Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (15 page)

By 1970, several protégés of the mufti, or associates or relatives of the mufti’s circle, had risen to positions of political prominence and leadership within radical Islam. Yasser Arafat had become head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). That same year, Anwar Al Sadat succeeded to the presidency of Egypt. By 1970, Saddam Hussein, the nephew and adopted son of another of al-Husseini’s longtime protégés and supporters, Khairallah Talfah, had risen to prominence in Iraqi politics as one of the leaders of Iraq’s Ba’ath Party, which had first seized power in Iraq in 1963. Throughout the 1970s, Saddam Hussein would consolidate his power over Iraq’s Ba’ath Party and its radical Islamic government and, in 1979 following a military coup, would formally assume the presidency of Iraq.

The Uncle and the Mufti

The story of the close relationship of Khairallah Talfah (Saddam Hussein’s uncle) with the mufti is a significant, albeit forgotten, chapter in the extraordinary public career and legacy of Haj Amin al-Husseini and in the political history of radical Islam in the second half of the twentieth century. Khairallah Talfah was an Iraqi army officer and passionate Arab nationalist who had been one of al-Husseini’s most trusted lieutenants in their short-lived pro-Nazi coup that had briefly returned Rashid Ali al-Gaylani to power in Iraq in April 1941. Talfah deeply opposed British control of the political and military structure of Iraq. A fervent admirer of Hitler, he was known to actively favor the victory of Nazi Germany. With the failure of their coup due to British military intervention, al-Husseini, al-Gaylani, and several of their supporters subsequently fled the country. They soon found a political haven in Berlin, where they spent the rest of the war as honored guests of the Nazi regime. Talfah and several of his fellow officers who had participated in the pro-Nazi uprising, however, were not so lucky. Many were imprisoned, and some were executed. Khairallah Talfah himself was dismissed from the military and jailed for five years.
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The events of the al-Gaylani coup and its aftermath had, as the mufti would later learn, a profound effect on the life of Talfah’s impressionable young nephew Saddam Hussein, who was only nine years old when al-Husseini returned to the Middle East. In the following years, the young Saddam would often inquire about his uncle, only to be told that he was in jail.
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As Saddam would later recall, his close relationship with his uncle was vital to his political development.
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It also fueled his anti-British and deep-seated anti-Jewish ideology and his belief that the Zionist entity, the state of Israel, must be eradicated. Khairallah Talfah, like the mufti, was a virulent anti-Semite whose Hitlerian hatred of the Jews led him to suggest, for decades after the Holocaust, that Jews were insects and thus, like all insects and other vermin infecting the body politic, should be exterminated. In 1981, Talfah published a scurrilously anti-Semitic pamphlet, widely distributed by the Iraqi Ba’ath Party, entitled
Three God Should Not Have Made: Persians, Jews and Flies.
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Jews, Talfah wrote, were a “mixture of the dirt and leftovers of diverse peoples,”
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who, like flies, were a trifling creation “whom we do not understand God’s purpose in creating.” Talfah had a solution to the Jewish problem: “There is a certain insecticide for every type of insect,” he declared.
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To Saddam Hussein, as to his uncle and to his mentor the mufti, it was especially evident that Israel, the hated Zionist entity, must be eradicated. For Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist supporters, Israel was always an artificial implant in the Middle East, “a multi-tentacled octopus,” a “deadly cancer,” or an “AIDS virus” to be burned up, as Saddam threatened to do shortly before the first Gulf War.
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As late as 2002, Saddam Hussein declared on Iraqi television: “Palestine is Arab and must be liberated from the river to the sea and all the Zionists who immigrated to the land of Palestine must leave.”
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In Saddam’s vision of the world, as in that of Khairallah Talfah and Haj Amin al-Husseini, Jews were by definition “outsiders,” “aliens,” and enemies of the Arab nation.

Beginning in 1947, shortly after his uncle’s release from prison, Saddam Hussein lived at his uncle Khairallah’s home in Tikrit, a small town 115 miles from Baghdad, where Saddam began attending school. Khairallah Talfah, like his friend al-Husseini, remained faithful to the idea of radical Islam, a political faith that he imbued in his nephew. The young Saddam Hussein, one can imagine, sat mesmerized as his beloved uncle regaled him with stories of the al-Gaylani coup and of the dreams that he, the mufti, and their old colleagues had of ridding both Iraq and Palestine of the infidel Zionists and of waging jihad against the British enemies of Islam, their Jewish allies, and indeed the entire corrupt, pro-Zionist West. Above all, he indoctrinated his nephew with a burning desire to liberate their native Iraq from British and Western control and to lead another military coup that would bring Iraqi Arab nationalists like themselves the freedom and power that the abortive al-Gaylani coup had not achieved. There can be little doubt that under the tutelage of Khairallah Talfah, the young Saddam Hussein came to share the mufti’s virulently anti-Zionist and anti-Western ideology.

Saddam attended a nationalistic secondary school in Baghdad and studied for three years at Iraq’s School of Law before dropping out. In 1957, at the age of twenty, he joined the newly formed Ba’ath Party, whose goal it was to win Iraqi independence from British control. In 1964, Saddam was put in charge of the party’s military organization.
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In 1968, he was appointed to the second most important post in the Ba’ath Party government, becoming the right-hand man to Iraqi president Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr.
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It was a position of power that he would hold for the next decade, until assuming the Iraq presidency himself. Throughout his rise to prominence in Ba’ath Party politics, his uncle Khairallah remained his closest political confidant and adviser.

After his return to the Middle East in 1946, al-Husseini was a frequent visitor to Baghdad. In 1959, he moved his own residence and his Arab Higher Committee office to Beirut, Lebanon, from where he often visited Baghdad.
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In May 1962, he was in Baghdad for several weeks to participate in a World Islamic Congress that he had been instrumental in convening.
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It is not implausible to speculate that on one or more of these visits to Baghdad, the mufti met and spoke with Saddam Hussein in the company of his uncle Khairallah, who had remained one of al-Husseini’s most loyal friends and supporters in the Iraqi capital.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Creation of the State of Israel, and the Palestine National Movement

Throughout his lifelong dedication to radical Islam, al-Husseini was consumed by hatred of the Jews and especially of the Zionist infidels who had settled in his beloved Palestine, usurping his hometown, his beloved Jerusalem, whose holy sites were so sacred to the entire Islamic world. Much of his political and terrorist activity, as head of the Arab Higher Committee, was directed toward trying to prevent or abort the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. On November 29, 1947, months before the actual creation of the state of Israel and the end of British rule in Palestine the following May, the United Nations General Assembly had voted to accept the principle of establishing two states in Palestine, one Arab and one Jewish. Throughout most of the Arab world, opposition to the UN partition vote soon erupted into violence. Al-Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee immediately condemned the UN decision, declaring a three-day general strike in protest,
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and Arab mobs began rioting in Jerusalem and elsewhere throughout Palestine. Radical Arab politicians and intellectuals in Egypt, led by al-Husseini, Nasser, Qutb, Arafat, and Sadat, had vocally and violently opposed the partition of Palestine as they would the actual establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine six months later. When on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of a sovereign Jewish state to be called Israel, their response was immediate and emphatic. As the Arab armies rolled to what they thought would be a swift and decisive victory over the Jews, al-Husseini eagerly awaited the destruction of the Jewish state.

Their demands that Egypt and its Arab allies immediately launch a war of aggression against the new Jewish state were also answered immediately: Within hours of Israel’s declaration of independence, the Arab League, which had been founded in March 1945 by all the sovereign Arab states of the Middle East—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, and Transjordan (later renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan)—declared war on the newly declared state. By the next day, an Egyptian army estimated at two hundred thousand men had been mobilized for war. The first attack on Israel came from the air, as Egyptian aircraft bombed Israel’s largest city, Tel Aviv,
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shelling and destroying numerous civilian homes. As the Egyptian air attacks persisted, many Israeli civilians were killed. With malicious intent, the central bus station in Tel Aviv was targeted for attack from the air.

Later on the first day of Arab hostilities, May 15, 1948, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry officially informed the United Nations Security Council that with the termination of the British Mandate and Israel’s declaration of statehood, “Egyptian armed forces have started to enter Palestine.”
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On the morning of May 15, the Arab war for Palestine gained momentum as the Arab Liberation Army, under the command of the mufti’s old comrade Fawzi al-Kawukji, attacked Neve Yaakov, a Jewish suburb just north of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem itself. Al-Kawukji, like the mufti, had been an accomplice of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in their pro-Nazi Iraqi coup against the British in April 1941.
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Like the mufti, when the revolt collapsed, he had escaped to Nazi Germany, where he had married a German woman,
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a member of the Nazi Party, and actively assisted al-Husseini in his efforts on behalf of the Third Reich. Also, like the mufti, the escape of Fawzi al-Kawukji, who arrived in Cairo via France, had been widely reported and applauded in the Arab press. With the Israeli declaration of independence, al-Kawukji’s Arab Liberation Army, on direct orders from the mufti, took the offensive in igniting what the mufti hoped would be a true jihad, a quick and complete war of extermination against the Jews and their new Jewish state.

Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, who together with the mufti and al-Kawukji had spent the war years in Berlin working for the Third Reich after the collapse of his abortive pro-Nazi Iraqi coup, had also managed to escape Europe. He was given sanctuary by King Ibn Saud in Saudi Arabia, from where he actively supported their new Arab war of extermination against Israel and its Jews. The initial means selected was the targeting of civilians. The Arab air force dropped bombs on civilian population centers that had no military or strategic value.
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The goal, for al-Husseini, al-Kawukji, and their terrorist followers, was to finish the job Hitler had started. “This will be a total war of extermination,”
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they vowed.

Al-Husseini immediately cabled his friend and benefactor King Farouk his congratulations on Egypt’s declaration of war against Israel.
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Their delight was shared by the vast majority of Muslim Egypt and the Islamic Middle East, who were united in their calls for Israel’s destruction. Everywhere in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, on May 15, calls for jihad against the new Jewish state were being proclaimed. The mufti himself was one of the first to call for a holy war, ordering his “Muslim brothers to murder the Jews. Murder them all.”
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This same call was made by his friend the sheikh of Al-Azhar. “The hour of the Holy War has struck,” proclaimed the sheikh. “All Arab fighters must look upon the struggle for Palestine as a religious duty.”
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As the Arab League’s secretary general, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam Pasha, candidly put it: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”
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Al-Husseini’s spokesman Ahmad Shuqairy, later to become the first chairman of the PLO, announced that the goal of the new Arab war against Israel was “the elimination of the Jewish state.”
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Jerusalem, the mufti told his supporters and friends, would soon become
Judenrein.

During the late spring and summer of 1948, much of the mufti’s outrage was directed at the United States and the pro-Zionist government of President Harry Truman, which had become the first nation to officially grant de facto recognition to the new Jewish state after its independence had been declared. For the mufti, the United States had come to replace Great Britain as the symbol of Western decadence, secularism, and Zionism that the new leaders of Islam were obligated to oppose and destroy. Increasingly, in the aftermath of 1948, calls for jihad against the West by al-Husseini, Qutb, and Arafat, and later by their new colleagues and disciples among the leadership of radical Islam, would be directed at the United States rather than Great Britain.

Al-Husseini’s hopes for the defeat and destruction of Israel were also enhanced by the coup that overthrew King Farouk of Egypt. While the affable Farouk had happily granted al-Husseini political asylum and hospitality after the mufti’s arrival in Egypt in 1946, the corrupt and inefficient Farouk government had become far too pro-Western and insufficiently militant in its anti-Zionism for the mufti’s tastes. Much to al-Husseini’s delight, on July 23, 1952, Farouk was deposed in a military coup by a group of army officers, among whom was the mufti’s friend and protégé Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser, who often referred to
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
as one of his favorite books, shared al-Husseini’s all-consuming hatred of the Jewish people. Another Egyptian officer who took part in the coup was Lieutenant Colonel Anwar Al Sadat,
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another protégé and ideological soul-mate of the mufti. Hostilities against Israel orchestrated by the new Nasser regime would lead inevitably to the Suez crisis and Sinai campaign of 1956. It was Nasser and his deputy Sadat, moreover, who would later orchestrate and launch the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel, in which the Nasser-led Arab armies hoped to finally defeat and destroy the Jewish state. Nasser would remain, perhaps, the preeminent leader of the Islamic Middle East until his death in 1970, when he would be succeeded by Sadat as president of Egypt, who together with Yasser Arafat would assume Nasser’s mantle of leadership within the Islamic Middle East.