You can't spend any time online nowadays without seeing the word “meme”—a construct, trend, or craze that spreads almost instantaneously across time, space, and culture via the Internet. Given the modern world's limited attention span, most of them are the very definition of ephemeral, going from meme to meaningless in the blink of an eye.
But some memes last. As Jeffrey Herf demonstrates conclusively in this very fine book, the Nazis spent a great deal of time, effort, and money on spreading wartime propaganda in the Middle East and North Africa. The goals were mainly strategic, with Germany seeking to sow dissent within the Arab populations of Britain and France's empires, much as it had tried during World War I. The means and methods were much more modern this time around, however, thanks to the magic of short-wave radio. Radio was the great enabler, linking the Nazi propaganda effort to the still largely illiterate Arab masses and carrying the words of Islamic and Arab exiles working in Berlin to every corner and cafe of the Arab street. Indeed, the preponderance of this book is a recitation and analysis of those very broadcasts.
What those programs contained, not surprisingly, were appeals to the locals to disrupt the Allied war effort, declarations of German support for anyone willing to be a freedom fighter, and promises that the Reich had no postwar designs on the region. They also carried something foul, however: the murderous antisemitism that was at the heart of Nazi ideology. If there really is an old Arabic proverb that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” then Nazi propagandists had found the ideal tool to pry open the instabilities of the region. Every day for years, the Arab listener heard that the Jews were his misfortune; that Jewish money power had plunged the world into war to destroy civilization and fatten on the scraps; that the Jews were pulling the strings in Washington, London, and Moscow alike; that they had their eyes on Palestine as a bridgehead to enslave the entire Middle East and destroy Islam; and that the Jews had to be killed “before they killed you” (p. 88).
The Middle East was no stranger to antisemitism, of course, and there were extremist and fundamentalist voices saying all these things already. What the vigorous Nazi effort managed to do, however, was to shift these voices from the periphery to the center of political discourse in the Islamic world, to make calls for the extermination of the Jews, if not normative, then at least respectable. Herf goes further than that, arguing that Nazi propaganda, harping as it did on the commonalities of National Socialism and Islam, the decadence of western liberalism, and the importance of the community over individual rights (summed up in the Nazi slogan “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz”), helped to bring to the fore a highly “selective” version of Islam, an “invented tradition” that emphasized hitherto minor strains of Islamic thought—things such as antisemitism, a belief in absurd conspiracy theories, and the need to wage violent jihad against one's enemies—at the expense of a more inclusive and modernist vision.
The virtues of this book are many, including solid archival research, feisty argumentation, and a willingness to wade into the post-9/11 debate over radical Islam. Most impressive is Herf's ability to link the operational situation in North Africa with the propaganda effort. The latter peaked in intensity in summer 1942, as Field Marshal Rommel's Panzerarmee hurtled across the wire into Egypt, driving the British 8th Army before him and aiming for Alexandria, Suez, and beyond. Fans of the desert war as a “Krieg ohne Hass” might want to consider the fact that an Einsatzgruppe Afrika was already formed and ready to roll into Palestine behind Rommel to murder the Jews there. That threat receded as the British first held and then counterpunched Rommel at El Alamein, driving him out of Egypt altogether. Once the Nazis could no longer plausibly offer liberation to the Arab world, however, their propaganda began to harp more and more on the evils of the Jew and the threat of Zionism. As Herf puts it, the broadcasts often made it seem as if the entire reason the Jews had “started” this vast global conflict was to ensconce themselves in Palestine.
The book does have one obvious gap. While Herf gives a close reading to the propaganda itself, he makes no effort to delve into thornier issues of audience and reception in the Arab world. As a result, his argument for the impact of the Nazi effort on those being propagandized is an inferential one. He is aware of the problem, however; he discusses it in the introduction, and his point that analyzing reception “cannot be adequately done before we look at the texts themselves” seems a fair one.
After 9/11, the question “Why do they hate us?” became another meme, shorthand for those who were seeking the roots of anti-Western anger in the Islamic world. Certainly, western policy toward the region has been problematic, favoring oil and stability over human rights, for example. If Herf is right, however, and Hitler's propaganda enabled the rise of a new anti-Western and anti-Jewish radicalism, then at least some of that hatred was learned at the feet of the master.
