Elliott A Green

The most striking proof that the Arab anti-Israel cause is a common meeting
ground for both Nazis and Communists --and that the Arabs welcomed
supporters of both ilks-- lies in the friendship of Carlos, the notorious
master terrorist who served the PLO, with Fran*ois Genoud, an old Nazi, one
of the leading Nazis in pre-War Switzerland, later a financier who provided
funds for Habash's faction of the PLO.

"Carlos" (his nom de guerre) was what is called a "red diaper baby." His
fabulously rich father, a Venezuelan lawyer and owner of estates, gave
"Carlos" the name Ilich, Lenin's patronymic, as his given name. His great
wealth notwithstanding, the father was a devoted Communist. Young Ilich
Ramirez Sanchez grew up a stranger to manual labor. When he left school in
1966 at age 17, he traveled in the Caribbean, later arriving in Cuba to take
terrorist training from a Soviet KGB instructor. The next year he showed up
at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, set up by the Soviet Communists
to train revolutionary cadres for the "Third World." Ilich fell in with Arab
schoolmates there, while receiving Soviet indoctrination, as well as
generous remittances from his father. By 1970 he was active in Habash's
PFLP, taking part in the Black September battles in Jordan. He later went to
live in London with his mother, separated from his father and receiving a
large monthly allowance from him. Carlos lived in London (and Paris) as a
playboy, indulging himself in luxuries and love affairs like many another
wealthy, young Latin American in Europe. Meanwhile, he was an incognito
agent for the PFLP, taking part in various acts of terrorist murder. By the
end of 1973, this red diaper child of a rich Communist had become the chief
PFLP terrorist in Europe.1

The Nazi-Arab-Communist triangle bears contemporary significance since it
undermines Arab political claims against Israel, and in particular the claim
of Arab moral innocence. Of course, because Arab nationalist support for
Hitler and the Nazis was notorious before and during World War II, Western
and Communist supporters of the Arab cause against Israel took pains to deny
any such Arab-Nazi collaboration, and in particular to deny any Arab role in
the Holocaust.

Where it was not denied explicitly, it was overlooked or minimized or denied
by implication. Various accounts of Amin el-Husseini, the main Arab leader
in the British Palestine Mandate (the Jewish National Home) acknowledge that
he "spent most of World War II (1939-1945) in Germany" (Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1985 ed), or that "he negotiated with Germany" (Dictionary of
World History, 1973). A PLO spokesman, Philip Mattar, allows that
el-Husseini "recruited Muslims to fight the Communists in Croatia, Bosnia,
and Serbia."2 He does not tell us that el-Husseini recruited them into a
Muslim S.S. division and that their atrocities were many. These and other
accounts avoid the fact that el-Husseini wholeheartedly identified with the
Nazi war effort and was a fervent supporter of the mass murder of Jews,
advocating that Jewish children be sent to Poland where they would be "under
active supervision," to use his euphemism for the death camps.3

One of the Nazis who met Haj Amin el-Husseini in the years of Nazi triumphs
was one Fran*ois Genoud, an early admirer of Hitler and a founder and
militant of the pre-war Swiss Nazi party, the National Front. He met
Husseini in 1936 in the Middle East and once again in Berlin in 1943, while
he was an agent of the Abwehr (German intelligence agency) and while
Husseini, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, was urging on the
Holocaust and recruiting Arabs and other Muslims into the Nazi service.
Genoud met him several times in Beirut after the war, until the Mufti died
in 1974. Meanwhile, unrepentant, veteran Nazi Genoud got a management
position with the Red Cross in Brussels4 and later (1958) opened a bank in
Geneva called the Banque Commerciale Arabe (backed by Syrian funds). Through
his connections in Cairo, a post-war sanctuary for sundry Nazi war
criminals, he met leaders of the Algerian FLN and was later invited to run a
bank in newly independent Algeria, the Banque Populaire Arabe. In another
role, he participated in organizing and/or financing the defense of Eichmann
in Israel, of Klaus Barbie in France, and of PLO terrorists in Europe. He
counted among his friends Wadi Haddad and Ali Hassan Salameh, PLO master
terrorists who accomplished airliner hijackings and other high-profile
terrorist acts. Genoud claimed in recent years that what Hitler did "was
proper and in support of peace."5 Carlos met Genoud in the 1970s through
mutual friends in the Habash gang, known as the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine. This was a Marxist faction of the PLO, which Habash
built out of a pan-Arab outfit he led called the Arab Nationalist Movement.

Genoud related with satisfaction: "He [Carlos] knew my past. I never hid it.
I was always accepted."6 As he described the struggle (the Kampf) of his
younger friend, Carlos, the battle was not only "for an Arab Palestine." The
struggle was worldwide; Arab terrorism "is actually a world war against
Zionism... Zionism is world-wide..."7 Carlos agreed with Genoud that they
shared a common kampf. He wrote to Genoud from jail in France: "In this
period of revolutionary ebb, men of your vision and faith in Victory are
more necessary than ever" (English in original).8 This should provide food
for thought for those who think that the Arab struggle is only about a
"home" for those Arabs called "Palestinians."

If we add the Carlos-Genoud story to our knowledge that many German Nazi
veterans, including war criminals, found refuge in Arab countries,
particularly Egypt and Syria, we should have enough evidence to demonstrate
that veteran Nazis see the Arab cause as a continuation of their own
endeavors, as well as an ex post facto vindication or justification for
them. We might paraphrase Clausewitz and call it a continuation of the
Holocaust by other hands. Be that as it may, after the rise of the State of
Israel, throughout the 1950s and into the Sixties, supporters of the Arab
cause made strenuous efforts to reject any association of themselves with
pro-Nazi sympathies, as well as to becloud the fact that their cause was
supported by Nazis too or that the Arabs themselves had supported the Nazis
during the Holocaust. For instance, an official of a US organization caring
for Palestinian Arab refugees argued that whereas Christianity might have
harshly persecuted Jews over the centuries, the Arabs were innocent, having
treated Jews well and, of course, they had nothing to do with the Holocaust
which was a purely European undertaking. Emerging from this claim was the
implication that the Jews were ungrateful for the good and kind treatment
they had received at Arab hands.

Yet, this endeavor was made more difficult since the Arabs themselves,
including the "Leftists" among them (essentially those Arab factions
supported by the Soviet Union and other Communists) continued to express
admiration and sympathy for the Nazis. For instance, Gamal Abdel-Nasser told
a German neo-Nazi editor in 1964: "Our sympathies in the Second World War
were on the German side."9

Nevertheless, rather than discrediting the Arabs, such remarks were seen as
indications that the Arabs needed guidance in presenting their image to
world public opinion. Thus, the Arabs' Western and Communist friends
continued to try to protect them from their indiscretions, as one might
expect. These efforts seem to have succeeded. Indeed, volunteers from the
German Neo-Nazi gang, the Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, took part in fighting
Israel in Lebanon in behalf of the PLO. Yet a PLO representative provided a
German journalist in Beirut with a unique and original anti-fascist
historical perspective:

"He was particularly happy to receive visitors and guests from Germany.
'Just as you Germans freed yourselves from Hitler, we Palestinians intend
one day to free ourselves from the Fascist Begin.'"10

When the journalist reported these remarks to the Communist East German
ambassador in Beirut, the diplomat

"expressed his profound satisfaction.

'It seems that in the long run our efforts to change the image the Arabs
have of Germany are paying off after all.' And the representative of East
Berlin laughed."11

Nevertheless, the natural affinities between Nazis and PLO militants brought
the two together, just as Amin el-Husseini, the British-appointed Mufti of
Jerusalem, found his way to Berlin and the Fuehrer during WW2. And these
affinities paved the way for leftist and Communist partisans of the PLO's
anti-Israel cause, often in the name of "Third World Liberation," to find
their way to old Nazis, as we have seen in Carlos' case. Another instance is
the French lawyer, Jacques Vergs, an associate of Genoud, a veteran
Communist and supporter of the PLO and the Algerian FLN, and the defense
attorney for Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.12

All this was of course long preceded by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939,
followed by the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. About this time, the
Soviet daily Izvestiya saw fit to evaluate Nazi ideology as "a matter of
taste" (November 9, 1939). But the Nazi-Soviet Pact was too big to be easily
forgotten. Thus it has made its way into some of the history books.

Yet very little remembered is another strikingly relevant joint effort of
Nazis and Communists. This was the support that Communists showed for Nazi
arguments in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Communists then sympathetically
described Germany as a victim of Western imperialism. German Communists did
it of course, but so did the French CP leader, Maurice Thorez, in a speech
in Berlin just two weeks before Hitler's rise to power. His words of
sympathy for Germany in January, 1933, should be compared with what the
worldwide Left has been saying for many years on behalf of Arabs and
"Palestinians." Thorez denounced the "loathesome yoke with which France was
crushing the German people" and declared himself

"in favor of the immediate evacuation of the Saar, in favor of a free choice
for the people of Alsace-Lorraine, up to and including separation from
France, in favor of the right of all German-speaking peoples to freely
unite."13

The French historian Georges Goriely explained that the German Communists
displayed

"a nationalism which sometimes surpassed that of the Nazis. Indeed,
according to the Comintern, the Treaty of Versailles had supposedly reduced
Germany to the status of a colony of international capitalism. Its desire
for national resurgence, especially vis--vis France, was likened to an
anti-imperialist struggle."14

It is needless to elaborate on the similarities with post-1948, pro-Arab,
pro-PLO propaganda. More recently, Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialist
rhetoric has been extended beyond supposedly this-worldly Arab nationalism.
Comrade "Carlos," whose ravings at his recent trial in France merely added
color to confirm his common ground with Genoud, spread his revolutionary
abrazo over the fanatic Islamist movements (in his letter to Genoud).

"Our materialistic conception of the World did not prevent us from seen [=
seeing; error in Carlos' original], years ago, that a new kind of militant,
the Islamic Revolutionist has joined the vanguard of Revolution, of which he
now is the spear-head.

"This new state of affairs was not accepted by most fellow revolutionaries
at the time, out of dogmatism."15

Genoud died in June 1996 and Carlos was convicted of murder in a French
court in December 1997. However, "the Islamic Revolutionist" is now leaving
his own trail of blood along the track trod by Hitler and Husseini. Can the
Communist Left today be seen as other than a partner in the mortal threats
hanging over humanity and civilization?

NOTES

1. Christopher Dobson and Ronald Payne, The Carlos Complex (New York, 1977),
pp 30-66. Le Monde, 13 December 1997.

2. Philip Mattar, "The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Politics of Palestine,"
Middle East Journal vol. 42 (Spring 1988); p. 237.

3. Bartley Crum, Behind the Silken Curtain, New York, 1947; 111-12. Lukasz
Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, London, 1966; 262-63, 312-13;
Daniel Carpi, "The Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, and His Diplomatic
Activity during World War II (October 1941-July 1943)," Studies in Zionism,
No. 7, Spring 1983; pp. 130-31. Joseph Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuehrer
(New York, 1965); pp. 154-58. Also see E.A. Green, "Arabs and Nazis -- Can
It Be True?" Midstream (October 1994).

4, Le Monde, June 2-3, 1996.

5. L'Express, January 25, 1996, p 16

6. Tribune de Genve, August 18, 1994; quoted in L'Express, January 25, 1996,
p 17.

7. Ibid.

8. L'Express, January 25, 1996; p 18.

9. I.F. Stone's Weekly, June 1, 1964, quoted from Deutsche National Zeitung
und Soldaten Zeitung, May 1, 1964. I.F. Stone was known as a leftist critic
of Israel.

10. Peter Scholl-Latour, Adventures in the East (New York: Bantam, 1988), p
163.

11. Ibid.

12. Le Point, 4 May 1987.

13. Le Monde, January 13, 1985, p 2.

14. Ibid.

15. L'Express, January 25, 1996; p. 18. Original in English.

1. Christopher Dobson and Ronald Payne, The Carlos Complex (New York, 1977),
pp 30-66. Le Monde, 13 December 1997.

2. Philip Mattar, "The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Politics of Palestine,"
Middle East Journal vol. 42 (Spring 1988); p. 237.

3. Bartley Crum, Behind the Silken Curtain, New York, 1947; 111-12. Lukasz
Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, London, 1966; 262-63, 312-13;
Daniel Carpi, "The Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, and His Diplomatic
Activity during World War II (October 1941-July 1943)," Studies in Zionism,
No. 7, Spring 1983; pp. 130-31. Joseph Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuehrer
(New York, 1965); pp. 154-58. Also see E.A. Green, "Arabs and Nazis -- Can
It Be True?" Midstream (October 1994).

4. Le Monde, June 2-3, 1996.

5. L'Express, January 25, 1996, p 16

6. Tribune de Genve, August 18, 1994; quoted in L'Express, January 25, 1996,
p 17.

7. Ibid.

8. L'Express, January 25, 1996; p 18.

9. I.F. Stone's Weekly, June 1, 1964, quoted from Deutsche National Zeitung
und Soldaten Zeitung, May 1, 1964. I.F. Stone was known as a leftist critic
of Israel.

10. Peter Scholl-Latour, Adventures in the East (New York: Bantam, 1988),
p163.

11. Ibid.

12. Le Point, 4 May 1987.

13. Le Monde, January 13, 1985, p 2.

14. Ibid.

15. L'Express, January 25, 1996; p. 18. Original in English

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