After the military defeat of Nazi Germany the center of radical Jew-hatred shifted from Europe to the Arab Middle East. The foundation for an Islamic version of Nazi eliminationist anti-Semitism had, in fact, already been created in Egypt and Palestine, right under the noses of the British colonial administration. The Muslim Brotherhood emerged from the war as the largest mass movement in the Arab world, with over one million followers and an armed paramilitary cadre of 40,000. The charismatic preacher Hassan Al-Banna launched the Brotherhood in 1928 as a vehicle for a religious awakening, calling on all Muslims to return to the purity of early Islam by rejecting the corrupting influence of Western political ideas and social customs.

By the 1930s, Al-Banna had found much to emulate in the western totalitarian movements in Germany and Italy. Like the Fascists and Nazis, the Brotherhood claimed to speak for the oppressed working class and the unemployed against predatory Jewish capitalism and British imperialism. To the Koranic narrative depicting the Jews as treacherous enemies, Al-Banna appended the modern Nazi doctrine that “international Jewry” was the spearhead of a worldwide conspiracy to enslave the German Volk as well as the Muslim Umma. Al-Banna arranged for the translation and distribution of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while elements of the Brotherhood’s paramilitary wing volunteered for active duty with the nascent Nazi war machine.

Hitler’s most effective Islamic messenger to the Arabs, however,