Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (12 page)

With the Duke of Windsor restored to his throne and Sir Oswald Mosley and Lord Londonderry governing the nation from 10 Downing Street, the Nazi defeat and takeover of Churchill’s Britain was now complete. Hitler had long had secret plans for his invasion of Great Britain. Among them was the Gestapo “Arrest List for Great Britain,” with Churchill’s name on it,
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which immediately had been put into effect. Winston Churchill and the members of his government had been taken into custody by the Gestapo the day after German troops entered London.
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Churchill and several of his senior cabinet ministers were immediately placed under house arrest in London, awaiting deportation to Auschwitz, where they would soon be executed as war criminals. More than two thousand other prominent British leaders—members of Parliament, professors, scientists, bankers, captains of industry, and churchmen, including the archbishop of Canterbury—were rounded up over the next few days. Like Churchill, they were soon shipped to Auschwitz. Within the first week of the Nazi occupation, Gestapo troops were everywhere in Great Britain, from Windsor Castle to Westminster Abbey, and had established bases of operation in cities throughout England. Churchill’s birthplace, Blenheim Palace, just outside of Oxford, which had been built by Churchill’s ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough in the early 1700s, had been taken over by the Nazis to serve as Gestapo headquarters.

Under Hitler’s specific orders, moreover, Nazi-occupied Britain had been made
Judenrein.
Although the exact numbers of British Jews who perished in the gas chambers of the death camps set up in Manchester, Leeds, and London have never been published, Eichmann, who had presided over their executions with his usual deadly efficiency, boasted later that they amounted to more than a hundred thousand. Many of the most eminent leaders of British Jewry, however, were sent immediately to Auschwitz. One of the first to be executed there was the seventy-four-year-old Sir Herbert Samuel, the British politician and statesman who, as the first high commissioner of Palestine, had appointed al-Husseini grand mufti in 1921. Samuel’s personal appeal for clemency to the mufti had been in vain. His son Edwin perished with his father at Auschwitz. The initial Nazi roundup of London Jews also included three prominent members of the Rothschild banking family: James de Rothschild, the well-known Jewish philanthropist and Zionist, who since 1929 had been serving as a Liberal Party member of Parliament, and his cousins Anthony Gustav de Rothschild, presiding head of the family’s London banking firm, and Baron Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, the eminent Cambridge University biologist. No fewer than one hundred other members of the extended Rothschild family were arrested in the initial Nazi roundup, all destined for deportation to Auschwitz or to the new Nazi death camp facility in Leeds. So, too, was Joseph Hertz, the distinguished chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, and Chaim Weizmann, the brilliant Manchester University chemist and Zionist leader who had been influential in convincing British foreign minister Arthur James Balfour to issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Had there ever been a state of Israel, as promised in the Balfour Declaration, it was always assumed that Chaim Weizmann would have been its first president. On the Saturday after the beginning of the Nazi roundup of London Jewry, moreover, the entire congregation of London’s historic Bevis Marks Synagogue was arrested during Sabbath worship services and taken away by the Gestapo, in preparation for deportation to the gas chambers of Leeds or Auschwitz.

Two prominent American Jews—Bernard Baruch, the influential Wall Street financier and FDR’s trusted presidential adviser, whom Hitler had listed as the “No. 1 Jew” in America,
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and U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter—were in London at the time, having been dispatched by Franklin Roosevelt at the behest of his wife, Eleanor, on a mission of mercy to try to save the leadership of British Jewry before the advent of the expected German occupation. The Nazi invasion and occupation, however, occurred so swiftly that, as misfortune would have it, Baruch and Frankfurter, caught up in the chaos of the unexpectedly quick Nazi invasion and thus still in London on the first day of the Nazi occupation of the city, were unable to escape. Both, having dined together the previous evening with James de Rothschild, to whom they had brought an urgent message from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt urging him to leave London immediately, were arrested by Gestapo agents as they tried to hail a taxi near the British Foreign Office at Whitehall. Both had planned to meet with their old friend Winston Churchill at 10 Downing Street later that afternoon. Their scheduled meeting, of course, never took place. Tragically, all three would briefly meet, one last time, the following week, while awaiting their shared fate outside one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Haj Amin al-Husseini was exhilarated by news of the Nazi defeat and occupation of England. Adolf Eichmann wrote al-Husseini what he had been overheard telling friends in Berlin: that “the Führer, in his next New Year’s proclamation, will proudly announce” that all Europe, including Great Britain, has been made
Judenrein—
“free of Jews.” This was the news that he had been eagerly anticipating for many months. “I was delighted to hear,” al-Husseini happily wrote his friend Eichmann, “that Britain like Palestine, and the rest of Europe, will now be completely
Judenrein.
Allah be praised!” In Mosley’s England, the mufti prophesied, radical Islam will grow and prosper: “Mosques will dwarf St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.” Arabs would soon replace Jews in London and in Oxford, Leeds, Cambridge, and Manchester. Mosques would soon outnumber churches on the streets of the British capital, which journalists and pundits alike would later rename Londonistan.
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“By the twenty-first century,” al-Husseini predicted, “London will boast a thousand mosques and will be the unofficial Muslim capital of Europe.”
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British liberal democracy would be no more. “Hitler’s Reich and radical Islam,” al-Husseini wrote Eichmann, “would now reign supreme in the British Isles.”

Of course, the mufti knew that this would never be….

Chapter 5

The Mufti’s Return to the Middle East

Introduction: The Mufti’s Escape

 Shortly before midnight on May 28, 1946, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in disguise and using the false name and passport of Ma’ruf al-Dawalibi, a member of the Syrian embassy staff in Paris,
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boarded an American TWA flight leaving Orly airport for Cairo. The following day, after an uneventful flight via Rome and Athens, the mufti arrived in Cairo.

As his plane approached the Cairo airport, al-Husseini could not help but reflect upon his good fortune; he had certainly lived a charmed life. Neither the Churchill nor the Attlee government in Great Britain, nor Marshal Tito’s government in Yugoslavia, had succeeded in its efforts to extradite him from France so that he could be put on trial for war crimes. As al-Husseini would later note in his memoirs, from the moment of his arrival in Paris on May 19, 1945, the French government had gone out of its way to protect him, rejecting the repeated demands of the British and Allied commands for his extradition.
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Having miraculously escaped indictment, he was now returning home to his beloved Middle East, where he would be free to assume his rightful place among the leadership of Islam and resume his life’s mission of jihad against his hated enemies, the British and the Jews.

His good fortune was even more remarkable, al-Husseini reflected, given the fate of so many of his former friends and comrades in Nazi Germany. Most of them—Himmler, Goebbels, and Göring, among others—were already dead or awaiting execution by the Allies. Albert Speer, Hitler’s gifted architect and munitions minister, was languishing in Spandau Prison, where he would remain for twenty years. Only his friend Adolf Eichmann, alone among the Nazi leadership with whom he had worked so closely during the war years, had escaped. Eichmann, al-Husseini had been told, had found temporary refuge and was living incognito in Argentina, which would soon become a haven for other Nazis fleeing postwar Germany. One day, the mufti mused, he and his old friend Eichmann would meet again, in Cairo or perhaps in Bueno Aires.

Al-Husseini’s well-planned escape from Paris had been a complete success. In London, Winston Churchill demanded in Parliament that al-Husseini be captured in Egypt. Prime Minister Clement Attlee responded by stating that he would take the matter under advisement and would consult with the British ambassador to Egypt to facilitate the mufti’s extradition. The mufti’s midnight escape from Paris had surprised everyone.
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King Farouk of Egypt had promised him a safe refuge and made good on his promise. Al-Husseini was safe and secure in Cairo, where he received political asylum, enjoying the patronage and hospitality of King Farouk’s rabidly anti-British Egyptian government. While Adolf Hitler had died by his own hand in a bunker in Berlin, al-Husseini would live on to further his and the führer’s dreams. His arrival in Cairo, he fervently hoped, would usher in a new chapter in his life and a new chapter in the history of Islam. During the next twenty-eight years, his hopes would be realized beyond his wildest expectations.

In Cairo, al-Husseini received a hero’s welcome. He was fifty-one years old. He had aged noticeably since the days of his active leadership of the Palestine National Movement during the 1920s and 1930s. His beard, originally reddish brown, was graying softly and was now white at the tip.
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His face, however, remained unlined and youthful. Still handsome, serene and elegant in appearance, he seemed younger than his years. Like the good wine he was fond of drinking, he felt that he had improved with age. He was at peace with himself, back home at last. After years of exile, self-imposed and otherwise, he had returned, as he always knew he would, to his beloved Arab Middle East.

Al-Husseini was greeted with great warmth by his wartime friend and ally King Farouk. Farouk, reciprocating perhaps for al-Husseini’s earlier offer to him of a safe political refuge in Hitler’s Berlin, immediately made good on his promise to the mufti. The mufti stayed briefly at the Metropolitan Hotel in the center of the city. He then left for Heliopolis, where he met with old friends and members of the royal family. On June 19, after being received warmly at Abdeen Palace by the head of King Farouk’s palace court, al-Husseini was granted a personal audience with Farouk, who was delighted to meet with his old friend. At the end of their conversation, the king invited al-Husseini to take up residence in Inshas Palace.
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After spending almost three weeks as the king’s guest, al-Husseini was transferred to the royal family’s al-Ma’amurah summer palace, where he was visited by King Farouk the following week. At this second meeting between the Egyptian monarch and the mufti, they discussed the future of Palestine and the need to protect the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock from the Jews. Arab and Muslim unity was essential, they concluded.
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Farouk ended the conversation by telling al-Husseini, “I am pleased that you are here and hope to benefit from your experience.”
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Throughout the next six years of his reign, prior to the military coup that would depose him in 1952, King Farouk remained the mufti’s friend and patron and frequently invited al-Husseini to be his guest at his al-Ma’amurah summer palace or at his even more luxurious Koubbeh Palace in Cairo, where the king and the mufti would spend many leisurely hours walking and talking in the splendid palace gardens.

The Mufti and His Protégés

Within weeks of his arrival in Egypt, al-Husseini met with several old friends and political allies, including Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s increasingly influential theoretician Sayyid Qutb. Al-Husseini also made new acquaintances and political allies, in both Heliopolis and Cairo. One of them was Yasser Arafat, a precociously ambitious seventeen-year-old student and political agitator who had been born and raised in Cairo. Arafat and al-Husseini were, in fact, distantly related: Arafat’s mother was the daughter of the mufti’s first cousin. Two years before Arafat’s birth on August 24, 1929, his parents had arrived in Cairo and settled in the middle-class Sakakini neighborhood of the city,
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where the young Arafat spent his youth and where al-Husseini first met him, at a family gathering, during the summer of 1946. The mufti quickly took upon himself the role of Arafat’s mentor. He instilled in Arafat a burning desire to wage terrorist war against the Jews. In their many long walks together in downtown Cairo, and in innumerable political discussions that would frequently continue for hours into the night, al-Husseini would regale the young Arafat with stories of Nazi Germany and the führer and share with his impressionable cousin his plans for the defeat of the Zionists and the Islamization of Jerusalem, his vision of a
Judenrein
Palestine, and his hopes for preventing the creation of a new state of Israel.