Quoting Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab–Israeli War of Narratives, pages 37–8:
Boasting a circulation that rose, late in the decade, to 40,000 copies, a third of which were sold in Arab capitals beyond Egypt’s borders, Al‐Risāla provided a forum for some of the most prestigious Egyptian and non‐Egyptian Arab intellectuals of the period: its contributors included ʻAli ʻAbdul‐Rāziq, Ahmad Amīn, ʻAbbās Mahmūd al‐ʻAqqād, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Tāha Hussein, Tawfīq al‐Hakīm,¹⁰ Mahmūd Taymūr, and Sātiʻ al‐Husri.¹¹
[…]
Avoiding the trap into which ultranationalists and religious conservatives fell, it struggled against all forms of the illusion that [the Third Reich] was pro‐Arab because it was anti‐Jewish: Al‐Risāla denounced [German Fascism] “as a ‘white imperialist attack’ on the Semitic peoples, first and foremost against the Arabs and Muslims,”¹³ while assailing the specific form of anti‐Judaism peculiar to [Fascist] anti‐Semitism. Yet all this went hand in hand with fierce denunciation of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.¹⁴
Gershoni insists that Al‐Risāla was in no sense marginal or exceptional: “It was actually the pro‐fascist […] intellectual voices that were peripheral.”¹⁵ He offered further proof a few years later in a study of another […] publication, the Egyptian monthly Al‐Hilāl (The Crescent), which played a key rôle in shaping culture in the Middle East.¹⁶
Like Al‐Risāla, Al‐Hilāl methodically denounced the […] imperialistic and racist nature of [Germanic] and Italian fascism. Gershoni dwells in particular on two essays that appeared in July and August 1933, one about the great mass slaughters of history, the other about anti‐Semitism; Al‐Hilāl warned that the Jews might fall victim to a massacre on a scale with the one that had decimated the Armenians, which it cited as the most terrible in modern history.¹⁷
(Emphasis added.)
…wow.
