Third and final portion of Martin Lee article.
Ghaddafi, the Green Book and Western Extremism
Links between Libya and the European far right have been scrutinized in several parliamentary and judicial probes in Italy. One Italian judicial inquiry found that the Libyan embassy in Rome had provided money to aid the escape of Italian terrorist suspect Mario Tuti shortly after the bombing of an express train near Florence in 1974. Tuti was later captured and sentenced to a lengthy prison term for orchestrating the attack, which killed 12 people and injured 44 others.
Ghadaffi's financial largesse and his militant anti-Zionism has generated support for the Libyan regime among right-wing extremists around the world, including in Great Britain, where the Green Book, Ghaddafi's political manifesto, was promoted by the neo-Nazi National Front. In 1984, according to former British Nazi leader Ray Hill (who later renounced racism and worked with antiracists), the Libyan People's Bureau put up money for a special anti-Semitic supplement to the National Front's monthly magazine. In addition, Ghadaffi's government picked up the tab for several junkets so that neofascists from England, France, Canada, the Netherlands, and several other countries could visit the Libyan capital.
Col. Ghaddafi is also widely admired by white supremacists in the United States. The Green Book has been featured as the top online book on the website of the American Front, whose professed aim is "to secure National Freedom and Social Justice for the White people of North America." Asserting that he is "against race mixing," American Front leader James Porrazzo praises Libya and says that his group has much in common ideologically with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, which has its own links to Ghaddafi (see sidebar, "Strange Bedfellows). Porazzo also says he has "great respect for the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah," two radical Islamist groups involved in suicide bombings, as long as they "see that their home is in the Mideast and that their religion is great for their people but not intended for all mankind."
"Working for Their Races"
The Philadelphia-based American Front thinks highly of Osama bin Laden, too, describing him as "one of ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government, the name many extremists give to the federal government, which they believe is run by Jews] and the New World Order's biggest enemies." And it is not alone. Wolfgang Droege, one of 17 Canadian racists who traveled on a "fact-finding mission" to Libya in 1989, is similarly enamored of bin Laden, seeing parallels between bin Laden's struggle and others supporting "racial nationalism" in North America. "I've had dealings with Black Muslims, I've had dealings with Arabs, I've had dealings with people of various races, and I realize that some of these people are as motivated as I am in working for the interest of their race," Droege told MacLeans magazine.
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 (www.tanzeem.com). 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. Both glorify violence as a regenerative force and both are willing to slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new social order. The potential for an alliance between American neo-Nazis and Islamic terrorists -- an alliance that could develop into strong operational ties -- cannot be ruled out given the long and sordid history of fascist links to the Muslim world.
Strange Bedfellows
Some American Black Muslims make common cause with domestic neo-Nazis and foreign Muslim extremists.
In 1961, Elijah Muhammad, founder of the black supremacist Nation of Islam, met with Ku Klux Klan leaders at the Magnolia Hall in Atlanta. Although they had different ideas about the skin color of the master race, they shared the belief that blacks and whites should stay separate. The following year, Muhammad invited American Nazi Party chief George Lincoln Rockwell to address a Nation convention in Chicago, even though Rockwell had often called blacks "the lowest scum of humanity." Flanked by a dozen storm troopers in swastika armbands, Rockwell told an audience of 5000 Nation devotees that he was "proud to stand here before black men … Elijah Muhammad is the Adolf Hitler of the black man."
Sporadic contacts between Black Muslims and white supremacists continued after Louis Farrakhan set up his own branch of the Nation of Islam in 1975. Klan leader Tom Metzger was so impressed with Farrakhan's anti-Semitic bombast that he donated $100 to the Nation after a Farrakhan rally in Los Angeles in September 1985. A month later, Metzger and 200 other white supremacists from the United States and Canada gathered on a farm about 50 miles west of Detroit, where they pledged their support for the Nation of Islam. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," explained Art Jones, a neo-Nazi militant from Chicago. "I salute Louis Farrakhan and anyone else who stands up against the Jews."
The Nation's contacts with non-black extremists has not been limited to domestic neo-Nazis and Klansmen. During his international travels, Farrakhan has been officially welcomed in a number of countries, including several repressive Arab states. The Final Call, Farrakhan's newspaper, describes one such globetrotting expedition in 1986, when he visited Libya for discussions with Colonel Ghaddafi, who had given Farrakhan a $5-million interest-free loan the previous year. After Libya, Farrakhan ventured to Jeddah, where he conferred with top Saudi Arabian officials before paying a courtesy call to Idi Amin, the exiled Ugandan despot. Farrakhan was also warmly received by General Zia-ul-Huq, the military dictator of Pakistan, whose abysmal human rights record coincided with efforts to impose a harsh Islamic fundamentalist regime in his country.
An American Takes Up the Cause
During the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan played a crucial role in supporting the U.S.-backed mujahedeen resistance forces that were fighting to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. Islamic volunteers from all over the world flocked to mujahedeen training camps in Pakistan to help win this holy war against godless Communism. They were joined by scores of combatants from the United States, including Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an American Black Muslim unaffiliated with the Nation of Islam, who suffered arm and leg wounds in Afghanistan.
After returning to Brooklyn, Hampton-El worked closely with a shadowy splinter group called al-Fuqra, whose followers in the United States and Canada are predominantly Black Muslims. Several other al-Fulqra initiates had also trained in Pakistan as part of the effort to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Founded in 1980 by a Pakistani mystic named Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani, al-Fuqra was organized into independent terrorist cells. An avowed enemy of the Nation of Islam, al-Fuqra has been linked by U.S. officials to 17 homicides and 13 firebombings in the United States. Its targets were usually other minorities or rival Muslim leaders.
In 1995, Hampton-El was sentenced to 35 years in prison for his involvement in a failed plot to bomb the United Nations and other New York City landmarks. Nine other Muslim extremists were convicted as co-conspirators in this case, including Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric, who is serving a life sentence for his role as ringleader of the plot. The blind sheik has also been linked to the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1000. Hampton-El told an FBI informant that he had participated in a test explosion for the first attack on the World Trade Center.
According to recent reports, the Justice Department is probing possible links between al-Fuqra and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. American officials have obtained a videotape of a December 1993 meeting in Sudan, then a nerve center for the bin Laden organization, where al-Fuqra leader Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani met with members of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups. Representatives of al Qaeda are also believed to have been present at this meeting. Federal officials also believe that al-Fuqra members collaborated with Wadih El-Hage, who was sentenced to life in prison this year for conspiring with Osama bin Laden in the bombings of two American embassies in Africa in 1998.
Between Friends
U.S. Holocaust deniers help unite neo-Nazis, Arab extremists.
American extremists who claim that Jews fabricated the Holocaust to discredit Hitler and to justify the dispossession of Palestinians have made common cause on the propaganda front with jihadists from the Middle East. At the forefront of this collaborative effort is the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the leading promoter of Holocaust denial in the United States.
Founded in 1978, the Southern California-based IHR distributes books, pamphlets, audio and videotapes that purport to prove the Holocaust never happened. These "assassins of memory," as French literary historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet calls the Holo-hoaxers, also publish the Journal of Historical Review, which tries mightily to impress its readers with footnotes and other scholarly trappings. A recent issue spoke breathlessly of a "white-hot trend: the rapid growth of Holocaust revisionism, fueled by increasing cooperation between Muslims and Western revisionists, across the Islamic world."
Early last year, the IHR organized a conference on "Zionism and Revisionism" that was set for Beirut that March. Billed as an opportunity for North American and European extremists to meet their counterparts in the Islamic world, the event was delayed and relocated due to complaints by Jewish groups and diplomatic pressure from the United States and Europe. An open letter signed by 14 leading Arab intellectuals also denounced the conference, which was eventually held in Amman, Jordan. The featured speaker at this scaled-down meeting, hosted locally by the Jordanian Writers Federation, was French negationist Robert Faurisson, a longtime IHR advisor, who told a sympathetic audience that "Hitler never ordered or allowed the killing of anyone on account of his or her race or religion" and "the Germans suffered, in reality, a fate far worse than that of the Jews."
Feeding the Propaganda Machine
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 website 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 violating hate speech laws in their home countries. Jurgen 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 tantamount to negating any Jewish claim to Israel. Columbia University professor Edward Said, a Palestinian American, laments the proliferation of this tendency among Arabs. "If we expect Israeli Jews not to use the Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the Palestinian people, we too have to go beyond such idiocies as saying that the Holocaust never took place," asserts Said.
Such idiocies have become increasingly common in leading newspapers in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab countries, where official thinking is reflected in tightly controlled national media. Support for holocaust denial enables corrupt Arab governments to deflect attention from their failures, including their own exploitation of Muslim populations and their brutal repression of many peoples -- Kurds, Berbers, Egyptian Copts, Maronite Lebanese, and others -- who, like the Palestinians, are being denied the right to self-determination.
Saudi Arabia at the Forefront
Of all the Arab nations involved in promoting anti-Semitic propaganda, Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most egregious offender. In the late 1970s, for instance, the Saudi government retained the services of American neo-Nazi William Grimstead as a Washington lobbyist. During this period, the Saudi royal family lavished funds on a numerous Sunni fundamentalist organizations, including the Pakistan-based World Muslim Congress (WMC), which was headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, an anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator, until his death in 1974.
A few years later, the WMC mailed no-holocaust literature to every member of the U.S. Congress and the British parliament. Issah Nakleh, a Palestinian writer affiliated with the WMC, became a fixture at IHR conferences in the United States and a regular contributor to the Journal of Historical Review. Nakleh was also well known to readers of The Spotlight, the anti-Semitic weekly published by the IHR's now-defunct parent organization, the Liberty Lobby. Acknowledging their political kinship, WMC secretary-general Dr. Inamullah Khan, a trusted advisor to the Saudi royal family, sent a letter to The Spotlight, praising its "superb in-depth analysis" and stating that the paper deserved "the thanks of all right-minded people."
Like many American and European neofascist groups, the WMC espoused a "Third Position" ideology critical of both Cold War superpowers, as underscored by this headline from Muslim World, the WMC's official mouthpiece: "U.S. and USSR -- Both Serve Zionist Interests." But the WMC tempered its anti-American tirades when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Working closely with Saudi and U.S. intelligence, the WMC supported the Afghan mujahedeen in their struggle against the Soviet-backed rulers in Kabul. During this period, WMC chief Inamullah Khan also served as head of the Pakistani section of the World Anti-Communist League, an international umbrella organization that included fascist collaborators from Europe, Latin American death squad bosses, and right-wing extremists from Asia and North America. After the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan, the World Muslim Congress and several other Islamic extremist groups once again turned their fundamentalist wrath against the United States.
Michael Pugliese