Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2009] DEFEAT, RAGE, AND JEW HATRED 109
mately to pay with their lives for the monumental, and indeed cowardly,
evasion of responsibility by Germany’s World War I military leadership in
seeking to preserve their “honor.” In his Political Testament, written on
April 30, 1945, the day before he killed himself, Hitler persisted in that
evasion. “It is untrue,” he claimed, “that I or anyone else in Germany
wanted the war in 1939.” On the contrary, “It was desired and instigated
exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish
descent or worked for Jewish interests.” 58 From 1919 to 1945, a rageobsessed
Adolf Hitler gave powerful expression to that emotion for himself
and his followers. His rage unappeased even by genocide and his own
Endkampf, Hitler concluded his testament by charging “the leaders of the
nation and those under them . . . to merciless opposition to the universal
poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.” To the bitter end, Hitler saw
himself as the innocent victim of those who had conspired to bring him and
Germany down.
DEFEAT AND MUSLIM RAGE
Like the rage of Hitler and the German ultra-right, the rage of contemporary
Islamists and their fellow travelers against Jews, Zionism, America,
and, ultimately, the entire Western world, has its roots in military defeat. In
the case of rage against the West, the roots can be found in the Battle of
Lepanto (1571), the lifting of the Ottoman siege of Vienna by the Polish
King Jan III Sobieski on September 12, 1683, and the Treaty of Karlowitz
(1699). At Karlowitz, the Ottomans signed a peace treaty for the first time
on terms “basically determined by their victorious enemies.” 59 The treaty
set the pattern of Muslim retreat and defeat that continued until the middle
of the twentieth century.
As noted above, no defeat visited upon Muslims by unbelievers has
ever been as deeply offensive to Muslim honor as the twin defeats inflicted
upon the Arabs in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and the Six-Day
War of 1967. This has been cogently expressed by the Israeli historian
58. Adolf Hitler, “My Political Testament,” United States, Office of United
States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and
Aggression (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946-1948), vol. VI, 259-
63, Doc. No. 3569-PS, http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1945/450429a.html.
59. On Lepanto, see Michael Novak, “Remembering Lepanto: A Battle not Forgotten,”
National Review Online, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWVhYWJ
mMDJlNzQwZWFhYWViM2FmNjE3MDY3MjZmZWQ=#more (November 18,
2008); on the Siege of Vienna and the Treaty of Karlowitz, see Bernard Lewis, The
Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (New York: Scribner, 1995),
276-77.