Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (18 page)

Contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism is also deeply rooted in Islamic religious teachings and political tradition. Since the founding of Islam, Jews have had to live with the enduring legacy of Muhammad’s historic antipathy toward the Jews of Medina. His anger toward the Jews who opposed him in Medina, recorded in the Koran, was followed by his merciless subjugation of them, in Medina and many other cities, as Muhammad and his followers embarked on their wars of conquest. This hostility set the tone for Islam’s subsequent attitude toward the Jews, and toward Judaism, over the centuries, a hostility that has become more virulent since the end of World War II. As descendants of those who opposed the founder of Islam and refused to accept the new faith he promulgated, Jews would forever be condemned by many Muslims as infidels.
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Contemporary Islamic anti-Semitic speakers and publications invoke Muhammad’s teaching in the Koran that the Jews are the greatest enemies of mankind. This verse, as well as other Koranic verses singling out Jews for special condemnation by the Islamic faith, have become increasingly popular in recent years with Muslim clerics the world over.
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Maliciously anti-Jewish pronouncements, many more vitriolic than others, are found throughout the Koran. Jews are accused of cowardice, greed, and chicanery, vilified as monkeys and pigs,
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and condemned as “corruptors of Scripture.”
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These accusations, first articulated by Muhammad in angry response to his rejection by the Jews, have ever since been regarded by many Muslims as God’s word. In recent decades, the leaders of radical Islam have continued to invoke Muhammad’s divinely based antipathy to the Jews, citing his teachings in the Koran to justify their call for a jihad, which every devout Muslim is obligated to carry out against the Jews. For radical Islamists today, as for the grand mufti before them, Muhammad’s divinely inspired hatred of the Jews has been the all-important pretext for the continuing Islamic war of terrorism against the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

Since the time of Muhammad, Jews have been denigrated as
dhimmis
—second-class citizens—in Muslim societies, where they have traditionally been treated as tolerated minorities, inferior and subservient to Muslims.
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During his reign, the caliph of Baghad, Harun al-Rashid (786–809), enacted legislation requiring Jews to wear a yellow belt and a tall conical cap. This landmark Muslim legal decree was the inspiration for the humiliating yellow badge that Jews were forced to wear in medieval Europe and, more recently, in Nazi-occupied European countries.
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Even in the relatively more tolerant Islamic Ottoman Empire, where many Jews sought refuge in the aftermath of their expulsion from Spain in 1492, laws were enacted restricting the number and location of synagogues and prohibiting their construction in proximity to mosques.
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The centuries that followed the caliph’s decree witnessed a rising tide of hostility and violence toward Jews throughout the Muslim world. During the nineteenth century especially, Jews were massacred by Muslims on numerous occasions and in numerous cities throughout the Middle East. Muslim rioters attacked and murdered Jews in Aleppo in 1853, in Damascus in 1848 and 1890, in Cairo in 1844 and 1901–1902, in Alexandria in 1870 and 1881,
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and on the Tunisian island of Djerba in 1864.
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In Tunis itself, in 1869, eighteen Jews were murdered in the space of a few months by Muslims. Between 1864 and 1880, more than five hundred Jews were murdered by Muslims in Morocco, often in broad daylight.
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, rampages against Jews by Muslims also occurred in the Moroccan cities of Casablanca and Fez.
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Indeed, in Fez, on April 18, 1912, Muslim riots resulted in the killing of sixty Jews and the sacking of the Jewish Quarter.
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The tragic tradition of Muslim anti-Semitism is venerable indeed.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf,
and Islamic Anti-Semitic Literature

In the decades since World War II, hatred of the Jews has been fanned throughout the Islamic world by the mass circulation of notoriously anti-Semitic publications, including
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and Hitler’s viciously anti-Semitic autobiography,
Mein Kampf,
a development encouraged and promoted by Haj Amin al-Husseini.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
is an infamous forgery dating from czarist Russia that purported to document the existence of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. Despite the fact that the
Protocols
had been discredited before the 1920s, they continued to be accepted as authoritative scholarship throughout much of the Islamic world. From his earliest years, the mufti had viewed the
Protocols
as such. In fact, Haj Amin al-Husseini grew up in a family that accepted the authenticity of the
Protocols.
In 1918, Haj Amin’s cousin Musa Kasim Pasha al-Husseini, the mayor of Jerusalem, told the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that he had received a copy of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
from a British officer of the military administration of Palestine and asked Weizmann whether the Zionist leaders were also “the elders of Zion” and whether they shared the same conspiratorial program.
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Just three years later, in 1921, shortly after Haj Amin al-Husseini was appointed mufti of Jerusalem, the first of many Arabic-language translations of the
Protocols
was published,
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with al-Husseini’s enthusiastic support and endorsement. During the 1920s, allegations of a Jewish international cabal to control the world through treachery and secret violence, as depicted in the
Protocols,
found an appreciative audience among the Arabs of Palestine. Only two months after al-Husseini’s appointment, a new anti-Jewish riot broke out in Jerusalem, instigated by the mufti’s propaganda, including the new translation in the Arab press of the
Protocols.
In 1929, in his testimony before the Shaw commission of inquiry appointed by the British Colonial Office to investigate the massacre of the Jews of Hebron and Jerusalem, al-Husseini admitted that he had distributed Arabic translations of the
Protocols
in Palestine and firmly asserted his belief in their authenticity. It was the Jewish-Zionist cabal described in the
Protocols,
al-Husseini told the Shaw commission, that was responsible for the increased Jewish immigration to Palestine of the 1920s, and the illegitimate efforts of the Jewish immigrants to take Palestine away from the Arabs and take possession of Islamic holy sites in Hebron and Jerusalem.

Haj Amin al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler shared a deep and abiding admiration for the
Protocols.
Hitler’s defeat and suicide in 1945 did not deter the mufti from carrying on the führer’s mission of republishing and disseminating the
Protocols
throughout the Middle East. In subsequent decades, as a result of the mufti’s unceasing efforts,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
would be published in Arabic many times as well as in a number of different translations
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and would enjoy best-selling status in Islamic capitals from Cairo to Tehran and Damascus. There have now been at least nine different Arabic translations of the
Protocols
and innumerable editions, more than in any other language, and it remains required reading in a number of Arab universities.
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One Arabic edition of the text, published in 1968, was translated by Shawqi Abd al-Nasser, brother of the Egyptian president
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and a devoted protégé and supporter of the mufti.

The
Protocols
have been publicly praised and recommended by various monarchs, presidents, prime ministers, and other political and intellectual leaders of radical Islam. On numerous occasions, for example, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser praised the book and recommended that it be widely read. Nasser told an interviewer from an Indian newspaper, “I will give you an English copy. It proves clearly, to quote from the
Protocols,
that ‘three hundred Zionists, each of whom knows all the others, govern the fate of European continents and they elect their successors from their entourage.’”
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King Faisal of Saudi Arabia ordered that all Saudi hotels have copies of the
Protocols
as bedside reading
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and often gave copies of the czarist forgery to the guests of his regime. Then U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger was among the many visiting diplomats to receive a copy of the
Protocols
from the Saudi monarch.
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When King Faisal presented the
Protocols,
along with an anthology of anti-Semitic writings, to French journalists who accompanied French foreign minister Michel Jobert on his visit to Saudi Arabia in January 1974, officials noted that it was among the king’s favorite books.
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Hamas, which evolved from the Muslim Brotherhood and which the mufti had promoted enthusiastically from its inception, invokes the
Protocols
in Article 32 of its charter, stating that the ongoing conspiratorial conduct of world Zionism, Israel, and the Jewish people “is the best proof of what is said [in the
Protocols
].”
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Spokesmen for the government of Iran, from the era of Ayatollah Khomeini to the present, have embraced the
Protocols
and often serialized the book in daily newspapers.
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Most recently, it was made available in English at the Iranian exhibition booth at the 2005 Frankfurt International Book Fair.
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Hundreds of Arab periodicals regularly quote or summarize the
Protocols,
referring to them as the definitive word on the international Jewish Zionist conspiracy. The Lebanese newspaper
Al-Anwar
reported that a recent edition of the book hit the top of its nonfiction best-seller list.
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On November 6, 2000, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, twenty-two television stations in the Arab world broadcast the first segment of a forty-part Egyptian television series,
Knights Without a Horse,
which depicted the Jewish plot to rule the world as presented in the
Protocols.
For the mufti, as for two generations of later radical Islamists, much of the evil, hatred, treachery, and violence in the world was attributable to Jewish plots and conspiracies hatched by the “Elders of Zion,” as described in the
Protocols.

Hitler’s
Mein Kampf,
a favorite anti-Semitic publication of the grand mufti and his protégés, has similarly enjoyed a wide and appreciative radical Islamic audience in recent decades. Indeed, if the
Protocols
is the most popular anti-Semitic tract in the Arab world,
Mein Kampf
could be considered a close second.
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Hitler’s hate-filled and virulently anti-Jewish autobiography has been available in Arabic since 1963 and remains a perennial best seller in several Islamic countries.
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After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli soldiers discovered that many Egyptian prisoners carried small paperback editions of
Mein Kampf,
translated into Arabic by an official of the Arab Information Center in Cairo. The translator, who was known as el-Hadj, had been a leading official in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry; his real name was Luis Heiden.
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He took this new name after he fled to Egypt following the war and converted to Islam. When
Mein Kampf
was republished by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian National Authority in 2001, shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it achieved best-seller status throughout the Arab world.

New Arabic editions of
Mein Kampf
have recently appeared in Turkey, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, and it is always available in Arabic translation in London bookstores.
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While
Mein Kampf
continues to enjoy a wide and appreciative Islamic audience,
Schindler’s List,
a film portraying the suffering of Jews under Nazi rule, is banned in most Arab countries.
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The Blood Libel Accusation in the Islamic Middle East

Since the early 1960s, the Arab media, at the urging of Haj Amin al-Husseini and his cohorts, have resurrected the notorious blood libel accusation, routinely charging Jews with committing the ritual murder of Muslim and Christian children during the Passover holiday. The Jews were accused of using the children’s blood in the unleavened bread eaten at the Passover meal. Accusations of ritual murder had been directed by Muslim leaders against Jews throughout the nineteenth century in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.
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For al-Husseini, the blood libel was not malicious rumor or libel, but historical fact. From his youth, al-Husseini had believed in the credibility of these accusations of Jewish ritual murder. Such accusations gained new momentum and popularity after al-Husseini’s arrival in Egypt in the late 1940s. During the 1950s and 1960s, the regime of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser published and disseminated many works accusing Jews of ritual murder, which subsequently gained a wide audience through the Arab press, radio broadcasts, and school textbooks.
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In 1962, at the suggestion of al-Husseini, the Egyptian Ministry of Education reissued
Talmudic Sacrifices
by Habib Faris, first published in 1890 in Cairo. In the introduction, the editor notes that the book constitutes “an explicit documentation of indictment, based upon clear-cut evidence that the Jewish people permitted the shedding of blood as religious duty enjoined in the Talmud.”
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In his 1964 book,
The Danger of World Jewry to Islam and Christianity,
the Egyptian writer Abdallah al-Tall argued that “the God of the Jews is not content with animal sacrifices” but “must be appeased with human sacrifices.” Thus, wrote al-Tall, “the Jewish custom of slaughtering children and exacting their blood to mix it with their
matzot
on Passover.”
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In his book
Illuminations on Zionism,
published in Cairo in 1969, Mustafa al-Sa’dani, one of the mufti’s favorite authors, devotes more than thirty pages to the blood libel,
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accepting allegations of Jewish ritual murder as historical fact. So, too, the Egyptian author Aisha Abd al-Rahman treats the draining of children’s blood at Passover as “a recognized Jewish ritual” in her book
The Enemies of Mankind.
In this book, published in Cairo in 1968, she also refers to Jews by such epithets as “sickness,” “plague,” and “noxious germ.”
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