2 Replies to “A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West”

  1. At the 30:43 minute mark of the New America video it becomes clear that Ian is not familiar with Islamic teachings:

    “I do not think um, that the Muslim . . .the book does not argue that the Muslim Brotherhood was created by Nazis or anything like that. I think that there were people, who we’d consider to be high level, high up in the Muslim Brotherhood, like, or or or, part of that ideological universe like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who clearly collaborated with the Nazis. Many of the propagandists, the Muslim propagandists who worked for fonenda regurgitated – at least you can say they regurgitated Nazi anti-semitic propaganda because most of them, pretty much all of them are dead, it’s hard to know motives or whether they believed it. The few that I talked with say they were just repeating what was in the Nazi newspapers. And that could be the case. But, clearly at some level they were able to work with the Nazis and the Nazis had no problem working with them, unlike with other minorities.

    Ian sounds like a bright man who stumbled upon some intrigue. Perhaps if he avails himself some time to thoroughly consider the Islamic trilogy (Qur’an, Sira, Hadith) he will again stumble upon the reasons this corroboration between Nazis and Muslims worked while it did not with ” other minorities.”

  2. Also revealed in this video at 24:00
    Nicholas Schmidle:

    “You suggest in the book that there’s a 9/11 connection as well.”

    Ian Johnson:

    “Not a direct connection. There’s the three pilots I mentioned in the beginning that were radicalized – were not radicalized in Munich but there were people, the guy often called al-qaeda’s financial chief, or bin Laden’s mentor, Salim. He was arrested in 1998 while visiting people close to the mosque. He was arrested in the suburb right near the mosque and he, uh . … there was a big investigation that went on at that time. It took them up to Hamburg to the al Quds mosque where the pilots had been radicalized, but the connection was never really made. Uh, and the first world trade center bombing in 1993, the person who was charged with that, he had been, he just visited Germany before going to the US

    Nicholas Schmidle:

    “The blind sheik?”

    Ian Johnson:

    No. Abu Halima. He sought spiritual counseling from the chief imam at the Hamburg mosque who said, you know, I can give spiritual counseling to anybody blah, blah, blah. There certainly are these places where there’s connections or

    Nicholas Schmidle:

    The Muslim brotherhood itself, we talk about Muslim Brotherhood Chapters go by different names all across the world. Jamaat Islami in Pakistan, the Islamic Renaissance Party in Tajikistan, so I mean, you know, you’ve got some different variations of the basic Muslim Brotherhood ideology. What do you see as being the goals and objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood itself? I mean, we’ve talked about, the book is very much about the Muslim Brotherhood is behind this mosque, but are they something, I mean, they dress like you and I – you know, no ties, suit? I mean, are they something to be feared or are they. . .?

    Ian Johnson:

    I think the wrong way to look at it is how we looked at it after 9/11. I think there was an immediate effort to criminalize the Muslim Brotherhood as they meant to say, ah there’s a link to terrorism. And almost, 9/11 was in some ways one of the best things that happened to the Muslim Brotherhood because there, in many cases there were no direct links to terrorism. And there was this feeling that if you’re not al-qaeda and you’re not blowing up a building, then you’re ok. Um, and I think the problem with The Brotherhood isn’t that, although it does have some links to terrorism, let’s say Hamas through The Brotherhood. Certainly it still has an antisemitic ideology, and people who are considered to be spiritual leaders of The Brotherhood have condoned suicide bombings. But the bigger problem to me is it creates the mentality which leads to terrorism. The ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ bifurcated world view, that’s the first step. It doesn’t mean that everybody who’s in The Brotherhood who comes into contact with Brotherhood ideology becomes a terrorist. Of course, a lot of it, it becomes a personal biographical component of why this switch has flipped in someones head and not in someone elses head. I think the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood helps facilitates that and helps lead to that.

    Ugh. For civilizations sake . . .CRIMINALIZE THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD NOW! ALL OF IT! Stop enabling the hard-wiring of the umma for terror. Stop enabling terror with feel good platitudes, dismisding the value of congregational enablers for MB doctrine of terror . . .with nonsense like: “It doesn’t mean that everybody who’s in The Brotherhood who comes into contact with Brotherhood ideology becomes a terrorist.. . .”

    Pfffft. The more I listen to this guy, the less likely it is I will purchase his book. I’m going to request it from the library instead.