

Adolf Hitler and the "Arab Reich" The genesis of the cooperation between militant Islam and the extreme right can be traced back to the early years of the Third Reich. During World War II, when much of the Islamic world sympathized with Hitler, members of the Muslim Brotherhood would often say prayers for an Axis victory during their meetings. Moreover, some Muslims went so far as to fantasize over putative Islamic affinities of fascist leaders. For example, rumors abounded that Benito Mussolini was an Egyptian Muslim whose real name was Musa Nili (Moses of the Nile) and that Adolf Hitler too had secretly converted to Islam and bore the name Hayder, or "the brave one." ( ee Amir Taheri, Holy Terror: Inside the World of Islamic Terrorism, published in 1987)



During the 1930s, the Third Reich had received entreaties from the Arab world. After the Nazi government promulgated the Nuremberg Laws in 1936, which greatly diminished the legal citizenship status of Jews, telegrams of support were sent to Hitler from all over the Arab and Islamic world. And Nazi Germany's war against the British Empire next, electrified the Islamic world even more, whose people viewed it as a noble struggle against imperialism. Furthermore, Germany and the Arab world shared the same enemies (England, Zionism, and communism). As well as Nazi influence in Iran, the Nazi regime also made overtures to Afghanistan during the 1930s and attempted to establish a political alliance with Mullah Mirza Ali Khan, who, along with his Waziri Mujahideen, resisted British rule of the Northwestern Province of Afghanistan from 1936 to 1947. In 1941 German envoys were sent to Gurwekht, which was a stronghold of Patani Islamic guerrilla action inside the British zone of occupied Sarhad. They brought with them money and a letter of support from Adolf Hitler. However the Afghan monarch was well aware of what happened to pro-German Iran, which was invaded by British forces. Seeking to avert a similar fate, he finally expelled German and Italian diplomats from his country. (Ataullah Bogdan Kopanski, "Muslims and the Reich," Barnes Review, September-October 2003). The early victories of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps raised the hopes of Arabs seeking to establish independence. Some Arabs from North Mrica volunteered to aid the German war effort, as evidenced by the creation of various Arab auxiliary units, including Freikorps Arabien (Arab Free Corps), the Kommando Deutsch-Arabischer Truppen (German-Arab Commando Troops), and the Deutsch-Arabisches Infanterie Battalion 845 (German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845). After the war, remnants of these units would go on to join the anti colonial struggle in Algeria. Islamic-fascist alliance was also exemplified by the cordial relationship between Hitler and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, al-Husseini joined the Ottoman Turkish Army, serving as an artillery officer until November 1916. As such, he would serve as a bridge carrying over imperialist ideas of Islam and Ottoman Turkey into modern times -- not unlike Hitler who feigned to be German in order to join Kaiser Wilhelm II’s battle, the German Kaiser who stood next to Ottoman Emperor Abdul Hamid inside the Great Mosque, solemnly declaring himself 'protector of all Muslims.' In April 1920 then, al-Husseini gained notoriety in Jerusalem when his followers went on a rampage at the festival of Nebi Musa, during which 5 Jews were killed and 211 Jews injured. He is credited with having introduced the first modern "one who is ready to sacrifice his life for his cause" suicide squads, which primarily targeted moderate Arabs who refused to support his agenda. Despite this record of incitement, the British appointed him Grand Mufti in 1922. On August 23, 1929, he led a second massacre of Jews in Hebron, followed by a third massacre in 1936. (Kenneth R. Timmerman, Preachers of Hate, 2003) Adolf Eichmann initially supported Jewish immigration into Palestine. After his trip to Jerusalem in 1937, however, he recommended that Jewish immigration be forbidden. He was apparently taken by the display of Nazi flags and portraits of Hitler that he saw during his stay there. (Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism) When Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Poland in 1939, France and England declared war on Germany, al­-Husseini decided to seek refuge in Iraq, where he found an ally in Rashid Ali al­-Gilani, who became prime minister of that country in March 1940. In October 1939 al­-Husseini already had gone to Baghdad and met with the Committee of Free Arabs, which was led by the so-called colonels of the Golden Square, to discuss plans for a revolution against the British. The Free Arabs demanded an immediate cessation of Jewish immigration to Palestine and a crackdown on violence perpetrated by Zionist organizations such as Betar, led by Vladimir Jabotinski. (Preachers of Hate, 2003) In October 1940, representatives of the Free Arabs signed an Axis-Arab Manifesto of Liberation in Berlin. Both Hitler and Mussolini expressed strong support for an independent, united Arab nation. Thus while in Iraq, al­-Husseini helped organize the new government led by Rashid Ali al-Gilani and the current minister of justice, Nadif Shaukat. Al-Gilani appointed Nur Said as his new foreign minister, a choice that would later doom his short-lived regime, when the latter conspired with the British embassy. Previously, in June, Said had helped to negotiate the German-Arab Peace and Cooperation Treaty in Ankara, Turkey. On January 31, 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the removal of al-­Gilani, and a power struggle ensued over the control of the new Iraqi government. Nur Said and Abdullah bin Ali briefly seized power with British support. However, a coup d' etat on April 1, 1941, restored al-Gilani to the position of prime minister. Abdullah and Nur Said escaped to Amman, Jordan. Soon thereafter, Germany recognized the new Iraqi government led by al-Gilani. On May 12, 1941, al-Gilani declared independence from Great Britain. In doing so, he sparked a greater anti colonial uprising of nationalist Muslims in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. One of the coup planners was an Iraqi officer named Khairallah Tulfah, the future father-in-law of Saddam Hussein. (Timmerman, Preachers of Hate) Al-Gilani's second regime was also short-lived, however, as British forces quickly deposed it, but not before troops and policeman loyal to al-Gilani car­ried out a pogrom in which roughly 200 Jews were killed. By May 29, the Brit­ish Army had seized Baghdad and reinstalled Nur Said as the Iraqi leader. To show his gratitude, Nur declared war against Germany in January 1943. Seeking to find a more hospitable location, the mufti thus sought refuge in Iran. The nationalist general Shah Reza Pahlavi, who seized power in 1925, was an admirer of Adolf Hitler's racial policies and even went so far as to rename his county Iran, which translates into Aryan in Persian. However, with the arrival of British and American troops in October 1941, the mufti was forced once again to relocate. Thus in November 1941, al- Husseini traveled to Berlin, where he met Hitler and offered his full support. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop helped prepare the meeting. In doing so, he forged an alliance between Nazi Germany and the Palestine Arab High Command, which al-Husseini led. According to the recent “Wegbereiter der Shoa” this meeting was the genesis of Nazi-style anti-Semitism as a mass movement in the Arab world. Hitler recognized al-Husseini as the leader of the Arab world and pledged to install him as the Arab Führer when the time was feasible. Hitler dedicated a text to Christoph Schröder and Frau Junge, his secretary, which is called the Hitler-Bormann Documents, or the Testament of Adolf Hitler. In this text, Hitler makes a criticism of his policies. For his part, Hitler was very proud of his stature among Muslims and, near the war's end, regretted that he had not done more to take advantage of this al­liance. According to documented private conversations he had with his staff, Hitler lamented his alliance with Italy, insofar as it alienated some people in the Muslim world. Italian adventures were looked upon as imperialistic aggression by those countries in North Africa that Mussolini had invaded. Hitler expressed admiration for the solidarity of the Muslim people and believed that they could have been potentially useful allies against his enemies. (See L. Craig Fraser, The Hitler-Bormann Documents. Date and publisher unknown.) Hitler even went so far as to accept the grand mufti as an "honorary Aryan" (Norman Cameron and R. H. Steven, trans., Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944, New York, 2000) and to support Hitler's war efforts, al-Husseini next traveled to Bosnia in 1943 and helped organize the Waffen-SS Handschar Division in Yugoslavia, which was composed of Bosnian Muslim volunteers. (For more on the Handschar Division, see George Lepre, Himmler's Bosnian Division: The Waffen-SS Handschar Division, 1943-1945, Schiffer Military History, 1997. According to one estimate, approximately 100,000 European Muslims fought for the Third Reich during the course of World War II. (Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism,2003) To further recruit­ment, al-Husseini wrote a book titled Islam and the Jews, which was distributed to Bosnian Muslim SS units during the war as motivational literature, and were encour­aged to identify themselves spiritually as Muslim and Arab but racially as German. (Morse,2003, Yossef Bodansky, Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument, 1999) In appreciation for his services, al-Husseini was elected as the supreme sheikh-ul Islam (supreme religious leader) of the Muslim troops of the Axis. (Kopanski, "Muslims and the Reich”) The German occupation government in territory that it had conquered in the Soviet Union , garnered some goodwill from the local Muslim populations by reconstructing mosques that had been destroyed by the Soviets. Furthermore, German authorities actually restored the institution of the mufti, which had been abolished by the Bolsheviks not long after the Russian Revolution. According to one estimate, over 500,000 Muslim Turkomans, Tadjiks, and Uzbeks from the Central Asian Soviet republics volunteered to fight on the side of the Third Reich. More than 180,000 Muslims were recruited to fight from the Caucasus, Crimea, and hil-Ural Tataristan. Many of these Muslim sol­diers came from Lithuania and Latvia and according to “Wegbereiter der Shoa” became known as ‘Askaris.’ Reportedly, the Islamic Waffen-SS fought in the Battle of Stalingrad. In 1945, the German military founded the Nordkaukasische Waffengruppe (North Caucus Armed Group) for Muslim volunteers from Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Ossetia. They were organized into nineteen independent Islamic combat battalions and twenty-four infantry companies in the Wehrmacht. Furthermore, Muslim Turks and Tartars formed a Waffen-SS division known as the Osttürkischer Waffenverband (East Turkish Armed League) and SS-Waffengruppe "Turkestan" (SS Armed Turkestan Group). Many Muslim soldiers had been recruited from Soviet labor camps by SS­ Sturmbannführer Andreas Mayer. Mayer died from a Soviet sniper's bullet in 1944 while conducting antipartisan operations in Belarus. In April 1944, SS- Standartenführer Haruan al-Rashid (William Hintersatz), an Austrian convert to Islam took over. He led several Muslim units in battle against partisans in the Warsaw uprising in April 1943. (Kopanski, "Muslims and the Reich") Many Arab nationalists looked to Germany for inspiration during the 1930s and 1940s and saw National Socialism as a viable model for state building. Hitler's Mein Kamf found a receptive readership in parts of the Arabic world. Many aspiring Arab leaders sought to emulate the German Führer and his National Socialist movement. As far back as 1933, Arab nationalists in Syria and Iraq embraced National Socialism. In Egypt, a protofascist organiza­tion, Young Egypt, also known as the Green Shirts, attracted many army officers, The grand mufti is believed to have been instrumental in the group's formation. The Green Shirts went by different official names during its history, including Misf al­Farlit in the 1930s, the Islamic National Party in 1940, and the Socialist Party in 1946. Its leader, Mmed Hussein, also wrote a book in the style of Hitler's Mein Kampf titled Imlini and published a rabidly anti-Semitic journal called al-Ichtirakya. During a visit to New York in the late 1940s, Mmed Hussein, the leader of the Green Shirt Party, addressed a meeting of the extreme right National Renaissance Party (NRP). Kurt Mertig, the NRP's first chairman, hoped to get a post at Cairo University. (Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, 1999). Members of the Green Shirts, including young lieutenant colonel and future Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, along with Wing Commander Hassan Ibrahim and General Aziz al-Masri, attempted to execute a scheme in World War II in which they would link up with Rommel's Afrika Korps and supply them with secret information on British strategy and troop movements. The Nazis with the help of the Palestinians also were to exterminate half a million Jews in what is now Israel plus all Jews in Tunisia and Syria. And as detailed in the recent “Wegbereiter der Shoa. Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung 1939 - 1945”) In 1942, the Nazis created a special "Einsatzgruppe," a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe. "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942, attached to the "Afrika Korps." Although hopes of a pan-German and pan-Arab alliance would be dashed with the defeat of Rommel, his early military successes gained admiration from the Arab popula­tion and this endured after the war. Not long after the war, many German military officers and Nazi party officials were granted sanctuary in Middle Eastern countries, most notably Egypt and Syria, where they helped develop the militaries and intelligences agencies of those countries. Unrepentant former Nazis formed clandestine networks that occasionally included contacts in the Middle East. In the early postwar years, Egypt hosted many leading Nazi refugees. For example, Major General Otto Ernst Remer, the officer that squelched the anti-Hitler coup in July 1944, found refuge in Egypt, where he offered his services to the Nasser regime. (See Martin Cüppers, Wegbereiter der Shoa, 2006.)

With the help of Remer and other German military and technical advisers, Egypt developed a support base for Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian guerrillas fighting against France, as well as anti-British movements in Aden and the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya. Cairo became the nerve center for the Front de liberation nationale (FLN, or National Liberation Front) insurgency and the seat of the provisional government for Algerian rebels. Remer also served as the front man for German arms traffickers who supplied the FLN and other Algerian guerrillas. Also, Homanned Said, a former SS volunteer who fought in the grand mufti's Handschar Division, assisted the Algerian insurrection as well, commanding FLN guerrilla operations near the Tunisian border. The Algerian war, however, proved to be a divisive issue among the international extreme right in the early postwar years. As the investigative journalist, Martin Lee, noted, this conflict split the extreme right in Europe into two camps. Among the leaders of the Secret Army Organization (OAS) were several French fascists, Vichy collaborators, and French Waffen SS volunteers who did not take kindly to the support that many of the German neo-Nazis provided to the FLN. (See Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens, 1997) In 1953 rumors spread in the Middle East that Hitler might still be alive and living in Brazil. This prompted AI-Musawaar, an Egyptian weekly journal, to ask public figures what they would say to the Führer if they could write to him at that time. Future Egyptian president Sadat expressed admiration for Hitler in the Egyptian Weekly: Dear Hitler, I welcome you back with all my heart. You have been defeated, but in fact one should regard you as the real victor. There will be no peace in the world until Germany again takes first place. Your principal mistake was in opening too many fronts, but everything is forgiven, for you are a shining example of belief in one's fatherland and people. You are eternal, and we shall not be surprised if we see you again, or a second Hitler, back in Germany.



~Irving Sedar and Harold J. Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx, 1960 Although Sadat would go on to sign a historic peace treaty with his arch­nemesis, Israel, according to some sources, he never really had a change of heart. According to Anis Mansour, one of Sadat's closest friends and advisers, the peace treaty did not mean that Sadat had a change of heart toward Israel. Rather, the treaty was a diplomatic maneuver that allowed Egypt to sit down with Israel and settle its accounts. (Bodansky, Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument). The German model of centralized government and corporatist nationalism remained attractive to many of the early pan-Arab nationalists in Egypt, some of whom sought the creation of an "Arab Reich" that would unite all Arabs into' one nation. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphin). The early pan-Arab leaders searched for methods to mobilize their populations and build independent nations. They were influenced in large part by European fascists who viewed the state as an organic outgrowth of the nation. As they saw it, only a strong, authoritarian state could protect the nation. Hence, the German model of bureaucratic centralization and authori­tarianism looked attractive to many Arabs who sought an alternative way to modernize their countries. Moreover, the fact that Germany was opposed to the Western powers, such as England and France, made it all the more appealing to Middle Easterners, who deeply resented colonialism. Perhaps no other Arab country was more deeply influenced by National Socialism than Egypt. King Farouk, who ruled Egypt during World War II, was initially seen as pro-Nazi, although his country was occupied by Britain. By the early 1950s, a wave of anti-British and anti-American sentiment had swept Egypt. Eventually both the U.S. and British governments decided that Farouk had to be replaced. The CIA, under the influence of John Foster Dulles, selected Egyptian army general Muhammad Naguib to lead a new Egyptian government. On July 22, 1952, with the help of the CIA, Naguib sent the army into the streets of Cairo and Alexandria and established himself as the commander in chief of military forces. Although Naguib was the titular head of state, unbeknown to the CIA, the real power ultimately rested with Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who soon assumed the position of president. This coup was also significant be­cause it opened the door for numerous Nazis to take prominent positions in the Egyptian government. Arguably, the most important former Nazi in Nasser's employ was Hitler's commando extraordinaire, Otto Skorzeny, who arrived in Egypt in the early 1950s. According to Martin Lee, Colonel Nasser, Otto Skorzeny, and Haj Amin al-Husseini (the grand mufti) formed a triumvirate to further both their personal and common goals. Nasser is reported to have had great respect for Skorzeny. Coincidentally, a young Yasser Arafat-a distant cousin of the grand mufti-participated in unconventional warfare training under the Egyptian soldiers, during which time he developed a rapport with Skorzeny that would reportedly last for many years. ( Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens, 1997) Skorzeny's principal responsibility was to train thousands of Egyptian com­mandos in guerrilla and desert warfare. Furthermore, he organized and planned the initial forays of the early Palestinian terrorists into Israel and the Gaza Strip around 1953-1954. (Glenn B. Infield, Skorzeny: Hitler's Commando, 1981) An Arab Foreign Legion was created, whose nucleus con­sisted of 400 former Nazi veterans who were recruited by Arab League agents in Germany. Finally, Skorzeny sought to protect German scientists, technicians, and engineers who were recruited to work on Egypt's special military program. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx). Not surprisingly, the Mossad -the newly created Israeli espionage agency- considered these personnel to be a serious threat to the security of Israel. Conse­quently, the Mossad launched numerous missions to assassinate them-usually through the use of letter bombs-some of which found their intended targets. During this period, renascent Nazis saw the rise of Arab and Third World nationalism as an excellent opportunity to create a German-Islamic neutralist alliance that would extend from the heart of Europe to the South China Sea. (Lee, The Beast Reawakens). This idea was consistent with the late Karl Haushofer's policy of an alliance with the "Colored World."(Coogan, Dreamer of the Day ) One vision of this new extreme right foreign policy was to create-with the assistance of the grand mufti and the Arab League-a German-Egyptian-dominated power bloc that could resist both the United States and the Soviet Union. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx). Several other unrepentant German Nazis made their way to the Middle East and played important roles as well. For example, Skorzeny's uncle-in-law, Hjalmar Schacht, brokered the "Jeddah agreement" between German industrial firms and Saudi Arabia in 1954. Under the agreement, the Saudi government agreed to establish a fleet of supertankers to be built in German shipyards ­that would transport Saudi oil around the world. The Greek magnate, Aristotle Onassis, was chosen to manage the shipping side of the arrangement. The Jeddah agreement occasioned considerable consternation among various Western oil companies; not only would the agreement have been extremely lucrative for the Ruhr shipbuilders, but it would also have threatened the market domi­nance of the "Seven Sisters" oil companies' distribution of Middle East oil. Ultimately, with the help of the CIA, the Western oil cartel was able to block the Jeddah agreement. (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day ). Former Nazis also served the new Nasser government in the realm of propaganda. For example, German expatriate Louis al-Hadj translated Hitler's Mein Kampf into Arabic. Johann von Leers, a former high-ranking assistant to Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Göbbels who worked in the Berlin Foreign Min­istry, eventually settled in Cairo, where he churned out anti-Western and anti-­Israeli propaganda for Nasser's government. (Martin Lee, "The Swastika and Crescent," Intelligence Report, Spring 2002). He eventually converted to Islam, assumed the Arabized name of Oman Amin von Leers, and went so far as to predict that the German people would turn their backs on Christianity and embrace Islam. He confided his thoughts to his friend H. Keith Thompson in conversations and correspondence:

The Islamic bloc is today the only spiritual power in the world fighting for a real religion and human values and freedom I think sometimes if my nation had got Islam instead of Christianity we should not have had all the traitors we had in World War II, two million women would not have been burnt as "witches" by the Christian churches, there would have been no Thirty Years War which destroyed Germany and killed more that half of our nation.



One thing is clear-more and more patriot[ic] Germans join the great Arab revolution against beastly imperialism. To hell with Christianity, for in Christianity's name Germany has been sold to our oppressors! Our place as an oppressed nation under the execrable Western colonialist Bonn government must be on the side of the Arab nationalist revolt against the West I hamd ul Allah! ... Indeed, for our nation there is only one hope-to get rid of Western imperialism by joining the Arab-led anti­imperialist group. (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day). . Still other former Nazis who worked for Nasser included SS lieutenant gen­eral Wilhelm Farmbacher, who was the head of the original military adviser group in Egypt, and his assistant, Major General Oskar Munzel, who orga­nized the Egyptian Parachute Corps. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx ) In the realm of economic development, Dr. Wilhelm Voss, the former director of the Skoda arms factory in Czechoslo­vakia and the Hermann Göring Steel Mills, was the architect of the Egyptian economy in the early postwar years. Working with Reinhard Gehlen, Skorzeny, and Hjalmar Schacht, he increased West Germany's trade with Egypt. (Infield, Skorzeny). During the Cold War, former Nazi officials would occasionally play off both sides of the East-West divide. The case of Dr. Fritz Grobba, a German Orientalist who converted to Islam, is instructive. Grobba was Berlin's minister to Baghdad and also to the court of King Ibn Saud at Riyadh. In the years leading up to World War II, with his colleagues and agents in the Middle East, Grobba conspired with the grand mufti to sabotage Anglo-French military and economic influence in the region. In 1941, they helped spark Rashid Ali al­Gilani's revolt in Iraq, which was quickly suppressed by the British govern­ment. Driven out of the Middle East by the Allies, Grobba, the grand mufti, al-Gilani, and their assistants took refuge in Berlin, where Hitler installed them in a special Bureau of Arab Affairs that was designed to disseminate propaganda to the Muslim world. Grobba survived the war and eventually served as the director of Arab affairs at the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow. Serving as a Soviet diplomatic intermediary, Grobba brokered an arms deal between Nasser's Egypt and the Soviet Union. His former compatriot, Otto Skorzeny, is thought to have helped engineer Nasser's alliance with the Soviet Union. Bolstered by the new alliance and relying on Nazi-trained military forces at his disposal, Nasser felt confident enough to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. His confidence backfired three months later, when Great Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt in order to regain control of the canal. (Sedar and Greenberg, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx), Ultimately, the Egyptian-Soviet alliance undercut Skorzeny's influence with Nasser. Under pressure from the Soviets to establish relations with East Germany, Nasser alienated the German Federal Republic, which broke off diplomatic relations with Egypt and cut off all economic aid. That effectively put an end to Skorzeny's work in Egypt, including a rocket program in Helwan. (Infield, Skorzeny). Not to be left out of the action, some American right-wing extremists also sojourned in the Middle East in the early postwar years as well. For example, in 1953 Francis Parker Yockey, the author of the 600-page tome Imperium, and H. Keith Thompson were reported to have visited Cairo in an effort to forge an alliance with the Nasser regime. Yockey was an early postwar exponent of pan­Eutopeanism. In his geo-political framework, the United States was a more se­rious enemy to the European-derived peoples than the Soviet Union. He praised Hitler as the "hero of the Second World War" and the Nazi seizure of power as the "European Revolution of 1933." Yockey and an associate, Fred Weiss, reportedly sought to persuade Nasser to underwrite the development of a "cobalt bomb" on which exiled Nazi scientists were working. (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day; and Lee, The Beast Reawakens.) Other American extremists reached out to Arabs in the Middle East as well. In 1959, the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, was reported to have made overtures to then President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic. (FBI Internal Memorandum, File Number 97-3835-33, July 13,1959). And James H. Madole, the leader of the extreme right National Renaissance Party, openly supported Arab regimes and may have received financial backing from Arab nationalists, including diplomats in the United States. There is some indication that these overtures were taken at least somewhat seriously. For example, Abdul Mawgoud Hassan, the press attaché of the Egyptian United Nations delegation, once spoke at an NRP meet­ing. The NRP also corresponded with the grand mufti. However, by all known accounts, not much ever came of these efforts. (Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, 2002).

Coogan believed that Nazi scientists in Argentina may have been working on a "cobalt bomb" project. Just exactly what the "cobalt bomb" is, is unclear. Weiss described it as 'a "goose-egg bomb, capable of destroying four city blocks." It sounds as if it might have been a forerunner to the so­ called suitcase nuclear bombs produced in the former Soviet Union. (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day). The rise of Palestinian terrorism in the early 1970’s then, caused some elements of the European extreme right to once again take interest in the Middle Eastern affairs. After King Hussein of Jordan expelled the PLO from Jordan in 1970, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat created a new terrorist organization called Black September. The organization established strong ties with German left-wing rad­icals. Working together, they carried out one of the most infamous acts in the annals of European terrorism-the kidnapping and subsequent killing of sev­eral Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympic games in Munich, Germany. Actually, representatives of the extreme right had collaborated with Palestin­ian rejectionist groups long before the representatives of the radical left had. A few neofascists even fought alongside Arab guerrillas in Middle Eastern conflicts. For example, Robert Courdroy, a veteran of the Belgian SS, died in combat while fighting for the Palestinians in 1968. And, on some occasions, the extreme right actually worked side by side with the radical left in support of Palestinian terrorists. Both the extreme right and Palestinian rejectionists shared hostility toward Zionism. Early efforts on the part of the European extreme right to assist Palestinian rejectionists consisted primarily of financial support. The case of Francois Genoud is illustrative. Genoud founded a Swiss extreme right organization and worked as a trusted banker for German neo-Nazis. Reportedly well connected to Arab circles in the Middle East, Genoud founded the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva and became a formidable financial power as tens of millions of dollars were funneled through his hands for the use of Palestinians in Europe. Through his various connections, Genoud was an important nexus between groups like Fatah and Black September on the one hand, and extre­mist groups in Europe on the other. (Claire Sterling, The Terror Network, 1984). In his capacity as a shadowy financier, Genoud paid the legal costs for three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who stood trial for blowing up an Israeli jet in Zurich. Genoud's Nazi roots went quite deep. While studying in Bonn as a teenager in 1932, Genoud actually met Hitler. The young Genoud shook hands with his mentor and expressed his admiration for National Socialism. When he returned to Switzerland in 1934, he joined the pro­Nazi Swiss National Front. Shortly thereafter in 1936, he traveled to Palestine, where he became a confidant of Grand Mufti al-Husseini. After the war, Genoud acquired all the posthumous rights to the writings of Hitler, Martin Bormann, and Josef Göbbels, increasing his fortune in the process. Using his Swiss banking connections, he helped many Nazis escape from Germany, an effort to which Grand Mufti al-Husseini also allegedly lent assistance. (Peter Wyden, The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adol Hitler, 2001). Genoud also helped underwrite the costs for the legal defense of Adolf Eichmann. According to some European press accounts, Genoud sold defeated Nazis' gold and deposited the proceeds into Swiss bank accounts to fi­nance these projects. Genoud was particularly close to the grand mufti, serving as his financial ad­viser. In 1958, he founded the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva to manage the assets of the Algerian National Liberation Front. As mentioned earlier, sev­eral former Nazis, including Major General Otto Ernst Remer, assisted the rebels in their struggle against French colonial rule. Genoud was reportedly involved in financing terrorist groups, disseminating anti-Israeli propaganda throughout the Middle East, and assisting the Palestinian hijackers of a Luft­hansa plane in 1972. He was particularly close to Dr. Waddi Haddad, the co­founder of the PFLP, and Ali Hassan Salameh of the Black September group. However, his activities did not go unnoticed by his enemies. In 1993 a bomb exploded in front of his house, and he barely escaped alive. Feeling trapped, Genoud committed suicide by drinking poison in May 1996. (Wyden, The Hitler Virus). Another important financial benefactor of Palestinian causes was the wealthy Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Ironically, Feltrinelli was a financial supporter of communist groups; however, he met secretly with the Italian neofascist Prince Valerio Borghese to discuss ways in which both the left and right could work together to battle imperialism. (Sterling, The Terror Network) The Black International, which operated under the name of the European New Order, held a summit in Barcelona on behalf of the Palestinians. The organization was composed of vari­ous Nazis and fascists from Nazi Germany, Vichy France, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Mussolini's Italy, and the Greek colonels' military junta. The Spanish leader, General Francesco Franco, is believed to have endorsed the meeting. Two representatives from Fatah, the military arm of the PLO, attended the event. Reportedly, the delegates discussed raising money, organizing arms traffic, and providing ex-Nazi military instructors to help train guerrillas. A major endeavor was to recruit Caucasians to augment Fatah's forces in the Mid­dle East and also collaborate in acts of sabotage and terrorism in Europe. (Ibid). Several summits followed this event, including one held on September 16, 1972, barely ten days after Palestinian Black September terrorists killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Six hundred delegates to this gathering re­portedly cheered Black September to the rafters. (Ibid). In May 1979, another sum­mit was held in Paris, where a former SS officer and Rexist Parry (a pro-fascist Belgian political parry that was active during the interwar years) member, Jean Roberts Debbaudt, pledged support to the Palestinian resistance. Still another right-wing extremist who established contacts in the Middle East was Jean Thiriart from Belgium, who served as a secretary for a neo-Nazi group called La Nation Europeene. He shared many of the ideas of Francis Parker Yockey, including creating a European Third World bloc that could re­sist the United States. In 1968, he traveled to several Arab countries to gain support for his idea of a "European brigade," which he envisaged as a guerrilla army that would engage in armed struggle against American soldiers stationed in Europe. Reportedly, Thiriart actually served as an adviser to Fatah in 1969. He sought to convince his Arab interlocutors that it would be in their interest if the United States became enmeshed in a "silent war" against neofascist ter­rorists in Europe. (Lee, The Beast Reawakens). He traveled to Iraq and conferred with Colonel Saddam Hussein, the future dictator of the country. According to Thiriart, the Iraqis were enthusiastic about the plan but were persuaded by their then sponsor, the Soviet Union, to abandon the plan. Thiriart was also believed to have been close to PFLP leader George Habash. (Ibid). Other efforts to collaborate in the field of terrorism followed. For example, there were several instances of cooperation between German right-wing extre­mists and terrorist groups in the Middle East. Following the example of Euro­pean left-wing terrorists, members of a small German neo-Nazi group, Wehrsportgruppe-Hoffmann, sought to develop an alliance with the PLO and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups during the 1970s and early 1980s. Karl Heinz Hoffman, the leader of the group, traveled to Damascus in July 1980 to develop links between the PLO and East German intelligence agents. Hoffman also worked out a deal that provided used trucks to the PLO in exchange for training. (Ibid). Members of this group reportedly received paramilitary training in PLO camps in Jordan and fought alongside Palestinians in that country during the "Black September" of 1970. (Bruce Hoffman, Right- Wing Terrorism in Europe since 1980). One German neo-Nazi mercenary, Karl von Kyna, even died in combat during a Palestinian commando raid in September 1967. (Lee, "The Swastika and Crescent") . One of the most notorious terrorist groups of this period was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which gained widespread notoriety in 1968 by hijacking several commercial airplanes. The leader of the PFLP, George Habash, received support from neo-fascists in Europe known as the Black International. The PFLP reportedly carried out terrorist attacks against Jewish targets in Europe with the assistance of Odfried Hepp and his neo-Nazi group, which unleashed a wave of bombings at four U.S. Army bases in Ger­many that damaged property and injured military personnel. (Benjamin Netanyahu, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network, New York, 2001). In early 1970, a neo-Nazi group calling itself the Freikorps Adolf Hitler, founded by Udo Albrecht, was identified as having participated in the Black September war against King Hussein's government in Jordan. In 1978 German police arrested members of the Freikorps Adolf Hitler and another organization, the Hilfskorps Arabien, on suspicion of smuggling arms from the Middle East into West Germany for Palestinian operatives that were living there. In that same year, Albrecht was arrested in Germany and was found to be carrying a card that connected him to the Fatah organization. This arrest was the first direct proof German authorities had linking German radicals with Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. (Rand C. Lewis, A Nazi Legacy: Right- Wing Extremism in Postwar Germany, 1991). Still another neo-Nazi with whom the PLO had contact was Manfred Röder. Following advice from Albrecht, he traveled to Lebanon to make contact with Yasser Arafat. He never met with the PLO chairman, however, instead speaking with his deputy, Abu Jihad. Disappointingly for Röder, Jihad refused to cooperate with him, which was a setback for relations between neo-Nazis and Palestinians. (Ibid). Undaunted, Röder continued to look for supporters in the Middle East. In 1980 he traveled to Syria and Iraq to build a relationship of mutual support and trust, but these efforts appear to have failed. Other German extremists, however, were able to establish significant ties. There were also sporadic reports that surfaced during the 1980s of cooperation between German neo-Nazis and a Turkish fascist organization known as the "Gray Wolves." Mehmet Kengerle, who served with the SS in World War II, was the figure that allegedly sought to arrange this alliance. (Ibid). The organization's most infamous member, Mehmet Ali Aga, attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul 11 in May 1981. This alliance, like the others that preceded it, was also short-lived and of limited significance. More recently Fawsi Salim el-Mahdi, the leader of Yasser Arafat's Praetorian Guard, "Tanzim 17," included the Nazi salute in a graduation ceremony for Palestinian Authority police cadets. Known to his colleagues as "Abu Hitler." In fact his affection for the Third Reich is reflected in his choice of names for his two sons, Eichmann and Hitler. (Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism). By the late 1980’s however, there was little cooperation between militant Islam and the extreme right. Arab nationalism had waned considerably, and most of the leading Nazi fugitives were dead or in permanent retirement. The Palestinian rejectionists had begun to moderate. What is more, the new Palestinian groups, such as Hamas, had no history of cooperation with the extreme right. However, the end of the Cold War significantly changed international poli­tics. Furthermore, the revolution in telecommunications greatly facilitated the exchange of ideas between dissident groups around the world. As one observer noted, the Internet has been key to the development of the nascent alliance between Islam and the right. By one estimate, more than 2,000 extremist sites dot the World Wide Web. 104 Another important factor is the demise of communism. The extreme right abandoned the communist threat as its chief enemy; in its place emerged the nemesis of the new world order, which, as one observer noted, is often perceived as "a juggernaut of international corporate finance, Jewish media, and American military power." (See David J. Whitaker, ed., The Terrorism Reader). The right's conceptualization of this new enemy parallels closely the principal adversaries of militant Islam. Finally, both the extreme right and Islam share a similar eschatology, in which the old order is viewed as incorrigibly corrupt, something that must be totally effaced in order to build a new order. For these reasons, new opportunities for cooperation began to emerge by the late 1990’s.. During the 1980s Iran began to sponsor conferences to establish a working relationship among Middle Eastern terrorist group. (Bodansky, Bin Laden). Michael Ledeen believed that "in all probability the working relationship between al Qaeda and Iran was forged in the Afghan war, and continued uninterrupted throughout the nineties." (Ledeen, The War against the Terror Masters). .

Tehran resolved to transform Hezbollah into the "vanguard of the revolution." Despite its Shi'ite orientation, Iran sought to build bridges with Sunni terrorist organizations. The Iranian arm of Hezbollah had been involved in interna­tional terrorism since 1981, but this most recent initiative broadened the scope of its operations. Although Tehran had previously sponsored numerous foreign terrorist groups, it could exert only a limited amount of influence over them, mostly by financial power and ideological suasion. (Taheri, Holy Terror). Khomeini's successor, President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, established the Supreme Council for Intelligence Afairs, which was construed elsewhere as the Supreme Council for Terrorism.The council laid the foundation for a broad-based terrorist organi­zation known as Hezbollah Internationa1. And in 1996 Dr. Mahdi Chamran Savehie from the Supreme Council convened a conference in Tehran, which brought many groups and leaders together, including Mustafa Al Liddawi of Hamas, George Habbash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abdullah Ocalan of the Kurdish People's Party, Ramadan Shalah of the Pales­tinian branch of Islamic Jihad, Ahmed Sala of the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad, and Osama bin Laden. (Robinson, Bin Laden). The summit participants agreed to the unification of their financial system as well as the standardization of training in order to establish interoperability for their terrorist operatives. Reportedly, a Committee of Three was established, which included Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda, Imad Mughniya of the Lebanese branch of Islamic Jihad, and Ahmed Sala of the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad. Although two of these individuals were Sunnis and one was a Shi'ite, all sides were comfortable with the arrangement, and Iran trusted them. In 1996 the Qods Force, the covert action arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, arranged the Khobar Towers bombing. (It is worth noting that there is still some uncertainty surrounding the Khobar Towers bombing. For example, the 9-11 Commission concluded, "While the evidence of Iranian involvement is strong, there are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown.") In early June 2002 the leaders of four major terrorist organizations-Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine general command-met in Tehran, Iran, presumably to work on a common strategy to oppose Israel. (David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win theWar on Terror, 2003). Richard Clarke (a former National Security Council staffer) in Against All Enemies makes it clear that Iran was a "priority" country "as important as the others," including the Taliban's Afghanistan, in the post 9/11 war on terrorism. And that,” al Qaeda regularly used Iranian territory for transit and sanctuary prior to September 11. Al Qaeda's Egyptian branch, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, operated openly in Tehran. It is no coincidence that many of the al Qaeda management team, or Shura Council, moved across the border into Iran after U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan. (See also the February 27, 2006 Weekly Standard article Tehran plays host to al Qaeda:



In fact the 9/11 Commission reports last year stated that al Qaeda operatives received explosives training from Iran in the early 1990s. Bin Laden "showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the one that had killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983." This early history of collaboration did not come to an end. Even after 1996, Iran continued to open its doors to al Qaeda. The Clinton administration's original unsealed indictment of al Qaeda in November 1998 states that bin Laden's group had allied itself with Iran and its terrorist puppet, Hezbollah. The 9/11 Commission even left open the possibility that Hezbollah had assisted al Qaeda's execution of the September 11 plot. And although still part of an ongoing investigation following the gradual release of Saddam Hussein documents these days, early on some intelligence analysts already maintained that al Qaeda had endeavored to create an operational alliance with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Simon Reeve claims that by early 1999, bin Laden was in the process of forging a secret alliance with Saddam Hussein. Contact between the two sides was first allegedly made in the early 1990s when Hassan al-Turabi put bin Laden in contact with operatives from the Iraqi secret service. These contacts were supposed to have been maintained by representatives of the Iranian terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), which had its headquarters in Baghdad. (Bergen, Holy War, Inc). A recent Foreign Affairs article titled “Blessed July,” refers to a book-length report with Iraqi documents and interviews with over 100 officials of Saddam’s regime which was, in the words of the Foreign Affairs article, “a regime-directed wave of ‘martyrdom’ operations against targets in the West.” The Foreign Affairs article mentions terror training camps operated by the Fedayeen Saddam, the militia of soldiers most loyal to Saddam. Started in 1994, according to the documents, it trained some 7,200 Iraqis in the art of terrorism in the first year alone. “Beginning in 1998,” according to the full report, “these camps began hosting ‘Arab volunteers from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, “the Gulf, and Syria.” Laurie Mylroie asserted that bin Laden had known ties to Iraqi intelligence and that both parties share similar objectives, such as overthrowing the Saudi regime, ending the U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf, and having sanctions against Iraq lifted. (Mylroie, The new war against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks, 2001). Accordingly, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited Baghdad in 1998 and received a $300,000 pay­ment just before he merged the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad group with al Qaeda. (Frum and Perle, An End to Evil). . Whereas there is evidence of Nazi Government links to various Governments in the Middle East including Iraq and Iran; according to accounts , a convoluted web of terrorists that includes elements of al Qaeda, Iraqi intelligence, and German neo-Nazis have established a working relationship. In the fall of 2002, investigators with the German government's Office for the Protection of the Constitution reported that right-wing extremists and radical Muslims were increasingly using similar rhetoric. They both decry the new world order, which they see as controlled by Jews and enforced by U.S. military power. Both movements are also wary of democracy. Recently, German neo-Nazis have been seen sporting Palestinian headscarves at rallies and calling for worldwide intifada. Also Udo Voigt, the chairman of the National Democratic Party, has reached out to Muslim extremists. (Jeffrey Fleishman, "Shared Hatred Draws Groups Closer," Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2003, Some investigators believe that Hezbollah and Argentinean right-wing extremists may have been responsible for the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1993 and 1994. Jewish institu­tions outside Israel are generally less protected, and local anti-Semitic extremists can provide logistical help for attacks. (Bodansky, Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrumen). In 1993, Imad Mughniya of Hezbollah masterminded the truck bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 29 people and wounded over 200 others. This attack was followed by a second bombing on July 18, 1994, which destroyed the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AIMA) building in Buenos Aires, which housed several Argentine Jewish organizations. The attack killed 86 peo­ple and wounded several hundred more. And some speculate that the Arab and Nazi expatriate communities may have assisted in the attack. (Samuel Katz, Relentless Pursuit: The DSS and the Manhunt for the al-Qaeda Terrorists, 2002). Although several factors would seem to militate against such an alliance, militant Islamic groups, including al Qaeda, have previously sought to cooperate with non-Islamic militant groups. For example, in Ireland, army intelli­gence investigated the possibility that funds raised by the Mercy International Relief Agency (MIRA) may have found their way into the coffers of the Irish Republican Army. In Spain, authorities discovered an alleged plan hatched by al Qaeda and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, or Basque Nation and Liberty) to car-bomb a meeting of leaders of the European Union. In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front was charged with selling millions of dollars worth of illegally mined diamonds to al Qaeda. Finally, in Sri Lanka, the media re­ported that Liberation Tigers of Tamil had established ties with al Qaeda. One of the chief obstacles to cooperation would seem to be a disagreement over religion. However, there may be ways in which to hurdle this obstacle. For example, inasmuch as the Koran teaches that Allah sent prophets to all major civilizations, it is conceivable that the extreme right could reconcile some of its beliefs with Islam. (For example, some Muslim scholars have attempted to show that Socrates, Lao-Tzu, Hammurabi, and Zoroaster were prophets of Allah and thus acceptable to Islam. (Yahiya Emerick, The Complete Idiots Guide to Understanding Islam, 2002). Furthermore, the entry requirements for Islam are relatively few in number. Technically, all one need do to become a Muslim is to recite the Shahadah:



I declare there is no god except God, and I declare that Muhammad is the messenger of God.



One significant difference between right-wing terrorists and the more prominent variants of terrorists (e.g., left-wing during the 1970s, contemporary Islamic) is that the former have had no significant state sponsors. This material and logistical disadvantage could conceivably make the more radical elements of the extreme right more amenable to an alliance with outside groups. Without governments to offer intelligence, funds, sanctuaries, training facilities, and other kinds of support, their effectiveness has been very lim­ited. (Benjamin Netanyahu, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, 1986). One of the principal reasons terrorism spread from the Middle East and Latin America to Western Europe in the 1970s was that a shared ideology of anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism cemented ties among radical group. (Martha Crenshaw, "Suicide Terrorism in Comparative Perspective," in International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Countering Suicide Terrorism, 2002). The chief difference today is that the nascent anti-American global movement lacks a powerful state sponsor. However, it is worth noting that most lethal acts of terrorism over the past decade have been perpetrated by groups and individuals unaffiliated with state sponsors. Another very significant difference between right-wing and Islamic terrorists is the latter's propensity for martyrdom. Islamic extremists have demonstrated time and again their commitment to carry out suicide attacks, whereas such methods are virtually nonexistent among right-wing terrorists, for both logistical and ideological reasons. Alex Curtis praised the exploits of Benjamin Smith, a former member of the World Church of the Creator, who went on a shooting spree that killed two and injured several others. Just before he was about to be apprehended by the police, Smith committed suicide via a gun­shot to the head. Curtis lauded Smith as an ''Aryan kamikaze" in a subsequent newsletter. (''Aryan Kamikaze Terrorizes Midwest," Nationalist Observer, No. 15 July 1999). Sophisticated suicide operations require an extensive network capable of support and planning. Islamic terrorists have such a network, but right-wing terrorists do not. Perhaps more important, for Islamic terrorists, dying in a suicide operation is considered an act of martyrdom that will immediately be rewarded with splendid afterlife bliss. Although right-wing extremists have traditionally not practiced suicide terrorism, the theme occasionally appears in their literature, most notably in William Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries. The conclusion is strikingly similar to the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. The story's protagonist, Earl Turner, writes in his diary just hours before his scheduled attack:



It's still three hours until first flight, and all systems are "go." I'll use the time to write a few pages-my last diary entry. Then it's a one-way trip to the Pentagon for me. The warhead is strapped into the front seat of the old Stearman and rigged to detonate either on impact or when I flip a switch in the back seat. Hopefully, I'll be able to manage a low-level air burst directly over the center of the Pentagon. Failing that, I'll at least try to fly as close as I can before I'm shot down.



~William Pierce, The Turner Diaries, 1993 Not unlike Muhammad Atta, Turner expressed a sense of calm before his mission.



It is a comforting thought in these last hours of my physical existence that, of all the billions of men and women of my race who have ever lived, I will have been able to play a more vital role than all but a handful of them in determining the ultimate destiny of mankind. What I will do today will be of more weight in the annals of the race than all the conquests of Caesar and Napoleon if ! succeed!



~Ibid Finally, like Atta, Turner shares a sense of religious fellowship with his com­rades. The night before his suicide mission, Turner is inducted into "the Order," the quasi-religious inner circle of the organization:



Knowing what was demanded in character and commitment of each man who stood before me, my chest swelled with pride. These were no soft-bellied, conservative businessmen assembled for some Masonic mumbo-jumbo; no loudmouthed, beery red necks letting off a little ritualized steam about "the goddam niggers"; no pious, frightened churchgoers whining for the guidance or protection of an anthropomorphic deity. These were real men, White men who were now one with me in spirit and consciousness as well as in blood.



~Ibid. Where it is known that Arab news­papers often reprint articles written by extreme right activists, there is also evidence to suggest that anti-Semitism has spread to some parts of the non-Arab Muslim World. Even during the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Malaysian prime minister Muhammad Mahathir went so far as to blame this predicament on Jews. The high-powered currency speculator, George Soros, was seen as the chief culprit in adversely affecting the Malaysian economy. More recently, in a speech presented at an Organization of the Islamic Conference summit in October 2003, Mahathir accused Jews of trying to "rule [the] world by proxy [and] get others to fight and die for them." Further, he asserted that Jews promoted socialism, communism, human rights, and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, and by doing so they have "gained control of the most powerful countries." Mahathir exhorted the Islamic umma "to face the enemy" and opined that 1.3 billion Muslims could not be "defeated by a few million Jews." (Speech by Prime Minister Muhammad Mahathir," October 16, 2003). Mahathir's remarks were met with scorn by President George Bush, as well as various European governments, however, numerous ex­treme right groups and Muslims commended him for speaking out on this issue. Defiant, Mahathir reiterated his criticism of Jews and Israel in an interview in May 2005, in which he accused American politicians of being "scared stiff of the Jews because anybody who votes against the Jews will lose elections. (Quoted in Simon Tisdall, ''Father' of Malaysia Savages Bush and Blair," Guardian, May 27,2005). Just as Islamists and the extreme right are beginning to find common ground, the gap between the far left and the far right may be narrowing as well. Both movements often decry globalization. Increasingly, they both share a criticism of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. A case in point is the case of Rachel Corrie, an attractive twenty-three-year-old American student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and a member of the International Sol­idarity Movement, who took a semester off to work as a peace activist in Gaza. While there, she took part in a protest in which an Israel driver using a bull­dozer was preparing to knock down a Palestinian's house. Corrie stood between the bulldozer and the house and refused to move. However, the Israel driver ran over her, and she sustained injuries from which she ultimately died. Despite Corrie's presumably left-leaning political orientation, various right-wing publications and websites eulogized her as an Aryan martyr. What is more, the antiglobalization rhetoric of the contemporary extreme right could conceivably make its agenda more palatable to the far left, which also champions a similar platform, including radical environmentalism and animal rights. In fact, in 2002, the National Alliance created a front group, the Anti-Globalism Action Network (AGAN), to capitalize on the left's opposition to globalist organizations such as the World Bank, G8, and the International Monetary Fund and sent it to Kananaskis, Canada, to protest a G8 meeting. AGAN added an anti­Semitic twist to the traditional left-wing conspiracy narrative. (Center for New Community. "CNC Uncovers Neo-Nazis Masquerading as Anti­Globalization Activists," June 21, 2002). Extreme right stalwarts, such as Louis Beam, the chief proponent of the leaderless resis­tance approach in the United States, expressed solidarity with anti-World Trade Organization protestors in Seattle. (Reynolds, "Virtual Reich"). The conflation of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism arises in large part from the relationship between the United States and Israel. The paradox of modern Israel, as Christopher Hitchens argued, is that the state was created to provide a safe, stable, and proudly independent nation to which Jews from around the world could come to escape from fluctuations in gentile goodwill. However, today Israel is largely reliant on foreign aid, most notably the annual subsidy of $3 billion from the United States. Furthermore, the tiny nation appears to be hopelessly involved in endless battles that have the effect of catalyzing anti-Zionist sentiment around the world. Anti-Semitism generated in the lands of the diaspora is weak, but anti-Zionism generated from the Middle East conflict grows strong. Therefore, paradoxically, the "new anti-Semitism" appears to be engendered in large part by the existence of Israel. In recent years, some observers have also noted the parallels between tradi­tional anti-Semitism and the current incarnation of anti Americanism. (Hitchens, "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril," Vanity Fair, September 2002). But as Waiter Laqueur observed, since the 1960s the American extreme right has been transformed from an ultrapatriotic movement to one that is increasingly anti­patriotic and nihilistic.(Laqueur, No End to War, 2003). This shift explains how the extreme right could find common cause with anti-American movements such as militant Islam. Both movements see the United States as being under the control of the Jews. It thus follows that with the global rise of American prominence, the Jewish threat ex­tends to the entire world. A new synthesis has been created, centered on the narrative of a U.5.-Israeli alliance. The Israeli-Jewish hand is seen as pulling the strings of the American leviathan. Just as bin Laden has conflated the United States and Israel under the rubric of the "Zionist-crusader" alliance, so has the international extreme right reified the notion of the U.S. government hopelessly under the control of a Jewish cabal in the phrase "Zionist occupation government," or "ZOG." For many years, the European extreme right has identified the United States and its pervasive popular culture as an existential threat to the racial, cultural, and spiritual integrity of European civilization. Ahmed Huber wrote an essay in this vein in 1982, titled "The Unknown Islam." In it he identified three principal threats to Islam: Zionism, Marxism, and finally "the American way of life," which was largely a code phrase for "Judaism." Huber commented on a trend in which anti-Semitism coincided with anti-Americanism: Now the anti-Americanism all over the world, which should be directed at the American government, against Zionist power in America, becomes now a general anti-Americanism. (For Huber see the article by Kevin Coogan, "The Mysterious Achmed Huber: Friend to Hitler, Allah and bin Laden") Similarly however, in an audio tape released in October 2003, Osama bin Laden voiced his contempt for the United States, replete with anti-Semitic themes: Some have the impression that you [Americans] are a reasonable people. But the majority of you are vulgar and without sound ethics or good manners. You elect the evil from among you, the greatest liars and the least decent and you are enslaved by your richest and the most influential among you, especially the Jews, who lead you using the lie of democracy to support the Israelis and their schemes and in complete antagonism towards our religion, Islam. ("Bin Laden Calls Americans 'Vulgar and without Sound Ethics,''' al- Jazeera, October 18, 2003). A similar pattern to the anti-Americanism in Europe in the wake of 9/11 could be obseved. Although anti-Americanism in the media came overwhelmingly from the political left, protests in the streets were almost all sponsored by the extreme right and radical Muslims. Militant Islam and the extreme right both share a strikingly similar critique on several issues. This development has not gone unnoticed by authorities. Dale Watson, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) assistant director for counterterrorism, saw evidence of communication between extremists in the United States and Muslim extremists overseas. (John Solomon, "U.S. Extremists' Links with Terror Groups Watched," Salon. corn, February 28, 2002.) In recent years however, domestic right-wing extremists appear to be more internationally inclined than they traditionally have been in the past. In the realm of terrorism, such cooperation would make for a very formid­able challenge, if carried out deftly. Islamic terrorists have traditionally been foreign young men of Middle Eastern origin. Despite the pronouncements on the part of authorities that they abhor racial profiling and would not condone its use, the fact remains that young men of Middle Eastern ancestry will tend to make people more suspicious than other population groups, for no other reason than that previous Islamic terrorists shared the same ethnic and religious characteristics. If well-funded Middle Eastern terrorists could enlist the support of terrorists with white, Anglo-Saxon ethnic features, it could present an intelligence nightmare to authorities. Reportedly, al Qaeda has already entertained this scheme. According to a statement by then US. attorney general John Ashcroft in May 2004, al Qaeda was seeking to recruit operatives "who can portray themselves as Europeans." Also Alfred Schobert, a researcher at the Information Service against Right-Wing Extremism in Duisburg, Germany, made this observation with regard to the situation in Germany. He conceded, however, that some far-right leaders see potential in such an alliance. In order to avoid the intense scrutiny received by travelers from certain Middle Eastern countries, it is believed that al Qaeda is now using operatives from Chechnya, Bosnia, and even Western Europe. Furthermore, some Muslim operatives are believed to have converted to Christianity in order to obscure their backgrounds and allay suspicion. The U.S. government has warned law enforcement agencies that Islamic extremists, without any formal affiliation with al Qaeda, might carry out terrorist attacks in the United States and overseas. The FBI fears that individuals on the fringes of extremist groups may carry out attacks on their own initiative. Certain events, such as the war on Iraq and increasing tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, could act as catalysts for such attacks. (David Johnston and James Risen, "Agencies Warn of Lone Terrorists," New York Times, February 23,2003) Extremists had used right-wing extremist propaganda to augment their anti-Zionist propaganda. One major obstacle to any kind of serious collaboration is the fact that in the United States, there is no real right-wing terrorist infrastructure to speak of; lead­erless resistance-actually a sign of desperation-predominates. However the significance of potential collaboration in the area of propaganda should not be blithely dismissed, as conflicts in the future will increasingly revolve around information and communication matters. So-called soft power is im­portant in an era of globalization. Joseph Nye was the first to distinguish between "hard power" and "soft power." The former consists of traditional measures such as military and economic strength, and the latter includes culture and ideology. Adversaries will emphasize media operations and "perception management" in order to get their side of the story out. As David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla argued, what happens at the "narrative level" is very important to the success of a network: Networks, like other organizations, are held together by the narratives, or stories that people tell. ... these narratives provide a grounded _expression of people's experiences, interests, and values. First of all, stories express a sense of identity and belonging-who "we" are, why we have come together, and what makes us different from "them." Second, stories communicate a sense of cause, purpose, and mission. The express aims and methods as well as cultural dispositions-what "we" believe in, and what we mean to do, and how. (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror. Crime, and Militancy, 2001). In fact there have been indications that the United States and the UK are losing the war of ideas, most notably in the Islamic world. A survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in forty-four countries and released in June 2003 found that a significant number of people in the Muslim world would trust Osama bin Laden to "do the right thing regarding world affairs." (Faye Bowers, "Al Qaeda's Profile: Slimmer but Menacing," Christian Science Monitor, September 9, 2003). It is known that the war in Iraq sent support for the United States to record lows in the Muslim world, and the extreme right is keenly aware of this, so next a more in detailed review. The new alliance has come. The eleventh of September has brought together [the two sides] because the new right has reacted positively They say, and I agree with them 100 percent, what happened on the eleventh of September, if it is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of counterterrorism.”



~Ahmed Huber, as quoted in Peter Finn, "Unlikely Allies Bound by a Common Hatred," Washington Post, April 29, 2002.

Saddam Hussein's uncle and future father-in law, Khairallah Tulfah, along with General Rashid Ali al-Gilani and the so-called colonels of the Golden Square, participated in a coup against the pro-British government of Iraq, and recognized as Iraq’s new Government by Germany declared independence from Great Britain on May 12, 1941. This pro-Nazi regime as we have seen was then ejected by a British military intervention soon thereafter, but not before the regime insti­gated an anti-Jewish pogrom in which 200 people were killed. (See also David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, 2003). Tulfah had a strong influence on his son-in-law, regaling him with his vision of a pan-­Islamic Nazi alliance. Not unlike Hitler, Saddam Hussein sought to implement a new order based on the principles of nationalism and socialism under the dictatorial control of the Führerprinzip. (Charles A. Morse, "The Nazi Background of Saddam Hussein," February 21, 2003). His Ba'ath (Renaissance) Party like the regimes in Iran, Syria, and soon also Egypt, had the characteristics of a European fascist party of the interwar years, seeking to mold the masses into a single organic collectivity through a program of corporatism and national regeneration. Saddam Hussein's defiant position toward the United States and Israel throughout the 1990s bolstered his image in some quarters. As a result, several representatives of the extreme right have reached out to him on numerous occasions. In the weeks leading up to the Gulf War, some European right-wing extre­mists sought to provide token assistance and moral support. For example, the late German neo-Nazi leader Michael Kuhnen reportedly negotiated with Iraqi diplomats in an effort to build an "Anti-Zionist Legion" to fight for Saddam Hussein and repel the U.S.-led coalition. Another German neo-Nazi leader, Heinz Reisz, appeared on Russian state television on January 25, 1991, and pro­claimed "Long live the fight for Saddam Hussein; long live his people; long live their leader; God save the Arab people." A French neo-Nazi, Michel Faci, traveled to Baghdad where he and twenty or so assorted activists and historical revisionists were guests of Saddam Hussein at a government-sponsored event titled "Friendship, Solidarity and Peace with Iraq." In 1986 famous Paganist and at the time intellectual leader of the so called, French Nouvelle Droite, Alain de Benoist released a publication, Europe, Tiers monde, meme combat (Europe, the Third World, the Same Fight), in which he called for an alliance between Europe and the Arab Middle East, to weaken both the U.S. and Soviet blocs and their hold on Europe. This rightist variant of "Third Worldism" was not informed by the more liberal-oriented admiration of the "noble savage" or white racial guilt, but rather by geopolitical hostility to the bloc system and its hold over Europe. In January 1991, Alain de Benoist, joined with a coalition that included various leftists, trade unionists, and anti-American rightists to protest the U.S.-led aggression against Iraq. (Michael O'Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, 2004). More recently Alain de Benoist has also been mentioned in a booklet with the misleading title “New Religions and The Nazis” 2006, by Karla Poewe. Poorly argued and under-researched, rather then having anything to do with the “Nazis” (as the that time Government of Germany), Karla Poewe’s booklet rather is a micro history of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer’s religious ideas. Saddam found support by Jean Marie Le Pen's Front National. Christian fundamentalists in the party favored Saddam because Iraq had been a major arms supplier to the Falange in its battle against Muslims in Lebanon during the civil war. Anti-Americanism and anti-British sentiment played a role as well. In October 1990, Le Pen traveled to Baghdad as part of a delegation of right-wing parties from Europe to meet with Saddam Hussein. They returned with fifty-three European hostages that were held by Iraq in the months prior to the war. For his part, supporting Iraq was a clever way in which Le Pen could defuse criticism that he was anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. (Harvey G. Simmons, The French National Front: The Extremist Challenge to Democracy, 1996). Reportedly, some elements of Jorg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) have also sympathized with Saddam Hussein's regime. For example, there is the case of Abdul Moneim Jebra, a sixty-year-old Iraqi arms dealer, who has report­edly sought to strengthen ties between the radical right and militant Islam. Jebra now lives in Austria, where members of Jorg Haider's FPO established an Iraqi-Austrian Association to promote ties with Baghdad. In 1998 a plot to smuggle helicopters to Iraq that involved Jebra was uncovered during a Swiss bribery case. Plus of course there is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Russian ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, who accused the Kremlin of "betraying" its long-term Arab partners and clients. The Soviet Union had strong diplomatic ties with many countries in the Middle East, and until its collapse, Moscow played a key role in the re­gion, supporting Arab leaders such as Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. However, Mikhail Gorbachev's government consented to the U.5.-led military action in the Gulf War, an operation that it could have vetoed in the Security Council. Furthermore, by that time, and even more so during Boris Yeltsin's tenure, relations with the United States became the top Russian priority. Zhirinovsky has sought to reestablish an alliance with Iraq. Toward this end, he reportedly developed a warm relationship with Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi ambassador to Russia appreciated Zhirinovsky's gestures of support and has frequently been in attendance at Zhirinovsky's birthday parties. (Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Zhirinovsky: Russian Fascism and the Making of a Dictator, 1995). Zhirinovsky visited Baghdad on numerous occasions during the 1990s and was a guest of Saddam Hussein. In one instance, he lectured the Iraq leader for four hours on the need to unite against the "American-Israeli plot" to dominate the world. (Ibid) In 1993, Zhirinvosky even went so far as to send a contingent of his paramilitary "falcons" to Iraq to fight against "American imperialism." Hussein is rumored to have contributed considerable financial support to Zhirinovsky. After his trip to Baghdad, Zhirinovsky increased the frequency and the stridency of his anti-American rhetoric. (Ibid). Other Russian right-wing extremists have also reached out to Muslims, so for example, Heidar Jamal has sojourned in several extremist orga­nizations. He worked briefly for the ultranationalist Pamyat (Memory) orga­nization in 1989 and the late Ahmed Khomeini, the son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1990. In 1993, he joined the Russian branch of the Islamic Committee. He ran unsuccessfully for the Duma in 1995. Finally, in 1999, his Islamic Committee joined forces with hard-line communists Victor Ilyukhin and Albert Marashov. One constant theme that links all his projects is a viru­lent disdain for the West.( Nabi Abdullaev, "Fundamentalism in Russia: An Interview with Islam Committee's Heidar Jamal," in Parfrey, Extreme Islam). With Heidar Jamal and his friend Alexander Dugin who translated both Rene Guenon and Julius Evola in Russian, we are back to the larger circle of intellectuals that include also Alain de Benoit, and what Mark Sedgwick for lack of a better word called ‘Traditionalism.’ It was during Perestroika that Russian Traditionalists first took active steps. In 1987 Dugin and Jamal together joined Pamyat' (Memory), later described by Dugin as "the most reactionary organization available." They hoped to in­fluence it toward Traditionalism, rather as Eliade had hoped to use the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania, and Evola had hoped to use the Fascists, the Herrenklub, and the SS. (Sedgwick, 2004). Pamyat' was the focus of popular opposition to Perestroika. But Dugin's and Jamal's attempts at infiltration of Pamyat' were no more successful than had been Eliade's or Evola's similar efforts earlier. Seminars they gave attracted respectable audiences (up to 100 people), and Dugin was appointed to Pamyat’s Central Council in late 1988, but in 1989 they gave up and left. Pamyat'; Dugin later described its members as "hysterics and KGB collaborators." Its importance for Russian oppo­sition politics in fact was like that of Theosophy for Western esotericism: it was the forum that facilitated the emergence of figures who would later be important elsewhere. After they left Pamyat, where Jamal continued in the line of Islamist Traditionalism, Dugin in a parallel course of action became involved with Eurasianism. In 1999 was appointed special advisor to Gennady Nikolayevich Seleznev, the CPRF speaker of the Duma. (Ivan Kurilla, Geopolitika i kommunizm, “Geopolitics and Commu­nism”, Russki Zhurnal 23, February 1999). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dugin helped found the not entirely serious National Bolshevik Party and became increasingly associated with two major figures in Russian political life. One was Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). The other, closer associate was Alexander Andreyevich Prokhanov, leader of a group known as the Pochvenniki (Patriots). In the end however Dugin would found his own Eurasian Party, characterized by Democratic intellectual Igor Vin­ogradov:

They are undertaking a noisy galvanization of a reactionary utopia that failed long ago, an attempt to revive it through the injection of a new vaccine-a combination of "Orthodoxy" and "Islam" in the name of combating insidious "Zionism," putrid Western "Catholi­cism" and any kind of Jew- Masonry whatever ... For all their [intel­lectual] ineptitude, they are very dangerous. After all, the temptation of religious fundamentalism in our century of unbelief and general spiritual corruption is attractive to many desperate people who have lost their way in this chaos. (Vinogradov, in Yelena Yakovich, "Kontinent in Moscow: Voice of Russian Culture," interview with Igor Vinogradov, Literaturnaya Gazeta, July 22, 1992). The credit for this revivification of a "failed" ideology must go to Dugin and Traditionalism, clearly the source of the "new vaccine" referred to. Dugin continue to maintain his friendly rela­tions first established with Dugin's visits to the West in 1989, and continued with visits to Russia by de Benoist and his Belgian ally Robert Steuckers (the first of which took place in March 1992). And with the publication of two collections of Dugin's articles in Italian by Claudio Mutti, in 1991 and 1992. Where Mark Sedgwick’s book is specifically about the ‘traditionalism’ of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola, what this has in common with other forms of traditionalism ore preservatist*, is that they construct a revisionist view of history that fits their own agenda. If we take as an example political traditionalists or new right groups in the USA, we will see that the patriot movement looks to the American Revolution for inspiration, whereas the neo-Confederates look to the Civil War. The Odinists idealize the Viking era, whereas the National Socialists and many of the historical revisionists admire Hitler's Third Reich. The World Church of the Creator idealizes not only the Third Reich but also the Roman Empire and the American Western frontier of the nineteenth century. And the Christian Identity followers identify with the lost tribes of Israel. For a preservatist/traditionalist political group in India we would look at (the recently covered on this website) RSS/Hindutva, and so on. Another expression used is heritage (in German called 'Völkish') for example leader of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke explains it as, “people understand very well that I'm not a white supremacist and that I am a European American who wants to preserve my heritage like all people in the world want to, but the real danger to all heritages is Jewish supremacism, which seeks to destroy every heritage but the Jewish heritage.” (G. Michael, The Enemy of My Enemy, 2006). Thus terms like the ‘new right’ or/and ‘extreme right’ today therefore, are not without contradictions , another good case example is the right/left mélange that came in the aftermath of a pamphlet written in 1950 by Julius Evola titled Orientamenti (Orienta­tions). Ultra-conservative, paganist/occultist, Julius Evola at the time when he wrote this, was a supporter of Junio Valerio Borghese-- an aristocrat, a Fascist, and Second World War military hero. (For details see Gianfranco De Turris, Elogio e diftsa di Julius Evola: Il Barone e i terroristi, 1997).



When in 1951 the Italian police arrested some thirty members of the ‘Fasces Revolutionary Action’ (FAR), Evola-- because his articles appeared in their publication was accused of also supporting the latter--however he was acquitted.( De Turris,1999). It was the publicity surrounding this trial, that helped launch Evola on his postwar career, and he expanded Orientamenti into a book published in 1961, Cavalcare la Tigre: Orientamenti esistenziali per un'epoca della dissoluzione (Riding the Tiger: Existential Orientations for a Period of Disso­lution). Here, Evola introduced the concept of what in Islam is titled hijra (emigration), fundamental to the more extreme varieties of late twentieth-century political Islam. Cavalcare la Tigre became one of the central texts for the Italian new right. Earlier the Ordine Nuovo (New Order), established by Pino Rauti a dedicated follower of Evola was publicly committed to the defense of "all that of the traditional that has been saved and has found a pole.” It launched a joumal, Ordine Nuovo, and offered courses and semi­nars based around Evola's (and sometimes Rene Guenon's) works, including Evola's Orientamenti. One small group from within Ordine Nuovo even followed Ev­ola's earliest interest, ceremonial magic and Roman neo-Paganism, establishing I Dioscuri (Greek Dioskouroi, sons of Zeus) in Rome in the late 1960’s.( Franco Ferraresi, Minacce alia democrazia: La Destra radicale e la strategia de’la tensione in Italia ne’ dopoguerra, 1995). Little is known of the activities of this latter group, except that it ran into difficulties of some sort that led to the suicide of many of its members. Most of the activities of Ordine Nuovo, however, were intellectual and political. When the Ordine Nuovo became involved with terrorism a court order called for it’s forced dissolution in 1974. But also for many leftists by then, the old division between left and right was no longer of much importance and had been replaced by a divide identified by Asor Rosa as a division between In and Out. Bourgeois industrialists were In, as were unionized workers and the PCI; the unemployed, women, students, and other marginal groups were Out. Next Franco Freda, another student of Julius Evola sentenced to 16 years in prison in 1972, founded the Fronte Nazionali (National Front). Its supporters were predominantly skin-heads, and their crusading issue was immigration, not as crude racism but as an attack on multiculturalism in the name of preserving the purity of distinct traditions. Exactly what Evola did mean by apoliteia in practical terms-in the realm of action-has since been much disputed. But just like is the case with various interpretations of what the exact meaning is of certain statements in the Koran, what is more important than what Evola meant, is what he was taken to mean. Evola's apoliteia thus was developed by Freda into a call for action against the bourgeois state irrespective of effect, a sort of Traditionalist existentialism-and the word "existentialism" is used in the subtitle of Cavalcare la Tigre. Freda's development of Evolian Traditionalism was not entirely nihilistic-he also argued for the destruction of the bourgeois state as a necessary preliminary to further developments, which implies belief in the possibility of "rectifying action" -but his call was in effect a call to what Gianfranco de Turris calls "rightist anarchism." (Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia, and De Turris, Elogio e d fesa). Mark Sedgwick maintains that Evola, “seems to have approved of what was being done in his name­ on condition that it was done with proper spiritual preparation.”(Sedgwick, 2004). Just as Evola shifted (or was thought to have shifted) the emphasis from the objectives of action to the interior state that gives rise to action, so Freda shifted the emphasis from the objective-which implied some central plan­ning and organization-to the individual. Freda was one of the earliest and most important proponents of the "archipelago solution," the new organiza­tional pattern of Italian ‘new right ‘terrorism that emerged a solution, by implication, to the problems raised by the dismantling of Ordine Nuovo. This meant the replacement of earlier, relatively large and hierarchical structures by small and fluid groupings, usually forming for a particular op­eration and then dissolving, and normally acting independently of each other and of any central command. (Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia). The archipelago solution presents certain obvious operational advantages. As an extension of the Leninist cell system, it is the ultimate guard against police infiltration: no more than a single operation can ever be compromised. It is, however, more than a defense, since the abandonment of any control over operational groups makes sense only as a corollary to the abandonment of overall strategy. The archipelago solution, then, is the companion of apoliteia, at least as Freda understood apoliteia. The two together make up spontaneismo armato (armed spontaneity), Freda's most destructive discovery, later popularized in his journal, Quex. Again, Mark Sedgwick suggests, “there were echoes of Freda in both the organizational method and the apparent objectives of the terrorists who carried out the attacks on the USA September 11, 2001.” (Sedgwick, 2004). Finally Freda and some fifty of his followers were, convicted in 1999 of "incitement to racial discrimination," and in 2000 the Fronte Nazionali was dissolved by decree of the minister of the interior and its assets were confiscated. (Ruotolo Guido, "Il PM di Verona Papalia: 'C'e' un vero pericolo" interview with Procurator Guido Papalia, La Stampa, December 3, 2000). There were rumors, however, that Fronte Nazionali activists, in alliance with members of the Alleanza Nazionale, this time financed by Osama bin-Laden, had helped ferment the violence that shocked Italy during anti-globalization protests at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. (On the basis of reports in Il Secolo XIX “July 25, 2001”, ascribed to sources in the Italian security services.) According to a report in the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Serra, also German intelligence services claimed that Osama bin Laden had financed extreme right organizations in Europe in the hope that they would assist him in carrying out terrorist attacks during a G-8 summit meeting held in Genoa in the summer of 2001.189 Though the Traditionalist terror in Italy ended in 1983, that was not the end of the Traditionalists who had been involved in it. Some, like Claudio Mutti after having spend some years in jail where he converted to Islam, continued nonviolently. (Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia). Two factors influenced his conversion: the writings of Guenon, to which he had been led by the writings of Evola, and Colonel Qad­dafi. Guenon had convinced him of the need for a "path of realization," some­thing Evola had not accomplished. Qaddafi is a more unusual source. Freda had had an interest in Qaddafi and Islam; he wrote in Quex about Evola's requirement for a spiritual basis for action in terms of the relationship between the "lesser jihad" (armed conflict) and the "greater jihad" (the struggle to sub­due the lower self), and he published a translation of some of Qaddafi's speeches. (Mutti, "Pourquoi j'ai choisi l'Islam," Elements: Revue de la Nouvelle Droite 53; Spring 1985). Mutti's Islam is militant and political. Like we have seen above he has published Italian translations of Jamal's work, but also of the Ayatollah Khomeini a preference he seems to have in common with Ahmed Huber cited at the beginning of this article. That Islam is in­stalled on top of his early Evolianism is symbolized by the decor of his office, which is predominantly Islamic but includes a Nazi standard propped behind the filing cabinet, reported by Sedgwick who visited Mutti. (Sedgwick,2004). But also Heidar Jamal during the time he was the ideologist for the Party of the Islamic Renaissance and editor of its organ Tavhid [Unity].In the first issue Jamal analyzed the state of Islam in Traditionalist terms, adding a historical angle rarely found elsewhere, derived in this case from Islamist writings. Islam, he pointed out, existed in time and was subject to decline just as everything else was. Further, there had been no real Islamic government since the death of the Prophet, and certainly not since the Mongols. Matters had grown much worse since then, since the "post-colonial elites" in the Islamic world were either nationalists (and hence enemies of universal Islam) or "atheist cosmopolitan[s]," equally enemies of true Islam. In an article from I99I in Tavhid, translated in Italian, Jamal, after comparing the existential significance of death in Evolian Traditionalism to the meta­physical significance of death (the final return to God) in Islam, argues that "authentic Islam and the authentic right are non-conformist; their vital char­acter consists of opposition, disagreement, non-identification." ("Islam and the Right," Giperbort a Vilnius, 1991, in Jamal, Tawhid). For a Christian, "God is almost synonymous with hyper-conformism," whereas Islam is a "protest ... against the reduction of God to 'consensus.''' The political right and Islam both fight the snares of the world, including self-deification and "profane elitarianism." (Ro'i, Muslim Eurasia). The PIR split in I992 over the issue of relations with Yeltsin and his project of Russian democracy, with the Jamall faction aligning with radical Islamists and Wahhabis in the Middle East and with the domestic opposition to Yeltsin, in the form of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) under Gennady Zyuganov and the rightist "Patriots" under Alexander Prokhanov. (Leonid Berres, "The Wahhabis are Ready to Make an Alliance with Maka­shov and Ilyukhin," Kommersant, July 24, 1999). Both men were as­sociates of Jamal from his time in Pamyat', and both also associated with the other major Traditionalist in Russia, Dugin. And Jamal's relations in the Middle East were with men such as Hasan al ­Turabi, the leader of the Sudanese Islamic Front and according to Michael Asher in his book about the Sudanes Mahdi, at least one of the em­inence grise behind Osama bin Laden. (Asher, Khartoum, 2005). The PIR as Jamal's institutional framework was replaced by the Islamic Committee of Russia-a network of such Islamic Committees was established under al­ Turabi's guidance at a conference in Khartoum in I993 in order to unite the leaders of various radical Islamist movements such as Turabi's own National Islamic Front, Hamas in Palestine, and the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Jamal be­came leader of the Moscow branch of this Islamic Committee. In a 1999 interview he spoke of contacts with the Hezbollah, Hamas, the Wolves of Islam (a Chechen group), and the Afghan Taliban. (Berres, "The Wahhabis.") According to Walid Pharis it was during the above meeting in Khartoum that the decision was made from now on al-Qaeda would be the “mother ship” of global Jihad. Or as Pharis notes: The central force of jihad, after the Khartoum gathering, targeted the United States head-on, both overseas and at home. By this point al Qaeda was in charge of the world con­flict with America. The "princes" (or emirs) were assigned the various battle­fields, but the "Lord" assumed the task of destroying the "greater Satan," America.The first wave started in 1993 on two axes: One was in Somalia, where jihadists met U.S. Marines in Mogadishu in bloodshed. The United States with­drew. The same year, the blind sheikh Ahdul Rahman and Ramzi Yusuf conspired to blow up the Twin Towers in New York. (Phares, Future Jihad, 2005) Finally of course a common ground between the extreme right and the Muslim world is the historical revisionism of Holocaust denial. For example the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggested that the Holocaust had been greatly exaggerated in part to undermine Islam: There is evidence which shows that Zionists had close relations with German Nazis and exaggerated statistics on Jewish killings. There is evidence on hand that a large number of non-Jewish hooligans and thugs of Eastern Europe were forced to migrate to Palestine as Jews. The purpose was to install in the heart of the Islamic world an anti-Islamic state under the guise of supporting the victims of racism and to create a rift between the East and the West of the Islamic world. (A.Foxman, Never Again, 2003). And the recent President of Iran, Rafsanjani ex­claimed that he was convinced that "Hitler had only killed twenty thousand Jews and not six million." (Foxman). Rafsanjani even went so far as to raise the prospect of national suicide as part of an effort to destroy Israel, musing that the nuclear annihilation of Iran as a result of a retaliatory attack by Israel would be an acceptable price to pay to destroy half of the world's Jewish population. In such a conflagration, only a small portion of the world's Muslims would perish. (Michael A. Ledeen, The War against the Terror Masters, New York: St. Martin's, 2003). Abraham Foxman, believes that many Arabs are embracing Holocaust revisionism to delegitimate the state of Israel. According to the reasoning of Holocaust revisionism, the trag­edy was deliberately exaggerated in order to generate global sympathy for Jews and support for the creation of the Jewish state. Furthermore, it has been used to "extort" billions of dollars from the West and demoralize Aryans and the West "so that Jews could more easily control the world." (Foxman, Never Again?). David Duke has been in the forefront of efforts to reach out to the Islamic world. In the fall of 2002, when he presented two lectures in Bahrain titled "The Global Struggle against Zionism" and "Israeli Involvement in September 11." And in an article published in the Arab News, a Saudi Arabian English daily newspaper, Duke repeated his assertion that Israel had assisted the terrorists in the 9/11 attack. Duke’s take on religion by the way, include things like “the Anti-Christ” , and “Satanic-Christianity”: T he truth is there is no such thing as Judeo-Christianity. That would be saying Satanic-Christianity. The religion now called Judaism did not even come formally into existence until six hundred years after Jesus Christ. It began with the codification of the Babylon Talmud . Interestingly enough, Islam is much closer to Christianity than Judaism. For instance, Judaism condemns the Virgin Mary as a prostitute and viciously condemns Jesus as an evil sorcerer and a bastard . In stark contrast, although Islam certainly does not share all the Christian views of Jesus Christ, it views Christ as the true prophet of God, virgin-born, and that God resurrected Jesus from the dead. Ironically, the chief religious book of Islam, the Qur'an, actually defends Jesus Christ from the obscene slanders made against Him in the Jewish Talmud. ("Evangelicals Who Serve the Anti-Christ!" January 25, 2003). More recently, in September 2005, Duke received a doctorate in his­tory from the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management-a major private university system in the Ukraine. And in November 2005, he traveled to Syria, where he held a news conference. Duke is not the only right-winger to draw parallels between Christianity and Islam. For example, Bill Baker, former chairman of the Populist Party, gave a lecture titled "Reviving the Islamic Spirit." (Gil Francisco White, "Islamist-Nazi Alliance Reborn on Campus?" The Daily Pennsylvanian, November 5, 2003). From the above we have also seen that just as Islamists and the (extreme) new right are beginning to find common ground, the gap between the far left and the far right have been narrowing as well. Both movements often decry globalization. Increasingly, they both share a criticism of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. A case in point is the case of Rachel Corrie, an attractive twenty-three-year-o1d American student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and a member of the International Solidarity Movement, who took a semester off to work as a peace activist in Gaza. While there, she took part in a protest in which an Israel driver using a bull­dozer was preparing to knock down a Palestinian's house. Corrie stood between the bulldozer and the house and refused to move. However, the Israel driver ran over her, and she sustained injuries from which she ultimately died. Despite Corrie's presumably left-leaning political orientation, various right-wing publications and websites eulogized her as an Aryan martyr. What is more, the antig10ba1ization rhetoric of the contemporary extreme right could conceivably make its agenda more palatable to the far left, which also champions a similar platform, including radical environmentalism and animal rights. In fact, in 2002, the National Alliance created a front group, the Anti-Globalism Action Network (AGAN), to capitalize on the left's opposition to globa1ist organiza­tions such as the World Bank, G8, and the International Monetary Fund and sent it to Kananaskis, Canada, to protest a G8 meeting. AGAN added an anti­Semitic twist to the traditional left-wing conspiracy narrative. (Center for New Community, “CNC Uncovers Neo-Nazis Masquerading as Anti­Globalization Acrivists,” June 21, 2002). And extreme right stalwarts, such as Louis Beam, the chief pro