Very few Europeans have ever heard of the Mufti of Jerusalem. The same can be said about European Jews. The subject is strictly off limits and is occasionally mentioned in passing. To illustrate this point, in 2009, the Berlin publicly-funded Multicultural Center's (Werkstatt der Kulturen) decided
to remove educational panels of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who was an ally of Adolf Hitler from an exhibit. The organisers "denied that there was an "agreement " reached with the local German-Muslim community to shut down the exhibit".
Jeffrey Herf writes @ The Times of Israel:
[...] Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World drew on
German archives and on the files of the United States Department of
State and US intelligence agencies to present the most extensive
documentation available about the vast Arabic language propaganda radio
broadcasts and printed leaflets that the Nazi regime sent to the Arab
societies during World War II. Husseini played a central role in those
broadcasts. He became world famous at the time for his incitement on the
radio to “kill the Jews” in summer 1942 as Rommel’s Afrika Korps
threatened to overwhelm the British and capture the Jews of pre-state
Palestine.
As the German historians Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin
Cuppers have documented in Nazi Palestine: Plans for the Extermination
of the Jews of Palestine, had the Germans won the Battle of Al Alamein,
an SS Einsatzgruppe was prepared to come to Egypt to carry out mass
murders with techniques that had been perfected on the Eastern Front in
Europe. The record of Husseini’s ranting and raving on Nazi radio was
well documented by American diplomats at the Embassy in wartime Cairo. I
used those thousands of pages of translations when I wrote Nazi
Propaganda for the Arab World. (That work is translated into French,
Italian, Japanese and Spanish but for some strange reason German
publishers in a country famous for “coming to terms with the Nazi past”
have refused to translate the most extensive record of Husseini’s
fulminations against the Jews.) [...]
Though the Prime Minister is thus wrong about
Husseini’s role in the decisions that led to the Holocaust of the Jews
in Europe, he is right to draw attention to Husseini’s disastrous impact
on Palestinian politics and society. In response to the storm of
criticism that greeted his remarks, Netanyahu replied:
My intention was not to absolve
Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the forefathers of
the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called
‘occupation’, without land and without settlements, even then aspired to
systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.
Husseini absolutely wanted to exterminate the Jews, above all, the Jews
of pre-state Palestine, and then the Jews of Israel. The evidence of
Husseini’s pleas to kill the Jews, of his boundless hatred of Judaism as
a religion and the Jews as a people is well documented in Nazi
Propaganda for the Arab World. He embedded his Jew-hatred in his
understanding of Islam as early as a 1937 speech in Syria that the
Germans published in German the following year. In the midst of the
terrorist attacks he led and incited from 1936 to 1939 in Palestine, it
was Husseini who claimed that the Zionists wanted to seize or destroy
the Al Aksa Mosque. This lie became a central element of Palestinian
propaganda over the decades until recent weeks.
On November 5, 1943, Husseini spoke at the
Islamic Institute in Berlin on “Balfour Day,” a day to denounce the
Balfour Declaration. The speech was printed in German and broadcast on
the radio. I examine it in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. He vents
his hatred of the Jews and the British for helping the Zionists. The
Jews, he said, had tormented the world for ages, and have been the enemy
of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence. The Holy Koran expressed
this old enmity in the following words: You will find that those who
are most hostile to the believers are the Jews.’ They tried to poison
the great and noble prophets. They resisted them, were hostile to them,
and intrigued against them. This was the case for 1,300 years. For all
that time, they have not stopped spinning intrigues against the Arabs
and Muslims.
Husseini the Palestinian leader of the war of
1948 and hero to Yasser Arafat and his generation of leaders of the
Palestine Liberation Organization, interpreted Zionism as only the most
recent of this supposed age-old Jewish hostility not only to the
Palestinians or Arabs as modern national groups but also to the religion
of Islam. In the Islamic Institute speech he also referred to a
supposed “Jewish desire” to seize the Islamic holy sites, a desire that
extended to the Al Akas Mosque. Indeed, the Jews, he said, planned “to
build a temple on its ruins.” Haj Amin al-Husseini’s very regrettable
but consequential accomplishment was to fuse secular Arab anti-Zionism
with the Islamist and thus theologically inspired hatred of the Jews and
Judaism. The lies which Mahmoud Abbas and others have told in recent
weeks about Israel’s supposed desire to somehow infringe on the rights
of Muslims to pay at the Al Aksa Mosque have their origins in lies that
are now at least 75 years old.
Prime Minister Netanyahu added the following:
Unfortunately, Haj Amin
al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society. He appears
in textbooks and it is taught that he is one of the founding fathers of
the nation, and this incitement that started then with him, inciting
the murder of Jews – continues. Not in the same format, but in a
different one, and this is the root of the problem. To stop the murders,
it is necessary to stop the incitement. What is important is to
recognize the historical facts and not ignore them, not then and not
today.
Here the Prime Minister is on rock solid
ground. Far from denouncing Husseini for spreading lies, absurd
conspiracy theories and radical anti-Semitism, he has remained a revered
figure in Palestinian political memory. The absurdities for which
Husseini became famous in the 1940s have continued to play a far too
prominent role in the Palestinian political culture ever since. He did
incite others to murder Jews. He did spread ridiculous conspiracy
theories comparable to those of the Nazis. He did all that he could to
help the Nazis in a failing effort to spread the Holocaust to the Middle
East and to win the war in Eurpoe. He left behind a legacy of hatred,
paranoia, religious fanaticism and celebration of terror so long as it
was aimed at Jews and Israelis. The Palestinian authority and Hamas even
more so has kept that legacy is alive and well and fills the heads of
Palestinian teenagers with rubbish that has led to the terror wave of
recent weeks.
The Prime Minister has erred in his
understanding of the timing of Hitler’s decision making but
he is right
about Husseini’s disastrous impact on Palestinian political culture. Read more.
