You are referring to Fox News on 24 February 2009, wherein Glenn Beck interviewed Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker facing possible jail for anti-Islamic remarks. Wilders has since come out for banning the Koran in Holland as a “fascist book.”

BECK: I just have to give you this quote and get your thoughts…. “The fact that in Mohammedan Law, every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property either as a child, a wife, or concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.” Pretty outrageous stuff.

WILDERS: Yes.

BECK: You didn’t say that, though.

WILDERS: I didn’t say that, no.

BECK: No. Winston Churchill said that.

WILDERS: Yes. And Winston Churchill, as a matter of fact, in a book in the Fifties, also made a comparison, like Oriana Fallaci in Italy but also Winston Churchill, the comparison between Mein Kampf and the Koran. One of the reasons that I’m being prosecuted. I don’t remember Winston Churchill, who got a Nobel Prize for this book, [being] prosecuted.

Some Confusions

Beck was accurate in his Churchill quotation (“The fact that in Mohammedan law…”), but the transcript suggests it was a recent remark. Actually it is from Churchill’s The River War (London: Longmans Green, 2 vols., 1899), II: 248-50. It was among the many deleted passages for the one-volume abridged text, published in 1901 and in print ever since.

On Churchill’s comparison of Mein Kampf to the Koran, Wilders may have read a concurrent review in The Washington Times of my book, Churchill by Himself. The reviewer was quoting from page 55 of Churchill by Himself, under “Mein Kampf and the Koran.” Churchill wrote of Mein Kampf:

All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message. —Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 43.

Wilders had the date wrong (it was 1948, not the Fifties), and of course the quote takes on added significance in the light of 9/11. Also, Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for the totality of his historical and biographical writings and speeches—not for his war memoirs, which were not complete when he received the Prize.

Addendum, 2019

In the first version of this post ten years ago, I said Churchill was “referring to Mein Kampf as an article of faith, like the Koran, but he could as easily have said the Bible.” In the light of Mr. Trott’s comment below and further research, I think I was mistaken. When Churchill called Mein Kampf a “new Koran of faith and war” he chose his words precisely.

Google <Mein Kampf and the Koran> and you will find several articles asserting that the latter influenced the author of the former. The scholar IQ al-Rassooli notes a direct reference by Hitler to his architect, Albrecht Speer, in a 2018 article, “Kuran & Mein Kampf.” Hitler, Speer wrote, thought Islam more suited to he “Germanic temperament than the Jewish filth and priestly twaddle of Christianity”…

Hitler would say: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” [1]

This does not however mean that Churchill ever compared Nazis to Muslims, and Wilders’ implication that he did was inaccurate.

Footnote

[1] Albrecht Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard Winston, Clara Winston, Eugene Davidson (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 143; Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 96.