Haj Amin Husseini, who was appointed by the British High Commissioner as Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate for Palestine, was the link for managing the recruitment of Arab fighters to the Nazi army, the Saudi newspaper Okaz reported in an article published on Friday.
The Nazi Ikhawn (Brothers),” the article refers to the close connections between the Muslim Brotherhood leaders and the Nazis. Saudi Arabia formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization in 2014 and banned it in the kingdom.
The Mufti meeting Hitler in 1941
Relations between Saudi Arabia and Hamas, an offshoot of Muslim Brotherhood, have been strained in the past few years. Last year Hamas accused the Saudi authorities of arresting several of its prominent figures and members in the kingdom. Husseini, who was the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, contributed with his friend and leader Hassan al-Banna, the founder of Muslim Brotherhood, to recruiting a Muslim Brotherhood army of Egyptians and Arabs, gathered from orphanages and poor rural areas, to work under the Nazi army led by Adolf Hitler,” the newspaper said in an article written by its assistant editor-in-chief, Khalid Tashkandi.
According to Tashkandi, the number of Arabs recruited by Husseini and Muslim Brotherhood was estimated at 55,000, including 15,000 Egyptians. The Saudi editor said there were a number of reasons why the Nazis were interested in Islam.
“On the one hand, the Nazis were aware that the oppression of Muslims in a number of Islamic areas under occupation and colonial powers would facilitate the recruitment,” he said. “On the other hand, the Nazis saw the Muslims as stiff fighters ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their faith.”
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This article by Mattias Kunzel, asking why a Palestinian state was not founded at the same time as Israel, demonstrates how the Palestinian Mufti, crushing his opponents and defying the best interests of his people, dragged the Arab League states into declaring war against the Jewish state in 1948. The Palestinian leadership must therefore be held accountable for the ramifications and consequences of this war.
The Arab leaders rejected the partition decision, at least in public. However, the question of whether the UN decision should be crushed using regular armies remained controversial to the end.
While Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and the allied Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, campaigned for militant jihad against the Jews in Palestine, Egypt and Saudi Arabia still refused military intervention in December 1947. The Arab League followed this stance in the same month.
It agreed to establish recruitment centers for guerrilla volunteers in Palestine. However, it viewed "the struggles in Palestine as a civil war, which it would only intervene in with regular forces if foreign armies attacked the country and enforced partition by force," Abd al-Rahman Azzam, secretary general, declared in February1948.
There were several good reasons to shy away from a Palestine war: First, the United Nations decision was unusually well founded. In April 1947, for example, a debate over Palestine in the UN plenary for several weeks had begun. On May 14, the penultimate day, Andrej Gromyko, the then Soviet UN delegate and later foreign minister, campaigned for the partition of Palestine. (...)
One reason was that in 1947 tens of thousands of them had found work in Jewish-dominated economic sectors, such as the citrus fields. Secondly, the military strength of the Zionists was known. "Most Palestinian Arabs," noted Ben Gurion in February 1948, "refused and still refuse to be drawn into the war." In his study Army of Shadows, Hillel Cohen provides examples of the tenacity with which Palestinian Arabs oppose their leaders' calls for war and make non-aggression pacts with the Jews around them, or even support Jewish defences.
But why did the war, which was so devastating for both sides, take place anyway? Why did the most radical one, Haj Amin el-Husseini's, prevail at a time when various answers to the partition decision still seemed possible? The die was cast in June 1946. That month, el-Husseini, who had been in French custody since May 1945 and was supposed to be a war criminal, arrived in Cairo. At the same time, the Arab League met in the Syrian resort of Bludan. There it made a grave decision: The Arab representative bodies in Palestine that had existed up to that point were quickly dissolved and replaced by a new Arab Higher Committee headed by Amin el-Husseini.
Opponents of the Mufti, who had previously organized under the name Arab Supreme Front , were denied participation in the Arab Higher Committee. "The Bludan 'dictation' was a complete victory for the Mufti," emphasizes the Mufti biographer Joseph Schechtman. David Thomas Schiller speaks of "a takeover, a coup d'état".
Although Amin al-Husseini was not even allowed to enter Palestine on instructions from the Egyptian authorities, this league decision enthroned him as the new leader of the Palestinian Arabs and gave him access to a £ 10,000 annual budget. This transfer of power had consequences for the Jews: the leadership of the Mufti was like a declaration of war against the Yishuv - the community of Jews in Palestine.
Al-Husseini's alliance with Hitler and his active participation in the Holocaust were well known. It also had ramifications for the Arabs: By its decision (to go to war), the Arab League had destroyed any approach to Palestinian politics that was independent of the Mufti. This is how countless Arabs experienced a déjà vu between 1946 and 1948: As in the period between 1936 and 1939, the Mufti once again established a terror regime against dissenters. Whoever wanted to grant the Jews rights or otherwise deviate from the doctrines of the Mufti stood with one foot in the grave.
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"the pro-Nazi Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem"
ReplyDeleteHe was not merely pro-nazi. He was an active collaborator in the German war effort and in the Shoah. See links below:
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2011/11/seventy-years-since-arab-mufti-haj-amin.html
1914 - April: Falastin newspaper banned by the Ottoman authorities for inciting "race hatred."
ReplyDelete1920-21: Mohammed Amin [al-Husayni] Al Husseini instigates to bloody violence, becomes the Mufti.
1921 - April: the British gave permission for the periodical to be reinstrated. Preceeding the May-1921 riots.
1929: following the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni incitement, attacks begin on Jerusalem Jews, atrocious Hebron massacre: mass rape, slaughter in beasty brutality, mutilations. Victims: non-Zionist pious Jews.
1929-1939: The Mufti de facto controls 'Falastin' newspaper.
1933-1946: major Arab newspapers, by-in-laege, overall, praise the Axis.
ReplyDelete1933 - March 31, 1933: some 2 months after Hitler’s elected, the Mufti meets the German Consul, congratulates on Hitler's win and that the Arabs are with the Nazis against democracies.
1933 - October: Eissael Bendek, member of the Arab Executive's Administrative Bureau, to direct a propaganda campaign in the interests of the Nazi Party.
1933-4: Istiqlal al-Difa'a became a fascist propaganda pamphlet.
1934 - June: the formation of an Arab Nazi Youth Organization.
1935: Istiqlal, reorganized, goes pro Nazi propaganda, according to Templars' paper March 15. And that many Arabs saw Hitler as the most important man of the 20th century.
1935: there is a special interest by Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in Arabic translation.
1935 - March: the Mufti with Jamal Husseini, establish the Futuwwah modeled on Hitler youths. It connected other Arab youths groups outside the area.
1935 - May: When delegates returned from an Arab youth conference in Haifa, their train to Afula bore a swastika chalked on one of the coaches with an Arabic inscription beneath it reading "Germany over All."
1935 - June: Arabs in Haifa form Nazi club, well funded by the Nazis.
1935 - September: After Hitler proclaimed the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935, a number of Palestinians sent telegrams congratulating him.
1935 - December 9: Falastin newspaper especially idealized Hitler.
1935 - 1941: pan-Arab al-Muthanna club, founded by Saib Shawkat and Taha al-Hashimi.
Yunis al-Sab'awi (يونس السبعاوي) (who translated Hitler's book Mein Kampf into Arabic in the early 1930s) was active in it. Syrian and Palestinian teachers (noted Palestinians names: Akram Zu'aytir and Darwish al-Miqdadi), became prominently involved in it.
1936-9: Riots, terrorism, assassinations. Some estimate, fatalities between 7-8,000. Of his first aides, Ahmad Shukeiri [Shukayri, Shukairy] who also helped in assassinating his brother, Anwar, on June 8, 1939, a moderate.
1936-7: Said Fattah al-Imam, founder of the al-Nadi al-Arabi (The Arab Club), later to be vehicle for advancing Nazi goals in Syria travelled twice to Germany, meeting personally with Hitler to try to talk him in to shipping arms to the Palestinians and Syrians.
After failing first in getting a statement from Hitler, the mufti had sent Imam in December 1937, who brought a letter to the Goebbels Propaganda Office a recommendation by the mufti, which ended with the words "Heil Hitler!"
1936: Swastikas & photos of Hitler start to appear (not just by Templars but) by Arabs.
1936-7: Said Fattah al-Imam, founder of the al-Nadi al-Arabi (The Arab Club), later to be vehicle for advancing Nazi goals in Syria travelled twice to Germany, meeting personally with Hitler to try to talk him in to shipping arms to the Palestinians and Syrians.
After failing first in getting a statement from Hitler, the mufti had sent Imam in December 1937, who brought a letter to the Goebbels Propaganda Office a recommendation by the mufti, which ended with the words "Heil Hitler!"
1936-8: "The shout of 'Heil Hitler' became a catchword which rang insolently over all Palestine."
1936: the 'Mein Kampf,' is 'a best seller in Palestine by radicals.
1937 - February: Istiqlal's (Ahmad Shukeiri's mentor, employer), leader and its representative at the (April 1937 founded) Arab Higher Committee, [Awni] Auni Abd al-Hadi states: 'Arabs Like Nazis.' And that the Arab national movement has much in common with Nazism.
ReplyDelete1937 - May: Arab Palestine celebrate Muhamnad's birthday with Hitler, Mussolini photos.
1937: The French Weekly, Marianne, reported, a great part of the arms employed in the rebellion were supplied by the Suhl and Erfurter Gewehrfabrik of Germany, which sent, in particular, many rifles and machine-guns.
1937 - September: Bludan Congress against the Partition, his hate booklet inciting Muslims against Jews distributed. A long message by him was given out by his discipline Ahmad Shukeiri. He would later distribute this propaganda among Bosnian Muslims to fight for the Nazis.
1937 - Mufti hides at Temple Mount, in October escapes disguised as a woman to Lebanon.
1938 - August: A Palestine ball was held at the Arab club in Berlin, in which, in addition to the Arab activists, staying in Berlin, some of the leaders of the Nazi party also participated. In their speeches at the ball, they spoke of the solidarity between the Germans and the Arabs, directed against the Jews and against England.
1938 - September: some 100 representatives from Arab Palestine at Nazi conference in Nürnberg.
1938 - October: "Mein Kampf" on sale cheaply in Palestine. Many copies are being distributed among the Arabs free of charge. It was noted that the edition placed on sale here carefully purged the passage in which the Arabs are graded fourteenth on the racial scale.
1939 - Jan: A large shipment of 'Mein Kampf' in Arabic arrives from Egypt.
1939 - Mufti's (then) aide Shukeiri also flees, after the war, it would be recorded that Shukeiri helped Hitler's side. Jamal Shukeiri and other terror leaders also flee.
1939 - June 8: Hitler meets Saudi King Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud's envoy, Khalid al-Qarqani, and expressed his admiration for the Jihad by Palestine Arabs. The Mufti would (in 1954) point to that the are to be praised, after the 1948 defeat.
1939 - October: Mufti is in Iraq.
1939: Auni [Awni] 'abd al-Hadi, meets Nazi officials in Betlin, he admits proudly that while he was interned by the British he had thoroughly worked through the English translation of "Mein Kampf."
1939: Headquarters of the Union of Islamic and Christian Arabs, the organization said to be behind much of the terrorism in North Africa, have been shifted to Berlin, and the name has been changed to "Islamischer Kulturbund."
1939: Younis Bahri begins his Nazi radio broadcast to Arabs.
1939: Journalist John Gunther, "The greatest contemporary Arab hero is — Adolf Hitler."
1940 - Shukeiri would later recall, everyone was cheering for the Axis.
ReplyDelete1941 - February: poll, 88% of Palestine Arabs polled, favored the Axis victory.
1941 - April 1: Iraq pro-Nazi coup by Rachid al-Kilani [Gaylani]: four army colonels, Salah Al-Din Al-Sabbagh, Kamel Shabib, Mahmud Salman, and Fahmi Sa'id, known together as Al-muraba' Al-Dhahabi or the Golden Square, they were joined by Yunis Al-Sab'awi, who worked at the German legation as a translator of Nazi propaganda, including the translation Mein Kampf.'
1941 - Iraq, the Mufti creates secret pan Arab Party - paragraph 3 calls to "expel" all Jews / secret Arab Nazi party.
1941 - May 9, the Mufti issues a fatwa in a radio speech from Baghdad, calling Muslims to engage in a holy war against Great Britain
1941 - May 29: the Mufti flees across the border to Iran, s British troops approach Baghdad.
1941 - June 1-2: Farhoud pogrom. Hundreds massacred brutally, At least 180 Jews had been murdered and close to 2,000 wounded; children thrown into the river, women raped, bodies mutilated and many Jewish businesses had been looted or destroyed. Some estimate upto a thousand died. It came after Nazi Arab incitement including on radio months earlier by Younis Bahri and by Mufti and entourage, poetions of 'Mein Kampf' published in newspaper. Muthanna / Futuwwah main perpetrators with some of Iraqi police and soldiers helping.
1941 - July: The German Abwehr establishes a German-Arab Training Department at a base near Athens, Greece, to train Arab volunteers for service as auxiliaries in the German Wehrmacht.
1941 - October: Italian diplomats smuggle al-Husayni out of Iran to [Fascist] Italy.
1941 - October 27: the Mufti meets with Benito Mussolini, who agrees to a joint Axis statement along the lines of his proposal to Hitler.
1941 - Nov 6: Germany, arrival. "Al-Husseini used the next 22 days until his meeting with Hitler to solicit from Nazi leaders two commitments: The end of legal travel by Jews to the Middle East (Himmler ordered it on Oct. 23, both Arabs having demanded this again on Sept. 24," among the Nufti and Al [Gaylani] Kilani's11-points plan they worked on since 1940.
1941 - Nov. 20: Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop told him that Palestine was "purely Arab" and met him twice more.
1941 - Nov 28: Meeting Hitler, agreements, discussed their alliance and mutual desire to rid both Europe and the Middle East of Jews. Hitler revealed to al-Husseini his plan to kill Jews in Europe, the Middle East and globally.
ReplyDeleteBundesarchiv Filmarchiv: 'Hitler declined to grant al-Husayni’s request for a public statement--or a secret but formal treaty--in which Germany would: 1) pledge not to occupy Arab land, 2) recognize Arab striving for independence, and 3) support the "removal" of the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Führer confirmed that the "struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine" would be part of the struggle against the Jews. Hitler stated that: he would "continue the struggle until the complete destruction of Jewish-Communist European empire"; and when the German army was in proximity to the Arab world, Germany would issue "an assurance to the Arab world" that "the hour of liberation was at hand." It would then be al-Husayni’s "responsibility to unleash the Arab action that he has secretly prepared." The Führer stated that Germany would not intervene in internal Arab matters and that the only German "goal at that time would be the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space under the protection of British power." '
The Nufti were to write later:
"Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine & the Arab world."
1941 Nov - 1945: In Berlin, with an entourage of some 60 Arabs. He is given a village confiscated from Jews, a hefty salary, chauffer and guard. Gernan girls come and go to accompany thus "religious" leader. He leads the Arab Office, heading the main Arab propaganda for the Nazis, including an almost daily radio broadcast.
Among the many Arabs helping the Mufti was Tunisian Hussein Triki, who in the 1960s would spread propaganda in Argentina and deny the Holocaust decades later.
1942 - early in the year: in collaboration with the Axis powers, al-Husayni begins developing themes for radio and print propaganda directed primarily at the Arab and Muslim world.
1942 - July: The Mufti proposes a pan-Arab center in newly occupied Egypt to produce and disseminate propaganda, to carry out sabotage operations and incite rebellions behind British lines, and to train Arab regulars as the core of a liberating Arab army under al-Husayni's control. The Germans and the Italians reject this concept.
1942 - Aug: CIA reports on 'majority' of Palestine Arabs' anti-Jewish sentiments, effected by propaganda.
1942 - Late September: the Mufti again proposes a pan-Arab center, this time in Tunis, to direct propaganda in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. The Axis powers reject the plan.
1942: Mufti plans crematoria in the Dothan Valley for his expected arrival of the Nazis and to employ the Nazi methods of extermination for Jews in the Middle East and North Africa. It was as Erwin Rommel leading Afrika Korps, pushing across Libya headed for the Suez Canal.
1942 - November 2, in a broadcast from Berlin, the Mufti praised the Germans for "knowing how to get rid of the Jews and eventually solving the Jewish problem."
1942 - November 8: in Operation Torch, Anglo-American troops land at Casablanca in Morocco and at Oran and Algiers in Algeria. Vichy French forces surrender.
1942 - December 18: at the opening of the Central Islamic Institute in Berlin, the Mufti denounces the Jews as the bitterest enemies of Islam. He accuses the Jews of provoking nations against each other and unleashing World War II. He calls on Muslims to liberate themselves from enemy persecution. Nazi propagandists provide major coverage of the opening and of al-Husayni's remarks. His speech is broadcast from Germany to the Middle East on December 23, 1942.
1943 - February 13: Hitler agrees to create the 13th Waffen-SS Mountain Division, later also known as "Handschar." SS chief Heinrich Himmler authorizes recruitment of Bosnian Muslims for the division. In March and April, the SS Main Office sends the Mufti to assist in recruitment efforts.
ReplyDelete1943 - July: Himmler confides in him, among other things he tells him, they murdered [already] 3 Million Jews.
1943 - July: the SS establish an Imam training school to prepare chaplains for the 13th Waffen-SS Mountain Division. The Mufti tells the trainees that Muslims would "never have a better or more loyal ally than the Greater German Reich."
1943: Visiting concentration camps with Ali al-Kailani, Mile Budak from Croatia and India's leader Subhas Chandra Bose, with officials in Germany's Trebbin camp. Fritz Grobba, Germany's expert on Middle East affairs, later admitted while in Soviet custody that the Arab officials wanted to see concentration camps as an inspiration for eliminating their Jewish population.
May-June 1943: intvenes against rescue of Jews, vetoing attempts to rescue thiusands of Jews particularly Jewish children, who perished by the Nazis as a result.
He writes to the Bulgarian, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian governments, demanding they not participate in British efforts to transfer Jewish children from Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to Palestine. He suggests the children be sent to Poland. The Germans had already taken steps to halt the transports in March and April of 1943.
1943 - 2nd half: Eyewitness testified he saw the mufti visiting Nazi labor camp Monowitz, part of the Auschwitz complex.
1943 - spring-October: for six months prior to Oct 29, 1943, urged the Nazi to bomb Jewish populated cities, especially Tel Aviv. He also asked, attack to be carried out on Nov 2 "celebrating" Balfour Declaration.
1943 - Nov 2: Telegram from Himmler to the Mufti. That he sympathises with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew." Radio Berlin later reported that Haj Amin had "arrived in Frankfurt for the purpose of visiting the Research Institute on the Jewish problem."
1944 - February: the Germans deploy the 13th Waffen-SS Mountain Division, now also known as the "Handschar" Division, in western Croatia and northeastern Bosnia.
ReplyDelete1944 - March: one of the Mufti's infamous broadcast "Kill the Jews wherever they are, this pleases (he said) Allah."
1944 - July: attends at Krakow, the 2nd international anti-Semitic conference.
1944 - October: Atlas. Falied. Some say, Mufti-Nazi plot involved chemical attack - poisoning the wells of Tel Aviv to massacre some 250,000.
1944 - November 2: At the Mufti's suggestion, the German Foreign Office announces the formation of an Arab-Muslim army (to be composed of Arab and Muslim volunteers and Muslim and Arab soldiers serving in Axis forces) to counter the Jewish Brigade Group in the British army.
1945 - The Mufti flees by plane to Bern, Switzerland. Swiss authorities deny him asylum and turn him over to French authorities.
Where he is treated well, the French hope this will help Arab population calm.
1946 - May 29: The Mufti "escapes," with a fake ID flies to Egypt.
1945 - Nov 2: author points out: "It's no coincidence that just a few months after Nazi Germany surrendered, on November 2, 1945, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, many synagogues were burned down in Egypt and dozens of Jews were killed on the streets of Cairo."
ReplyDelete1946 - June 20: When King Darouk granted asylum to the Mufti - confirmed Nazi War criminal, al-Banna and the Brotherhood hailed hi as a hero.
1946 - summer: Ahmad Shukeiri and Jamal Husseini justify the Holocaust.
1947 - Akram Zu'aytir and Issa Nakhleh among others, sent by the Arab League to revive anti-Semitism in Latin America. In the 1950s Nakhleh lublishes glorification of Hitler's regime. He'd work with neo Nazis 1960s-1980s and deny the Holocaust. (Was Palestine Delegate and Council to Muslim Congress).
1950s: Johann von Leers, aka Omar Amin (1902-1965), known for his anti-Jewish polemics, was one of the foremost antisemitic propagandists of the Third Reich. In 1945 he fled to Italy, living there for five years, and then moving to Argentina in 1950 where he continued his propaganda activities. The Mufti Brought Van Leers to Egypt. Van Leers was working for Cairo's Ministry of National Guidance, President Gamal Nasser's propaganda department. It was the mufti who obtained the position in Cairo for him. When he arrived, he greeted him publicly, adding,"We thank you for venturing to take up the battle against the power of darkness[sic] that has become incarnate in world [sic] Jewry.