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Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part
1)
By Marc Erikson
[Editor's note: As distinct from the world religion of Islam,
Islamism - as in part contextually
defined below - is a political ideology that adherents would
apply to contemporary governance and politics, and
which they propagate through political and social
activism.]
On November 7, 2001, on the request
of the US government, the Swiss Federal Prosecutor's
Office froze the bank accounts of Nada Management, a
Lugano-based financial services and consulting firm, and
ordered a search and seizure raid on the firm's offices.
Police pulled in several of the company's principals for
questioning. Nada Management, part of the international
al-Taqwa ("fear of God") group, is accused by US
Treasury Department investigators of having acted for
years as advisers and a funding conduit for Osama bin
Laden's al-Qaeda.
Among those interrogated by
police was a certain Albert Friedrich Armand (aka Ahmed)
Huber, 74, a Swiss convert to Islam and retired
journalist who sits on the Nada board of directors.
Nothing too unusual perhaps, except for the fact that
Huber is also a high-profile neo-Nazi who tirelessly
travels the far-right circuit in Europe and the United
States. He sees himself as a mediator between radical
Islam and what he calls the New Right. Since September
11, a picture of Osama bin Laden hangs next to one of
Adolf Hitler on the wall of his study in Muri just
outside the Swiss capital of Bern. September 11, says
Huber, brought the radical Islam-New Right alliance
together.
On that, as his own career amply
demonstrates, he is largely wrong. Last year's horrific
terrorist acts were gleefully celebrated by Islamists
and neo-Nazis alike (Huber boozed it up with young
followers in a Bern bar) and may have produced closer
links. But Islamism and fascism have a long, over
80-year history of collaboration based on shared ideas,
practices and perceived common enemies. They abhor
"Western decadence" (political liberalism, capitalism),
fight holy wars - if needs be suicidal ones - by
indiscriminate means, and are bent on the destruction of
the Jews and of America and its allies.
Horst
Mahler - once a lawyer for, later a member of, the
1960s/'70s German ultra-left terrorist Baader-Meinhof
gang, and now a leading neo-Nazi - summed up convergent
radical Islamic and far-right views and hopes in a
September 21, 2001 letter: "The USA - or, to be more
exact, the World Police - has shown itself to be
vulnerable ... The foreseeable reaction of the East
Coast [= the Jewish controllers and their gentile allies
= the US Establishment] can be the spark that falls into
a powder keg. For decades, the jihad - the Holy War -
has been the agenda of the Islamic world against the
'Western value system.' This time it could break out in
earnest ... It would be world war, that is won with the
dagger ... The Anglo-American and European employees of
the 'global players,' dispersed throughout the entire
world, are - as Osama bin Laden proclaimed a long while
ago - military targets. These would be attacked by
dagger, where they least expected an attack. Only a few
need be liquidated in this manner; the survivors will
run off like hares into their respective home countries,
where they belong."
Such convergence of views,
methods and goals goes back to the 1920s when both
Islamism and fascism, ideologically pre-shaped in the
late 19th century, emerged as organized political
movements with the ultimate aim of seizing state power
and imposing their ideological and social policy
precepts (in which aims fascism, of course, succeeded in
the early '20s and '30s in Italy and Germany,
respectively; Islamism only in 1979 in Iran; then in
Sudan and Afghanistan). Both movements claim to be the
true representatives of some arcane, idealized religious
or ethnically pure communities of days long past - in
the case of Islamism, the period of the four "righteous
caliphs" (632-662), notably the rule of Umar bin
al-Khattab (634-44) which allegedly exemplifies "din wa
dawla", the unity of religion and state; in the case of
the Nazis, the even more obscure Aryan
"Volksgemeinschaft", with no historical reference point
at all. But both are in reality - as historian Daniel
Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, puts it - 20th
century outgrowths, radical movements, utopian and
totalitarian in their outlook. The Iranian scholars
Ladan and Roya Boroumand have made the same point.
The Nazi ("national socialist") movement was
formed in reaction to the World War I destruction of the
"Second Reich", the "unequal and treasonous" Versailles
Treaty and the mass social dislocation that followed,
its racialist, corporatist ideology laid out in Hitler's
Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The Muslim Brotherhood
(Al Ikhwan Al Muslimun), parent organization of numerous
Islamist terrorist outfits, was formed in 1928 in
reaction to the 1924 abolition of the caliphate by
Turkish reformer Kemal Ataturk, drawing the consequences
of the World War I demise of the Ottoman Empire. Ikhwan
founder Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian school teacher,
wrote at the time that it was endless contemplation of
"the sickness that has reduced the ummah (Muslim
community) to its present state" which prompted him and
five like-minded followers - all of them in their early
twenties - to set up the organization to rectify it.
Fascist Nazi history need not be dwelt on
further here. It led to the horrors and destruction of
World War II and the Holocaust. Neo-Nazism, whether in
Europe or the US, remains a terrorist threat and - as
the French Le Pen version demonstrated in parliamentary
elections this year - retains a measure of political
clout. It is nonetheless a boxed-in niche force with
little capability for break-out. Its ideological twin,
Islamism, by sharp contrast, has every chance for
wreaking escalating world-wide havoc based on its
fast-growing influence among the world's more than one
billion Muslims. Immediately following September 11 last
year, US President George W Bush declared war on
terrorism. It's a catchy phrase, but a serious misnomer
all the same. Terrorism is a method of warfare, not the
enemy. The enemy is Islamism.
Al-Banna's
brotherhood, initially limiting itself to spiritual and
moral reform, grew at astonishing speed in the 1930s and
'40s after embracing wider political goals and by the
end of World War II had around 500,000 members in Egypt
alone and branches throughout the Middle East. Event
background, ideology, and method of organizing all
account for its improbable success. As the war drew to a
close, the time was ripe for an end to British and
French colonial rule and the Ikhwan was ready with the
persuasive, religiously-buttressed answer: Free the
Islamic homeland from foreign, infidel (kafir)
control; establish a unified Islamic state. And al-Banna
had built a formidable organization to accomplish just
that: it featured sophisticated governance structures,
sections in charge of different segments of society
(peasants, workers, professionals), units entrusted with
key functions (propaganda, press relations, translation,
liaison with the Islamic world), and specialized
committees for finances and legal affairs - all built on
existing social networks, in particular those around
mosques and Islamic welfare associations. Weaving of
traditional ties into a distinctly modern political
structure was at the root of al-Banna's success..
But the "Supreme Guide" of the brethren knew
that faith, good works and numbers alone do not a
political victory make. Thus, modeled on Mussolini's
blackshirts (al-Banna much admired "Il Duce" and soul
brother "Fuehrer" Adolf Hitler), he set up a
paramilitary wing (slogan: "action, obedience, silence",
quite superior to the blackshirts' "believe, obey,
fight") and a "secret apparatus" (al-jihaz
al-sirri) and intelligence arm of al-Ikhwan to
handle the dirtier side - terrorist attacks,
assassinations, and so on - of the struggle for power.
In 1948, after the brotherhood had played a
pivotal role in mobilizing volunteers to fight in the
war against "the Zionists" in Palestine to prevent
establishment of a Jewish state, it considered itself to
have the credibility, political clout, and military
might to launch a coup d'etat against the Egyptian
monarchy. But that wasn't to be. On December 8, 1948, a
watchful Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha disbanded it. He
wasn't watchful enough. Less than three weeks later, the
brethren retaliated by assassinating the prime minister
- in turn prompting the assassination of al-Banna by
government agents on February 12, 1949.
That
didn't end it. Under a new, more radical leader, Sayyid
Qutb, the al-Ikhwan fight for state power continued and
escalated. A mid-1960s recruit was Ayman al-Zawahiri,
present number two man of al-Qaeda and the brains of the
organization.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co Ltd.
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for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Next, Part 2: The World War II Nazi
connections of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological
precursors of Islamism, and its present-day exponents
and financiers.
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