Meet Today’s Frontpage Magazine Pseudo-Academic Character Assassin, Jeffrey Herf

The Frontpage Magazine Neo-Commissariat continues to belch forth calumniating screeds against a serious journalist, and researcher, Diana West.

Today’s screedwriter was Jeffrey Herf, a pseudo-historian whose alleged specialty is “Germany,” and recently, in particular, the supposed “Nazification” of Islam.

He was a major promoter of the idiotic, counterfactual “Kuntzel hypothesis”—a debunking of which you can still read at Frontpage (hurry before they take it down now that I am defending one of the Frontpage “Untermentschen,” Diana West)

Of course like Kuntzel, he went about this with the same level of pseudo-academic charlatanism.

If you look at “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism” I demonstrated this briefly in a footnote, reproduced below.

Herf who is a respected German translator failed to translate the writings of von Leers in a manner that reflected their important contents, or context. In Sharia Versus Freedom I further included discussion of a full pious Muslim-perspective treatise on jihad that von Leers wrote in 1942-43, which I arranged to get out of captured German archives held in Russia, and have translated. Got that? I obtained these vaunted “primary source documents,” not the pseudo-academic Herf. They confirmed Leer’s Islamic reverence which, in fact,  dated back to the early 1930s—twenty years before he converted to Islam, in Egypt, his conversion being overseen by Hajj Amin el-Husseini.

Leers adopted the name—as I, not Herf—documented in a primary source letter of Leers I obtained from the Hoover Inst (written to a US Nazi H. Keith Thompson, who, in turn donated his papers to the Hoover)—“Omar Amin von Leers,” in “honor” of both his friend Hajj Amin, andCaliph Omar (“Rightly Guided” Caliph # 2), the latter because Leers dubbed Caliph Omar, appropriately, as per the hadith, “a bitter enemy of the Jews”!

Zilch/NadaA/None of this and more appears in Herf’s “oeuvre” as of 2006—and he was supposed to be the “expert scholar.”

p. 205, Note 939b. “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism”, 2008: Johann von Leers, “Judentum und Islam als Gegensatze,” Die Judenfrage in Politik, Recht, and Wirtschaft 6, no. 24 (December 24, 1942): 275–78. A full translation of this essay by Steven Rendall (“Judaism and Islam as Opposites”) is provided in part 8. I first learned of this essay by von Leers while reading Joel Fishman, “The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel: From Inversion of the Truth to Inversion of Reality,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, July 29, 2007, http://bit.ly/akBijj;  Fishman, in turn cited Jeffrey Herf, “The Jewish Enemy—Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust” (Cambridge, MA: 2006), pp. 180–81, as his source. Herf included a very limited English translation extract of von Leers’s conclusions. Oddly, Herf made no mention of von Leers’s subsequent conversion to Islam,and was also oblivious to the Nazi author’s thorough grounding in, and accurate representation of, the pious Muslim sources (i.e., Qur’an, hadith, and sira). Fishman, in contrast, did make note of von Leers’s conversion to Islam.

 

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