Eating the Soup We Have Cooked

Our Swedish correspondent LN sends his translation of a program on Swedish State Radio, and includes this introductory note:

The following text was read today (May 4) at 13:45 by its author, Margareta Flygt, a freelance cultural journalist with a background as an editor and translator, on the culture program OBS of the Swedish State Radio P1.

You can listen to and read about it here.

The topic is the book Eine Moschee in Deutschland: Nazis, Geheimdienste und der Aufstieg des politischen Islam im Westen (“A Mosque in Germany: Nazis, Intelligence Services, and the Rise of Political Islam in the West”) by Stefan Meining.

Many thanks to LN for the following translation:

How Munich became the center for Islamic terrorists

Eine Moschee in DeutschlandThe United States’ intelligence services spent more than a decade trying to capture Osama bin Laden, following the terrorist attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Saalam.

Now they have succeeded, Osama bin Laden’s body has been lowered into the sea, and in newspapers and on the Internet it is speculated whether the world has become a safer place.

Looking back it is possible to detect many different times and places where things happened and that in one way or another pointed toward various future terrorist crimes.

One such place, which is important for our understanding of how the European militant Islam has emerged, is in Munich, according to the German TV journalist and historian Stefan Meining.

He has written the book Eine Moschee in Deutschland.

Margareta Flygt has read it.

[The above was spoken by the introducer.]

On my last visit to Munich, I drank a cocktail at “Schumann’s” on the Odeon Platz. Here the members of the in-crowd meet and rub shoulders with one another. Few of them know that Islamic history was written here.

In 1960 seven men met at the restaurant which was then only a simple Wienerwald chicken barbecue. They founded the so called “Mosque Construction Commission”. It was then that the German and European Islamist network was born, according to the author Stefan Meining. Almost all Islamic terrorism in the West, he says, has some connection with the Munich mosque.

How did Munich become a center for Islamic terrorists? Well, says Stefan Meining, it is a story that begins as early as 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Nationalist Muslims from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan, whose countries had been forcibly incorporated in Stalin’s Soviet Union, joined the Nazi Turkish Infantry Division and the SS. Originally they were not anti-Semites, or Hitler supporters; they just wanted to get their countries back. The Nazis made use of this.

After the war, high-ranking Nazis and SS men who had knowledge of the Eastern Bloc were recruited by the government of the German Federal Republic.

The former yet convinced Nazis Theodor Oberländer became “Minister for expelled people” and Gerhard von Mende head of the “Büro für heimatvertriebene Ausländer” (“Office of Expelled Foreigners”). None of them were prosecuted after the war, but were instead rewarded for their knowledge. Von Mende committed/used Muslim combatants in his espionage activities against the Soviet Union and they also worked for the U.S. Radio Free Europe in Munich.

The Muslim Soviet exiles in Munich were living a Western life; religion was not as important to them as their nationalism and hatred of the Soviets. Both von Mende and the mosque-building commission had approached radical key personnel in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Algeria, and Egypt. Mende sought help in his anti-communist activities, and the Commission attempted to get both support and money.

Since the Muslim Brotherhood was banned in Egypt, its members made their way to Europe. They were openly accepted in Europe, and with CIA help also in the USA. When the Islamic center was opened in Munich in 1973, with mosque, schools, dormitories, daycare and community centers, this radical group wanted to take over. The power struggle was between the previously appointed Nurredin Namangani, a gulag survivor and a former imam of an SS division, and the new Saudi Arabian and Egyptian Islamists under the charismatic Said Ramadan, son-in-law of Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. [Said was also the father of the Swiss “philosopher” Tariq Ramadan. — BB]

That the young newcomers and skilled doctors, lawyers and engineers won against the older, often poorly educated Muslims from the Soviet Union, is not surprising. Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt supported the building of the mosque, but the final decisive contribution was made by none other than Libya’s Muammar Al-Ghaddafi.

No single German journalist and politician reflected on what was said or written at the center. No one realized the implications of what radical opinions could cause, and I simply believe that no one took these people seriously. Muslims did not count for very much; it was believed that they were Western puppets.

But everybody used everybody else. Islamists saw an opportunity to establish political Islam in Europe, old German anti-Semites breathed fresh air, and the CIA gave support to everything anti-communist. Slowly and persistently, the European Islamist network was built up without influence from the outside. Many of the now internationally-known Islamists began their careers in Munich.

One of those who were preparing the terrorist attacks of September 11 was Ghaleb Himmat, a former leader of the “Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland” (“Islamic Community of Germany”). Himmat was one of those who sat at the restaurant in 1960 and took part in the planning of building a mosque in Munich. Today he is a central figure of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is important to point out: most Muslims in Germany do not know anything about — and have nothing to do with — the history of the mosque in Munich. They also have been misled by radical Islamists.

Eine Moschee in Deutschland is not a speculative book, but it suggests how Islamic terrorist groups have been able to grow strong in Europe, and above all it is a settling of accounts with Germany’s irresponsibility in the postwar period. Nazis and anti-communists could affect postwar politics on a scale that has had devastating consequences. It is a bitter lesson of overconfidence in oneself. It is now, as they say in German, that we must eat the soup we have cooked.

5 thoughts on “Eating the Soup We Have Cooked

  1. Excellent post, a key piece in the jigsaw. Thanks.
    Munich seems an accursed place: rise of the Nazi party 1933, the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Olympics. Now the blacks who made the black power salutes at the athletics, as a comment on the nazis views on Africans, have joined the national socialists in their Jew/Christian hating jihad.

  2. Margareta Flygt makes the following sweeping claim about the “Nationalist” Muslims of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan in the 1940s:

    “Originally they were not anti-Semites, or Hitler supporters; they just wanted to get their countries back.”

    On what basis does she know that these Muslims were not antisemitic? From everything we know (or should know) about Muslims anywhere, their cultural programming, based in religious fanaticism encoded by their religious texts both of the Koran and the Sunnah, positively dictates antisemitism as part of their worldview.

    Secondly, there is no such thing as a “nationalist” Muslim. The concept of “nationalism” is modern Western, has nothing to do with Islam. What we have had are Muslims who opportunistically use nationalism as a tool by which to advance Islam the only way they can, given their astronomical geopolitical inferiority relative to the global hegemony enjoyed by the modern West in the last two or three centuries

  3. USA – our twinkling light in a dark universe
    (ok-but this one works!)
    http://tinyurl.com/earlybeginning

    Goethe already knew to be careful in the long run with the spirits he called, otherwise they will be out of control. In view of fundamentalistic violent Islam, this has already been demonstrated. The enemy of our enemy is our friend the intelligence agencies have declared over and over again when they wanted to fight communism with Islamists.

    It all started in 1941. The Nazis fabricated auxiliary troops out of Soviet prisoners of war. Many of them were Muslims and of these the Eastern Ministry expected a lot. So a certain Gerhard von Mende [Latvian-born Turkic-studies professor. Served in Nazis’ “Ostministerium” during World War II, where he championed the Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union who had been conquered by the Germans. After the war, aided and monitored the former Soviet Muslims living in Germany. Died in Duesseldorf in 1963] came to power and like many others he did not lose his importance at the end of Nazi domination.

    After the war and in the fifties, soldiers, worn out Nazi bureaucrats and other elderly gentlemen, displaced officials, intelligence agents, Muslims who had bee engaged by the Wehrmacht and the SS fighting against the Soviet Union, collected in Munich, where a nucleus of political Islam in the West was germinating. They should now help the CIA to create unrest in the eastern Soviet republics. Many of the former Muslim army soldiers who remained in Munich formed a community that wanted to build a mosque.

    With the help of what we call freedom, seven Muslims in 1960 in a Munich restaurant, established the “Islam community in Germany”. But they also intended to build that mosque. The building of the so-called “fourth mosque” in Munich was finished in 1973. It bears this name because, as U.S. author Ian Johnson in 2003 accidentally discovered, on an Islamic map of the world, it was, next to the mosques in Mecca, Jerusalem and Istanbul, the most important mosque in the world.

    Turkish guest workers were not allowed to join the Mosque Building Association, the membership of the club was rejected. When the mosque was opened, they were allowed in to use the prayer room , but were excluded from all other mosque activities. And then it finally happened: The Egyptian fundamentalistic Muslim Brotherhood totally infiltrated the Munich Mosque community – and was in turn of course pampered by the German state. So the Islamism in Germany and Europe was established – starting from Munich – and government supported.

    Anather book about the 4:th mosqu was witten by the US auther Ian Johnson: http://www.ian-johnson.com/mosqueinmunich.html

    If you are interested in the subjekt it certainly pays off
    to visit the links!

    Here is som early material by Mr Jonson:
    Part one,
    http://tinyurl.com/6du7ztj
    Part two,
    http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05193/536684.stm
    – – – – – –
    More Johnson material
    http://www.moralgroup.com/NewsItems/Islam/p20.htm

    US secret connections withe the Muslim Brotherhood
    http://tinyurl.com/brotherhoodplusus

    Mr Johnsons book at:
    http://books.google.com
    – – – – –
    http://tinyurl.com/globalislam

    http://tinyurl.com/islamicfascism

    http://tinyurl.com/6x4fsra

    http://tinyurl.com/azbfsz

    http://tinyurl.com/yjuerol

  4. I guess my comment was swallowed by an overambitious spam-filter –
    or I might be censored by Google that does not like my nick.
    My comment was tidy, no n- or other forbidden words, but a lot of most interesting and rather rare links.

    Hello BB, please redeem me!

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