Arab Nazis WW2
The Times Herald
Port Huron, Michigan
11 Dec 1941, Thu • Page 3
THE PORT HURON TIMES HERALD THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1941
Hitler Tells Mufti to Get Tough
The Rock Island Argus
Rock Island, Illinois
13 Dec 1941, Sat • Page 11
HITLER TELLS MUFTI TO GET TOUGH
Official German picture radioed from Berlin shows Adolf Hitler receiving Haj Amin Al-Husseini, Moslem leader, grand mufti of Jerusalem and British-hater: Mufti received conversations important to Arabian nations.
__
The Guardian from London, Greater London, England on July 14, 1942 · 6
The United States enjoys a high prestige m the Middle East.. concrete evidence of American association with the Allies has possibly done more than anything else to convince the Middle East that "Abu Ali " the Arab name for Hitler is a false god.
____
Battle Creek Enquirer
Battle Creek, Michigan
09 Jun 1946, Sun • Page 1
Exiled Arab Chief 'Escapes' From France PARIS (U.R) The pro-Nazi grand mufti or Jerusalem, Haj Amin El Husseini, has secretly "escaped" from France, the French press agency reported last night, but officiais at the ministry of interior asserted there was nothing clandestine about his departure.
The press agency said officials started an inquiry to determine how the mufti, one of the most ruthless and ambitious of Arab politicians, had slipped out of the country. At the ministry, however, a spokesman said the mufti never had been under arrest and was free to come and go as he pleased. The news agency revealed no details other than that the mufti, an arch-conspirator and personal friend of Adolf Hitler, was headed for an unknown destination. This, political observers said, undoubtedly was the Middle East, probably Saudi Arabia or Palestine. Rumors of the mufti's reappearance in the Middle East through a negotiated "escape" have been recurrent for months. His actual arrival there, observers said, might touch the match to the political tinder in Palestine. Haj Amin. although created "mufti" by a British high commissioner, is rabidly anti-British and anti-Jewish.
To the Arab world. Haj Amin is an unparalleled political leader. To the non-Arab world, his record Includes unsuccessful intrigue and abortive revolt which he inflamed in Palestine. Iran and Iraq.
The Yugoslavs have named him as a war criminal for his part in collaborating with Heinrich Himmler in formation of the Arab Legion, Moslem organization used by the Nazis to police Yugoslavia during the occupation. The Jews have accused him of helping plan the extermination of 6.000.000 Jews in Europe.
___
The Pittsburgh Press from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · Page 22
The Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Wednesday, August 20, 1958
Page 22
Hitler Popular In Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq ... would be gratifying days for Abu Ali, if he were alive to enjoy them. But it's a little late, if Abu Ali is Adolf Hitler. That's what the Iraqis called him.
His suddden return to popularity in these parts is only Hitler one of the queer twists the recent chain reaction of revolutions has imposed on the Middle East.
Others include some unofflcial private joshing between the Commander of the United States Sixth Fleet, Vice Adm. Charles (Cat) Brown, and the ex-Prime Minister of Lebanon, Saeb Salam, now a rebel chief.
But first Abu Ali Hitler. He made a big hit with many Arabs a couple decades back chiefly because they approved his attitude ' toward Jews and Englishmen.
Perhaps his top fan in Iraq was Rashid Ali GaylanI, who for a few months in 1941 dominated the country after an anti-British coup... German planes flew In Nazi "volunteers" to help. Looking for a hero name for the man who sent them, Iraqis hit on "Abu Ali." which means "Father of Ali," namely Rashid Ali Gaylani.
Later the same year British troops routed GaylanI and his German forces, re-imposing pro-British government which lasted until the coup of last month. And who should turn up in the new regime but at least three veterans of the GaylanI attempt 17 years ago.
"It wasn't nice of Mr. Dulles to call us Communists," said one major plotter, deeply offended. "Actually I'm a Nazi." Abdel Karim Kassem. the new Prime Minister-himself a GaylanI survivor-gave his first interview to a group of German newsmen and even paid cable tolls for their stories to Bonn. Scenting business opportunities in this, Baghdads West German businessmen urged quick Bonn recognition of the new Iraqi government "before Japan beats us to it." ..
_______
WHEN HITLER BECAME ABU ALI - 07/06/2002 [Miami Herald]
Forty years ago last week, SS-Oberstumbannfuehrer Adolf Eichmann was executed in Israel. He had been arrested at the end of World War II and confined to an American internment camp, but he managed to escape to Argentina. He lived there for 10 years under the name Ricardo Klement until Israeli secret agents abducted him in 1960 and spirited him to Israel.
Eight months after his trial opened in Jerusalem, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people and was sentenced to death. He was executed on May 31, 1962; his remains were cremated and the ashes scattered over the Mediterranean Sea — outside Israeli waters. This is the only case in which the death penalty has been carried out in Israel.
Eichmann's record is notorious. He was the head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo from 1941 to 1945 and was chief of operations in sending three million Jews to the extermination camps. After the war, he became one of the most sought-out Nazi fugitives.
The international community condemned Israel's kidnapping of Eichmann, but it was nonetheless able to see the justice in, and legitimacy of, Israel's action. The trial itself, marked by strict adherence to legal procedure, elicited worldwide admiration, and the Nazi's execution was seen everywhere as a crucial vindication in the post-Holocaust era.
Everywhere, that is, but in the Arab world. There, Eichmann's capture, trial and execution were condemned, and Eichmann was venerated as a "martyr." The Jordanian daily A-Ra' ai praised him for exterminating "members of the race of dogs and monkeys." The Saudi periodical Al-Bilar saluted him for his courage. The Lebanese newspaper Al-Anwar published a cartoon lamenting the fact that the Nazi officer had not killed more Jews.
But let us view this Arab beatification of Eichmann in its proper historical context.
When Hitler took power in 1933, telegrams of congratulations were dispatched from Arab capitals. In 1937, Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels praised the Arabs' "national .. conscience," noting that "Nazi flags fly in Palestine and they adorn their houses with Swastikas and portraits of Hitler." In 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, spoke highly of the ''natural alliance that exists between the National-Socialism of Great Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the world."
HISTORICAL INVERSION
Pro-German parties and youth movements attuned to the trappings of National-Socialism sprouted in Syria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. Even Nazi slogans were translated into Arabic. A Mideast song popular in the late 1930s crooned: "No more Monsieur, no more Mister. In Heaven Allah, on Earth Hitler." The Fuehrer himself was even Islamicized under the new name of Abu Ali.
Love of Nazism spread like wildfire in the region. Among the many Nazi sympathizers at the time were Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Arab Higher Committee; Ahmed Shukairi, first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization; Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, who became presidents of Egypt; Islamic fundamentalist leaders; and the founders of the Pan-Arab socialist Ba'ath party, currently ruling Syria and Iraq. (One Ba'ath leader proudly recounted: "We were racists, admiring Nazism, reading their books and sources of their thought. We were the first who thought of translating Mein Kampf").
Praise for Hitler among Arabs did not vanish after the war. In 1965, a Moroccan commentator on Middle East affairs wrote this in the French magazine Les Temps Modernes: "A Hitlerian myth is being cultivated on a popular level. Hitler's massacre of the Jews is eulogized. It is even believed that Hitler did not die. His arrival is longed for."
In mid-2001, an Egyptian columnist wrote in the government-sponsored Al-Akhbar: "Thank you, Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians avenged in advance against the most vile criminals on Earth." Two months later, Egypt's Press Syndicate awarded this writer its highest distinction.
Since Hitler's ascent to power in 1933, the Arabs have been adulating Nazism. It seems that some things never change — or perhaps some things do. Now the Arabs accuse the Jews of being Nazis. In this way, Hitler's loyal fans are equating the primary victims of his genocide with the Nazi executioners themselves.
The defining expression of chutzpah is a man who murders his parents and then begs the jury for pity on the grounds that he is an orphan. But the Arabs' perverse historical and moral inversion requires a new definition for the term. For chutzpah cannot sufficiently represent this incredible gall.
Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.
OCTOBER 23, 2015 12:05 PM
The Mufti and the Holocaust, Revisited
by Ben Cohen / JNS.org
OPINION
The Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, meets with Adolf Hitler in 1941. Photo: German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – “If a man was a Jew, it was good enough for him to be killed or stamped out,” wrote a senior British official serving abroad to his superiors in London in 1929.
From where was this gentleman—Major Alan Saunders—writing his dispatch? From Munich or Berlin or any of the other German cities where Hitler’s Nazi Party was gaining supporters and street thugs? In fact, no. Major Saunders was the head of the British Police in Palestine during the mandate period, and his statement concerned the massacre by Arabs, in August 1929, of 69 Jews in Hebron, a city where their community had been a consistent presence for at least two millennia.
GET THE BEST OF THE ALGEMEINER STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX!
SIGN UP!
I was reminded of Major Saunders’s pithy summary of the motive behind the Hebron pogrom when news broke of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, in which he essentially argued that it was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who crystallized the idea of the mass extermination of the Jews in Adolf Hitler’s mind. But before I talk about the controversy that followed these comments, I want to make a couple of more general observations by way of introduction.
The first is that while Hitler unarguably remains the most powerful and devastating anti-Semite to ever hold state power, he was far from the only one at that time to approach the “Jewish question” in exterminationist terms. As Major Saunders related from faraway Palestine, about an episode that presaged the Nazi atrocities that were to follow in Germany and then in occupied Europe and North Africa, the same hatred of Jews simply for being Jews was in painful evidence there. For there were thousands, even millions, of ordinary people in Europe and the Middle East who regarded the Jews as a social and religious poison and wanted them—all of them—dead. In that sense, the Fuhrer was their representative and their master.
The second is that, as an Israeli Jew, Netanyahu is naturally sensitive to the Palestinian Arab dimension of the broader issue of collaboration with the Nazis, something I can relate to. As a kid, I remember sitting around my grandfather’s table with his relatives from Bosnia—men with sad eyes and the muscles and paunches of retired boxers, who had spent their youths in the Socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement, graduating to fight with Marshal Tito’s communist partisans against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia that began in 1941. Men who, I realized with awe, had actually killed some of these Nazis that I’d seen in the movies.
And yet, when they spoke about the war, their anger really flowed when they remembered the locals who had assisted the Germans. Like Netanyahu now, what they found hardest to stomach was the spectacle of those non-Jews who lived alongside them collaborating with the Nazi extermination program.
In the pantheon of Nazi collaborators, Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini is right up there with Pavelic in Croatia, Petain in France, Horthy in Hungary, and all the other quislings—their name comes from the collaborationist leader in Norway, Vidkun Quisling—who implemented Hitler’s will. It was, ironically, the British authorities who appointed him to his position in 1921. During the 1929 massacre in Hebron, as during the openly anti-Semitic 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine, al-Husseini proved himself a confirmed Jew-hater and the natural ally of Hitler in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
It wasn’t until November 1941 that the Mufti met Hitler in person. Significantly, in the view of many historians, that encounter in Berlin took place two months before the Wannsee conference, where leading Nazis led by Hitler’s security chief, Reinhard Heydrich, plotted the implementation of the “Final Solution”—the extermination of the Jews.
In the official German record of their discussions (not an exact transcript, but a summary of what was said), it was clear that both Hitler and the Mufti were already in agreement that the Holocaust had to be visited upon the Jews. For his part, the Mufti expressed his appreciation of Germany’s commitment to the “elimination of the Jewish national home,” while Hitler restated his “active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a center, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests.”
For good measure, the Fuhrer added that “Germany was also aware that the assertion that the Jews were carrying out the functions of economic pioneers in Palestine was a lie. The work there was done only by the Arabs, not by the Jews”—a slander that could easily be expressed in the exact same words by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that targets the “Jewish national home” in our own time.
That last point highlights a critical factor which the furore around Netanyahu’s speech—much of it generated by visceral opponents of Israel who only talk about the Holocaust when it justifies their backing of Palestinian violence against Jews now—has largely missed.
During the 1930s, both Germany and Palestine were the sites of mob violence, boycotts, and discriminatory laws and regulations against Jews. The Nazi consolidation of power in the 1930s was what enabled them to launch their campaign of war and genocide at the end of that decade.
Had Palestine been conquered by the Germans from the British, there is no doubt that the Mufti would have been installed as the local quisling, and that the entire Jewish population would have been shipped to concentration and death camps in Europe—assuming that the Germans and their Arab militias didn’t build similar camps in the vicinity, of course. That was the mutual vision expressed in Berlin in 1941, the distinctly Arab contribution to the achievement of the “Thousand Year Reich.”
As the German historian Matthias Kuentzel has noted, the 700,000 Jews in the Middle East were in Hitler’s sights when he received the Mufti.
“As Hitler envisaged it, after the assault on the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht would also occupy the Caucasus and so open the way to the Middle East…Part of this scenario was the killing of the Jews,” Kuentzel writes. Even though this grand ambition failed, the Mufti was still able, as the prominent Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer put it, to be “an active partner in devising the Final Solution.” The Mufti also played a role in its implementation, raising three SS divisions composed of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims in the western Balkans.
Nor did the Mufti forget Palestine. The Israeli scholar Edy Cohen has revealed how, in May 1943, he blocked a deal agreed to by the British and the Germans to allow 4,000 Jewish children to enter Palestine in exchange for 20,000 German prisoners of war, while in 1944, he parachuted a terror cell into Tel Aviv with the intention of poisoning the local water supply.
The Mufti, disgracefully, escaped the Nuremburg Trials of Nazi war criminals, and ended his days in Beirut in 1974. His legacy survives in the daily incitement against Jews that emanates from Palestinian official and social media. So, when considering the latest Netanyahu controversy, please remember this: Those Holocaust scholars who criticized Netanyahu’s speech nonetheless recognize the fundamental, bitter fact of Palestinian anti-Semitism and the Mufti’s position in fomenting it. It is the Palestinian leadership and their supporters—who have neither offered an apology nor reparations for the Mufti’s crimes against the Jews—who don’t.
Ben Cohen, senior editor of TheTower.org & The Tower Magazine, writes a weekly column for JNS.org on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Commentary, the New York Post, Haaretz, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is the author of “Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism” (Edition Critic, 2014).
___
Comments
Post a Comment