Robert Wistrich: Radical Islam Is the Third Totalitarianism of the 20th Century

First came Communism, then came Nazism, then came, well, you already know. Robert Wistrich, the historian who coined the phrase "the longest hatred," discusses this immensely threatening phenomenon in his essay in the new book, Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives:

Radical Islam, in effect, constitutes the third "totalitarian" wave of the twentieth century, following the demise of National Socialism and Soviet-style communism. As an ideological movement, it contains within itself a mumber of utopian elements that we could define as "Islamo-fascist" (even Islamo-Nazi) as well as "Islamo-communist." Like its predecessors, the Islamist grand project ultimately involves world conquest and a war to the death against the West - ideological, cultural, political and military. The Islamists are certainly no less illiberal, antidemocratic, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and wedded to violence than their forerunners. Contemporary forms of totalitarian Islam - born with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 - are not only fanatical but are committed to a violent revolution that would "purify" the umma from all alien and infidel sources of contamination. It is in this context that we need to see its hatred of Jews and Israel. The most obvious manifestation and a potent cause as well as pretext for Islamist anti-Semitism remains the "Palestine Question." There can be no doubting the centrality of the myth of Palestine within modern totalitarian Islam. Between 1933 and 1945, this took the form of resolute collaboration with Nazism against the West, the revolt in Palestine and the farud in Baghdad (a bloody pogrom in 1941), as well as identification with the Nazi genocidal ideology toward the Jews. Today, it is the Islamists who set the tone with their hysterical propaganda against the Jews and Israel. The heirs of communism and Nazism often follow admiringly in their wake, fascinated by the violent dynamism of Allah's apostles. All three totalitarian ideologies - in the past as in the present - have operated with broadly similar assumptions about the "Jewish peril."

Here are some heirs of communism and Nazism marching in Toronto's 2013 Al Quds Day parade: