Special to WJW

After a Palestinian gunman killed eight students earlier this month at Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, most world leaders were quick to condemn the shooting. But in Gaza, Hamas issued a statement blessing the operation, while crowds of people celebrated in the streets.

There have been a variety of explanations for this reaction, but German scholar Matthias Kuntzel believes the most logical answer lies in the connection between Nazism and Islamic anti-Semitism -- the topic of a talk he gave last week in Washington, D.C., based on his new book, Jihad and Jew Hatred.

Kuntzel spent about an hour explaining his argument to an audience of approximately 60 people. The event, which was sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and Holocaust Museum Watch, took place at JINSA's office at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

At the beginning of Kuntzel's talk, he played video excerpts from a sermon that Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris gave in May 2005 in Gaza. The sheik spoke in Arabic as English subtitles appeared on the screen.

"This preacher is very aggressive, but this is not an isolated case," Kuntzel said after the audience watched the sermon, which was riddled with anti-Semitic rhetoric and Holocaust denial. "Everything you have heard here can also be found in statements by the Iranian leadership and texts from al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas," he added.

According to Kuntzel, Muslim anti-Semitism is often downplayed and many people react "as if hating Jews were a feature of the Oriental world, like hookahs or mosques." Others claim that anti-Semitism among Muslims is justified as a side effect of the Middle East conflict. Both approaches are similar in that they assume that Muslim anti-Semitism differs from Nazi views and European anti-Semitism.

But, Kuntzel contends that it does not.

It "was no accident" that the rise of Nazism and Islamism took place during the same period, the author argued, explaining that both movements tried to answer the world economic crisis of 1929 and the crisis of liberal capitalism.

"However different their answers may have been, they shared a crucial central feature: In both cases, the sense of belonging to a homogeneous community was created through mobilizing against the Jews," Kuntzel told the audience.

He called Radio Zeseen, a short-wave station that operated from 1939 until 1945 and targeted illiterate Muslims through daily Arabic programs, the "Nazis' most important propaganda machine." After the station stopped broadcasting, "its frequencies of hate" continued to reverberate in the Arab world, he said.

Kuntzel's reading of history after World War II supports his idea that Islamic anti-Semitism is not the result of the Middle East conflict, but rather that anti-Semitism in the Arab world is the cause of violence in the Middle East. Kuntzel acknowledged that only a certain faction of Muslims made common cause with the Nazis, but said that this pro-Nazi wing used terrorism to gain the upper hand over the Muslims who disagreed -- before Israel was founded.

In Kuntzel's view, these Muslims have viewed the world through the two "distorting filters" of early Islamic Jew-hatred and modern anti-Semitism, regardless of Zionism. "This distorted view is the reason why Hamas prioritizes weapons and war rather than peace and welfare," he said.

As a number of audience members asked questions at the end of the talk, Kuntzel said he was happy with the lively question-and-answer session, although he prefers a more "controversial debate."

Philadelphia's Marilyn Stern, who has been a JINSA member since 1998, said that although she knew about the close ties between the mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler, she "wasn't aware of the near total infiltration of Nazi ideology during the '20s and '30s in the Arab world, which morphed into the modern Islamism of today."

Kuntzel's argument, she said, shows that the "same Islamist forces that are targeting Israel, target the West as a whole."

America, she added, "ignores this warning at our own peril -- we witnessed this on 9/11."