Abraham Lincoln is spared a Hitler comparison in the book.
But in a panel discussion two years after the book’s publication, he argued Lincoln’s policy of “herd[ing] American Indians” into reservations was an “inspiration” to the Nazis, according to a report by Fox News which covered the event.
Hitler ‘studied US genocides’
According to Prof Mamdani, Hitler took his cue for the Holocaust from the US’ treatment of Native Americans, where he found “proof” the Nazi project could succeed.
The US is the “outcome of a history of genocide, ethnic cleansing, official racism, and concentration camps,” he asserts. “Nazi Germany followed a similar path in the construction of the German nation.”
Hitler, following the ideas of Roosevelt among others, “studied” the treatment of Native Americans, and would adopt “the eugenic justifications of genocide that Americans promoted at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th”.
Even today, Prof Mamdani claims, the US maintains a colony through its Native American reservations, though he concedes that “even Indian activists” and “scholars of indigeneity fail to see this”.
Just as Nazi Germany was inspired by the US, Israel is said to have the same “nationalist ideology” as the Third Reich.
“Zionists created a Jewish state in Palestine so that Jews, too, could have their rightful homogenous nation-state,” he writes.
Reagan ‘launched American jihad’
In Prof Mamdani’s telling, the roots of the 9/11 attack lie decades before Osama bin Laden finally signed off on the plans for the most devastating terrorist attack in history in 1999.
More than 2,700 people were killed in New York after the American Airlines and United Airlines flights hit the World Trade Centre, and hundreds more were killed in attacks on the nation’s capital.
According to Prof Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, it was the consequence of the US having spent the previous 40 years backing terror groups abroad as a means to wear out the Soviet Union and topple the states aligned with it.
