South Africans have a deep need to know the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organisation of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), which described itself in its 1988 Covenant as "one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine."

This is not possible without understanding the Muslim Brotherhood's close relation with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who recruited Muslims for a branch of the SS after meeting with Adolf Hitler in Berlin on 28 November 1941.

The article below is based on passages from a crucial historical study by David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011), which I've copied out below, giving page references.

As Patterson writes, Hasan al-Banna, an Egyptian, "founded the Muslim Brotherhood (Jam'iyyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) in March 1928 in the presence of other men devoted to the cause....

"From the begnning, the Muslim Brotherhood has proved to be the most successful, must influential of all the modern Islamic Jihadist groups: indeed, it has deep ties with most of the Jihadist organizations operating in the world today. From the beginning, they emulated the Nazis, as Jeffrey Herf has demonstrated: on 23 February 1945, he points out, the British Political Intelligence Centre Middle East issued a report on the Muslim Brotherhood. It found that Hasan al-Banna had 'made a careful study of Nazi and Fascist organizations. Using them as a model, he has formed organizations of specially trained and  trusted men who correspond respectively to the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts. ...'. [Patterson,quoting Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World , Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009. pp.225-26].

"The Brotherhood established relations with Palestine in 1935, when Hasan's brother Abd-al-Rahman al-Banna met with Haj Amin al-Husseini in Jerusalem. Ten years later, after having established killing units of tens of tousands of Muslims for the Nazi SS, al-Husseini would declare, 'I believe in the Muslim Brotherhood as they are the troops of God who shall defeat the troops of Satan.' During the Palestinian revolt of 1936, the Brotherhood carried out propaganda campaigns for the Arab rebels. From 1936 to 1938, its membership rose from 800 to 200,000. By 1948, they numbered about half a million, with at least as many in the Arab world; there were forty thousand in the paramilitary wing alone. ... by 1947, there were some two dozen offices operating in Palestine. By 1952, they had fifty branches in the Sudan, the population of which would later be subjected to Omar al-Bashir's genocidal program of Islamization. Al-Bashir, of course, is a follower of the Ikhwan.

"... For al-Banna, this meant, among other things, liberation 'from all un-Islamic or foreign control, whether political, economic, or ideological', and a complete return to Sharia as the law of the land and ultimately of the world." (pp.64-67)

Al-Banna's most important successor in leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood was his fellow-Egyptian ideologue, Sayid Qutb (1906-1966). Patterson continues: "The aim of Islamic Jihadism, as expressed by its chief ideologue [Sayyid Qutb], is 'to  annihilate all those political and material powers which stand between the people and Islam.' ... (p.79)

"Matthias Kuentzel demonstrates that Qutb saw Hitler as a divine instrument, sent by Allah to punish the Jews. 'In Qutb's eyes, the Jews are to blame for  everything they have suffered over the centuries, and this applies to Hitler and the Shoah too. Thus, in the modern period, "the Jews again returned to evil-doing and consequently Allah ... brought Hitler to rule over them." But even the 'punishment' meted out by Hitler was not sufficiently terrible, since 'once again today the Jews have returned to evil-doing, in the form of "Israel".... So let Allah bring down upon the Jewish people ... the worst kind of punishment.' Qutb's message is internally consistent: the Jew is the source of evil in the world, the Shoah is therefore no crime and Israel deserves to be erased from the map." [Patterson, on p.83, quoting Matthias Kuentzel, Jihad and Jew Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, Telos Press, New York, 2007. p.84)

Citing research by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothman, Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the the Rise of Radical Islam (Random House, New York, 2008. p.60), Patterson quotes them as stating that "in consultation with the Mufti [al-Husseini], the Nazi leadership had created a special Einsatzgruppe Egypt, a mobile SS squad distinct from Einsatzgruppe Afrika, under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann, which was to carry out the mass murder of Palestinian Jewry." (Patterson, p.117)

Patterson quotes the following passage from al-Husseini's post-war memoirs, written following the defeat of Nazi Germany after al-Husseini had escaped from France to Egypt and later Lebanon: "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.' " 

Patterson concludes this passage: "Once again we discover the tie that binds National Socialism to Islamic Jihadism, both as influence and as affinity: it is exterminationist Jew hatred." On al-Husseini's arrival in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood "gave him a hero's welcome. ... Within a week of his arrival in Cairo, he met with Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, thus demonstrating again his intimate ties with the Ikhwan, a point that is crucial to an understanding of the genealogy of this evil. Said al-Banna, 'The Mufti is worth the people of a whole nation put together. The Mufti is Palestine and Palestine is the Mufti.' 

"Herf's interpretation: 'Husseini was continuing the same struggle that Hitler and Germany - and Husseini himself - had been waging during the war.' In 1946, the mufti took in Yasser Arafat [later the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation - PT], whose mother was the daughter of Husseini's first cousin, as his protege and brought in a former Nazi commando officer to teach Arafat 'the fine points of guerrilla warfare.' ... Thus we see how the intricate web linking the Nazis to the Muslim Brotherhood and to the Palestine Liberation Organization finds its nexus in Haj Amin al-Husseini.

"In 1948, the Mufti played an active role in the Arabs' attempt to destroy the Jewish state." (pp.120-22)

In addition to this never-ending jihad against Jews, David Patterson notes also "the Muslims' slaughter of the Armenians in the Armenian genocide and the genocide perpetrated by the Muslims in the Sudan." (p.79)

Through Amin al-Husseini's participation in Nazi Germany's genocide against Jews, it is the Muslim Brotherhood that links the Islamist massacre of Jews by Hamas on October 7 last year - leading to Israel's self-defensive war in Gaza and against Hezbollah based in Lebanon - with the Arab Islamist slaughter of black Africans in Sudan under Omar al-Bashir, a loyal supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, now continuing under two of al-Bashir's former military commanders.