I studied this extensively in my history classes in college even though it wasn't really related to my work at the time but everything I can find seems to point to the fact that the current crop of Islamic extremist leaders in the middle east all point back to Mohammed Amin al-Husseini or "The Nazi Sheik" as he was known. All of the older extremist leaders of today were either taught directly by him or his disciples and the younger extremist leadership was taught by those people. Prior to the Nazi support of the Sheik and the weapons and propaganda campaign they helped him with he was little known and marginalized and Muslim/Jewish relations were not anywhere near as tense as today. Even today in random battlefields all over the middle east you can still find caches of Nazi weapons, we were personally fired at by an artillery piece with a Nazi stamp on the barrel and there are some famous photos floating around showing the large cache of STG-44's they found and used in Syria.
My question was do you think it's fair to place the blame mostly at the feet of the Nazi Sheik and the Nazis in general for the current middle east state of affairs or do you think its just one factor and how big of a factor do you think it plays into the instability of the region? (And secondarily does it even matter).
Thanks, love history.
The short answer would be "no".
There have been a number of in-depth previous posts about just how inconsequential al-Husseini actually was, I would suggest reading these two here and here from /u/commiespaceinvader and /u/kieslowskifan.
All of the older extremist leaders of today were either taught directly by him or his disciples and the younger extremist leadership was taught by those people.
This is simply not true. Al-Husseini isn't even mentioned in my copies of, say, The Historical Dictionary of Islamic Fundamentalist Movements in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey, Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought, or Shiraz Maher's recent book Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea. Nor can I recall ever seeing reference to him in any contemporary Islamist or Jihadist literature of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, or ISIS.
He is not even a minor figure in these movements, let a lone a major one.
Even today in random battlefields all over the middle east you can still find caches of Nazi weapons, we were personally fired at by an artillery piece with a Nazi stamp on the barrel and there are some famous photos floating around showing the large cache of STG-44's they found and used in Syria.
The overwhelming majority of materiel used in conflicts in the Middle East was built and supplied by the Soviet Union, the United States, their partners, or produced locally on the model of the arms of those countries (e.g. Egypt's vast domestic arms production.)
World War II surplus equipment was important to all sides in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and e.g. heavily modified Sherman tanks were used by Israel in various capacities into the 1970s. While it is not surprising that weapons produced in Germany from 1933-45 might occasionally turn up in contemporary conflicts in the region, it is simply not credible to "blame" those conflicts on those weapons compared with the regional arms bonanza that began in the Cold War and continues to this day.
For more on the impact of Fascism and Nazism in the region I would suggest reading Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion by Israel Gershoni. As a generalized introduction to the region I always recommend Eugene Rogan's The Arabs: A History. For contemporary conflicts including the rise of ISIS, there are a number of good books that have come out. I would suggest starting with Joby Warrick's Black Flags.
Edit: This blog post also details how many of the weapons that you described as being used in Syria from the Nazi era were actually sold to the Syrian government after the war as surplus by the Communist East German government and Czechoslovakia: https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/syrian-civil-war-wwii-weapons-used/
e.g.:
Despite the small production, an inordinate percentage of StG-44s still existing in May 1945 were retained by Allied forces that secured them due to their advanced nature. The USSR alone still had 102,000 StG-44s in inventory three years after WWII’s end.
The USSR did not desire the StG-44 as a long-term asset and transferred most to allies, mainly Czechoslovakia (which also already had some left behind on it’s territory in 1945), but also East Germany and North Vietnam. Hungary also received a small (4,000) batch, and Yugoslavia had a large allotment; both from Soviet transfers and partisan captures during WWII. (Yugoslavia later sold it’s whole inventory to Libya, and none went to Syria).
Syria’s total receipts of StG-44s is thought to be between 6,100 to 7,500 guns, of which half were ex-East German (2,200 in the 1964 weapons transfer); with the balance coming from Czechoslovakia (several thousand in 1957, mixed with SKSs), and a small quantity from the USSR.