The closest I ever came to a Nazi flag in my youth growing up in Milwaukee was when the National Socialist Party of America decided to march on Skokie, Illinois in 1977. The Nazis chose Skokie because of its Jewish population, including a disproportionately large number of Holocaust survivors – the fortunate Jews who had escaped Nazi persecution by luck, grit, resistance and the aid of Righteous Gentiles who risked their own lives to save their neighbors.
I was fourteen years old and the free speech debate about the Nazis constitutional rights to march and wave the flag captivated debate among Americans across the political spectrum. The American Civil Liberties Union argued successfully before the Supreme Court of the United States for their right to free speech, however traumatizing and objectionable the expression of that right was, and the Nazis marched.
I can still recall the conversations with my father who, with thousands of other Milwaukeeans, served his country to defeat Hitler during the Second World War; and my grandmother, a Jewish refugee from Minsk who fled Tsarist pogroms in 1903 and made Wisconsin her home. The blatant antisemitism of the Nazis was an abhorrence. My father and grandmother’s anguish in seeing the Nazis’ right to march under a swastika defended by court felt wrong. But I’ll never forget my father saying to me in the aftermath that if speech is sacred, then so is the power of education to counter hateful ideas. Fight words with words, he said.
Imagine my revulsion, then, at driving through Milwaukee on a recent visit home, and seeing the despicable and antisemitic mural equating the swastika with the Star of David, posted on the private property of Ihsan Atta, a Palestinian businessman and activist. While purportedly a protest against Israeli policy in its war against Hamas in Gaza, Atta’s mural is a bigoted smear on all of Judaism. It is not, as his message states, “the irony of becoming what you once hated.” Rather, Atta has purposely distorted Judaism into Nazism, an ideology that decimated Jewish life in Europe during the Holocaust. His analogy is not ironic but repulsive and overtly antisemitism. Rather than share his grief over loss of life, Atta has resorted to hate.
Since the early 7th century B.C., the Star of David has been a symbol of Judaism throughout the ancient Near East. From the late Iron Age into the Babylonian period; from the Roman conquest and on into the Middle Ages, wherever Jewish communities and houses of worship were to be found, the Star of David was an unmistakable sign of Jewish presence. Christian and Muslim authorities recognized it as such, even referring to it in countless sources in Arabic as the “seal of Solomon.” In fact, the star is seen as magical, an amulet against evil, and a positive talisman for safety and protection.
But it was not until the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime that was responsible for the mass murder of six million Jews (including two million children) that the Star of David became a mark of death: the infamous yellow star, which the Nazis forced Jews to wear in the ghettos and concentration camps of extermination to identify the Jews and mark them for death.
Students of history know that when the swastika met the Star of David, it was a death sentence for the Jew and that in British Mandate Palestine, there was a Muslim leader fanning those flames. Seeking an alliance with Hitler to rid the Middle East of Jews, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was received by Hitler in Germany during World War Two with the stated aim of both Hitler and the Grand Mufti being “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space” and the “struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine.”
If the “annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space” sounds familiar to us today, then look no further than the Hamas Covenant. Its language and stated aims, made known to the world by the October 7 rape, maiming, murder and abduction of more than 1400 Israelis and nationals from more than 40 countries, is the direct descendent of the Grand Mufti’s Hitlerite aims. I challenge observers of this horrific war to read Israel’s Declaration of Independence in the light of the Hamas Covenant. Nowhere will they find such hateful and violent rhetoric. One such example: “The State of Israel… it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
Contrast that with the Covenant which states, quoting the Koran: “"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
So bizarre, so twisted, so hateful is this document that, like Nazi ideology, Hamas believes that Jewish Zionists seek world domination and control non-Jewish civic organizations to carry out their goals: “Zionist organizations under various names and shapes, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, espionage groups and others, which are all nothing more than cells of subversion and saboteurs. These organizations have ample resources that enable them to play their role in societies for the purpose of achieving the Zionist targets and to deepen the concepts that would serve the enemy.” It is the Hamas Covenant which equates Zionism with Nazism. Is this the company Atta claims to keep?
This kind of rank and hateful paranoia, with parts lifted almost verbatim from the conspiratorial and universally debunked Protocols of the Elders of Zion, would be laughable if it did not result in Hamas’s murderous and genocidal rampage of October 7 – the killing of Jews for the crime of being Jewish.
Which is exactly what Hitler did, under the swastika and the Nazi flag.
To be clear, I share Ihsan Atta’s anguish over the loss of innocent life in Gaza; is it too much to ask that Atta extends his humanity to the loss of Jewish life as well? For the sake of the preservation of human life, I want a return of the hostages and a ceasefire; can Atta say the same?
I still believe most Israelis and Palestinians want to live in peace. But when Hamas uses its own people as human shields in schools, hospitals and mosques while engaging in an eliminationist war against all Jews; and Hamas allies here in the states use Hitlerite imagery to tar Jews with the most vile of antisemitic tropes, then we must speak up for the humanity of all, educate all who will listen, and work tirelessly for the peace, understanding and acceptance that all of us deserve.
Pure projection of Nazism onto the main and intended victims of Nazism. The Arab League aligned with the Nazi regime for the logistics of having the same enemies: British and Jews. But that is not all there was to the alliance. (The Mufti of Jerusalem resided more in Nazi Berlin than in Jerusalem from 1941-1945.) Both Pan-Germanism and Pan-Arabism had a great deal in common. Both aggressively advanced ethnic and linguistic supremacy across vast regions. In both cases, all who spoke the supreme language would be included. All who did not would be eliminated or subjugated. (Note the Islamic Revolution has shoved Arabic down the Farsi throat, and many resist learning Arabic as a colloquial language.) Under Pan-Arabism, no regional state that did not have Arabic (the language of the Koran) as its first language would be permitted to have national status in the region. This has affected the Kurds and others as well. 'Tolerated minority' was the best they would attempt. Like their hero, Hitler, Hamas believes in the concept of eternal war until the Islamic Caliphate is all over the place. The number of Gazans sacrificed to this goal is conceived of as pure martyrdom for Allah. Hitler, when asked by his generals about the millions of young men being lost on the Eastern Front responded that there are no individuals, only The Nation. And that HE was the embodiment of The Nation. One tiny Israel's very existence is enough to make Hamas and global Nazis crazy. They also hate Israel's enormous ethnic-social diversity and democratic regime (flawed though it may be).
Am Yisroel Chai!
shalom / salaam (See...two languages can coexist.)
Great piece. Kol Hakavod. ישר כח