Eisenhower-Ramadan meeting took place in the context of sustained U.S. government efforts
to rally Muslims against Soviet Communism, in part by putting Said Ramadan on the CIA payroll. Talcott Seelye, an
American diplomat who met with him about that time explains: "We thought of Islam as a counterweight to Communism."
Then there was Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949), Tariq's grandfather, Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and recipient of Nazi
funding. American diplomats in Cairo in the late 1940s had "regular meetings" with al-Banna, found him "perfectly
empathetic," and perceived his organization to be a "moderate" and even a "positive" force. The British apparently offered
al-Banna money.
In other words, Western governments have a history of ignoring the Islamists' repulsive ideology and working with them,
even strengthening them.
In a stunning piece of investigative historical research, Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly with the
Wall Street Journal, reveals new twists and turns of this drama in his just-released book, A Mosque in Munich:
Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27).
Johnson opens with a review of the systematic Nazi efforts to recruit Soviet Muslims from among their prisoners of war.
Many Muslims loathed Stalin; and between 150,000 and 300,000 of them fought for the Axis in World War II. In other
words, over and above their unfulfilled propaganda effort directed at Arabs, the Nazis actually fielded a substantial force
of mainly Turkic Muslims under the leadership of a scholarly Nazi enthusiast named Gerhard von Mende.
After the German defeat in 1945, Johnson follows von Mende as he continued his anti-Communist work with ex-Soviet
Muslims, now in a Cold War context. But von Mende's network of former soldiers proved not very competent at the task
of arousing Muslim hostility against the Soviet Union. Their leading intellectual, for example, had served as the Imam of
an SS division that helped suppress the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Islamists quickly proved themselves far more
competent at this political and religious challenge. Johnson explains that they "wear suits, have university degrees, and
can formulate their demands in ways that a politician can understand."
The heart of his fascinating study lies in tracing the evolution, much of it in Munich, from old soldiers to new Islamists.
It's a classic tale of 1950s intrigue, complete with rehabilitated Nazis, CIA-front organizations, and dueling
Soviet-American ambitions.
Johnson shows how, without anyone quite planning it, the Americans usurped von Mende's network and handed it
over to Said Ramadan. This early U.S. boost to the Muslim Brotherhood, Johnson argues, gave it the means to establish
an Islamist framework just in time to welcome the surge of Muslim immigration to Europe in the 1970s.
Thus did the Islamist domination of European Muslims have two hidden facilitators, Nazi and American. Its origins in
Operation Barbarossa reveals the ugly pedigree of today's Islamist strength. Hitler and his thugs could not have
foreseen it, but they helped set the stage for Eurabia.
American backing for Islamists prompts Johnson to warn against the futility of allying with the Muslim Brotherhood and
its ilk – as Tony Blair once again recently attempted. However tempting, it invariably harms the West. The lesson is
simple: be cognizant of history and do not assist the Islamists.
May 25, 2010 updates: (1) The published book lacks photographs to help bring its leading characters come to life.
Fortunately, these are available on Ian Johnson's website.
(2) Coincidentally, I spent the Summer of 1953 (at the age of three) in Munich, just as that city was emerging as a center
of Islamic activism, precisely because of the major presence of ex-Soviet Muslims living there. An excerpt from my
father's autobiography, Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (Yale University Press, 2003), page 74,
explains why he took the family to Munich:
"At the end of May, 1951, with financial assistance from
the Center of International Affairs at MIT, Irene and I
left Daniel with our parents and went on a four-month
trip to Europe and the Middle East. My purpose was to
interview the surviving members of national
governments of what had been the Russian Empire
during the period 1917-1921. I located quite a few of
them in London, Paris, Munich and Istanbul, and they
helped me appreciably to understand the complex
situations of that era. In Paris, I established contact
with the Georgian émigré community. Two years later,
I spent another summer in Europe, this time in Munich,
interviewing refugees from Soviet Central Asia, nearly
all of them ex-German prisoners of war. The information
they furnished on life in their regions in the 1930s
reinforced my conviction that nationalism was well and
alive in the borderlands of the USSR and that no mass
assimilation was taking place."
His research that Summer provided the basis of his article, "Muslims of Soviet Central Asia: Trends and Prospects,"
The Middle East Journal, Spring, 1955, pp. 147-162, and Summer, 1955, pp. 295-308.
© Daniel Pipes 2010
Originally Published in National Review Online, May 25, 2010
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from the Daniel Pipes Mailing List, May 25, 2010
Article URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/8412/islamists-dominate-european-islam
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is Founder and Director of the Middle East Forum,
Founder of Campus Watch, Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, a
signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former
adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology, and a
former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author or co-author of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for National Review Online, Front Page
Magazine, the New York Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His analyses of world trends and of forces and
developments in the Middle East have appeared in numerous North American newspapers, including the Washington
Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears on American network
television, as well as at universities and think tanks, to discuss the Middle East, Islam, and the Islamist threat to the
U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on BBC and Al Jazeera, and has lectured in approximately
twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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