This article is highly problematic in that it is oversimplified and haphazardly makes connections and overlaps between a highly diverse set of Arab political movements and actors.

For example, McQuillan conflates the Muslim Brotherhood with the PLO as part of the same general milieu when both organizations were quite divergent in beliefs and ideology. The Muslim Brotherhood was part of a wider religious revival and the PLO was avowedly Marxist and secular in its early years. Additionally, McQuillan asserts that antisemitism was the ideological glue that held many movements together. This is projecting a unity upon the politics of the Middle East that is frankly quite absurd.

The article is uncritical of some of its (few) sources. For example, she treats Churchill's 1939 speech to the House of Commons claiming fascist money was behind Palestinian unrest very uncritically. British policy and actions often created this unrest and Churchill's whole speech paints Britain as a noble empire in the Middle East, a statement that would strike many on the receiving end of British acts as a self-serving rewriting of history. She also examines Netanyahu's A Place Among the Nations with the same carelessness. This was an articulation of Right wing Israeli thought that used a very biased view of history to justify Likud policy.

What this article does is it has taken a grain of truth and magnified it. Many Arab nationalist movements within the 1930s looked to fascism as an organizational model, especially its paramilitary formations and leadership cult (incidentally, so did some Zionist groups and many European nationalist movements). The Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was an avowed Nazi sympathizer and active supporter of the Third Reich's actions against the Jews. He did conduct propaganda broadcasts trying to stir up Palestinians against Zionists and the British occupation. Jeffrey Herf has made much of these broadcasts in his monograph Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, but Herf never really proves that this propaganda found a wide receptive audience within the Arab world. Very few Arabs owned shortwave radios and there is no real evidence one way or the other that they listened to the Third Reich's propaganda. Herf asserts that Sayyid Qutb might have been influenced by these broadcasts, but Qutb's antisemitic essays only appeared in 1951 after the first Arab-Israeli War.

Far more persuasive than Herf is the work of Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski who assert that fascist propaganda fell on deaf ears within most of the Arab world. Most Arab public intellectuals saw fascism as a more malignant form of Western colonialism and saw German propaganda as self-serving. Meir Litvak and Esther Webman have backed up this assertion by a deep analysis of Egyptian newspapers that reveals that between 1945-46, they regularly and accurately reported on the Holocaust and expressed a degree of sympathy with the Jewish victims. The Arab-Israeli wars led to a sea-change and then is when Holocaust denial and minimization gained traction within the Arab public sphere.

The problem with this article is that it is an abuse of history to justify a political goal. If Arab political leaders have a long ideological association with the Third Reich, than it follows that their movements are all suspect. By magnifying the Third Reich's impact, McQuillan distorts the historical record. What pisses me off about it (which is why I have written such a lengthy post) is that the impact of the Third Reich on the Middle East is a legitimate historical topic and this type of dreck undermines legitimate scholars who are studying this period by adding an unnecessary politicization to history.

Sources

Gershoni, I., and James P. Jankowski. Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship Versus Democracy in the 1930s. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Gershoni, Israel, editor. Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2014.

Herf, Jeffrey. Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2009.

Litvak, Meir, and Esther Webman. From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.