Nazister och islamister i förening

Den som verkligen vill förstå varför islamisten Mohamed Omar kan lyftas fram i extremnationalistiska tidningen Nationell Idag bör läsa nya Intelligence report från antirasistiska Southern Poverty Law Center. Den långa artikeln The Swastika and the Crescent ger otaliga exempel på islamistiska kontakter med nazister, från 1900-talets första halva till idag.

While they wouldn't want bin Laden, or anyone of non-European descent, living next door, leaders of the hard-core racist movement in the United States have seized upon the Sept. 11 attacks as an opportunity to expand their strategic alliance with Islamic radicals under the pretext of supporting Palestinian rights.

After hijacked airplanes demolished the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, a number of Muslim newspapers published a flurry of articles by American white supremacists ranting against Israel and the Jews.

Anti-Zionist commentary by neo-Nazi David Duke appeared on the front page of the Oman Times, for instance, and on an extremist website based in Pakistan.

Another opinion piece by Duke ran in Muslims, a New York-based English-language weekly, which also featured a lengthy critique of U.S. foreign policy by William Pierce, head of the rabidly racist National Alliance.

In the wake of Sept. 11, several American neo-Nazi websites also started to offer links to Islamic websites.

The psychological dynamics that propel the actions of Islamic terrorists have much in common with the mental outlook of neo-Nazis.

Självfallet är också Sverige med på ett hörn. Det är Omars vän Ahmed Rami som nämns i den angränsande artikeln Between friends, om hur nazistiska och arabvärldens förintelseförnekare konvergerar. Rami pekas ut som central medarbetare vid det förintelseförnekande Institute for Historical Review.

Driven by the proliferation of neo-Nazi propaganda and antagonism toward Israel, Holocaust denial has gained widespread acceptance across the Arab world in recent years.

It's no coincidence that commentary on the IHR Web site is translated and posted in Arabic, as well as in German and English. IHR director Mark Weber takes pride in the fact that he and other "revisionists," as they like to call themselves, have been interviewed on Iranian state radio.

Iran's Islamic fundamentalist regime has granted refuge to several European Holocaust-deniers, who were convicted of hate speech crimes in their home countries. Jürgen Graf, an IHR editorial advisor, fled to Tehran rather than serve a 15-month sentence in a Swiss prison.

A key IHR ally among Muslim extremists is Ahmed Rami, a former Moroccan army officer who fled his native country after joining a failed coup attempt against King Hassan in 1972.

Today Rami runs Radio Islam, a Stockholm-based neo-Nazi propaganda outfit. In addition to articles such as "USA's Rulers: They are all Jews," the website of Radio Islam carries the full text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the vilest forgeries in modern history.

For many Palestinians, denying the Holocaust is an effective way to reject any Jewish claim to Israel.