A prime reason this latest project is garnering substantial attention, including a condemnation from Secretary of State Clinton, who is traveling in the region, is because of what the Shepherd Hotel is: Originally a residence built for Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who notoriously gave comfort to the Nazis during World War Two. Naturally, pro-settlement groups justifiably saw poetic justice in its demolition. At the same time, the Husseinis, which remain a prominent Palestinian family, were able to galvanize outrage.

Meanwhile, Laura Rozen reports that Moskovitz was a huge donor to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican from Miami Beach (and Moskovitz’s congresswoman). The new Republican majority has Ros-Lehtinen chairing the Foreign Affairs Committee; Moskovitz and his wife gave her somewhere between nearly $10,000 and nearly $15,000 during the most recent election cycle. In his recent East Jerusalem travelogue, Todd Gitlin wrote, “By spreading Jewish settlements throughout an area that Palestinians insist must become the capital of a Palestinian state, Moskowitz is financing the facts on the ground that stand in the way of a deal.”

Israeli Demolition Begins in East Jerusalem Project [NYT]
Shepherd Hotel Developer Top Donor to Foreign Affairs Chair Ros-Lehtinen [Laura Rozen]
Related: Facts on the Ground [Tablet Magazine]

Mykola Lebed led an Ukranian nationalist group that took part in the killing of Jews and Poles in Western Ukraine during World War II. After the war, according to the report, Lebed was recruited by U.S. intelligence to run guerrilla operations against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the C.I.A. not only repeatedly protected him from other intelligence agencies hoping to prosecute him, but also relocated him to New York City in 1949.

The report, entitled Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence, and the Cold War, describes numerous examples of an emerging pattern in the years after the war, when, to intelligence agencies, “settling scores with Germans or German collaborators seemed less pressing; in some cases, it even appeared counterproductive.” Instead, according to the documents, resources were often spent in spying upon politically active Jews in displaced persons’ camps.

Also discussed in meticulous detail is the collaboration between Nazi officials and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini. The grand mufti was paid “an absolute fortune” of 600,000 marks a year (24 times that of a German field marshal) by the Nazis, and promised leadership of Palestine after the defeat of the British and elimination of the 350,000 Jews living there. Husseini, for his part, enthusiastically recruited Muslims for the SS.

The report also explored new details of the escapes of prominent Nazis after the war, and absolved the U.S. of responsibility in Adolf Eichmann’s escape to Argentina.

Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War [National Archives]
U.S. Recruited Nazi’s More Than Thought, Declassified Papers Show [NYT]

The second strain comes from 19th-century Europe, where religious Jew-hatred had given way to modern anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Thus the Hamas charter states that Jews “control the world media [and use their] wealth to stir revolutions… They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions… They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests.” (Among these Zionist front organizations, you will be interested to learn, are the Rotary Club, the Lions, and B’nai Brith.)

Last but not least, the Hamas charter incorporates the 20th-century rhetoric of apocalyptic anti-Zionism. “Today it is Palestine and tomorrow it may be another country or other countries. For Zionist scheming has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates.” It follows that peace between Israel and Arab countries is, by definition, impossible: “Leaving the circle of conflict with Israel is a major act of treason and it will bring curse on its perpetrators.”

Koranic anti-Judaism, European anti-Semitism, Arab anti-Zionism: mix them together and you have an intoxicatingly paranoid worldview, in which Jews are all-powerful and totally malevolent, and Israel is not just a state but the latest incarnation of an eternal evil. You have, in fact, a 21st-century version of Nazism. The revelation of Jeffrey Herf’s new book, Nazi Propaganda in the Arab World, is that this affinity is not coincidental. Rather, between 1939 and 1945, Germany tirelessly used radio and print media to spread Nazi ideas about the Jews to Arab countries, especially Egypt. Herf, who is a historian of Nazi Germany and not a student of Arabic or Arab history, makes clear that his book is not a study of the way this propaganda was actually received. But simply by documenting, in great and horrible detail, what the Nazis were telling the Arabs about the Jews, he raises the question of whether “the impact of fascism and Nazism on the Middle East [is] inseparable from contemporary political controversies about anti-Semitism, radical Islam, ‘Islamofascism,’ and international terrorism since the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

The key source for Nazi Propaganda in the Arab World are transcriptions of German and Italian radio broadcasts made by experts at the American Embassy in Cairo. Between September 1941 and March 1945, the embassy sent the State Department weekly reports on “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic.” After the war, these transcripts, totaling thousands of pages, ended up the National Archives, and Herf is the first historian to consult them extensively. In addition to showing just what these broadcasts said, Herf puts them into historical context, showing how the German message evolved in response to wartime events. As the author of a definitive study of the Nazis’ domestic propaganda, Herf is also able to show how the Nazi message was specifically tailored for Arab and Muslim listeners.

Before World War II, German attempts to reach out to the Muslim world were made very awkward by the Nazis’ racial doctrines, which held Arabs, Persians, and Turks to be biologically inferior to Aryans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler openly declared, “I am prevented by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ from linking the destiny of my own people with theirs.” Accordingly, the Nazis frowned on marriage between Germans and Muslims; in 1935, the Hitler Youth expelled a boy whose father was Turkish, leading to a public-relations disaster in Turkey. When the 1936 Olympics were held in Germany, Egypt and Iran threatened to boycott to express their insulted racial pride. Significantly, what smoothed over these diplomatic quarrels were the Nazis’ assurances, private and public, that their anti-Semitism was directed solely against Jews, not against other Semitic peoples.

Once the war began, Germany turned its attention to the Muslim world in earnest. In particular, the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa were important to the Nazis’ geopolitical designs. During World War I, the British had inspired the Arabs to revolt against Ottoman Turkey with promises of independence. But when peace came, the region was divided up between the British and French empires, breeding a resentment among the Arabs comparable to the Germans’ feelings about the Treaty of Versailles. Adding fuel to the fire was the Balfour Declaration, in which the British promised to support a Jewish home in Palestine.

The key themes of Nazi propaganda, accordingly, were anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, with a sideline in anti-Communism. It may seem incredible that, at the very moment Germany was occupying almost every country in Europe—and exploiting them for slave labor—it could pose to the Arabs as a champion of native peoples against foreign rule. But in some quarters, the Arab resentment of Britain was so intense that Germany could be taken for a potential liberator.

The Nazis found a valuable ally, for instance, in Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who found refuge in Berlin after fighting the British in Palestine and Iraq. Germany’s Arabic-language radio made great use of Husseini’s speeches, such as the one he delivered in Berlin in 1943, explaining that the Jews “lived like a sponge among peoples, sucked their blood, seized their property, undermined their morals…. All this has brought the hostility of the world down on them and nourished the Jew’s hatred against all the peoples that had been burning for two thousand years.” As Herf notes, despite spending the war as a guest of Hitler and Himmler, the Mufti was never tried for war crimes, but returned to Egypt as a national hero.

One of the things Husseini and Hitler talked about, when they met in November 1941, was their plans for the Jews in Palestine and throughout the Middle East. Hitler, who still hoped that he was on the verge of a quick victory over Stalin, promised that once the USSR fell, German forces would cross the Caucasus mountains and proceed to the “destruction of the Jewish element” in the Middle East. That plan was blocked by the resistance of the Red Army, but eight months later, when Rommel’s Afrika Korps invaded Egypt, it seemed that the Nazis might reach Palestine from the west instead. At that desperate moment for the Allies, German radio issued a broadcast in Egypt whose title was “Kill the Jews Before They Kill You.” “It is the duty of the Egyptians to annihilate the Jews and to destroy their property,” the announcer said. “Egypt can never forget that it is the Jews who are carrying out Britain’s imperialist policy in the Arab countries and that they are the source of all the disasters, which have befallen the countries of the East.” If it were not for Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein, it is certain that the Holocaust would have extended to Palestine and North Africa. In fact, the SS had already set up an Einsatzgruppe for the region, like the ones that initiated the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

Given the extreme vulnerability of the Jews in Palestine, and the utter destruction being visited on the Jews in Europe, what is most striking in the Nazis’ Arabic-language propaganda is the unquestioning assumption of Jewish power. Again and again, the British and the Americans are described as pawns of the Jews; Roosevelt is alternately said to be Jewish or surrounded by Jews (including Eleanor); Chaim Weizmann is considered as powerful as Roosevelt and Churchill put together. “Had it not been for the Jews, neither London, Washington, nor Moscow would have been linked together,” explained one broadcast in December 1943. It is a perfect example of the Nazi “Big Lie,” for of course the truth is exactly the opposite: it was Germany’s aggression that brought together those unlikely allies.

Reading Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World is a reminder of how powerful such lies can be. They are so shameless, so contrary to every evident fact, that they seem to render facts meaningless. If you could believe, for instance, that following the American landings in North Africa, “the Jews” bestowed on Eisenhower the title “the Glittering Sword of Israel”; or that on the way home from the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill stopped in Jerusalem to confer with their Zionist masters; or that the tiny Jewish settlement in Palestine was the nucleus of a planned Jewish empire that would include the entire Middle East and all of North Africa—then what wouldn’t you believe?

Herf does not show that such Nazi propaganda claims were actually accepted by Arab listeners, and surely the vast majority discounted them. But sadly, as the Hamas charter shows, we have not yet heard the end of the ideas whose birth Herf documents in this frightening, necessary book.

According to one report, in the Australian, Lieberman intended to counter the American argument that Israel should not allow a 20-apartment development on the site of a former hotel previously owned by the family of the mufti who had sat with Hitler. The site, in the eastern part of Israel’s capital city, was purchased by a Jewish group that is seeking to extend Jewish ownership in the quarter through private acquisition.

“Crude and diversionary” is how Lieberman’s line of thinking is described by the Guardian newspaper’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, who reports that the demarche is “directly related” to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “insistence that he will not give in to international demands to freeze Israeli settlement activity.” The Middle East correspondent of the Australian, John Lyons, quotes one source as telling the newspaper that inside Israel’s own foreign ministry the instruction was met with “laughter, skepticism and a sense of misplaced communication that this doesn’t help one bit the real argument.”

Maybe he should have asked the diplomats’ mothers. Certainly the fact that the Palestinian Arabs hewed to Hitler was understood by an earlier generation as fundamental. It was marked over and over again by such great liberal institutions as the Forward newspaper. The error of the Arabs was compounded as they refused—in sharp contradistinction to, say, the Germans—to make an effort to educate their people to the facts of what happened under Hitler and what it all meant. It seems they wanted the world not to regret but to forget.

The mufti whose picture Lieberman wants circulated was born in 1893, as political Zionism was being organized. I last wrote about him for the Wall Street Journal’s website, when, in August 2001, the German foreign minister was trying to organize a Mideast peace powwow in Berlin. I suggested that such a conference would be haunted by el-Husseini. The mufti didn’t just pass through Berlin during the war. He was in Berlin for three years between 1941 and 1945. Hitler, in the meeting that Lieberman wants people to remember, reassured the mufti that after dealing with the Jews the Germans would turn their attention to liberating the Arabs.

As one of the mufti’s biographers, Joseph Schechtman, tells the story, the mufti went on to build up “a truly world-wide network of anti-Allied activities,” including broadcasting propaganda against the Jews, England, and America. He maneuvered furiously to block the ability of Jews to escape Hitler by going to Palestine. After the war, the mufti ended up in France and was eventually allowed to escape to Cairo.

Sympathetic biographers have tried to suggest that the mufti’s maneuvering in Berlin fell somewhat short of outright collaboration. One, Phillip Mattar, has suggested the Zionists were so eager to prove the mufti guilty of collaboration and war crimes that they exaggerated his connections to the Nazis. But he acknowledges that “the Mufti and other Arabs were so busy justifying his statements and actions in the Axis countries that they ignored the obvious and overwhelming fact that the Mufti had cooperated with the most barbaric regime in modern times.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, in a dispatch issued by The New York Times in January 2008, considered the question of how the anti-Jewish ideas being used by Iranian agencies such as Hezbollah were able to “work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse.” He reasons that they were imported from Europe, and quoted a German scholar, Matthias Küntzel, as warning of their seriousness. Küntzel, Goldberg noted, “makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism.”

Küntzel was quoted by Goldberg as saying that the mufti and the “Egyptian proto-Islamist” Hassan al-Banna “willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses.” Goldberg reckons that Hassan al-Banna “did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner” as the mufti, but he quotes Küntzel as saying his movement was subsidized with German funds that enabled it to, among other things, distribute Arabic translations of, among other tomes, Mein Kampf. He quoted Küntzel as writing that across the Arab world, “Nazi methods and ideology whipped up anti-Zionist fervor, and the effects of this concerted campaign are still being felt today.”

Goldberg offered a caveat, saying that “one doesn’t have to be soft on Germany to believe it was organic Muslim ideas as well as Nazi ideas that led to the spread of anti-Semitism in the Middle East.” But he concluded that Küntzel was “right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East.” Goldberg quoted his own interview with a former leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who said: “The question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” Goldberg ended by quoting Küntzel as arguing that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

In other words, the more one gets into it, the more it is plain that Avigdor Lieberman knows just what he is doing—and is doing it for good reason.

Seth Lipsky is a columnist for Tablet. He can be reached at slipsky@tabletmag.com.