Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (17 page)

The 1967 crisis in the Middle East offered al-Husseini a brief return to center stage. King Hussein of Jordan and President Nasser of Egypt were in the midst of a war of words and nerves as the year opened. Nasser backed Shuqairy and the PLO, and Shuqairy adopted the position that Jordan was a part of Palestine rather than an independent Arab state. While Shuqairy was correct historically, the British having severed Jordan from the original Palestine Mandate in the 1920s, King Hussein was not prepared to surrender his kingdom or his life. Moreover, despite his power struggle with the new leadership of the PLO, Haj Amin al-Husseini was still viewed by many Palestinian Arabs as their leader. On March 1, 1967, King Hussein, in a calculated political move designed to neutralize the threat posed by Nasser and Shuqairy, invited al-Husseini to return to Jerusalem. Despite what he knew to have been al-Husseini’s direct responsibility for the death of his beloved grandfather King Abdullah, Hussein remembered the old adage “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” and temporarily embraced the mufti as a welcomed ally in his struggle against Nasser and the PLO.

Al-Husseini’s brief return to Jerusalem was a great personal triumph and gave him immense satisfaction. Despite all the pitfalls, missteps, failed plans, misplaced alliances, and tragic betrayals, for the first time in thirty years he was back in his beloved Jerusalem and felt the warm adulation of the Arabs of Palestine wash over his aging person. While visiting the Holy City, he stayed in the personal residence of King Hussein at Beit Hanina. All of the leaders of Arab Jerusalem, religious, secular, and nationalist, greeted him with deference, reverence, and enthusiasm. Al-Husseini was to speak of that time in Jerusalem with these affecting words: “While the plane flew around Jerusalem’s airport, I saw the Dome of the Rock smiling at me. I left a part of myself in every corner of the city and on every one of its hills.”
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As he prayed in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, he felt a new surge of hope and renewal. He was home at last. That night, when he dined with King Hussein at his palace in Amman, they raised their glasses to toast what al-Husseini hoped would be a long and enduring alliance. It was their common enemies that had brought them together. Within a few months, however, all of this would be forgotten as Nasser and Hussein put aside their enmity and realigned themselves against Israel in preparation for what was to become known as the Six-Day War.

At dawn on June 11, 1967, Israel’s military triumph was complete. The dream of Arab victory had turned into a nightmare of defeat. All of the mufti’s hopes that Palestine would be liberated were destroyed. He knew now that he would never live to see the liberation of Palestine.

If only the Arabs had struck Israel first. If only they had succeeded in destroying Israel’s air force on the ground. If only Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had better coordinated their war plans. All of the what-ifs replayed in al-Husseini’s mind as he realized that his lifelong hopes for the liberation of Palestine would not become a reality.

In the aftermath of Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War, al-Husseini briefly visited Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family was angry with Nasser, who constantly attacked them and their rule. Once again, the principle “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” worked its magic for the mufti and his new patrons. The Saudis welcomed Haj Amin al-Husseini with open arms. King Faisal, a virulent anti-Semite who, like al-Husseini, revered
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
embraced the mufti and came to value his advice and counsel. In public and in private, the mufti’s role was welcomed and acknowledged. As one Saudi newspaper noted, “The journalists smilingly nod polite assent and make vigorous motions with their head. The King quotes from chapter 3 of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
to reinforce his argument. It is said that his thoughts are influenced by those of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, former Mufti of Jerusalem. King Faisal even uses Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s own words.”
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In September 1967, the ideological influence of al-Husseini was felt again when the Arab summit held in Khartoum adopted his long-standing “three no’s” as official policy: “There will be no peace nor negotiation with the Zionist state and no relinquishment of any part of the occupied Arab territories.”

When his rival Ahmed Shuqairy was forced to resign as chairman of the PLO on December 24, 1967, following the debacle of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Haj Amin al-Husseini felt a sense of triumph and vindication. On February 4, 1969, al-Husseini’s cousin and most devoted protégé Yasser Arafat was elected as the new chairman of the PLO. With Arafat’s election, al-Husseini accepted the reality of the PLO as the representative organization of the Palestinian Arab people and willingly handed over the mantle of radical Palestinian Arab leadership to his younger cousin. As Muheideen al-Husseini, the mufti’s son-in-law, would later recall: “Hajj Amin felt that Arafat would be the right leader for the Palestinian nation after him. He thought he could carry the responsibility”
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of leadership and continue his mentor’s legacy of uncompromising opposition to the state of Israel.

Yes, thought Haj Amin al-Husseini, there was hope. His young cousin Yasser Arafat was determined to continue the battle. He was prepared to organize a war of national liberation, and the mufti understood that although it was only the start of a long struggle, with faith and fortitude the battle might still be won. It was Arafat who coined the slogan “Revolution Until Victory.” These words carried resonance with al-Husseini. As each of his expected triumphs turned to defeat and despair, he simply turned the page and hurtled forward to confront the next challenge. Now, as he approached the sunset of his life, the old warrior could look with satisfaction on the fact that the torch would be carried by a younger, equally determined member of his own family. Yes, he mused, Arafat would suffer setbacks, but he had learned the lessons of the mufti’s own life and legend.

No matter what would follow, he knew the Palestinian Arab cause would be in good hands.

With Arafat’s election as PLO chairman, al-Husseini retired to his home in Beirut, from where he continued to play an informal yet influential role in the Palestine National Movement, advising Arafat on his unfolding war of terror against the state of Israel and the Jewish people.

Haj Amin al-Husseini spent the last years of his life in Beirut, Lebanon, and died there on July 4, 1974. Most notable among the mourners at al-Husseini’s funeral was Yasser Arafat. According to newspaper reports, Arafat arrived with “tears in his eyes.”
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Lebanese president Suleiman Franjieh and King Hussein of Jordan sent representatives, as did other Arab heads of state. It is not impossible to imagine that among the mourners would have been Saddam Hussein’s uncle Khairallah Talfah, the mufti’s devoted friend for more than forty years. A large crowd, thousands of mourners,
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attended the funeral as well.

When Haj Amin al-Husseini died, the Supreme Muslim Council, of which he had been the founding president, asked the Israeli government for permission to bring his body back to Jerusalem for burial at Haram al-Sharif. Permission was denied, and three days later al-Husseini was buried, amid much pomp and circumstance, in the cemetery of the Fallen of the Palestinian Revolution, in Beirut. It was clear to all the mourners who gathered to pay their last respects to the mufti that when the lifelong goals of al-Husseini were eventually realized—when the liberation of Jerusalem from the Zionists and the destruction of their illegitimate Jewish state in Palestine were finally achieved—the mortal remains of Haj Amin al-Husseini would be brought back to Jerusalem for burial. Then, and only then, would their beloved mufti rest in peace for eternity in a truly
Judenrein
Islamic holy city, the capital of a new and enduring Palestinian Arab state that, like the Third Reich envisioned by Hitler and al-Husseini, would last for a thousand years.

Today, sixty years after the Holocaust, the wartime career and historical significance of Hitler’s mufti should be better remembered and understood. In the Arab world, the effects of the mufti’s historic November 28, 1941, meeting with the führer, and of radical Islam’s subsequent wartime alliance with Hitler, have been long-lasting. The Muslim-Nazi alliance that the mufti forged with Hitler has in real ways continued to this day.

The death of the mufti did not end the debate about his life and legacy. To his supporters, Haj Amin al-Husseini was a hero of epic proportions. He was the George Washington of the radical Islamic world. Much like Atatürk in Turkey and Nehru in India, the mufti had won great acclaim in his early years as a charismatic national leader who many foreign leaders believed would lead his people into statehood. His close friend and supporter Issa Nakhleh, who for more than three decades served as the Arab Higher Committee’s representative at the United Nations, described him as a great Palestinian patriot, the century’s “greatest Palestinian leader, who spent his entire life defending Palestinian rights” and working for Palestinian Arab independence.
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Yasser Arafat, who would succeed the mufti as head of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969, always spoke with great pride on being the mufti’s student and protégé, referring to him as “our hero al-Husseini,” as a heroic “symbol of withstanding world pressure, having remained an Arab leader in spite of demands to have him replaced because of his Nazi ties.”
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To the leaders of radical Islam in the latter half of the twentieth century, the mufti was viewed as both hero and mentor.

A very different, and more accurate, view of al-Husseini was offered by Edgar Ansel Mowrer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign correspondent and nationally syndicated columnist. “As a murderer,” wrote Mowrer, “this man ranks with the great killers of history. As an enemy of the United Nations, he was surpassed only by Hitler. In the evil of his intentions, Haj Amin equaled Hitler.”
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For his critics, then and now, Haj Amin al-Husseini had become a true icon of evil—a murderer and terrorist who justified the use of terror to achieve his political ends. His legacy is still with us today.

Chapter 6

Mandate for Hate:
Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Islamization of Anti-Semitism

 “I am a Jew.” These were the last words that Daniel Pearl, the
Wall Street Journal
reporter, uttered before his decapitation by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan in 2004. His killing was the culmination and fulfillment of the viciously anti-Jewish ideology of Haj Amin al-Husseini, an ideology that has inspired decades of Jew hatred throughout the Islamic world. The horrifying murder cruelly exemplified the existential threat that this ideology now represents. To be born a Jew has become, for many radical Islamists today as it was for Hitler and for Haj Amin al-Husseini, a mandate for hate.

Radical Islam is the preeminent source of anti-Semitism in the modern world. In recent decades, Jew hatred and the widespread circulation and distribution of anti-Semitic literature, such as
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
have increased dramatically and exponentially throughout the Islamic Middle East. “Kill the Jews…. This pleases God, history and religion”: The fatwa proclaimed by the mufti on German radio in 1943 has become a slogan that has inspired generations of radical Islamic terrorists, from Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the Muslim terrorist who masterminded the brutal kidnapping and barbaric murder of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. As the founding father of radical Islamic anti-Semitism in the twentieth century, al-Husseini remains the inextricable and enduring link between the old anti-Semitism of pre-Holocaust Europe and the Jew hatred and Holocaust denial that now permeates the Muslim world.

Today more than ever, anti-Semitism is publicly endorsed by Arab governments, disseminated by the Arab media, taught in Muslim schools and universities, and preached in mosques. Indeed, it can be said without fear of exaggeration that classical anti-Semitism is now a major and inextricable component of the Arab intellectual life of our time, as it was in the intellectual and cultural life of Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.
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The roots of Islamic anti-Semitism run deep. They were invigorated by the radical Islamic and Nazi collaboration, inspired and fostered by the mufti, during World War II. The enduring anti-Jewish legacy of Nazism, which the mufti did much to shape and further during the 1950s and 1960s, has found an appreciative audience in the contemporary Islamic world, where an especially virulent strain of Jew hatred, the likes of which has not been seen since the Holocaust, finds widespread expression in books, magazines, newspapers, radio and television, and the Internet.