"As many have now observed, the “Islamists” have semi-consciously spun together diverse ideological materials. They have borrowed uncritically from such 20th century totalitarian ideologies as Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. Each of these European ideologies, itself simplistic, had previously played a part in Arab nationalism. The Hitler strain came right off a flight from Berlin, in the person of the satanic old Mufti of Jerusalem. You look at the fascist salutes in the Hezbollah warrior parades, and see that almost everything about these soi-disant “soldiers” is pathetically imitated from a melodrama on some other history channel.

The very obsession with Israel and the Jews -- exhibited in obscene repetitions of blood libels -- is instructive. While there is some choice indigenous anti-Jewish material to be found within the Islamic tradition, starting in the Koran, the flavour and pitch of contemporary Muslim “anti-Semitism” owes little to it. One must ask such questions as, why do the current rulers of Iran spend so much time denying the Holocaust? It had nothing to do with Islam."