Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World by Jeffrey Herf

Author:Jeffrey Herf [Herf, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2015-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

"The Americans, the British, and the Jews

Are All Conspiring against Arab Interests"

Propaganda from 1944 to Spring 1945

lthough the military battles of World War II in North Africa had ended in 1943, Nazi Arabic-language propaganda continued with unabated intensity. The Germans, as well as the Americans and British, knew that their attacks on Zionism were popular among a broad segment of the Middle Eastern public and that their explicit attacks on the Jews were finding a positive reception among a smaller audience that shared their radical anti-Semitism. Judging from the content of the last year and a half of their broadcasts, the Nazis also believed that their most fervent supporters in the Middle East were the Islamists, who accepted the idea that there indeed was an elective affinity between National Socialism and the Islam of its imaginings. At modest cost and with a now-established staff, the regime took aim at what some American and British officials believed was an, if not the, Achilles' heel of Allied policy in the region, namely, the association of Britain and especially the United States with the Jews and with Zionism. Leading American military and diplomatic officials also feared that this identification carried with it the risk of offending the Arabs and Muslims to such an extent that added troops would have to be diverted from the war in Europe to Palestine and Egypt or that Allied pipelines might be sabotaged. Early in the war, Hitler had described the spread of anti-Semitism to other countries and regions as an important element in a strategy to win the war. If its purpose was to split the Grand Alliance, it failed. Its success lay in offering an explanation rooted in radical anti-Semitism about why the Allies were winning and why the Axis was losing the war and what the consequences would be for Arabs and Muslims.

Berlin in Arabic began the new year with a completely uninformative "Commentary on the Events of i943." In place of an account of what had actually happened in the war, it offered these three points: "The events of the last year give us proof that the Allies have agreed to hand over Europe to the Bolsheviks.... The Jewish American capitalists now dominate India, South and North Africa and Southern Australia ... Germany is fighting to establish the right; but the Allies are fighting to strangle right, abolish justice, and establish atheism."' On the same evening the VFA gloomily noted that the advance of Axis forces in Egypt had offered a possible "termination of the British occupation of Egypt and the Sudan." The Egyptians were "surprised" at Rommel's "withdrawal" but had "not lost hope in the final victory of their friends the Germans." In fact, the vast bulk of Rommel's forces were defeated and captured and thus unable to "withdraw." But for VFA, the broadcast was a rare acknowledgment that the war was going terribly badly for the Axis.

On January 4, Berlin in Arabic asserted that after Germany had driven the British forces off the Continent in 1940, it wanted to end a war it had not sought.

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