The anti-Semitism in the Black Muslim world-view, white Jews by that time almost rival the Masons as arch-devils in the NOI. And although the extent to which this common understanding of Jews has developed through a racialist black-white exchange of ideas is still somewhat unclear, but it is safe to say that the black and white racialist arguments in this area have been mutually reinforcing. Just like revisionist historian Arthur Butz was invited as guest
lecturer at the 1985 NOI convention, and NOI soldiers were present as security at a public lecture by revisionist David Irving in Oakland, California, on September 10, 1996. (Most recently David Irving was on his way to Iran where he was to attend a Holocoast Denial Conference, when he was arrested in Austria and kept in jail there.)

Most of the white racialists who have developed links with the Nation of Islam in a similar but reversed fashion seem to have made a tactical decision based on the logic of "the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend." The "alliance" is thus mostly pragmatic, based on a common recognition of enmity and partition.

What made us however decide to investigate this more in depth was when in July 2002, Iraq's state-run media quoted Farrakhan as saying during a visit to Baghdad that American Muslims were praying for an Iraqi victory in the event of war with the United States. Farrakhan held several meetings with Iraqi officials on a "solidarity trip" in which he sought to avoid a U.S. military campaign against Saddam Hussein. (See also http://www.finalcall.com .)

In fact in the spring of 2003 John Tyndall, a longtime extreme right activist in the United Kingdom and former leader of the British National Party, would say that:

Yes-9/11 has confirmed our basic case, which is that (1) the power of the Jewish lobby in the United States, and the perversions of American foreign policy that are engaged in to accommodate it, provoke outrages like 9/11 because such things are perceived in the Islamic world to be the only available response; (2) western countries should not interfere in the politics of the Islamic world or any other part of the world except where their own vital national
interests are at stake and/or under threat; (3) globalism, as adhered to by the governments of the United States, UK and others, leads to this very interference; and (4) nationalism and (relative) isolationism are therefore the preferred policy. In short, were the USA to adhere to the principles of foreign policy prevailing before World War I, 9/11 would almost certainly not have happened.

While American David Myatt in March 2003, predicted that initially the war on terror would be used as a pretext to suppress elements of the extreme right. However, ultimately he believed that the present crisis will redound against the present governments of the West: The attacks have certainly been used, by ZOG [the Zionist occupation government], to increase their tyranny, as witness the surveillance, the new laws, the many arrests and detentions. They have also been used to appeal to a vacuous "patriotism" based upon the abstract, nonfolkish, concept of "the State." In the long term, this can be to our advantage, since such things reveal the real nature and intent of those who wield power, as it reveals the insolent, dishonorable, un-Aryan nature of such governments. In the short term, it will probably lead to some government suppression of Aryan dissent, but given good leadership and the correct understanding of our own Aryan aims, goals and culture, this will not be much of a problem.

The extreme right newspaper “American Free Press” followed suit in 2004 by referring to Osama bin Laden as “one of the most influential men on the planet.” (See "Osama bin Laden Offsets Peace to Europe," American Free Press 4, nos. 17-18, April 26 and May 3, 2004, p. 16.)

Based on the in depth research that followed, we finally suggested in part 3 of out “General Overview” at the beginning of World Jihad Research Project P.1 that: “one can see hints of possible future alliances forming among the Islamists/ jihadists by looking at the complex alliances of the past.”

During the 1930s, the Third Reich had received entreaties from the Arab world. After the Nazi government promulgated the Nuremberg Laws in 1936, which greatly diminished the legal citizenship status of Jews, telegrams of support were sent to Hitler from all over the Arab and Islamic world. And Nazi Germany's war against the British Empire next, electrified the Islamic world even more, whose people viewed it as a noble struggle against imperialism. Furthermore, Germany and the Arab world shared the same enemies (England, Zionism, and communism).

Where we already presented our earlier report about Nazi influence in Iran, we should mention that the Nazi regime also made overtures to Afghanistan during the 1930s and attempted to establish a political alliance with Mullah Mirza Ali Khan, who, along with his Waziri mujahideen, resisted British rule of the Northwestern Province of Afghanistan from 1936 to 1947. In 1941 German envoys were sent to Gurwekht, which was a stronghold of Patani Islamic guerrilla action inside the British zone of occupied Sarhad. They brought with them money and a letter of support from Adolf Hitler. However the Afghan monarch was well aware of what happened to pro-German Iran, which was invaded by British forces. Seeking to avert a similar fate, he finally expelled German and Italian diplomats from his country. (Ataullah Bogdan Kopanski, "Muslims and the Reich," Barnes Review, September-October 2003, 27.)

The early victories of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps raised the hopes of Arabs seeking to establish independence. Some Arabs from North Mrica volunteered to aid the German war effort, as evidenced by the creation of various Arab auxiliary units, including Freikorps Arabien (Arab Free Corps), the Kommando Deutsch-ArabischerTruppen (German-Arab Commando Troops), and the Deutsche-Arabisches Infanterie Battalion 845 (German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845). After the war, remnants of these units would go on to join the anti colonial struggle in Algeria.

As we suggested elsewhere, the Islamic-fascist alliance was also exemplified by the cordial relationship between Hitler and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, al-Husseini joined the Ottoman Turkish Army, serving as an artillery officer until November 1916. As such, he would serve as a bridge carrying over imperialist ideas of Islam and Ottoman Turkey into modern times-- not unlike Hitler who--feigned to be German in order to – join Kaiser Wilhelm II’s battle. The German Kaiser who stood next to Ottoman Emperor Abdul Hamid inside the Great Mosque, solemnly declaring himself 'protector of all Muslims.'

In April 1920 then, al-Husseini gained notoriety in Jerusalem when his followers went on a rampage at the festival of Nebi Musa, during which 5 Jews were killed and 211 Jews injured. He is credited with having introduced the first modern "one who is ready to sacrifice his life for his cause" suicide squads, which primarily targeted moderate Arabs who refused to support his agenda.

Despite this record of incitement, the British appointed him grand mufti in 1922. On Au­gust 23, 1929, he led a second massacre of Jews in Hebron, followed by a third massacre in 1936. (Kenneth R. Timmerman, Preachers of Hate, 2003, pp. 102-103.)

Eichmann initially supported Jewish immigration into Palestine. After his trip to Jerusalem in 1937, however, he recommended that Jewish immigration be forbidden. He was apparently taken by the display of Nazi flags and portraits of Hitler that he saw during his stay there. (Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism, p. 45.)

When Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Poland in 1939, France and England declared war on Germany, al­-Husseini decided to seek refuge in Iraq, where he found an ally in Rashid Ali al­-Gilani, who became prime minister of that country in March 1940. In October 1939 al­-Husseini already had gone to Baghdad and met with the Committee of Free Arabs, which was led by the so-called colonels of the Golden Square, to discuss plans for a revolution against the
British. The Free Arabs demanded an immediate cessation of Jewish immigration to Palestine and a crackdown on violence perpetrated by Zionist organizations such as Betar, led by Vladimir Jabotinski. (Preachers of Hate, 2003, p. 28. )

In October 1940, representatives of the Free Arabs signed an Axis-Arab Manifesto of Liberation in Berlin. Both Hitler and Mussolini expressed strong support for an independent, united Arab nation. Thus while in Iraq, al­-Husseini helped organize the new government led by Rashid Ali al-Gilani and the current minister of justice, Nadif Shaukat. Al-Gilani appointed Nur Said as his new foreign minister, a choice that would later doom his short-lived regime, when the latter conspired with the British embassy. Previously, in June, Said had helped to negotiate the German-Arab Peace and Cooperation Treaty in Ankara, Turkey. On January 31, 1941, British prime minister Winston Churchill ordered the removal of al-­Gilani, and a power struggle ensued over the control of the new Iraqi government. Nur Said and Abdullah bin Ali briefly seized power with British support. However, a coup d' etat on April 1, 1941, restored al-Gilani to the position of prime minister. Abdullah and Nur Said escaped to Amman, Jordan. Soon thereafter, Germany recognized the new Iraqi government led by al-Gilani. On May 12, 1941, al-Gilani declared independence from Great Britain. In doing so, he sparked a greater anti colonial uprising of nationalist Muslims in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. One of the coup planners was an Iraqi officer named Khairallah Tulfah, the future father-in-law of Saddam Hussein. (Timmerman, Preachers of Hate, pp. 105-106.)

Al-Gilani's second regime was also short-lived, however, as British forces quickly deposed it, but not before troops and policeman loyal to al-Gilani car­ ried out a pogrom in which roughly 200 Jews were killed. By May 29, the Brit­ish Army had seized Baghdad and reinstalled Nur Said as the Iraqi leader. To show his gratitude, Nur declared war against Germany in January 1943. Seeking to find a more hospitable location, the mufti thus sought refuge in Iran.

As we have already seen, the nationalist general Shah Reza Pahlavi, who seized power in 1925, was an admirer of Adolf Hitler's racial policies and even went so far as to rename his county Iran, which translates into Aryan in Persian. However, with the arrival of British and American troops in October 1941, the mufti was forced once again to relocate. Thus in November 1941, al- Husseini traveled to Berlin, where he met Hitler and offered his full support.

Reichsfurher Heinrich Himmler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop helped prepare the meeting. In doing so, he forged an alliance between Nazi Germany and the Palestine Arab High Command, which al-Husseini led. According to the recent “Wegbereiter der Shoa” this meeting was the genesis of Nazi-style anti-Semitism as a mass movement in the Arab world. Hitler recognized al-Husseini as the leader of the Arab world and pledged to install him
as the Arab fuhrer when the time was feasible.

Hitler dedicated a text to Christoph Schroeder and Frau Junge, his secretary, which is called the Hitler- Bormann Documents, or the Testament of Adolf Hitler. In this text, Hitler makes a criticism of his policies. For his part, Hitler was very proud of his stature among Muslims and, near the war's end, regretted that he had not done more to take advantage of this al­liance. According to documented private conversations he had with his staff, Hitler lamented his alliance with Italy, insofar as it alienated some people in the Muslim world. Italian adventures were looked upon as imperialistic aggression by those countries in North Africa that Mussolini had invaded. Hitler expressed admiration for the solidarity of the Muslim people and believed that they could have been potentially useful allies against his enemies. For the above see L. Craig Fraser, The Hitler-Bormann Documents. Date and publisher unknown.) Hitler even went so far as to accept the grand mufti as an "honorary Aryan" (Norman Cameron and R. H. Steven, trans., Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944, New York, 2000), p. 547) and to support Hitler's war efforts, al-Husseini next traveled to Bosnia in 1943 and helped organize the Waffen-SS
Handschar Di­vision in Yugoslavia, which was composed of Bosnian Muslim volunteers. For more on the Handschar Division, see George Lepre, Himmler's Bosnian Division: The waffin-SS Handschar Division, 1943-1945, Schiffer Military History, 1997.

According to one estimate, approximately 100,000 European Muslims fought for the Third Reich during the course of World War II. (Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism,2003, p. 74.)

To further recruit­ment, al- Husseini wrote a book titled Islam and the Jews, which was distributed to Bosnian Muslim SS units during the war as motivational literature, and were encour­aged to identify themselves spiritually as Muslim and Arab but racially as German. (Morse,2003, p. p. 74,Yossef Bodansky, Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument, 1999, p. 30.)

In appreciation for his services, al-Husseini was elected as the supreme sheikh-ul Islam (supreme religious leader) of the Muslim troops of the Axis. (Kopanski, "Muslims and the Reich," p. 27.)

The German occupation government in territory that it had conquered in the Soviet Union , garnered some goodwill from the local Muslim populations by reconstructing mosques that had been destroyed by the Soviets. Furthermore, German authorities actually restored the institution of the mufti, which had been abolished by the Bolsheviks not long after the Russian Revolution. According to one estimate, over 500,000 Muslim Turkomans, Tadjiks, and
Uzbeks from the Central Asian Soviet republics volunteered to fight on the side of the Third Reich. More than 180,000 Muslims were recruited to fight from the Caucasus, Crimea, and hil-Ural Tataristan. Many of these Muslim sol­diers came from Lithuania and Latvia and according to “Wegbereiter der Shoa” became known as ‘Askaris.’ Report­edly, the Islamic Waffen-SS fought in the battle of Stalingrad.

In 1945, the German military founded the Nordkaukasischer Waffen­gruppe (North Caucus Armed Group) for Muslim volunteers from Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Ossetia. They were organized into nineteen independent Islamic combat battalions and twenty-four infantry companies in the Wehrmacht. Furthermore, Muslim Turks and Tartars formed a Waffen-SS division known as the Ostturkisches Waffenverband (East Turkish Armed League) and SS
-Waffengruppe "Turkestan" (SS Armed Turkestan Group). Many Muslim soldiers had been recruited from Soviet labor camps by SS­ Sturmbannfuhrer Andreas Mayer. Mayer died from a Soviet sniper's bullet in 1944 while conducting antipartisan operations in Belarus. In April 1944, SS- Standartenfuhrer Haruan al-Rashid (William Hintersatz), an Austrian convert to Islam took over. He led several Muslim units in battle against partisans in the Warsaw
uprising in April 1943. (Kopanski, "Muslims and the Reich," pp. 30-31.)

Many Arab nationalists looked to Germany for inspiration during the 1930s and 1940s and saw National Socialism as a viable model for state building. Hitler's Mein Kampf found a receptive readership in parts of the Arabic world. Many aspiring Arab leaders sought to emulate the German fuehrer and his National Socialist movement. As far back as 1933, Arab nationalists in Syria and Iraq embraced National Socialism. In Egypt, a protofascist organization,
Young Egypt, also known as the Green Shirts, attracted many army offi­cers, The grand mufti is believed to have been instrumental in the group's formation. The Green Shirts went by different official names during its history, including Misf al­Farlit in the 1930s, the Islamic National Party in 1940, and the Socialist Party in 1946. Its leader, Mmed Hussein, also wrote a book in the style of Hitler's Mein Kampf titled Imlini and published a rabidly anti-Semitic
journal called al-Ichtirakya. During a visit to New York in the late 1940s, Mmed Hussein, the leader of the Green Shirt Party, addressed a meeting of the extreme right National Renaissance Party (NRP). Kurt Mertig, the NRP's first chairman, hoped to get a post at Cairo University. (Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, 1999, pp. 380, 387.)

Members of the Green Shirts, including young lieutenant colonel and future Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, along with Wing Commander Hassan Ibrahim and General Aziz al-Masri, attempted to execute a scheme in World War II in which they would link up with Rommel's Afrika Korps and supply them with secret information on British strategy and troop movements.39 the Nazis with the help of the Palestinians also were to exterminate half a million
Jews in what is now Israel plus all Jews in Tunisia and Syria. And as detailed in the recent “Wegbereiter der Shoa. Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung 1939 - 1945”-- in 1942, the Nazis created a special "Einsatzgruppe," a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe. "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to
disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942, attached to the "Afrika Korps." Although hopes of a pan-German and pan-Arab alliance would be dashed with the defeat of Rommel, his early military successes gained admiration from the Arab population and as we will see in part 2 of this new 4 part series, this endured after the war.





From Hitler to the Arab Reich pt 2

“The new alliance has come. The eleventh of September has brought together [the two sides] because the new right has reacted positively They say, and I agree with them 100 percent, what happened on the eleventh of September, if it is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of counterterrorism.” Ahmed Huber (As quoted in Peter Finn, "Unlikely Allies Bound by a Common Hatred," Washington Post, April 29, 2002, page A13.)

We already discussed how Saddam Hussein's uncle and future father-in law, Khairallah Tulfah, along with General Rashid Ali al-Gilani and the so-called colonels of the Golden Square, participated in a coup against the pro-British government of Iraq, and recognized as Iraq’s new Governement by Germany-- declared independence from Great Britain on May 12, 1941. This pro-Nazi regime as we have seen was then ejected by a British military intervention soon thereafter, but not before the regime insti­gated an anti-Jewish pogrom in which 200 people were killed. (See also David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the war on Terror, 2003, p. 49.)

Tulfah had a strong influence on his son-in-law, regaling him with his vision of a pan-­Islamic Nazi alliance. Not unlike Hitler, Saddam Hussein sought to implement a new order based on the principles of nationalism and socialism under the dic­tatorial control of the Fuhrerprinzip. (Charles A. Morse, "The Nazi Background of Saddam Hussein," February 21, 2003, http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/2/20/145726.shtml.)

His Ba'ath (Renaissance) Party like the regimes in Iran, Syria, and soon also Egypt, had the characteristics of a European fascist party of the interwar years, seeking to mold the masses into a single organic collectivity through a program of corporatism and national regeneration. Saddam Hussein's defiant position toward the United States and Israel throughout the 1990s bolstered his image in some quarters. As a result, several representatives of the extreme right have reached out to him on numerous occasions.

In the weeks leading up to the Gulf War, some European right-wing extremists sought to provide token assistance and moral support. For example, the late German neo-Nazi leader Michael Kuhnen reportedly negotiated with Iraqi diplomats in an effort to build an "Anti-Zionist Legion" to fight for Saddam Hussein and repel the U.S.-led coalition. Another German neo-Nazi leader, Heinz Reisz, appeared on Hussian state television on January 25, 1991, and
pro­claimed "Long live the fight for Saddam Hussein; long live his people; long live their leader; God save the Arab people." A French neo-Nazi, Michel  activists and historical revisionists were guests of Saddam Hussein at a government- sponsored event ti­tled "Friendship, Solidarity and Peace with Iraq."

The ‘New Right’ in Support of Saddam.

In 1986 famous Paganist and at the time intellectual leader of the so called, French Nouvelle Droite, Alain de Benoist released a publication, Europe, Tiers monde, meme combat (Europe, the Third World, the Same Fight), in which he called for an alliance between Europe and the Arab Middle East, to weaken both the U.S. and Soviet blocs and their hold on Europe. This rightist variant of "Third Worldism" was not informed by the more liberal-oriented admiration
of the "noble savage" or white racial guilt, but rather by geopolitical hostility to the bloc system and its hold over Europe. In January 1991, Alain de Benoist,joined with a coalition that included various leftists, trade unionists, and anti-American rightists to protest the U.S.-led aggression against Iraq. (Michael O'Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, 2004, pp. 167, 172.)

More recently Alain de Benoist has also been mentioned in a booklet with the misleading title “New Religions and The Nazis” 2006, by Karla Poewe. Poorly argued and under-researched, rather then having anything to do with the “Nazis” (as the that time Governement of Germany), Karla Poewe’s booklet rather is a micro history of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer’s religious ideas. (1)

Saddam found support by Jean Marie Le Pen's Front National. Christian fundamentalists in the party favored Saddam because Iraq had been a major arms supplier to the Falange in its battle against Muslims in Lebanon during the civil war. Anti-Americanism and anti-British sentiment played a role as well. In October 1990, Le Pen traveled to Baghdad as part of a delegation of right-wing parties from Europe to meet with Saddam Hussein. They returned
with fifty-three European hostages that were held by Iraq in the months prior to the war. For his part, supporting Iraq was a clever way in which Le Pen could defuse criticism that he was anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. (Harvey G. Simmons, The French National Front: The Extremist Challenge to Democracy, 1996, pp. 101-102.)

Reportedly, some elements of Jorg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) have also sympathized with Saddam Hussein's regime. For example, there is the case of Abdul Moneim Jebra, a sixty-year-old Iraqi arms dealer, who has report­edly sought to strengthen ties between the radical right and militant Islam. Jebra now lives in Austria, where members of Jorg Haider's FPO estab­lished an Iraqi-Austrian Association to promote ties with Baghdad. In 1998 a plot to smuggle helicopters to Iraq that involved Jebra was uncovered during a Swiss bribery case.

Plus of course there is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Russian ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, who accused the Kremlin of "betraying" its long-term Arab partners and clients. The Soviet Union had strong diplomatic ties with many countries in the Middle East, and until its collapse, Moscow played a key role in the re­gion, supporting Arab leaders such as Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Syrian president Hafez al-
Assad, and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. However, Mikhail Gorbachev's government consented to the U.5.-led military action in the Gulf War, an operation that it could have vetoed in the Security Council. Furthermore, by that time, and even more so during Boris Yeltsin's tenure, relations with the United States became the top Russian priority. Zhirinovsky has sought to reestablish an alliance with Iraq. Toward this end, he reportedly developed a
warm relationship with Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi ambassador to Russia appreciated Zhirinovsky's gestures of support and has frequently been in attendance at Zhirinovsky's birthday parties. (Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Zhirinovsky: Russian Fascism and the Making of a Dictator, 1995, pp. 122-123.)

Zhirinovsky visited Baghdad on numerous occasions during the 1990s and was a guest of Saddam Hussein. In one instance, he lectured the Iraq leader for four hours on the need to unite against the "American-Israeli plot" to dominate the world. (Ibid., p. 124.) In 1993, Zhirinvosky even went so far as to send a contingent of his paramilitary "falcons" to Iraq to fight against "American imperialism." Hussein is rumored to have contributed considerable financial support to Zhirinovsky. After his trip to Baghdad, Zhirinovsky increased the frequency and the stridency of his anti-American rhetoric. (Ibid., pp. 127-129.)

Other Russian right-wing extremists have also reached out to Muslims, so for example, Heidar Jamal has sojourned in several extremist orga­nizations. He worked briefly for the ultranationalist Pamyat (Memory) orga­nization in 1989 and the late Ahmed Khomeini, the son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1990. In 1993, he joined the Russian branch of the Islamic Committee. He ran unsuccessfully for the Duma in 1995. Finally, in 1999, his Islamic
Committee joined forces with hard-line communists Victor Ilyukhin and Albert Marashov. One constant theme that links all his projects is a viru­lent disdain for the West.( Nabi Abdullaev, "Fundamentalism in Russia: An Interview with Islam Committee's Heidar Jamal," in Parfrey, Extreme Islam, pp. 281-284.)

With Heidar Jamal and his friend Alexander Dugin who translated both Rene Guenon and Julius Evola in Russian, we are back to the larger circle of intellectuals that include also Alain de Benoit, and what Mark Sedgwick for lack of a better word called ‘Traditionalism.’ (For a review of Sedgwick's book see.)

It was during Perestroika that Russian Traditionalists first took active steps. In 1987 Dugin and Jamal together joined Pamyat' (Memory), later described by Dugin as "the most reactionary organization available." They hoped to in­fluence it toward Traditionalism, rather as Eliade had hoped to use the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania, and Evola had hoped to use the Fascists, the Herrenclub, and the SS. (Sedgwick, 2004, p.224.)

Pamyat' was the focus of popular opposition to Perestroika. But Dugin's and Jamal's attempts at infiltration of Pamyat' were no more successful than had been Eliade's or Evola's similar efforts earlier. Seminars they gave attracted respectable audiences (up to 100 people), and Dugin was appointed to Pamyat’s Central Council in late 1988, but in 1989 they gave up and left. Pamyat'; Dugin later described its members as "hysterics and KGB collaborators." Its importance for Russian oppo­sition politics in fact was like that of Theosophy for Western esotericism: it was the forum that facilitated the emergence of figures who would later be important elsewhere.

After they left Pamyat, where Jamal continued in the line of Islamist Traditionalism, Dugin in a parallel course of action became involved with Eurasianism. In 1999 was appointed special advisor to Gennady Nikolayevich Seleznev, the CPRF speaker of the Duma. (Ivan Kurilla, Geopolitika i kommunizm, “Geopolitics and Commu­nism”, Russki Zhurnal 23, February 1999)

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dugin helped found the not entirely serious National Bolshevik Party and became increasingly associated with two major figures in Russian political life. One was Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). The other, closer associate was Alexander Andreyevich Prokhanov, leader of a group known as the Pochvenniki (Patriots).

In the end however Dugin would found his own Eurasian Party, characterized by Democratic intellectual Igor Vin­ogradov:They are undertaking a noisy galvanization of a reactionary utopia that failed long ago, an attempt to revive it through the injection of a new vaccine-a
combination of "Orthodoxy" and "Islam" in the name of combating insidious "Zionism," putrid Western "Catholi­cism" and any kind of Jew- Masonry whatever ... For all their [intel­lectual] ineptitude, they are very dangerous. After all, the temptation of religious fundamentalism in our century of unbelief and general spiritual corruption is attractive to many desperate people who have lost their way in this chaos. (Vinogradov, in Yelena Yakovich, "Kontinent
in Moscow: Voice of Russian Culture," interview with Igor Vinogradov, Literaturnaya Gazeta, July 22, 1992, p. 5.)

The credit for this revivification of a "failed" ideology must go to Dugin and Traditionalism, clearly the source of the "new vaccine" referred to. Dugin continue to maintain his friendly rela­tions first established with Dugin's visits to the West in 1989, and continued with visits to Russia by de Benoist and his Belgian ally Robert Steuckers (the first of which took place in March 1992). And with the publication of two collections of Dugin's articles in Italian by
Claudio Mutti (see below), in 1991 and 1992.

Where Mark Sedgwick’s book is specifically about the ‘traditionalism’ of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola, what this has in common with other forms of traditionalism ore preservatist*, is that they construct a revisionist view of history that fits their own agenda. If we take as an example political traditionalists or new right groups in the USA, we will see that the patriot movement looks to the American Revolution for inspiration, whereas the neo- Confederates look to the Civil War. The Odinists idealize the Viking era, whereas the National Socialists and many of the historical revisionists admire Hitler's Third Reich. The World Church of the Creator idealizes not only the Third Reich but also the Roman Empire and the American Western frontier of the nineteenth century. And the Christian Identity followers identify with the lost tribes of Israel. For a preservatist/traditionalist political group in India we
would look at (the recently covered on this website) RSS/Hindutva, and so on.

Another expression used ist heritage (in German called 'Voelkish') for example leader of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke explains it as, “people understand very well that I'm not a white supremacist and that I am a European American who wants to preserve my heritage like all people in the world want to, but the real danger to all heritages is Jewish supremacism, which seeks to destroy every heritage but the Jewish heritage.” (G. Michael, The Enemy of My
Enemy, 2006, p.162.)

Thus terms like the ‘new right’ or/and ‘extreme right’ today therefore, are not without contradictions , another good case example is the right/left mélange that came in the aftermath of a pamphlet written in 1950 by Julius Evola titled Orientamenti (Orienta­tions). Ultra-conservative, paganist/occultist, Julius Evola at the time when he wrote this, was a supporter of Junio Valerio Borghese-- an aristocrat, a Fascist, and Second World War military hero. (For details see Gianfranco De Turris, Elogio e diftsa di Julius Evola: Il Barone e i terroristi, 1997, pp. 50, 52, 59, 61.

When in 1951 the Italian police arrested some thirty members of the ‘Fasces Revolutionary Action’ (FAR), Evola-- because his articles appeared in their publication was accused of also supporting the latter--however he was acquitted.( De Turris,1997, pp. 51-52.) It was the publicity surrounding this trial, that helped launch Evola on his postwar career, and he expanded Orientamenti into a book published in 1961, Cavalcare la Tigre: Orientamenti
esistenziali per un'epoca della dissoluzione (Riding the Tiger: Existential Orientations for a Period of Disso­lution). Here, Evola introduced the concept of what in Islam is titled hijra (emigration), fundamental to the more extreme varieties of late twentieth-century political Islam. Cavalcare la Tigre became one of the central texts for the Italian new right.

Earlier the Ordine Nuovo (New Order), established by Pino Rauti a dedicated follower of Evola was publicly committed to the defense of "all that of the traditional that has been saved and has found a pole.” It launched a joumal, Ordine Nuovo, and offered courses and semi­nars based around Evola's (and sometimes Rene Guenon's) works, including Evola's Orientamenti. One small group from within Ordine Nuovo even followed Ev­ola's earliest interest, ceremonial magic and Roman neo-Paganism, establish­ing I Dioscuri (Greek Dioskouroi, sons of Zeus) in Rome in the late 1960’s.( Franco Ferraresi, Minacce alia democrazia: La Destra radicale e la strategia de’la tensione in Italia ne’ dopoguerra, 1995, pp. 112-13.)

Little is known of the activities of this latter group, except that it ran into difficulties of some sort that led to the suicide of many of its members. Most of the activities of Ordine Nuovo, however, were intellectual and political. When the Ordine Nuovo became involved with terrorism a court order called for it’s forced dissolution in 1974.

But also for many leftists by then, the old division between left and right was no longer of much importance and had been replaced by a divide identified by Asor Rosa as a division between In and Out. Bourgeois industrialists were In, as were unionized workers and the PCI; the unemployed, women, students, and other marginal groups were Out.

Next Franco Freda, another student of Julius Evola sentenced to 16 years in prison in 1972, founded the Fronte Nazionali (National Front). Its supporters were predominantly skin-heads, and their crusading issue was immigration, not as crude racism but as an attack on multiculturalism in the name of preserving the purity of distinct traditions.

Exactly what Evola did mean by apoliteia in practical terms-in the realm of action-has since been much disputed. But just like is the case with various interpretations of what the exact meaning is of certain statements in the Koran, what is more important than what Evola meant, is what he was taken to mean. Evola's apoliteia thus was developed by Freda into a call for action against the bourgeois state irrespective of effect, a sort of Traditionalist
existentialism-and the word "existentialism" is used in the subtitle of Cavalcare la Tigre. Freda's development of Evolian Traditionalism was not entirely nihilistic-he also argued for the destruction of the bourgeois state as a necessary preliminary to further developments, which implies belief in the possibility of "rectifying action" -but his call was in effect a call to what Gianfranco de Turris calls "rightist anarchism." (Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia, pp. 101, 296, and De Turris, Elogio e di- fesa, p. 99.)

Mark Sedgwick maintains that Evola, “seems to have approved of what was being done in his name­ on condition that it was done with proper spiritual preparation.”(Sedgwick, 2004, p.185.)

Just as Evola shifted (or was thought to have shifted) the emphasis from the objectives of action to the interior state that gives rise to action, so Freda shifted the emphasis from the objective-which implied some central plan­ning and organization-to the individual. Freda was one of the earliest and most important proponents of the "archipelago solution," the new organiza­tional pattern of Italian ‘new right ‘terrorism that emerged a solution, by implication, to the problems raised by the dismantling of Ordine Nuovo. This meant the replacement of earlier, relatively large and hierarchical structures by small and fluid groupings, usually forming for a particular op­eration and then dissolving, and normally acting independently of each other and of any central command. (Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia, p. 302.)

The archipelago solution presents certain obvious operational advantages. As an extension of the Leninist cell system, it is the ultimate guard against police infiltration: no more than a single operation can ever be compromised. It is, however, more than a defense, since the abandonment of any control over operational groups makes sense only as a corollary to the abandonment of overall strategy. The archipelago solution, then, is the companion of
apoliteia, at least as Freda understood apoliteia. The two together make up spontaneismo armato (armed spontaneity), Freda's most destructive discovery, later popularized in his journal, Quex. Again, Mark Sedgwick suggests, “there were echoes of Freda in both the organizational method and the apparent objectives of the terrorists who carried out the attacks on the USA Septem­ber 11, 2001.” (Sedgwick, 2004, p.320.)

Finally Freda and some fifty of his followers were, convicted in 1999 of "incitement to racial discrimination," and in 2000 the Fronte Nazionali was dissolved by decree of the minister of the interior and its assets were confiscated. (Ruotolo Guido, "Il PM di Verona Papalia: 'C'e' un vero pericolo" interview with Procurator Guido Papalia, La Stampa, December 3°,2000, p. 7.)

There were rumors, however, that Fronte Nazionali activists, in alliance with members of the Alleanza Nazionale, this time financed by Osama bin-Laden, had helped ferment the violence that shocked Italy during anti-globalization protests at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. (On the basis of reports in Il Secolo XIX “July 25, 2001”, ascribed to sources in the Italian security services.)

According to a report in the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Serra, also German intelligence services claimed that Osama bin Laden had financed extreme right organizations in Europe in the hope that they would assist him in carrying out terrorist attacks during a G-8 summit meeting held in Genoa in the summer of 2001.189

Though the Traditionalist terror in Italy ended in 1983, that was not the end of the Traditionalists who had been involved in it. Some, like Claudio Mutti after having spend some years in jail where he converted to Islam, continued nonviolently. (Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia, p. 195.)

Two factors influenced his conversion: the writings of Guenon, to which he had been led by the writings of Evola, and Colonel Qad­dafi. Guenon had convinced him of the need for a "path of realization," some­thing Evola had not accomplished. Qaddafi is a more unusual source. Freda had had an interest in Qaddafi and Islam; he wrote in Quex about Evola's requirement for a spiritual basis for action in terms of the relationship between the "lesser jihad" (armed conflict) and the "greater jihad" (the struggle to sub­due the lower self), and he published a translation of some of Qaddafi's speeches. (Mutti, "Pourquoi j'ai choisi l'Islam," Elements: Revue de la Nouvelle Droite 53 ; Spring 1985, 37-39)

Mutti's Islam is militant and political. Like we have seen above he has published Italian translations of Jamal's work, but also of the Ayatollah Khomeini a preference he seems to have in common with Ahmed Huber cited at the beginning of this article. That Islam is in­stalled on top of his early Evolianism is symbolized by the decor of his office, which is predominantly Islamic but includes a Nazi standard propped behind the filing cabinet, reported by Sedgwick
who visited Mutti. (Sedgwick,2004, 260.)

But also Heidar Jamal during the time he was the ideologist for the Party of the Islamic Renaissance and editor of its organ Tavhid [Unity].In the first issue Jamal analyzed the state of Islam in Traditionalist terms, adding a historical angle rarely found elsewhere, derived in this case from Islamist writings. Islam, he pointed out, existed in time and was subject to decline just as everything else was. Further, there had been no real Islamic government since the death of the Prophet, and certainly not since the Mongols. Matters had grown much worse since then, since the "post-colonial elites" in the Islamic world were either nationalists (and hence enemies of universal Islam) or "atheist cosmopolitan[s]," equally enemies of true Islam.

An in an article from I99I inTavhid, translated in Italian, Jamal, after comparing the existential significance of death in Evolian Traditionalism to the meta­ physical significance of death (the final return to God) in Islam, argues that "authentic Islam and the authentic right are non-conformist; their vital char­ acter consists of opposition, disagreement, non-identification." ("Islam and the Right," Giperbort a Vilnius, 1991, in Jamal, Tawhid, pp. 31-36.)

For a Chris­tian, "God is almost synonymous with hyper-conformism," whereas Islam is a "protest ... against the reduction of God to 'consensus.''' The political right and Islam both fight the snares of the world, including self-deification and "profane elitarianism." (Ro'i, Muslim Eurasia, p. 44.)

The PIR split in I992 over the issue of relations with Yeltsin and his project of Russian democracy, with the Jamall faction aligning with radical Islamists and Wahhabis in the Middle East and with the domestic opposition to Yeltsin, in the form of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) under Gennady Zyuganov and the rightist "Patriots" under Alexander Prokhanov. (Leonid Berres, "The Wahhabis are Ready to Make an Alliance with
Maka­shov and Ilyukhin," Kommersant, July 24, 1999, pp. I ff.)

Both men were as­sociates of Jamal from his time in Pamyat', and both also associated with the other major Traditionalist in Russia, Dugin. And Jamal's relations in the Middle East were with men such as Hasan al ­Turabi, the leader of the Sudanese Islamic Front and according to Michael Asher in his book about the Sudanes Mahdi, at least one of the em­inence grise behind Osama bin Laden. (Asher, Khartoum, 2005, pp.406-407.)

The PIR as Jamal's institutional framework was replaced by the Islamic Committee of Russia-a network of such Islamic Committees was established under al­ Turabi's guidance at a conference in Khartoum in I993 in order to unite the leaders of various radical Islamist movements such as Turabi's own National Islamic Front, Hamas in Palestine, and the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Jamal be­came leader of the Moscow branch of this Islamic Committee. In a 1999 interview he spoke of contacts with the Hezbollah, Hamas, the Wolves of Islam (a Chechen group), and the Afghan Taliban. (Berres, "The Wahhabis.")

According to Walid Pharis it was during the above meeting in Khartoum that the decision was made from now on al-Qaeda would be the “mother ship” of global Jihad. Or as Pharis notes: The central force of jihad, after the Khartoum gathering, targeted the United States head-on, both overseas and at home. By this point al Qaeda was in charge of the world con­flict with America. The "princes" (or emirs) were assigned the various battle­fields, but the "Lord" assumed the task of destroying the "greater Satan," America.The first wave started in 1993 on two axes: One was in Somalia, where jihadists met U.S. Marines in Mogadishu in bloodshed. The United States with­drew. The same year, the blind sheikh Ahdul Rahman and Ramzi Yusuf conspired to blow up the Twin Towers in New York. (Phares, Future Jihad, 2005, p.157.)

Finally of course a common ground between the extreme right and the Muslim world is the historical revisionism of Holocaust denial. For example the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggested that the Holocaust had been greatly exaggerated in part to undermine Islam:

There is evidence which shows that Zionists had close relations with German Nazis and exaggerated statistics on Jewish killings. There is evidence on hand that a large number of non-Jewish hooligans and thugs of Eastern Europe were forced to migrate to Palestine as Jews. The purpose was to install in the heart of the Islamic world an anti-Islamic state under the guise of supporting the victims of racism and to create a rift between the East and the West of the Islamic world. (A.Foxman, Never Again?, 2003, 220.)

And the recent President of Iran, Rafsanjani ex­claimed that he was convinced that "Hitler had only killed twenty thousand Jews and not six million." (Foxman, 223.)Rafsanjani even went so far as to raise the prospect of national suicide as part of an effort to destroy Israel, mus­ing that the nuclear annihilation of Iran as a result of a retaliatory attack by Is­rael would be an acceptable price to pay to destroy half of the world's Jewish population. In such a conflagration, only a small portion of the world's Mus­lims would perish. (Michael A. Ledeen, The War against the Terror Masters, New York: St. Martin's, 2003, p. 282.)

Abraham Foxman, believes that many Arabs are embracing Holocaust revisionism to delegitimate the state of Israel. According to the reasoning of Holocaust revisionism, the trag­edy was deliberately exaggerated in order to generate global sympathy for Jews and support for the creation of the Jewish state. Furthermore, it has been used to "extort" billions of dollars from the West and demoralize Aryans and the West "so that Jews could more easily
control the world." (Foxman, Never Again?,219-220.)

David Duke, mentioned above, has been in the forefront of efforts to reach out to the Islamic world. In the fall of 2002, when he presented two lectures in Bahrain titled "The Global Struggle against Zionism" and "Israeli Involvement in September 11." And in an article published in the Arab News, a Saudi Arabian English daily newspaper, Duke repeated his assertion that Israel had assisted the terrorists in the 9/11 attack..

Duke’s take on religion, include things like “the Anti-Christ” , and “Satanic-Christianity” and that there is no such thing as Judeo-Christianity. That it would be saying Satanic-Christianity. That the religion now called Judaism did not even come formally into existence until six hundred years after Jesus Christ. That it began with the codification of the Babylon Talmud . That Islam is much closer to Christianity than Judaism. That Judaism condemns the Virgin Mary as a prostitute and viciously condemns Jesus as an evil sorcerer and a bastard . And claims in stark contrast, although Islam does not share all the Christian views of Jesus Christ, it views Christ as the true prophet of God, virgin-born, and that God resurrected Jesus from the dead. And that the chief religious book of Islam, the Qur'an,  defends Jesus Christ from the slanders made against Him in the Jewish Talmud. ("Evangelicals Who Serve the Anti-Christ!" January 25, 2003, http://www davidduke.com/
radio.)

More recently, in September 2005, Duke received a doctorate in history from the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management-a major private university system in the Ukraine. And in November 2005, he traveled to Syria, where he held a news conference.

Duke is not the only right-winger to draw parallels between Christianity and Islam. For example, Bill Baker, former chairman of the Populist Party, gave a lecture titled "Reviving the Islamic Spirit." (Gil Francisco White, "Islamist-Nazi Alliance Reborn on Campus?" The Daily Pennsylvanian, November 5, 2003, http://vryvw.daily pen nslyvania.com/vnews/display.v?ART/3fa8a3666637e.)

From the above we have also seen that just as Islamists and the (extreme) new right are beginning to find common ground, the gap between the far left and the far right have been narrowing as well. Both movements often decry globalization. Increasingly, they both share a criticism of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. A case in point is the case of Rachel Corrie, an attractive twenty-three-year-o1d American student at Evergreen State College in Olympia,
Washington, and a member of the International Solidarity Movement, who took a semester off to work as a peace activist in Gaza. While there, she took part in a protest in which an Israel driver using a bull­dozer was preparing to knock down a Palestinian's house. Corrie stood between the bulldozer and the house and refused to move. However, the Israel driver ran over her, and she sustained injuries from which she ultimately died. Despite Corrie's presumably left-leaning political orientation, various (extreme) right-wing publications and websites eulogized her as an Aryan martyr. What is more, the antig10balization rhetoric of the contemporary extreme right could conceivably make its agenda more palatable to the far left, which also champions a similar platform, including radical environmentalism and animal rights. In fact, in 2002, the National Alliance created a front group, the Anti-Globalism
Action Network (AGAN), to capitalize on the left's opposition to globa1ist organiza­tions such as the World Bank, G8, and the International Monetary Fund and sent it to Kananaskis, Canada, to protest a G8 meeting. AGAN added an anti­Semitic twist to the traditional left-wing conspiracy narrative. (Center for New Community. -CNC Uncovers Neo-Nazis Masquerading as Anti­Globalization Acrivists," June 21, 2002, http://newcom.org.)

And extreme right stalwarts, such as Louis Beam, the chief proponent of (Evola student Franco Freda’s see above) 1eaderless resis­tance approach in the United States, expressed solidarity with anti-World Trade Organization protestors in Seattle. Similar to Freda’s example also left-wing radicals now extol revolutionary strategies that sound very similar to the 1eader1ess resistance approach advocated by extreme right revolu­tionaries. Although there
have been no significant displays of overt anti­Semitism on the part of so-called eco-extremists, some elements have become increasingly strident in their opposition to the war on terror, especially once it expanded to encompass Iraq. A former spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, Craig Rosebraugh, exhorted antiwar activists to escalate their opposition to the war. Among his suggestions to foment revolution were attacking the financial centers of the country; provoking large-scale urban rioting; attacking the media centers of power; spreading the battle to the individuals responsible for the war (the heads of government and U.S. corporations); publicly announc­ing that the antiwar movement does not support U.S. troops; targeting U.S. military establishments within the United States; and when engaging in the aforementioned activities, striking hard and fast and retreating in anonymity. (Rosebraugh's strategy is described in Michelle Malkin, "Eco-terrorists Declare War," Washington Times, March 24, 2003, http://-,vw -,v.washingtontimes.com)

Thus if anything, the far left is in a state of flux, while some of its activists question traditional tenets of their platform, such as unrestricted immigration. (See Neil Clark, "Why the Left and Right Must Unite and Fight: The View from the Left," Anti-Wancom, April 1, 2003.)

The Post 9/11 Resistance Movement.

At first, 9/11 and its immediate aftermath appeared to galvanize the National Alliance, overtly praising the 9/11 hijackers. Its chairman, Dr. William L. Pierce, became even more strident in his rhetoric in his American Dissident Voices radio broadcasts, and interest in his American Dissident Voices program increased significantly after the 9/11 attacks.

Then there is the Aryan Nations' Islamic outreach with its own ‘Liaison’ website with as one of the frequent writers David Wulstan Myatt. Reputed to have been a member of the underground paramilitary groups Column 88 and Combat 18 in the UK, he was twice imprisoned for violent political ac­tivism. (Nick Ryan,Into a World of Hate: A Journey among the Extreme Right, 2004, p.17.)

After several years of radical politics, Myatt became disillusioned and during his travels joined Islam. Myatt is also the chief proponent of the "leaderless resistance" (see Franco Freda above) in England and joined the small Reichsfolk or­ganization, which had the twofold aim of propagating the philosophy of Na­tional Socialism and forming rural communities where the like-minded could live in accord with the "ethos of their Aryan culture." (David Myatt,
"Towards the Galactic Empire: Autobiographical Notes Part Two.)

Myatt was much impressed with the power of religion so evident in the ranks of Muslim militants.

I came to understand that what motivated the fighters I and others had discussed previously was an intense faith: a real belief in an after-life; a belief that it was their duty to act in such a way, and that by doing their duty in the way they did, they would be assured of entering Paradise. And this faith was not a political belief they had acquired or accepted in adult life: it was part of their very culture. Indeed, it was their culture, their tradition, and their way of life,
from birth through death. It was this type of faith, this immersion in one's own culture, which our own people so sadly lacked. We were trying to motivate people in a political way, whereas Muslim fighters did what they did because it was accepted as their duty, as their own people understood this duty and gladly accepted their martyrdom. (David Myatt, "A Covert Life, http://www.geocities .com/davidmyatt/covertlife.html )

Myatt had little difficulty reconciling his newfound faith with National Socialism (as follows):

"How could a National Socialist-an admirer of Adolf Hitler and his SS ­come to sit happily in the homes of a Pakistani, an Arab, an African from Chad, share a meal, talk affably about God, our dreams for the future, the need for a spiritual renaissance, and of course, the common enemy? Because the truth about National Socialism has been obscured for over fifty years, thanks to the intensive, hateful, worldwide, well-financed and unending propaganda
campaign directed against it. There is some common ground, since both ways-when correctly understood-produce civilized, honorable individuals who use reason as a Islam shared common enemies, the capitalist-consumer West and international finance. (Myatt, "Towards the Galactic Empire.")

"There is some common ground, since both ways-when correctly understood-produce civilized, honorable individuals who use reason as a guide. The differences are, first, that Islam concentrates on the next life, on Jannah, and there is therefore what I have called an individualistic and Earth-based ethic: individuals do what they do in anticipation of the reward of Jannah; and, second, that the individual is understood in relation to such things as taqwa [the conscious awareness that God is watching you] and imaan [faith or belief], for these define them. For Islam, the folk-and the diversity and difference of human culture-is basically irrelevant. For National Socialism, this diversity and difference should be treasured and developed in an honorable, rational way. In addition, National Socialism concentrates on our connection to our folk and thus to Nature and the Cosmos, with Nature and the Cosmos being
understood as living beings. That is, we, as part of our folk, are Nature made manifest, and that our purpose is to aid Nature, and thus the Cosmos, through our folk: to evolve ourselves, our folk, our culture, and thus our human species. Hence, the perspective of National Socialism ­and the basis for its ethics-is a cosmic, evolutionary one, of ourselves as a nexus, a connection between our human past and our human future. National Socialism believes we can and should evolve further: that this is our unique human destiny. In National Socialism (and folk culture, I should add) the individual is defined by honor, loyalty, and duty, just as a National-Socialist society is. So, in one sense Islam was part of my lifelong quest to discover the meaning, the purpose, of our lives. As a result, I do believe I understand Islam, which is why I know an alliance between Muslims and National Socialists is possible, and indeed necessary. ( Michael,145-146.)

According to Myatt, the great potential for cooperation between the extreme right and militant Islam stems from both movement's shared opposition to the so-called new world order, which he defines as a collection of Western capitalist nations whose way of life is dominated by materialism. According to Myatt, the plan of the new world order is to subjugate the planet through an oppres­sive world police force so that no dissidents can escape its reach-in
short, a one-world government, with its own police force, courts, and army that have jurisdiction anywhere in the world. In that sense, the new world order regime amounts to "bully-made law." By contrast, Myatt sees Islamic sharia as far superior in that it was putatively derived from God, thus making it superior to fallible human-derived laws. Myatt has publicly expressed admiration for the Taliban movement in Afghanistan because it sought to establish "a true Islamic society" and defended Mullah Muhammad Omar's decision to continue to grant Osama bin Laden sanctuary in the wake of 9/11. ("Islamic Sanctuary,” http://www.aalhagq.jeeraii.com/ sanctuary.html )

In Myatt's analysis, the only real significant opposition to the new world order comes from militant Islam. On previous occasions, he has expressed open admiration for Osama bin Laden and views him as an exemplary warrior who has forsaken a life of luxury to pursue his Islamic duty. (Myatt, "Why I Support Sheikh Usama bin Laden,http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/alghurabah/support/usama.html.)

Like David Myatt, also Ahmed Huber (quoted at the outset of this article above) found no contradiction in terms of his Islamic faith and his admiration for
German National Socialism, as he explained:

I judge as a Muslim, I judge Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich and his movement in a different way than the Zionists, or the Marxists, or the Anglo-Americans do because I know very, very much. I have been studying the sources of what was the Third Reich. And I met a lot of people who knew Hitler personally. I have met his secretary, Frau Gertrud Junge, who recently died, and Christa Schroeder. I have met Arlton Axman, the last Hitler Youth leader, who brought
the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun to the Reich Chancellery and burnt them. I met a lot of Waffen-SS generals from the Leibstandarte, who personally knew Hitler.

We Muslims were fascinated by the Third Reich in the 1930s because Hitler had some ideas at the political level and the economic level, and the cultural field, which were very close to the political, economic, and cultural sharia. For instance, the economic concept of an interest-free noncapitalist economy is very close to the Islamic concept of the economy. His [Hitler's] idea that art should represent God and not be degenerate and make a cult of ugliness, oflies, and of evil, this corresponds to the cultural sharia, and so on.

So this man and his movement were fascinating to many Muslim intellectuals all during the 1930s. And since 1945, Muslims have been studying all of these things. And we judge him in a different way. Even if now, of course, when the Muslims protest against America, they say Bush equals Hitler, or Shawn equals Hitler, they say that not for themselves, but [because] they know that it has an impact on Western public opinion.

Hitler himself said several times, "The only religion I respect is Islam. The only prophet I admire is the Prophet Muhammad." He said several times in his table talks that ''After the final war the swastika will rule over Europe and will represent a new Europe. We will help the Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East to reestablish the Caliphate." That means there would be an Islamic civilization. (See also Coogan, "The Mysterious Ahhmed Huber: Friend to
Hitler, Allah and Ibn Laden?" http://coraclesyndicate.org/pub e/k.coo e/publ 05-02-1.htm, September 2002.

As for the ‘new right’ mentioned in the initial quote from Huber at the beginning of this article, Huber explained:You see, in the past ten years I have been in Switzerland, Austria, France, and Germany. I have been around with groups of young people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, and especially what we call the new right. Sometimes we hold meetings together, Muslims and people from the new right, to speak about these things and to show what we have in common. I also spoke about this at the University of Tehran. I spoke at a seminar and workshops about
these problems. Explaining what was the Third Reich, what it was all about. (Michael,146.)

On March 20, 2002, a U.S. Treasury task force raided businesses connected to individuals which they thought financed al-Qaeda. For example Jamal Barzinji’s northern Virginia-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth was alleged to have been deeply involved in provid­ing cover for Wahhabi terrorism. (Stephen Schwarz, "Wahhabis in the Old Dominion: What the Federal Raids in Northern Virginia Uncovered," Weekly Standard 7, no. 29, April 8, 2002, http://www.weeklystandard. com.) Here a connection was found to Alessandro Ghe, an Italian, who has been questioned by Italian authorities for possible ties to bin Laden. And again, Ghe belonged to the Ordine Nuovo (New Order) organization, which began to reach out to Muslim radicals in the 1970’s as seen above.


part 3
During the 1980s Iran began to sponsor conferences to establish a working relationship among Middle Eastern terrorist group. (Bodansky, Bin Laden, pp. 102-104.) Michael Ledeen believed that "in all probability the working relationship between al Qaeda and Iran was forged in the Afghan war, and continued uninterrupted throughout the nineties." Ledeen, The nwr against the Terror Masters, p. 50.

Tehran resolved to transform Hezbollah into the "vanguard of the revolution." Despite its Shi'ite orientation, Iran sought to build bridges with Sunni terrorist organizations. The Iranian arm of Hezbollah had been involved in interna­tional terrorism since 1981, but this most recent initiative broadened the scope of its operations. Although Tehran had previously sponsored numerous foreign terrorist groups, it could exert only a limited amount of influence over them,
mostly by financial power and ideological suasion. (Taheri, Holy Terror, pp. 99-111.)

Khomeini's successor, President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, established the Supreme Council for Intelligence Afairs, which was construed elsewhere as the Supreme Council for Terrorism.The council laid the foundation for a broad-based terrorist organi­zation known as Hezbollah Internationa1. And in 1996 Dr. Mahdi Chamran Savehie from the Supreme Council convened a conference in Tehran, which brought many groups and leaders together,
including Mustafa Al Liddawi of Hamas, George Habbash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abdullah Ocalan of the Kurdish People's Party, Ramadan Shalah of the Pales­tinian branch of Islamic Jihad, Ahmed Sala of the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad, and Osama bin Laden. (Robinson, Bin Laden, p. 188.)

The summit participants agreed to the unification of their financial system as well as the standardization of training in order to establish interoperability for their terrorist operatives. Reportedly, a Committee of Three was established, which included Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda, Imad Mughniya of the Lebanese branch of Islamic Jihad, and Ahmed Sala of the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad. Although two of these individuals were Sunnis and one was a Shi'ite, all sides were comfortable with the arrangement, and Iran trusted them.

In 1996 "the Qods Force, the covert-action arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, arranged" the Khobar Towers bombing. (It is worth noting that there is still some uncertainty surrounding the Khobar Towers bombing. For example, the 9-11 Commission concluded, "While the evidence of Iranian involvement is strong, there are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown.")

In early June 2002 the leaders of four major terrorist organizations-Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine general command-met in Tehran, Iran, presumably to work on a common strategy to oppose Israe1. (David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the war on Terror, 2003, p. 43.)

Richard Clarke (a former National Security Council staffer) in Against All Enemies, Clarke makes it clear that Iran was a "priority" country "as important as the others," including the Taliban's Afghanistan, in the post-9/11 war on terrorism. And that,” al Qaeda regularly used Iranian territory for transit and sanctuary prior to September 11. Al Qaeda's Egyptian branch, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, operated openly in Tehran. It is no coincidence that many of the al
Qaeda management team, or Shura Council, moved across the border into Iran after U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan. (See also the Febr. 27, 2006 article Tehran plays host to al Qaeda: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/782ppuml.asp)

In fact the 9/11 Commission reports last year stated that al Qaeda operatives received explosives training from Iran in the early 1990s. Bin Laden "showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the one that had killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983." This early history of collaboration did not come to an end. Even after 1996, Iran continued to open its doors to al Qaeda. The Clinton administration's original unsealed
indictment of al Qaeda in November 1998 states that bin Laden's group had allied itself with Iran and its terrorist puppet, Hezbollah. The 9/11 Commission even left open the possibility that Hezbollah had assisted al Qaeda's execution of the September 11 plot.

And although still part of an ongoing investigation following the gradual release of Saddam Hussein documents these days, early on some intelligence analysts already maintained that al Qaeda had endeavored to create an operational alliance with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Simon Reeve claims that by early 1999, bin Laden was in the process of forging a secret alliance with Saddam Hussein. Contact between the two sides was first allegedly made in the
early 1990s when Hassan al- Turabi put bin Laden in contact with operatives from the Iraqi secret service. These contacts were supposed to have been maintained by representatives of the Iranian terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq Organiza­tion (MKO), which had its headquarters in Baghdad. (Bergen, Holy war, Inc., p. 77.)

A recent Foreign Affairs article titled “Blessed July,” refers to a book-length report with Iraqi documents and interviews with over 100 officials of Saddam’s regime which was, in the words of the Foreign Affairs article, “a regime-directed wave of ‘martyrdom’ operations against targets in the West.” The Foreign Affairs article mentions terror training camps operated by the Fedayeen Saddam, the militia of soldiers most loyal to Saddam. Started in 1994, according to the documents, it trained some 7,200 Iraqis in the art of terrorism in the first year alone. “Beginning in 1998,” according to the full report, “these camps began hosting ‘Arab volunteers from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, “the Gulf, and Syria.”

Laurie Mylroie asserted that bin Laden had known ties to Iraqi intelligence and that both parties share similar objectives, such as overthrowing the Saudi regime, ending the U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf, and having sanctions against Iraq lifted. (Mylroie, The new war against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks, 2001, p. 252.)

Accordingly, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited Baghdad in 1998 and received a $300,000 pay­ment just before he merged the Egyptian branch ofIslamic Jihad group with al Qaeda. (Frum and Perle, An End to Evil, p. 46.)

Where in part one and two of these series we have seen evidence of Nazi Government links various Governments in the Middle East including Iraq and Iran, according to accounts , a convoluted web of terrorists that includes elements of al Qaeda, Iraqi intelligence, and German neo-Nazis have established a working relationship. In the fall of 2002, investigators with the German government's Office for the Protection of the Constitution re­ported that right-wing extremists and radical Muslims were increasingly using similar rhetoric. They both decry the new world order, which they see as controlled by Jews and enforced by U.S. military power. Both movements are also wary of democracy. Recently, German neo-Nazis have been seen sporting Palestinian headscarves at rallies and calling for worldwide intifada. Also Udo Voigt, the chairman of the National Democratic Party, has reached out to Muslim extremists. (Jeffrey Fleishman, "Shared Hatred Draws Groups Closer," Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2003,
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/019/nation/Shared_hatred_draws_groups_ closerP.shtml. )

Some investigators believe that Hezbollah and Argentinean right-wing extremists may have been responsible for the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1993 and 1994. Jewish institu­tions outside Israel are generally less protected, and local anti-Semitic extremists can provide logistical help for attacks. (Bodansky, Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument, p. 76. )

In 1993, Imad Mughniya of Hezbollah masterminded the truck bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 29 people and wounded over 200 others. This attack was followed by a second bombing on July 18, 1994, which destroyed the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AIMA) building in Buenos Aires, which housed several Argentine Jewish organizations. The attack killed 86 peo­ple and wounded several hundred more.
And some speculate that the Arab and Nazi expatriate communities may have assisted in the attack. (Samuel Katz, Relentless Pursuit: The DSS and the Manhunt for the al-Qaeda Terrorists , 2002, p. 235.)

Although several factors would seem to militate against such an alliance, militant Islamic groups, including al Qaeda, have previously sought to cooperate with non-Islamic militant groups. For example, in Ireland, army intelligence investigated the possibility that funds raised by the Mercy International Relief Agency (MIRA) may have found their way into the coffers of the Irish Republican Army. In Spain, authorities discovered an alleged plan hatched by al
Qaeda and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, or Basque Nation and Liberty) to car-bomb a meeting of leaders of the European Union. In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front was charged with selling millions of dollars worth of illegally mined diamonds to al Qaeda. Finally, in Sri Lanka, the media reported that Liberation Tigers of Tamil had established ties with al Qaeda.

One of the chief obstacles to cooperation would seem to be a disagreement over religion. However, there may be ways in which to hurdle this obstacle. For example, inasmuch as the Koran teaches that Allah sent prophets to all major civilizations, it is conceivable that the extreme right could reconcile some of its beliefs with Islam. (For example, some Muslim scholars have attempted to show that Socrates, Lao-Tzu, Hammurabi, and Zoroaster were
prophets of Allah and thus acceptable to Islam. Yahiya Eme­rick, The Complete Idiots Guide to Understanding Islam, 2002.)

Furthermore, the entry requirements for Islam are rela­tively few in number. Technically, all one need do to become a Muslim is to re­cite the Shahadah: "I declare there is no god except God, and I declare that Muhammad is the messenger of God."One significant difference between right-wing terrorists and the more prominent variants of terrorists (e.g., left-wing during the 1970s, contempo­rary Islamic) is that the former have had no significant state
sponsors. This material and logistical disadvantage could conceivably make the more radical elements of the extreme right more amenable to an alliance with outside groups. Without governments to offer intelligence, funds, sanctuaries, training facilities, and other kinds of support, their effectiveness has been very lim­ited. (Benjamin Netanyahu, Terrorism: How the west Can Win, 1986, p. 13.)

One of the principal reasons terrorism spread from the Middle East and Latin America to Western Europe in the 1970s was that a shared ideology of anti -Americanism and anti-imperialism cemented ties among radical group. (Martha Crenshaw, "Suicide Terrorism in Comparative Perspective," in International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Countering Suicide Terrorism, 2002, p. 22.)

The chief difference today is that the nascent anti-American global movement lacks a powerful state sponsor. However, it is worth noting that most lethal acts of terrorism over the past decade have been perpetrated by groups and individuals unaffiliated with state sponsors. Another very significant difference between right-wing and Islamic terrorists is the latter's propensity for martyrdom. Islamic extremists have demonstrated time and again their
commitment to carry out suicide attacks, whereas such methods are virtually nonexistent among right-wing terrorists, for both logistical and ideological reasons. Alex Curtis praised the exploits of Benjamin Smith, a former member of the World Church of the Creator, who went on a shooting spree that killed two and injured several others. Just before he was about to be apprehended by the police, Smith committed suicide via a gun­shot to the head.
Curtis lauded Smith as an ''Aryan kamikaze" in a subsequent newsletter. (''Aryan Kamikaze Terrorizes Midwest," Nationalist Observer, no. 15 July 1999).

Sophisticated suicide operations require an extensive network capable of support and planning. Islamic terrorists have such a network, but right-wing terrorists do not. Perhaps more important, for Islamic terrorists, dying in a suicide operation is considered an act of martyrdom that will immediately be rewarded with splendid afterlife bliss. Although right-wing extremists have traditionally not practiced suicide terrorism, the theme occasionally appears in
their literature, most notably in William Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries. The conclusion is strikingly similar to the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. The story's protagonist, Earl Turner, writes in his diary just hours before his scheduled attack: It's still three hours until first flight, and all systems are "go." I'll use the time to write a few pages-my last diary entry. Then it's a one-way trip to the Pentagon for me. The warhead is strapped into the front seat of the
old Stearman and rigged to detonate either on impact or when I flip a switch in the back seat. Hopefully, I'll be able to manage a low-level air burst directly over the center of the Pentagon. Failing that, I'll at least try to fly as close as I can before I'm shot down. (William Pierce, The Turner Diaries, 1993, p.
202.)

Not unlike MuhammadAtta, Turner expressed a sense of calm before his mission. It is a comforting thought in these last hours of my physical existence that, of all the billions of men and women of my race who have ever lived, I will have been able to play a more vital role than all but a handful of them in determining the ultimate destiny of mankind. What I will do today will be of more weight in the annals of the race than all the conquests of Caesar and
Napoleon-if! succeed! (Ibid., p. 202.)

Finally, like Atta, Turner shares a sense of religious fellowship with his com­rades. The night before his suicide mission, Turner is inducted into "the Order," the quasi-religious inner circle of the organization: Knowing what was demanded in character and commitment of each man who stood before me, my chest swelled with pride. These were no soft-bellied, conservative businessmen assembled for some Masonic mumbo-jumbo; no loudmouthed, beery red necks letting off a little ritualized steam about "the goddam niggers"; no pious, frightened churchgoers whining for the guidance or protection of an anthropomorphic deity. These were real men, White men who were now one with me in spirit and consciousness as well as in blood. (Ibid., p. 203.)

Where it is known that Arab newspapers often reprint articles written by extreme right activists, there is also evidence to suggest that anti-Semitism has spread to some parts of the non-Arab Muslim World. Even during the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Malaysian prime minister Muhammad Mahathir went so far as to blame this predicament on Jews. The high-powered currency speculator, George Soros, was seen as the chief culprit in adversely affecting
the Malaysian economy. More recently, in a speech presented at an Organization of the Islamic Conference summit in October 2003, Mahathir accused Jews of trying to "rule [the] world by proxy [and] get others to fight and die for them." Further, he asserted that Jews promoted socialism, communism, human rights, and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, and by doing so they have "gained control of the most powerful
countries." Mahathir exhorted the Islamic umma "to face the enemy" and opined that 1.3 billion Muslims could not be "defeated by a few million Jews." ("Speech by Prime Minister Muhammad Mahathir," October 16, 2003, http://www . adl.org/ Anti_semitism/ malaysian.asp.)

Mahathir's remarks were met with scorn by President George Bush, as well as various European governments, however, numerous extreme right groups and Muslims commended him for speaking out on this issue. Defiant, Mahathir reiterated his criticism of Jews and Israel in an interview in May 2005, in which he accused American politicians of being "scared stiff of the Jews because anybody who votes against the Jews will lose elections. (Quoted in Simon Tisdall, ''Father' of Malaysia Savages Bush and Blair," Guardian, May 27,2005.)

Just as Islamists and the extreme right are beginning to find common ground, the gap between the far left and the far right may be narrowing as well. Both movements often decry globalization. Increasingly, they both share a criticism of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. A case in point is the case of Rachel Corrie, an attractive twenty-three-year-old American student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and a member of the International Sol­
idarity Movement, who took a semester off to work as a peace activist in Gaza. While there, she took part in a protest in which an Israel driver using a bull ­dozer was preparing to knock down a Palestinian's house. Corrie stood between the bulldozer and the house and refused to move. However, the Israel driver ran over her, and she sustained injuries from which she ultimately died. De­spite Corrie's presumably left-leaning political orientation, various right
-wing publications and websites eulogized her as an Aryan martyr. What is more, the antiglobalization rhetoric of the contemporary extreme right could conceivably make its agenda more palatable to the far left, which also champions a similar platform, including radical environmentalism and animal rights. In fact, in 2002, the National Alliance created a front group, the Anti-Globalism Action Network (AGAN), to capitalize on the left's opposition to globalist organiza­tions such as the World Bank, G8, and the International Monetary Fund and sent it to Kananaskis, Canada, to protest a G8 meeting. AGAN added an anti­Semitic twist to the traditional left-wing conspiracy narrative. (Center for New Community. "CNC Uncovers Neo-Nazis Masquerading as Anti­Globalization Activists," June 21, 2002, http://newcom.org.)

Extreme right stalwarts, such as Louis Beam, the chief proponent of the leaderless resis­tance approach in the United States, expressed solidarity with anti-World Trade Organization protestors in Seattle. (Reynolds, "Virtual Reich.")

The conflation of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism arises in large part from the relationship between the United States and Israel. The paradox of modern Israel, as Christopher Hitchens argued, is that the state was created to provide a safe, stable, and proudly independent nation to which Jews from around the world could come to escape from fluctuations in gentile goodwill. However, today Israel is largely reliant on foreign aid, most notably the annual subsidy of $3 billion from the United States. Furthermore, the tiny nation appears to be hopelessly involved in endless battles that have the effect of catalyzing anti-Zionist sentiment around the world. Anti-Semitism generated in the lands of the diaspora is weak, but anti-Zionism generated from the Middle East conflict grows strong. Therefore, paradoxically, the "new anti-Semitism" appears to be engendered in large part by the existence of Israel. In recent years, some observers have also noted the parallels between tradi­tional anti-Semitism and the current incarnation of anti Americanism. (Hitchens, "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril," Vanity Fair, September 2002, pp. 194-202.)

But as Waiter Laqueur observed, since the 1960s the American extreme right has been transformed from an ultrapatriotic niovement to one that is increasingly anti­patriotic and nihilistic.( Laqueur, No End to War, 2003, p. 150.) This shift explains how the extreme right could find common cause with anti-American movements such as militant Islam. Both movements see the United States as being under the control of the Jews. It thus follows that with the global rise of American prominence, the Jewish threat ex­tends to the entire world. A new synthesis has been created, centered on the narrative of a U.5.-Israeli alliance. The Israeli-Jewish hand is seen as pulling the strings of the American leviathan. Just as bin Laden has conflated the United States and Israel under the rubric of the "Zionist-crusader" alliance, so has the international extreme right reified the notion of the U.S. government hopelessly
under the control of a Jewish cabal in the phrase "Zionist occupation government," or "ZOG."

For many years, the European extreme right has identified the United States and its pervasive popular culture as an existential threat to the racial, cultural, and spiritual integrity of European civilization. Ahmed Huber wrote an essay in this vein in 1982, titled "The Unknown Islam." In it he identified three principal threats to Islam: Zionism, Marxism, and finally "the American way of life," which was largely a code phrase for "Judaism." Huber commented on a
trend in which anti-Semitism coincided with anti-Americanism: Now the anti-Americanism all over the world, which should be directed at the American government, against Zionist power in America, becomes now a general anti-Americanism. (For Huber see the article by Kevin Coogan, "The Mysterious Achmed Huber: Friend to Hitler, Allah and Ibn Laden" http://coraclesyndicate.org/pub_e/k.coo_e/pubC 05-02_1.html.)

Similarly however, in an audio tape released in October 2003, Osama bin Laden voiced his contempt for the United States, replete with anti-Semitic themes: Some have the impression that you [Americans] are a reasonable people. But the majority of you are vulgar and without sound ethics or good manners. You elect the evil from among you, the greatest liars and the least decent and you are enslaved by your richest and the most influential among you, especially the Jews, who lead you using the lie of democracy to support the Israelis and their schemes and in complete antagonism towards our religion, Islam. ("Bin Laden Calls Americans 'Vulgar and without Sound Ethics,''' al- Jazeera, October 18, 2003, http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage. )

As reported on this website we also observed a similar pattern to the anti-Americanism in Europe in the wake of 9/11. Although anti-Americanism in the media came overwhelmingly from the political left, protests in the streets were almost all sponsored by the extreme right and radical Muslims. (See also:)

Militant Islam and the extreme right both share a strikingly similar critique on several issues. This development has not gone unnoticed by authorities. Dale Watson, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) assistant director for counterterrorism, saw evidence of communication between extremists in the United States and Muslim extremists overseas. (John Solomon, "U.S. Extremists' Links with Terror Groups Watched," Salon. corn, Feb­ruary 28,
2002.)

In recent years however, domestic right-wing extremists appear to be more internationally inclined than they traditionally have been in the past. In the realm of terrorism, such cooperation would make for a very formid­able challenge, if carried out deftly. Islamic terrorists have traditionally been foreign young men of Middle Eastern origin. Despite the pronouncements on the part of authorities that they abhor racial profiling and would not condone its use, the fact remains that young men of Middle Eastern ancestry will tend to make people more suspicious than other population groups, for no other reason than that previous Islamic terrorists shared the same ethnic and religious characteristics. If well-funded Middle Eastern terrorists could enlist the support of terrorists with white, Anglo-Saxon ethnic features, it could present an intelligence nightmare to authorities. Reportedly, al Qaeda has already entertained this scheme. According to a statement by then US. attorney general John Ashcroft in May 2004, al Qaeda was seeking to recruit operatives "who can portray themselves as Europeans."

Also Alfred Schobert, a researcher at the Information Service against Right-Wing Extremism in Duisburg, Germany, made this observation with regard to the situation in Germany. He conceded, however, that some far-right leaders see potential in such an alliance. In order to avoid the intense scrutiny received by travelers from certain Middle Eastern countries, it is believed that al Qaeda is now using operatives from Chechnya, Bosnia, and even Western Europe. Furthermore, some Muslim operatives are believed to have converted to Christianity in order to obscure their backgrounds and allay suspicion.

The U.S. government has warned law enforcement agencies that Islamic extremists, without any formal affiliation with al Qaeda, might carry out terrorist attacks in the United States and overseas. The FBI fears that individuals on the fringes of extremist groups may carry out attacks on their own initiative. Certain events, such as the war on Iraq and increasing tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, could act as catalysts for such attacks. (David Johnston
and James Risen, "Agencies Warn of Lone Terrorists," New York Times, February 23,2003, http://www.nytimes.com. extremists had used right-wing extremist propaganda to augment their anti-Zionist propaganda.)

One major obstacle to any kind of serious collaboration is the fact that in the United States, there is no real right-wing terrorist infrastructure to speak of; lead­erless resistance-actually a sign of desperation-predominates. However the significance of potential collaboration in the area of propaganda should not be blithely dismissed, as conflicts in the future will increasingly revolve around information and communication matters. So-called soft power is im­
portant in an era of globalization. Joseph Nye was the first to distinguish between "hard power" and "soft power." The former consists of traditional measures such as military and economic strength, and the latter includes culture and ideology. Adversaries will emphasize media operations and "perception management" in order to get their side of the story out. As David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla argued, what happens at the "narrative level" is very important to the success of a network:

Networks, like other organizations, are held together by the narratives, or stories that people tell. ... these narratives provide a grounded _expression of people's experiences, interests, and values. First of all, stories express a sense of identity and belonging-who "we" are, why we have come together, and what makes us different from "them." Second, stories communicate a sense of cause, purpose, and mission. The express aims and methods as well as cultural dispositions-what "we" believe in, and what we mean to do, and how. (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror. Crime, and Militancy, 2001, p. 328.)

In fact there have been indications that the United States and the UK are losing the war of ideas, most notably in the Islamic world. A survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in forty-four countries and released in June 2003 found that a significant number of people in the Muslim world would trust Osama bin Laden to "do the right thing regarding world affairs." (Faye Bowers, "Al Qaeda's Profile: Slimmer but Menacing," Christian Science Monitor, September 9, 2003)

It is known that the war in Iraq sent support for the United States to record lows in the Muslim world, and the extreme right is keenly aware of this, so next a more in detailed review.