Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (27 page)

“According to my opinion, the Grand Mufti, who has been in Berlin since 1941, played a role in the decision of the German Government to exterminate the European Jews, the importance of which must not be disregarded. He had repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he has been in contact, above all before Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this as a comfortable solution of the Palestine problem. In his messages broadcast from Berlin, he surpassed us in anti-Jewish attacks. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and has constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard say that, accompanied by Eichmann, he has visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”

The Record of Collaboration of King Farouk of Egypt with the Nazis and Their Ally, the Mufti

T
HE
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FFICIAL
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AZI
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ECORDS OF THE
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ING’S
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LLIANCE AND OF THE
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UFTI’S
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LANS FOR
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OMBING
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ERUSALEM AND
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EL
A
VIV

M
EMORANDUM
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UBMITTED TO THE
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NITED
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ATIONS
J
UNE
1948

Mufti Urged Nazis to Bomb Jerusalem and Tel Aviv

While the Jews were helping the Allies, the Mufti was planning with the Axis on the fashion in which Jewish Palestine should be destroyed. His reasons were two:

(1) Personal vindictiveness and hatred of the Jews which had previously caused his active association with the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews of Europe.

(2) The second purpose was military, namely to destroy an essential military factor which played a role in the subsequent Allied victory in North Africa.

The Mufti was constantly urging attacks on Jerusalem, on the Jewish Agency Headquarters there and on Tel Aviv, the all Jewish city. This is revealed in a number of secret documents found by the Allied Armies in Germany when they entered the country.

Thus, according to one of these documents, a secret report of the German Air Force Command, dated October 29, 1943, revealed that the Mufti for the past six months had been proposing an attack on Jerusalem and the Headquarters of the Jewish Agency by air and an attack on Tel Aviv. According to this report, the Mufti proposed that November 2, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration should be “celebrated” by such an attack.

At the same time, and again under the Mufti’s pressure, the Air Force Command was considering an attack on military objectives along the Palestine coast and expressed the opinion that “even the Grand Mufti, as the Reich Secretary Headquarters has said, would consider this sufficient.”

In the same report, the Mufti’s efforts to secure an attack on Tel Aviv are described. According to the report, “without doubt Tel Aviv should be considered as the object of counter-attacks against the British and American terrorist attacks. Any attack must be carried out with a very large force in order to have a lasting effect.” But Fieldmarshal Goering was obliged to turn down the request on July 17 because no task force in sufficiently large numbers was available.

Apparently the Mufti did not rest, for another report dated March 30, 1944, reveals that the Mufti again urged that the bombing of Tel Aviv again take place on April 1, 1944. Again the Air Force Command reluctantly had to reiterate its refusal to do so.

Notes

CHAPTER
1:
RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY

1. The definitive study of Nazi foreign policy making and diplomacy on the Wilhelmstrasse, on which Hitler’s Foreign Office and Reich Chancellery were both located, can be found in Paul Seabury,
The Wilhelmstrasse: A Study of German Diplomats Under the Nazi Regime
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954).

2. Albert Speer,
Inside the Third Reich,
translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 102.

3. Ibid.

4. Joachim Fest,
Speer: The Final Verdict
(Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1999), 103.

5. Chuck Morse,
The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini
(Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc., 2003), 57.

6. “Record of the Conversation Between the Führer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941, in the Presence of Reichs Foreign Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin,”
Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945,
series D, vol. XIII, London, 1964; quoted in Kenneth R. Timmerman,
Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 108.

7. Bernard Lewis,
Semites and Anti-Semites
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), 147.

8. Quoted in Alan M. Dershowitz,
The Case for Israel
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 55.

9. Quoted in ibid., 55–56.

CHAPTER
2:
THE GENESIS OF MODERN JIHAD

1. Eliyahu Elath,
Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini: The Former Mufti of Jerusalem—His Personality and Stages of His Rise to Power
(Jerusalem: Office of the Prime Minister, Bureau of the Advisor of Arab Affairs, 1968), 11.

2. Bernard Lewis, “The British Mandate for Palestine in Historical Perspective,” in Bernard Lewis,
From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 152.

3. Elias Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian: The Nazi Mufti,”
American Zionist
LXVIII, no. 4 (March–April 1978): 6.

4. Elath,
Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini,
11.

5.
The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson,
vol. 1 (New York: Review of Reviews Corporation, 1924), 418–419.

6. Martin Gilbert,
Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 83.

7. Quoted in ibid., 84.

8. This story is recounted in Michael Bar-Zohar and Eitan Haber,
The Quest for the Red Prince
(New York: William Morrow & Co., 1983), 34–35.

9. Bernard Wasserstein,
Herbert Samuel: A Political Life
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1; and the chapter on Herbert Samuel in Chaim Bermant,
The Cousinhood: The Anglo-Jewish Gentry
(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971), 329–355.

10. Tom Segev,
One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2000), 148.

11. Ibid.

12. Vivian D. Lipman, “Herbert Louis Samuel,”
Encyclopedia Judaica
, vol. 14 (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1971), 799.

13. Bermant,
The Cousinhood,
344.

14. Ibid.

15. Martin Gilbert,
Exile and Return: The Struggle for a Jewish Homeland
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1978), 83; and Gilbert,
Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century,
43.

16. Bermant,
The Cousinhood,
343.

17. Douglas J. Feith, “Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904–1922,” in James W. Muller, ed.,
Churchill as Peacemaker
(Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1997), 217–218.

18. Gilbert,
Exile and Return,
99.

19. Edwin Montagu letter to Lloyd George, October 4, 1917, quoted in Leonard Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961), 500; and in Feith, “Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904–1922,” 222.

20. Feith, “Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904–1922,” 223–224.

21. Stein,
The Balfour Declaration,
543.

22. Gilbert,
Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century,
96.

23. Bermant,
The Cousinhood,
345.

24. Rashid Khalidi.
The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 63.

25. Ibid.

26. Elie Kedourie, “Sir Herbert Samuel and the Government of Palestine,” in Elie Kedourie,
The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1984), 62–63.

27. Philip Matter,
The Mufti of Jerusalem: Hajj-Amin al Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 25.

28. Elie Kedourie, “Sir Herbert Samuel and the Government of Palestine,” 64–66.

29. William B. Ziff,
The Rape of Palestine
(New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1938), 103.

30. Kedourie, “Sir Herbert Samuel and the Government of Palestine,” 65.

31. Ibid., 63.

32. Ronald Storrs,
Orientations
(London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, Limited, 1937), 23–24.

33. Kedourie, “Sir Herbert Samuel and the Government of Palestine,” 63.

34. Conor Cruise O’Brien,
The Siege
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 160.

35. Martin Sieff,
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East
(Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2008).

36. Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen,
Middle East Diary, 1917–1956
(London: Cresset Press, 1959), 97–98 (April 27, 1921, diary entry); also quoted in Feith, “Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904–1922,” 245–246.

37. Feith, “Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904–1922,” 244–245.

38. As Douglas Feith has noted, “These intrepid officials inconsistently asserted that the Arab community could be appeased after all, if Britain would limit Zionist activity—for example, by restricting Jewish immigration to and settlement of Palestine—and institutionalize Arab political power” by appointing radical Arab Palestinian leaders, such as al-Husseini, to positions of political authority. Ibid., 245.

39. Ibid., 235.

40. Wasserstein,
Herbert Samuel: A Political Life,
249.

41. As Samuel’s biographer Bernard Wasserstein has noted, when His Majesty’s government replaced its military government in Palestine with a civilian administration headed by Samuel, “though the chief had changed, the administration’s collective frame of mind—its prevailing lack of sympathy with the Balfour Declaration and the pro-Zionist policy of the Lloyd George government—remained in tact.” Ibid.

42. As Douglas Feith has so aptly described the relationship between Samuel and the anti-Zionist professional military and civilian subordinates on his staff, such as Ernest Richmond, whose influence Samuel came under: “He [Samuel] supervised, but they led.” Feith, “Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904–1922,” 235.

43. Ibid.

44. Kedourie, “Sir Herbert Samuel and the Government of Palestine,” 53.

45. Feith, “Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904–1922,” 243.

46. Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian,” 7.

47. Bermant,
The Cousinhood,
345.

48. Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv,
Behind the Uprising: Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), 30.

49. Ibid., 7–8.

50. Wasserstein,
Herbert Samuel: A Political Life
, 256.

51. Ibid., 257.

52. Matter,
The Mufti of Jerusalem,
33.

53. Ibid., 35.

54.
Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab and British Policies
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), 599.

55. Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian,” 8.

56. Gilbert,
Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century,
120.

57. Maurice Pearlman,
Mufti of Jerusalem: The Story of Haj Amin El Husseini
(London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1947), 16.