Re: Thousand-and-one reasons why Palestine must get independence...
- From: jwsheffield@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2011 14:32:16 -0700 (PDT)
The Mufti and the Führer
By Mitchell Bard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1941, Haj Amin al-Husseini fled to Germany and met with Adolf
Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and other Nazi
leaders. He wanted to persuade them to extend the Nazis’ anti-Jewish
program to the Arab world.
The Mufti sent Hitler 15 drafts of declarations he wanted Germany and
Italy to make concerning the Middle East. One called on the two
countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine.
Furthermore, “they accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the
right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and
other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of the Arabs
and, by the same method, that the question is now being settled in the
Axis countries.”1
In November 1941, the Mufti met with Hitler, who told him the Jews
were his foremost enemy. The Nazi dictator rebuffed the Mufti's
requests for a declaration in support of the Arabs, however, telling
him the time was not right. The Mufti offered Hitler his “thanks for
the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially
Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his
public speeches....The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because
they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely....the Jews....”
Hitler replied:
Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally
included active opposition to the Jewish national home in
Palestine....Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the
Arabs involved in the same struggle....Germany's objective
[is]...solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the
Arab sphere....In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative
spokesman for the Arab world. The Mufti thanked Hitler profusely.2
In 1945, Yugoslavia sought to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for
his role in recruiting 20,000 Muslim volunteers for the SS, who
participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary. He escaped
from French detention in 1946, however, and continued his fight
against the Jews from Cairo and later Beirut. He died in 1974.
The Husseini family continued to play a role in Palestinian affairs,
with Faisal Husseini, whose father was the Mufti's nephew, regarded
until his death in 2001 as one of their leading spokesmen in the
territories.
Notes
1“Grand Mufti Plotted To Do Away With All Jews In Mideast,” Response,
(Fall 1991), pp. 2-3.
2Record of the Conversation Between the Fuhrer and the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem on November 28, 1941, in the Presence of Reich Foreign
Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin, Documents on German Foreign
Policy, 1918-1945, Series D, Vol. XIII, London, 1964, p. 881ff in
Walter Lacquer and Barry Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, (NY: Facts on
File, 1984), pp. 79-84.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/muftihit.html
.
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