The fact is that Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, and the late Yassir Arafat all embrace the Third Reich. ~Mark Levin, a.k.a., El Guapo

Levin links to sites that tell us that, well, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem cavorted with Nazis back when, which everyone knows and which everyone also can see does not tell us much, much less does it prove that all these people “embrace the Third Reich.”  With Arafat, it is at least possible, and with the Baathists there are better reasons to at least associate them with fascism (see below).  But Ahmadinejad?  I know lots of people here like to talk as if he were the new Hitler, but that does not mean that he himself embraces the regime or legacy of Hitler.  There is a lot of sloppy thinking going on out there.  Since Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust happened, and it is fairly clear that he despises Jews, why would he particularly feel obliged to embrace a regime that, according to his revisionism, didn’t engage in in the mass murder of Jews?  Somewhere along here there is a problem.  Why we need to link all of these people to the Third Reich baffles me; presumably the crimes and villainies of most of these people are already proof enough that they are appalling people, are they not?  

How old Osama has anything to do with admiring the Third Reich, we will never know.  It is quite one thing to say that jihadis are totalitarian and use the same methods of violence and an ethic that the ends justify the means–all of which I grant you without a fight–and another to say that these people “embrace the Third Reich,” as if they were members of the NDP sitting around singing Nur der Freiheit gehoert unser Leben and thinking wistfully on the New Order that might have been.  In fact, from everything we think we know about him, Osama pines for the good old days of Cordoba and the Caliphate and probably does not give a thought to the ideology of a failed secular Western megalomaniac–unless he could find in it some useful rhetorical point to use against us.  The people who seem more preoccupied with the legacy of said megalomaniac are people who write political commentary in this country.  They need to turn off the History Channel and pick up a book about, oh, I don’t know, Venice or maybe the history of salt.  Then we could hear them make equally inane comparisons between Osama and Enrico Dandolo, which would be just as stupid but might be more entertaining. 

Baathism does have certain similarities to fascism–the only “Islamic fascists” in the world are arguably secular Baathists, who are Islamic mostly in name only, and not the Islamists who want them dead–and builds on similar ideas of combining nationalism and socialism.  Baathism’s main origins lie in Arab nationalism and socialism.  The name of the party (Renewal) does suggest a palingenetic drive for restoration, which Stanley Payne has identified as an important element in fascist ideologies, but many other kinds of revolutionary ideologies use the same sort of language (“new birth of freedom” ring any bells?).  But as was made clear time and time again before the war Hussein’s “role model,” so to speak, was Stalin, not Hitler.  That doesn’t say much for Hussein’s taste in role models, but it does suggest that the pervasive desire to link the present fight against al Qaeda, jihadis or just Bad Guys in the Near East as a struggle against the Sons of Nazism is more than a little deranged.