Dangerous liaisons | 1 May 2010

For the impartial reader, this book is doubly disagreeable. An account of National Socialist short-wave radio broadcasts to the Arab world in the second world war, it prints pages of anti-Jewish propaganda as monotonous as it is vile. The author then shows no sympathy at all for Arab grievances, which makes the brew no more palatable.

Jeffrey Herf, who is a professor at the University of Maryland, contends that Nazi anti-Semitism broadcast across the Middle East from Berlin and Bari between 1939 and 1945 has borne fruit. Hatred of the Jews, discredited in mainstream politics in Europe by the Holocaust, has found ‘renewed life’ in the Arab world and Iran.

That the anti-Jewish statements of an Ahmadinejad or a bin Laden might owe something to European influence is an interesting question, but not one that Herf, knowing no Arabic or Persian, can answer. With the exception of the outright collaborators with Nazism in Berlin — the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini and the Iraqi nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gailani — the Arabs and Iranians of this story might be on the moon.