Matthias Küntzel (born 1955) is a German political scientist and historian. He was an external research associate at the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 2004 to 2015. Currently, he is a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations DGAP and of the advisory board of UANI (United Against Nuclear Iran).

From 1984 to 1988, Küntzel served as a senior advisor for the German Green Party caucus in the Bundestag. He was member of the Communist League (Kommunistischer Bund, KB) and part of the Anti-Germans movement. After the KB split in 1991, he belonged to the Anti-German editorial minority, which thereafter called itself Gruppe K and published the Bahamas magazine. Between 1992 and 2021 he held a tenured part-time position as a teacher of political science at a technical college in Hamburg, Germany.

In 1991, he received his doctorate in Political Science at the University of Hamburg. His thesis Bonn & the Bomb. German Politics and the Nuclear Option (London: Pluto Press) was published in English in 1995.

Since 2001, his main field of research and writing have been anti-Semitism in current Islamic thinking, Islamism, Islamism and National Socialism, Iran, German and Western policies towards the Middle East and Iran. His essays and articles have been translated into sixteen languages and published inter alia in The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, The Weekly Standard, Telos, Policy Review, The Jerusalem Post, Der Standard, Spiegel Online, Die Welt, Die Zeit and Internationale Politik.

In 2003, he delivered the keynote address at the "Conference on "Genocide and Terrorism – Probing the Mind of the Perpetrator". 20 March 2003. at Yale University. In 2005, he discovered antisemitic tracts at the Iranian stands at the Frankfurt Book Fair, an incident he wrote about in the Wall Street Journal. In 2007, he co-founded the German section of the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and was a member of its board until March 2013. According to its own statement, SPME aims to counter antisemitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism through “information and persuasion work” conducted over the long term.

In 2007, Telos Press (New York, NY) published his book Jihad and Jew-Hatred. Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. In 2008, he presented "Jihad and Jew-Hatred in the USA" at numerous universities (Stanford University, Columbia University, UCLA, UC-Santa Cruz, UC-Irvine, SUNY-Buffalo, University of Maine, and the Cooper Union). The book was criticized by Gilbert Achcar as "a fantasy-based narrative pasted together out of secondary sources and thirdhand reports; it aims to demonstrate that there is a direct line of descent from Amin al-Husseini and Hassan al-Banna through Gamal Abdel-Nasser to Osama bin Laden." Alexander Flores has critiqued the book for lacking context about Palestinians' relationship to Zionism: "he draws a grotesquely distorted picture of the general strike and subsequent rebellion of the Palestinians from 1936 to 1939. According to this picture, the rebellion was brought about by the machinations of the mufti who just followed his lust for power and his anti-Semitic leanings and who already at that time colluded with the Nazis. The real background of the revolt, the Palestinians' apprehension at enhanced Jewish immigration, accelerated Zionist upbuilding and the possible loss of their homeland, is absent from this picture."

Jeffrey Goldberg reviewing the book in the New York Times called it a "bracing, even startling, book" and an "invaluable contribution" about an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred. "Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. [...] Küntzel marshals impressive evidence to back his case, but he sometimes oversimplifies."

He also spoke at conferences organized inter alia by the American Enterprise Institute, the Israel Project, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and at the "Global Forum For Combating Antisemitism" at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He participated in an international academic workshop on "Antisemitism in the 21st Century: Manifestations, Implications and Consequences", organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Museum. In December 2008, Küntzel’s criticism of the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism triggered a controversy over the equation of hostility toward Jews with hostility toward Muslims.