Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (21 page)

Chapter 7

The Mufti’s Legacy:
Jew Hatred, Jihad, and Terror

Islamic Anti-Semitism in a New Age of Terror: Blaming the Jews for September 11

 The radical Islamic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, shocked America and the world. For America, and for the West, it was a day of infamy comparable to, if not greater than, Pearl Harbor. This murderous slaughter of innocent civilians ushered in a new and unprecedented era in the history of radical Islamic terrorism.

The perpetrators of September 11 shared much in common with the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which have their genesis in
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
lie at the heart of the radical Islamic ideology and worldview that served as the pretext for September 11. In the aftermath of September 11, radical Islam would blame the attacks on the World Trade Center on “the Elders of Zion” and on the Jews.
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Barely two weeks after September 11, a columnist in the Egyptian newspaper
Al-Wafd
wrote that the Zionists must have known in advance that the September 11 attacks were impending but refused to share the information with the United States “in order to sow disputes and troubles” throughout the world. “Proof is found,” the columnist added, “in the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion.”
²

The September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States were welcomed by many in the Muslim world. The grand mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, preaching his Friday sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, called openly for the destruction of Israel, Great Britain, and the United States: “Oh Allah, destroy America, for she is ruled by Zionist Jews…. Allah will paint the White House black!”
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For the sheikh, such prayerful calls for global jihad were nothing new. Well before September 11, Sabri, who served as the supreme religious leader of the Palestinian National Authority, had prayed in public for the destruction of America. “Oh, Allah, destroy America as it is controlled by Zionist Jews,” he implored during his weekly sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on July 11, 1997. Two months later he repeated his appeal, adding: “Cast [the Americans] into their own traps and cover the White House with black!” It was a prayer he would repeat again just two weeks before the September 11 terrorist attacks.
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The Egyptian-based journal of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Haj Amin al-Husseini had once contributed anti-Semitic and anti-Western diatribes, hailed Osama bin Laden “as a hero in the full sense of the word” and prayed that his followers would eventually “eradicate America.”
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For the Muslim Brotherhood, to whose malicious ideology al-Husseini had been so fervently devoted, the September 11 terror attacks were nothing less than “divine retribution,” not least because the Americans “preferred the apes [that is, the Jews] to human beings, treating human beings from outside the U.S. cheaply, supporting homosexuals and usury.”
⁶
Perhaps the most dramatic—and explicit—response came from the Hamas weekly
Al-Risala
in Gaza, in its issue of September 13, 2001: “Allah has answered our prayers.”
⁷

Almost immediately in the aftermath of September 11, throughout the Islamic world, blame for the terrorist attacks was placed on the Zionists, Israel, and the Jews. The Syrian ambassador to Tehran was quoted as saying that “the Israelis have been involved in these incidents and no Jewish employee was present in the World Trade Organization building on that day.” In the Jordanian newspaper
Al-Dustour
on September 13, 2001, an article appeared that argued, in the conspiratorial tradition of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
that the Twin Towers massacre was in fact “the act of the great Jewish Zionist mastermind that controls the world economy, media and politics…,” and the diabolical Zionist plot “was rapidly leading the world to global disaster.”
⁸
The Egyptian sheikh Muhammad al-Gameia, former imam of the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque of New York, who had paid homage to Haj Amin al-Husseini as a hero and spiritual mentor, also had little doubt that the Jews were behind the September 11 terrorist attacks. “The Jewish element is as Allah described,” asserted al-Gameia. “We know they have always broken agreements, unjustly murdered the prophets, and betrayed the faith.”
⁹
Explaining that “only the Jews” were capable of destroying the World Trade Center, the sheikh added that “if it became known to the American people, they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did.”
¹⁰
In Kuwait, there were reports that New York rabbis “told their followers to take their money out of the stock market before September 11.”
¹¹
In Egypt and other Muslim countries, the Mossad was blamed for the attack.

The conspiratorial theory that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, was behind the Twin Tower attacks gained widespread credence throughout the radical Islamic world in the aftermath of September 11 and enjoyed great credence in Pakistan. In support of this anti-Zionist conspiracy theory, the
Jihad Times
and other media in Pakistan stated as fact that four thousand Israelis and Jews working in the World Trade Center had been ordered by the Mossad not to show up for work on September 11. The terrorist attacks, it was alleged, had been ordered by “the Elders of Zion” in response to criticism of Israel and Zionism at the Third UN World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, in the weeks before the attacks.
¹²

Fatwas and Holy War: Al-Husseini’s Legacy as a Pioneer of Modern Jihad

During the 1920s and 1930s, Haj Amin al-Husseini was one of the first radical Islamic leaders to issue fatwas, or religious rulings, calling for jihad, or holy war, against Great Britain, the United States, the Jews, and the West. Since World War I, during which al-Husseini served as an officer in the Ottoman Turkish army, the fatwa has served as a major instrument by which Islamic religious leaders have impelled their followers to engage in acts of jihad, which invariably involved acts of violence and terrorism.

The first twentieth-century use of the fatwa to declare an Islamic holy war against the British and its Western allies was invoked during World War I by the Ottoman Turkish sultan Sheikh ul-Islam, in support of the German-Turkish war effort led by Kaiser Wilhelm II. It is likely that the Turkish sultan’s idea of World War I as a holy war against the British was one that al-Husseini passionately shared, envisioning it also as a jihad against the Jewish supporters of Lord Balfour and his pro-Zionist British government. Swiftly translated into Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Tartar, the Turkish sultan’s fatwa was a truly global call to jihad, addressed to the approximately 120 million Muslims then living under British, French, and Russian rule.
¹³
It was the first of many such twentieth- and twenty-first-century proclamations of holy war in the emerging struggle between radical Islam and the West.

Shortly after being appointed grand mufti in 1921, al-Husseini declared a fatwa of jihad against Great Britain and the Jews in response to the British decision to affirm its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. After the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in Palestine in April 1936, and the declaration of a state of emergency by the British mandatory government, the newly established Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, of which al-Husseini had been elected president, called for a general strike against the British, urging other Arab leaders to join in a jihad
watani,
or “patriotic struggle,” to “work for rescuing the country from [British] imperialism and Jewish colonization….”
¹⁴
After the British expelled al-Husseini from Palestine in September 1937, the mufti helped establish the Central Committee of the Jihad, also known as the General Command of the Arab Revolt, which under his direction issued the following fatwa against the British: “The fighters…have sold themselves to Allah and they have set out in [obedience] to Him, only in order to strive for His goal, for the jihad in His way…. They try to get ahead of one another [in hurrying] to the battlefield of jihad and martyrdom, in order to support what is right, to establish justice and to defend the noble community and their holy country…. We call upon any Muslim [or] Arab to setout for jihad in the way of Allah and to help the fighters in defending the holy land.”
¹⁵

In Iraq in May 1941, in the immediate aftermath of the failed pro-German coup that he had been so instrumental in launching, the mufti issued what was perhaps his best-known fatwa, a summons to a holy war against Great Britain. In the mufti’s fatwa against Britain, he invited “my Moslem brothers throughout the world to join in the Holy War for God, for the defense of Islam and her lands against her enemy [the British]…. In Palestine the English have committed unheard of barbarisms…. I invite you, O Brothers, to join in the War for God to preserve Islam, your independence and your lands from English aggression.”
¹⁶

During the next four years, as his radio broadcasts from Berlin were transmitted throughout the Islamic world, the mufti issued several other calls to jihad against the British, its Western Allies, and the Jews, calls for holy war that often cited the Koran.
¹⁷
In these radio broadcasts to the Middle East, the mufti elaborated upon the claim that Jews were vilified by the Koran, the now so familiar claim that subsequent generations of radical Islamic terrorist leaders have invoked. “They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property and corrupt their morals,” al-Husseini asserted in his radio broadcast of November 2, 1943, in which he also called upon his fellow Arabs “to rise and fight” a holy war against the British and the Jews. “The divine anger and the curse that the Koran mentions with reference to the Jews,” proclaimed the mufti, “is because of this unique character of the Jews.”
¹⁸
In this, as in other areas, he made enduring contributions to both the rhetoric and the practice of the modern Islamic fatwa that laid the foundation for contemporary Islamic terrorism.

After his return to the Middle East in 1946, al-Husseini once again resorted to the fatwa, issuing religious rulings to mobilize Arab support for a new Islamic holy war to prevent the creation and future existence of a Jewish state in Palestine. In May 1948, at the beginning of Israel’s War of Independence, the mufti called for Arabs throughout the Islamic Middle East to wage a holy war against the newly established Jewish state. The goal of this jihad, he emphasized, was the extermination of the Jews and the destruction of their state of Israel.

His calls for a holy war were directed not only at the British and the Jews, but increasingly at America as well. In a famous radio broadcast from Berlin in March 1944, he denounced American policy in support of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine: “No one ever thought,” he thundered, that 140 million Americans “would become tools in Jewish hands….” How could America “dare to Judaize Palestine?” American intentions were now “clear,” he claimed, and reflected America’s demonic effort to establish a “Jewish empire in the Arab world,”
¹⁹
an effort that he called upon his fellow Muslims to fight and oppose. It was, quite simply, their religious obligation to do so.

It may well have been Sheikh ul-Islam’s use of the fatwa during World War I that first inspired al-Husseini to issue his subsequent fatwas. In so doing, al-Husseini was a true pioneer. For al-Husseini in the 1930s, as for his ideological heirs in the 1990s, these religious rulings “provided the legal and moral dispensation for acts of terrorism that are deemed to fulfill the duty of Jihad.”
²⁰
In his calls for global jihad, Haj Amin al-Husseini was setting a precedent for future fatwas: for the fatwa of the Ayatollah Khomeini, calling for the killing of Salman Rushdie, author of
The Satanic Verses,
in 1989; for the fatwas of the Egyptian sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, which provided the religious justification for the 1981 assassination of Anwar Al Sadat and for the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993;
²¹
and for Osama bin Laden’s infamous 1996 fatwa calling on all Muslims to wage jihad against the United States and Israel, which would provide the religious justification for the Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11. “Our Muslim brothers throughout the world…are asking you to participate with them against their enemies, who are also your enemies—the Israelis and the Americans—by causing them as much harm as can possibly be achieved,”
²²
asserted bin Laden. In an even more explicit and notorious fatwa of February 22, 1998, bin Laden proclaimed that “in order to obey the Almighty…to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military, it is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country…. In the name of Allah, we call upon every Muslim, who believes in Allah and asks for forgiveness, to abide by Allah’s order by killing Americans and stealing their money anywhere, anytime, and whenever possible.”