Elliott A Green
The most striking proof that the Arab anti-Israel cause is a common meeting ground for both Nazis and Communists --and that the Arabs welcomed supporters of both ilks-- lies in the friendship of Carlos, the notorious master terrorist who served the PLO, with Fran*ois Genoud, an old Nazi, one of the leading Nazis in pre-War Switzerland, later a financier who provided funds for Habash's faction of the PLO. "Carlos" (his nom de guerre) was what is called a "red diaper baby." His fabulously rich father, a Venezuelan lawyer and owner of estates, gave "Carlos" the name Ilich, Lenin's patronymic, as his given name. His great wealth notwithstanding, the father was a devoted Communist. Young Ilich Ramirez Sanchez grew up a stranger to manual labor. When he left school in 1966 at age 17, he traveled in the Caribbean, later arriving in Cuba to take terrorist training from a Soviet KGB instructor. The next year he showed up at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, set up by the Soviet Communists to train revolutionary cadres for the "Third World." Ilich fell in with Arab schoolmates there, while receiving Soviet indoctrination, as well as generous remittances from his father. By 1970 he was active in Habash's PFLP, taking part in the Black September battles in Jordan. He later went to live in London with his mother, separated from his father and receiving a large monthly allowance from him. Carlos lived in London (and Paris) as a playboy, indulging himself in luxuries and love affairs like many another wealthy, young Latin American in Europe. Meanwhile, he was an incognito agent for the PFLP, taking part in various acts of terrorist murder. By the end of 1973, this red diaper child of a rich Communist had become the chief PFLP terrorist in Europe.1
The Nazi-Arab-Communist triangle bears contemporary significance since it undermines Arab political claims against Israel, and in particular the claim of Arab moral innocence. Of course, because Arab nationalist support for Hitler and the Nazis was notorious before and during World War II, Western and Communist supporters of the Arab cause against Israel took pains to deny any such Arab-Nazi collaboration, and in particular to deny any Arab role in the Holocaust.
Where it was not denied explicitly, it was overlooked or minimized or denied by implication. Various accounts of Amin el-Husseini, the main Arab leader in the British Palestine Mandate (the Jewish National Home) acknowledge that he "spent most of World War II (1939-1945) in Germany" (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1985 ed), or that "he negotiated with Germany" (Dictionary of World History, 1973). A PLO spokesman, Philip Mattar, allows that el-Husseini "recruited Muslims to fight the Communists in Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia."2 He does not tell us that el-Husseini recruited them into a Muslim S.S. division and that their atrocities were many. These and other accounts avoid the fact that el-Husseini wholeheartedly identified with the Nazi war effort and was a fervent supporter of the mass murder of Jews, advocating that Jewish children be sent to Poland where they would be "under active supervision," to use his euphemism for the death camps.3
One of the Nazis who met Haj Amin el-Husseini in the years of Nazi triumphs was one Fran*ois Genoud, an early admirer of Hitler and a founder and militant of the pre-war Swiss Nazi party, the National Front. He met Husseini in 1936 in the Middle East and once again in Berlin in 1943, while he was an agent of the Abwehr (German intelligence agency) and while Husseini, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, was urging on the Holocaust and recruiting Arabs and other Muslims into the Nazi service. Genoud met him several times in Beirut after the war, until the Mufti died in 1974. Meanwhile, unrepentant, veteran Nazi Genoud got a management position with the Red Cross in Brussels4 and later (1958) opened a bank in Geneva called the Banque Commerciale Arabe (backed by Syrian funds). Through his connections in Cairo, a post-war sanctuary for sundry Nazi war criminals, he met leaders of the Algerian FLN and was later invited to run a bank in newly independent Algeria, the Banque Populaire Arabe. In another role, he participated in organizing and/or financing the defense of Eichmann in Israel, of Klaus Barbie in France, and of PLO terrorists in Europe. He counted among his friends Wadi Haddad and Ali Hassan Salameh, PLO master terrorists who accomplished airliner hijackings and other high-profile terrorist acts. Genoud claimed in recent years that what Hitler did "was proper and in support of peace."5 Carlos met Genoud in the 1970s through mutual friends in the Habash gang, known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This was a Marxist faction of the PLO, which Habash built out of a pan-Arab outfit he led called the Arab Nationalist Movement.
Genoud related with satisfaction: "He [Carlos] knew my past. I never hid it. I was always accepted."6 As he described the struggle (the Kampf) of his younger friend, Carlos, the battle was not only "for an Arab Palestine." The struggle was worldwide; Arab terrorism "is actually a world war against Zionism... Zionism is world-wide..."7 Carlos agreed with Genoud that they shared a common kampf. He wrote to Genoud from jail in France: "In this period of revolutionary ebb, men of your vision and faith in Victory are more necessary than ever" (English in original).8 This should provide food for thought for those who think that the Arab struggle is only about a "home" for those Arabs called "Palestinians."
If we add the Carlos-Genoud story to our knowledge that many German Nazi veterans, including war criminals, found refuge in Arab countries, particularly Egypt and Syria, we should have enough evidence to demonstrate that veteran Nazis see the Arab cause as a continuation of their own endeavors, as well as an ex post facto vindication or justification for them. We might paraphrase Clausewitz and call it a continuation of the Holocaust by other hands. Be that as it may, after the rise of the State of Israel, throughout the 1950s and into the Sixties, supporters of the Arab cause made strenuous efforts to reject any association of themselves with pro-Nazi sympathies, as well as to becloud the fact that their cause was supported by Nazis too or that the Arabs themselves had supported the Nazis during the Holocaust. For instance, an official of a US organization caring for Palestinian Arab refugees argued that whereas Christianity might have harshly persecuted Jews over the centuries, the Arabs were innocent, having treated Jews well and, of course, they had nothing to do with the Holocaust which was a purely European undertaking. Emerging from this claim was the implication that the Jews were ungrateful for the good and kind treatment they had received at Arab hands.
Yet, this endeavor was made more difficult since the Arabs themselves, including the "Leftists" among them (essentially those Arab factions supported by the Soviet Union and other Communists) continued to express admiration and sympathy for the Nazis. For instance, Gamal Abdel-Nasser told a German neo-Nazi editor in 1964: "Our sympathies in the Second World War were on the German side."9
Nevertheless, rather than discrediting the Arabs, such remarks were seen as indications that the Arabs needed guidance in presenting their image to world public opinion. Thus, the Arabs' Western and Communist friends continued to try to protect them from their indiscretions, as one might expect. These efforts seem to have succeeded. Indeed, volunteers from the German Neo-Nazi gang, the Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, took part in fighting Israel in Lebanon in behalf of the PLO. Yet a PLO representative provided a German journalist in Beirut with a unique and original anti-fascist historical perspective:
"He was particularly happy to receive visitors and guests from Germany. 'Just as you Germans freed yourselves from Hitler, we Palestinians intend one day to free ourselves from the Fascist Begin.'"10
When the journalist reported these remarks to the Communist East German ambassador in Beirut, the diplomat
"expressed his profound satisfaction.
'It seems that in the long run our efforts to change the image the Arabs have of Germany are paying off after all.' And the representative of East Berlin laughed."11
Nevertheless, the natural affinities between Nazis and PLO militants brought the two together, just as Amin el-Husseini, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, found his way to Berlin and the Fuehrer during WW2. And these affinities paved the way for leftist and Communist partisans of the PLO's anti-Israel cause, often in the name of "Third World Liberation," to find their way to old Nazis, as we have seen in Carlos' case. Another instance is the French lawyer, Jacques Vergs, an associate of Genoud, a veteran Communist and supporter of the PLO and the Algerian FLN, and the defense attorney for Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.12
All this was of course long preceded by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, followed by the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. About this time, the Soviet daily Izvestiya saw fit to evaluate Nazi ideology as "a matter of taste" (November 9, 1939). But the Nazi-Soviet Pact was too big to be easily forgotten. Thus it has made its way into some of the history books.
Yet very little remembered is another strikingly relevant joint effort of Nazis and Communists. This was the support that Communists showed for Nazi arguments in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Communists then sympathetically described Germany as a victim of Western imperialism. German Communists did it of course, but so did the French CP leader, Maurice Thorez, in a speech in Berlin just two weeks before Hitler's rise to power. His words of sympathy for Germany in January, 1933, should be compared with what the worldwide Left has been saying for many years on behalf of Arabs and "Palestinians." Thorez denounced the "loathesome yoke with which France was crushing the German people" and declared himself
"in favor of the immediate evacuation of the Saar, in favor of a free choice for the people of Alsace-Lorraine, up to and including separation from France, in favor of the right of all German-speaking peoples to freely unite."13
The French historian Georges Goriely explained that the German Communists displayed
"a nationalism which sometimes surpassed that of the Nazis. Indeed, according to the Comintern, the Treaty of Versailles had supposedly reduced Germany to the status of a colony of international capitalism. Its desire for national resurgence, especially vis--vis France, was likened to an anti-imperialist struggle."14
It is needless to elaborate on the similarities with post-1948, pro-Arab, pro-PLO propaganda. More recently, Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialist rhetoric has been extended beyond supposedly this-worldly Arab nationalism. Comrade "Carlos," whose ravings at his recent trial in France merely added color to confirm his common ground with Genoud, spread his revolutionary abrazo over the fanatic Islamist movements (in his letter to Genoud).
"Our materialistic conception of the World did not prevent us from seen [= seeing; error in Carlos' original], years ago, that a new kind of militant, the Islamic Revolutionist has joined the vanguard of Revolution, of which he now is the spear-head.
"This new state of affairs was not accepted by most fellow revolutionaries at the time, out of dogmatism."15
Genoud died in June 1996 and Carlos was convicted of murder in a French court in December 1997. However, "the Islamic Revolutionist" is now leaving his own trail of blood along the track trod by Hitler and Husseini. Can the Communist Left today be seen as other than a partner in the mortal threats hanging over humanity and civilization?
NOTES
1. Christopher Dobson and Ronald Payne, The Carlos Complex (New York, 1977), pp 30-66. Le Monde, 13 December 1997.
2. Philip Mattar, "The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Politics of Palestine," Middle East Journal vol. 42 (Spring 1988); p. 237.
3. Bartley Crum, Behind the Silken Curtain, New York, 1947; 111-12. Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, London, 1966; 262-63, 312-13; Daniel Carpi, "The Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, and His Diplomatic Activity during World War II (October 1941-July 1943)," Studies in Zionism, No. 7, Spring 1983; pp. 130-31. Joseph Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuehrer (New York, 1965); pp. 154-58. Also see E.A. Green, "Arabs and Nazis -- Can It Be True?" Midstream (October 1994).
4, Le Monde, June 2-3, 1996.
5. L'Express, January 25, 1996, p 16
6. Tribune de Genve, August 18, 1994; quoted in L'Express, January 25, 1996, p 17.
7. Ibid.
8. L'Express, January 25, 1996; p 18.
9. I.F. Stone's Weekly, June 1, 1964, quoted from Deutsche National Zeitung und Soldaten Zeitung, May 1, 1964. I.F. Stone was known as a leftist critic of Israel.
10. Peter Scholl-Latour, Adventures in the East (New York: Bantam, 1988), p 163.
11. Ibid.
12. Le Point, 4 May 1987.
13. Le Monde, January 13, 1985, p 2.
14. Ibid.
15. L'Express, January 25, 1996; p. 18. Original in English.
1. Christopher Dobson and Ronald Payne, The Carlos Complex (New York, 1977), pp 30-66. Le Monde, 13 December 1997.
2. Philip Mattar, "The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Politics of Palestine," Middle East Journal vol. 42 (Spring 1988); p. 237.
3. Bartley Crum, Behind the Silken Curtain, New York, 1947; 111-12. Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, London, 1966; 262-63, 312-13; Daniel Carpi, "The Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, and His Diplomatic Activity during World War II (October 1941-July 1943)," Studies in Zionism, No. 7, Spring 1983; pp. 130-31. Joseph Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuehrer (New York, 1965); pp. 154-58. Also see E.A. Green, "Arabs and Nazis -- Can It Be True?" Midstream (October 1994).
4. Le Monde, June 2-3, 1996.
5. L'Express, January 25, 1996, p 16
6. Tribune de Genve, August 18, 1994; quoted in L'Express, January 25, 1996, p 17.
7. Ibid.
8. L'Express, January 25, 1996; p 18.
9. I.F. Stone's Weekly, June 1, 1964, quoted from Deutsche National Zeitung und Soldaten Zeitung, May 1, 1964. I.F. Stone was known as a leftist critic of Israel.
10. Peter Scholl-Latour, Adventures in the East (New York: Bantam, 1988), p163.
11. Ibid.
12. Le Point, 4 May 1987.
13. Le Monde, January 13, 1985, p 2.
14. Ibid.
15. L'Express, January 25, 1996; p. 18. Original in English
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