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Adolf Eichmann Believed the Muslim World Would Complete the Task He Failed to Finish

Jan. 28 2015

In Eichmann before Jerusalem, Bettina Stangneth analyzes the Nazi official’s interviews and writings from the time he spent in Argentina between the end of World War II and his capture by Israel’s Mossad. Besides decisively refuting Hannah Arendt’s celebrated thesis that Eichmann was a mindless bureaucrat, Stangneth uncovers his burning admiration for the Islamic world, and his belief that it would pick up where the Nazis left off. Douglas Murray writes:

Eichmann [wrote in his unfinished memoir] that if he himself were ever found guilty of any crime it would only be “for political reasons.” He tries to argue that a guilty verdict against him would be “an impossibility in international law” but goes on to say that he could never obtain justice “in the so-called Western culture.” The reason for this is obvious enough: because in the Christian Bible “to which a large part of Western thought clings, it is expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Western culture has, for Eichmann, been irrevocably Judaized. And so Eichmann looks to a different group, to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” to whom this [memoir] is aimed.

That “‘large circle of friends’” comprised, in Eichmann’s words, “the 360 million Muhammadans” whose Quran he much preferred to the Jewish and Christian scriptures. And here, writes Murray, we confront “the only strain of Nazi history which really remains strong to this day.” He concludes, quoting Stangneth,

Eichmann refused to do penance and longed for applause. But first and foremost, of course, he hoped his “Arab friends” would continue his battle against the Jews who were always the “principal war criminals” and “principal aggressors.” He hadn’t managed to complete his task of “total annihilation,” but the Muslims could still complete it for him.

Read more at Spectator

More about: Adolf Eichmann, Anti-Semitism, Hannah Arendt, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Islam

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic