‘You are from Europe? Ah, Hitler!” The young Islamist—he couldn’t have been older than 25—flashed two thumbs up at me with a smile.
“You like Hitler?” I asked, taken aback. With his dark-green fatigues and wispy facial hair, he looked more like a Cuban revolutionary than a Hezbollah militant. His colleague beside him had the same face and moustache as Che Guevara.
“Yes, of course. He killed the yahood.”
“And you, you like Hitler?”
It was a question I’ve never been asked before.
Best not to reveal that the führer had killed a good portion of my family precisely because they were yahood. I was, after all, on this fellow’s turf.
“Well, Hitler tried to invade my country. I’m not so keen.”
“My country” being England, which suddenly felt twice as far away than it already was.
