Even before 9/11 there was a trend in German scholarship that argued that the anti-Zionism of European radical leftists and Muslims was crossing the line to anti-Semitism, thus reintroducing anti-Semitism into Europe, which had presumably been cleansed of this disease since World War II. In September 2000 Juliane Wetzel organized a conference on this premise at the Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Berlin Institute of Technology. Many of the invited Middle East specialists objected to the notion that anti-Semitism was the only form of racism in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the invitation was revised to mention anti-Arab racism as well. Nonetheless, Wetzel asserted in her own presentation that she could discern, through her study of websites, a firm link between radical Islamists and neo-Nazis. Since 9/11, even cruder arguments have proliferated purporting to discover a historical linkage between “Islamo-fascism” and National Socialism going back to the 1930s, for example, Matthias Küntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 and even more tendentiously, right-wing talk show host Chuck Morse's The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolph Hitler and Haj Amin Al-Husseini.

Jeffrey Herf's Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World and Meir Litvak and Esther Webman's From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust are neither as unrefined nor polemical as the books of Küntzel and Morse. However, they are part of the current of scholarship seeking to link anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and Islamism.

There is no doubt that al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, actively supported National Socialism, including its program of genocide against European Jews. Rashid ʿAli al-Gaylani (Kaylani), who led a short-lived coup in Iraq in April and May 1941, also collaborated with the Nazis, primarily for anti-British reasons. Although al-Gaylani did not refrain from anti-Semitism, he was not directly responsible for the farhud (pogrom) against the Jews of Baghdad in 1941, which occurred after he was deposed. Other Arab political figures, including Egypt's ʿAli Mahir and ʿAziz al-Misri, also sympathized with the Axis on the basis of its challenge to Anglo–French domination of the Middle East without embracing Nazi racialist ideology.

Stefan Wild, a scholar of Arabic literature and former director of the German Oriental Institute, identifies five Arab political organizations that “to a greater or lesser degree had taken over certain elements of National Socialism or fascism”–-a rather vague formulation: Young Egypt, the Lebanese Kataʾib (Phalanges), the Syrian Social National Party (PPS), the Iraqi Futuwwa youth movement, and the Syrian Baʿth (Stefan Wild, “National Socialism in the Arab Near East between 1933 and 1939,” Die Welt des Islams 25 [1985]: 130). Because the Kataʾib is a Christian party and the PPS and Baʿth are militantly secular, they are not likely to have influenced Islamists. Misr al-Fatat leader Ahmad Husayn became critical of fascist Italy as early as 1934 and Nazi Germany after 1938. Gilbert Achcar, professor of development studies and international relations at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, strongly refutes Wild's characterization of the Baʿth (in the 1930s and 1940s) (The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab–Israeli War of Narratives [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010], 64–74). This leaves the Iraqi Futuwwa, which was influenced by Nazi anti-Semitism and did attack Jews during the farhud. The Society of Muslim Brothers also adopted anti-Semitism and elements of fascist organizational techniques. However, Hasan al-Banna rejected the Nazi political program because of its atheism and “ultra-imperialism,” which he considered worse than Anglo–French colonialism. Non-Arab political formations including Betar, the youth movement of the Union of Revisionist Zionists (the historic core of the Likud Party led today by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu), also adopted fascist organizational methods. Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky was supportive of Mussolini in the 1930s. Uniforms, militarism, a leader cult, and ultranationalism were a common political style in the 1930s, compatible with differing right-wing ideologies.

After the establishment of the State of Israel, denial, distortion, and minimization of the European Jewish genocide became widespread in the Arab world. Several editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and admiring biographies of Hitler have been published in Egypt and elsewhere. Zionism is widely—and grossly incorrectly—equated with Nazism, and wild distortions of the historical relationship between the two are common. Egyptian school textbooks are appalling in this regard (Marisa Jones, “Holocaust Education in Egyptian Schools” [master's thesis, American University in Cairo, 2008]).

Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World offers a detailed account of the Nazi propaganda effort, conducted mostly over shortwave radio. The original transcripts of the broadcasts were destroyed or lost. However, Alexander Kirk, head of the American Legation and then U.S. ambassador to Egypt from March 1941 to March 1944, and his successors until spring 1945, when the broadcasts ceased, directed their staff to transcribe and translate the broadcasts into English. Consequently, thousands of pages of these texts, designated “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic,” are preserved in the U.S. National Archives in the files of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. This is the source of most of the new material in Herf's book.

There is value in establishing a detailed record of the Nazi propaganda effort directed toward Arabs, which was based on an anti-Jewish interpretation of Islam, anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism. However, Herf is not very careful at distinguishing between what the Nazi propaganda machine transmitted and how it was received. The U.S. Office of War Information estimated that there were 90,500 shortwave radios in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia in January 1942 and another 155,770 in Palestine, Algeria, and Morocco (p. 9). Almost all of the shortwave radios in Palestine were owned by Jews, a large number of those in Algeria and Morocco were owned by colons or Jews, and many of those in Egypt and some in Iraq were owned by Allied soldiers stationed there. Relatively few Arabs owned shortwave radios, and surely not every Arab who did used it to listen to Nazi propaganda.

A good portion of Herf's book rehearses generally known information about the wartime collaboration of Amin al-Husayni and Rashid ʿAli al-Gaylani with the Nazis. The significance of this collaboration should in no way be dismissed. However, should we not ask how much of an impact it had on Arabs in the Middle East? Filastin, the leading Palestinian Arabic daily, was consistently anti-Nazi from 1933 to the end of World War II (Achcar, pp. 43–44). Husayni's flight from Palestine to Lebanon in October 1937 and thence to Baghdad and Berlin diminished his influence in Palestine (Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1929–39: From Riots to Rebellion [London: Cass, 1977], 236–37). He never exercised effective leadership there again. Despite Husayni's efforts, the Wehrmacht had only 130 members in its Arab unit in May 1942. Altogether, 6,300 Arabs served in German military units, including 1,300 from Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, but 9,000 Palestinian Arabs enlisted in the British army and hundreds of thousands of Maghribians served in the Free French forces (Achcar, pp. 145–46).

Herf speaks ominously about “the merging of National Socialist with radical Islamist anti-Semitism and its diffusion to the Middle East” (p. 11). There is no easy way to determine how many Arabs listened to Nazi propaganda broadcasts or their reactions to the message. So, Herf resorts to speculative formulations like, “It is plausible that during World War II, Sayyid Qutb listened to Nazi broadcasts and traveled in the pro-Axis intellectual milieu of the radical Islamists in and around Al Azhar University” (p. 259). We don't know what radio broadcasts Qutb may have listened to. However, because Adnan Musallam's biography of Sayyid Qutb is in his bibliography, Herf should know that it was not until his visit to the United States from 1948 to 1950 that Qutb repudiated Western liberalism and began writing about Islamic themes (Adnan A. Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism [Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2005]). Qutb did not join the Muslim Brothers until the early 1950s. His anti-Semitic essay “Maʿrakatuna maʿa al-Yahud” (Our Battle with the Jews) appeared in 1951, after the first Arab–Israeli War. This chronology, although it in no way excuses it, establishes a very different context for Qutb's anti-Semitism. The case for a link between Nazi propaganda and Sayyid Qutb's views about Jews rests on conjecture and innuendo, as does much of what Herf offers when he ventures beyond the terrain of Germany.

Although many of the errors in Herf's book can be attributed to his lack of Middle East expertise, Meir Litvak and Esther Webman are scholars of the region with good knowledge of Arabic. They have mined Arab books and media and present a horrific compendium of denials, distortions, and minimization of the mechanized mass murder of European Jewry in From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust. The authors begin by demonstrating that throughout 1945 and 1946 major Egyptian newspapers and magazines—al-Ahram, al-Misri, al-Hilal—reported regularly and accurately on the “massacres of the Jews,” “German atrocities,” “selections,” “gas chambers,” “crematoria,” Nazi “death factories,” and the Nuremberg trials (pp. 25–33). This is consistent with the findings of Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski for the previous decade. They argue in Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s that the central currents of Egyptian political thought were prodemocratic and anti-Nazi, like the Palestinian daily, Filastin, mentioned previously.

However, when the future of the survivors of the catastrophe was linked to their immigration to Palestine, the Arab media began to minimize or distort Jewish suffering while asserting Arab lack of responsibility for it. The structure of Litvak and Webman's argument clearly indicates that Arab Holocaust denial is instrumental—a weapon in the struggle against Zionism and the State of Israel. They acknowledge that “Arab attitudes have been influenced and shaped by developments in the Arab–Israeli conflict” (p. 12). Although this does not excuse anti-Semitism, it is a different argument and context than claiming that Arab and Muslim anti-Zionism is organically related to Nazi anti-Semitism.

Litvak and Webman organize Arab expressions of Holocaust denial into four categories: liberal westernizers, nationalists, Islamists, and leftists. They then present studies of several issues, such as the Eichmann trial, followed by a survey of the themes of what they term “the Arab discourse” of the Holocaust. They acknowledge that “the Arab discourse did not develop into one coherent narrative.” Nonetheless, they argue that “there is a high degree of continuity in the Arab discourse throughout the period” (p. 13). Litvak and Webman are correct in asserting that ideas have cross-pollinated. For example, some Islamists and secular nationalists now deploy the blood-libel accusation, introduced to the Middle East by French Catholics in Damascus in 1840 against Jews. However, the contention that the range of Arab opinions on matters related to the Jewish genocide constitutes one discourse is untenable.

This fundamental methodological error is partly inherent in Litvak and Webman's approach to intellectual history. Their encounter with the Arab world, like many Israeli scholars, is largely via texts. This leads to mischaracterization and miscontextualization of some of the authors they examine. For example, Litvak and Webman regard the writings of Arab intellectuals who have denounced Holocaust denial—the late Edward Said and Mohamed Sid-Ahmed as well as ʿAzmi Bishara, Joseph Massad, and others—as “charged, in different degrees with sophisticated motifs of Holocaust denial discourse, as well as elements of relativization and political instrumentalization” (p. 373). That is to say, their views are not based on principle but are merely a way to gain recognition of Palestinian rights. Arabs are not permitted to claim that Palestinian Arabs are “the victims of the victims,” as Said often said. Arabs are not permitted to note that Zionists and Israel memorialize and sacralize the Jewish genocide in ways that serve their political purposes—an argument elaborated by Tom Segev in The Seventh Million, which is in Litvak and Webman's bibliography, and Idith Zertal in Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, which is not in their bibliography but perhaps should be. In effect, Litvak and Webman imply that Arab writing must conform to the Zionist forms of expression hegemonic in Israel to be acceptable.

As Achcar recognizes, the conceptual forerunner of Litvak and Webman's book is the late Yehoshafat Harkabi's Arab Attitudes to Israel (Achcar, pp. 177–79). Harkabi collected many Arab expressions of anti-Semitism and intense enmity to Israel. On this basis he concluded that the Arab–Israeli conflict was irresolvable. However, in Israel's Fateful Decisions, Harkabi completely changed his views. This suggests that conclusions based on collecting quotations may depend more on one's interpretation of current political possibilities than on historical evidence. After all, the would-be Nazi collaborator, Anwar al-Sadat, was the first Arab head of state to recognize and sign a peace treaty with Israel.