Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (29 page)

82. Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews
(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 504–505; also cited in Medoff, “The Mufti’s Nazi Years Re-examined.”

83. Lewis,
Semites and Anti-Semites,
156.

84. Ibid.

85. Daniel Carpi, “The Diplomatic Negotiations over the Transfer of Jewish Children from Croatia to Turkey and Palestine in 1943,”
Yad Vashem Studies
12 (1977): 109–111; also cited in Medoff, “The Mufti’s Nazi Years Re-examined,” 330.

86. Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian,” 28.

87. Thomas Krumensackeer, “Nazis Planned Holocaust for Palestine Historians,”
Washington Post
/Reuters, April 7, 2006.

88. Kirchwey et al.,
The Record of Collaboration of King Farouk of Egypt,
8.

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid.

91. Ibid.

92. Sir Martin Gilbert Archival Collection, the Churchill War Papers (London, England). We would like to thank Sir Martin Gilbert for making this material from his personal archival collection, relating to the Churchill War Papers, available to us.

93. Ibid.

94. Schechtman,
The Mufti and the Fuhrer,
159.

95. Ibid., 159–160.

96. Ibid., 160.

97. Timmerman,
Preachers of Hate,
112.

98. Schechtman,
The Mufti and the Fuhrer,
152.

99. More recently, the Israeli historian Zvi Elpeleg has concluded that “it is impossible to estimate the extent of the consequences of Hajj Amin’s efforts to prevent the exit of the Jews from countries under Nazi occupation, nor the number of those whose rescue was foiled and who consequently perished in the Holocaust.” Elpeleg,
The Grand Mufti,
72.

100. Bartley C. Crum,
Behind the Silken Curtain
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947), 109.

101. Ibid., 109–110.

102. Schechtman,
The Mufti and the Fuhrer,
170–172; and Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian,” 30.

103. This was the statement of Hector McNeil, undersecretary for foreign affairs in the Attlee government, which is quoted in Schechtman,
The Mufti and the Fuhrer,
172; also cited in Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian.”

104. Schechtman,
The Mufti and the Fuhrer;
and Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian.”

105. “Palestine” (editorial),
The Nation,
165, no. 16 (October 18, 1947): 399.

106. The term
Hitler’s Houdini
was first coined by Sir Martin Gilbert in conversation with the authors, in Washington, D.C., on March 22, 2007.

107. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre,
O Jerusalem
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 54.

108. Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian,” 30.

CHAPTER
4:
THE MUFTI’S REFLECTION

1. While the mufti’s imagined scenario is indeed counterfactual, the footnotes in this section are authentic, establishing the historical basis for all the counterfactual events recounted.

2. William L. Shirer, “If Hitler Had Won World War II,”
Look
magazine, December 19, 1961, 30.

3. Ibid.

4. David Fromkin, “Triumph of the Dictators,” in Robert Cowley, ed.,
What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been
(New York: Berkley Books, 2000), 308.

5. Shirer, “If Hitler Had Won World War II,” 30.

6. John Keegan, “How Hitler Could Have Won the War,” in Cowley, ed.,
What If?
, 297 and 301.

7. Ibid., 295.

8. Fromkin, “Triumph of the Dictators,” 308.

9. This is a point made by the military historian David Fromkin in “Triumph of the Dictators.”

10. Gilbert,
Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century,
162.

11. Bevin Alexander,
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II: The Fatal Errors That Led to Nazi Defeat
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000), 141.

12. Michael Lee Lanning, “El Alamein,” in Michael Lee Lanning,
The Battle 100: The Stories Behind History’s Most Influential Battles
(Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2003), 243.

13. Ibid.

14. This was, of course, a counterfactual scenario imagined by al-Husseini. In fact, Axis losses at El Alamein totaled twenty thousand casualties and thirty thousand prisoners, with all of the Axis tanks and artillery being destroyed or captured. Lanning,
The Battle 100.

15. This was also a counterfactual account, imagined by al-Husseini, of what Winston Churchill had said. In fact, Churchill had later remarked: “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.” (Lanning,
The Battle 100,
242.) As Wendell L. Willkie said, in his book
One World,
“Had the British lost [the Battle of El Alamein], Rommel would have been in Cairo in a few days.” (Wendell Willkie,
One World
[New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943], 5.) And so Rommel was.

16. Peter G. Tsouras, “Operation ORIENT Joint Axis Strategy,” in Kenneth Macksey, ed.,
The Hitler Options: Alternate Decisions of World War II
(London: Wren’s Park Publishing, 2000), 98.

17. Ibid.

18. The mufti actually used this precise quote in a radio address, broadcast over Berlin radio, on March 1, 1944. Elpeleg,
The Grand Mufti,
179.

19. Ibid.

20. Gilbert,
Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century,
210.

21. Thomas Krumenacker, “Nazis Planned Holocaust for Palestine,”
Washingtonpost.com
,
April 7, 2006; Krumenacker’s article reports new evidence about the Nazi plans for the extermination of the Jews of Palestine, based on a recent study completed by German historians Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cueppers of Stuttgart University.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. In 1922, Beatrice Webb, wife of the British Labor Party leader Lord Passfield, had referred to Mosley, then a Labor Party member of Parliament, as “the perfect politician” and “the most brilliant man in the House of Commons.” (Colin Cross,
The Fascists in Britain
[New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963], 17.) Throughout the 1920s, she and many others in England assumed that Mosley would one day become prime minister. This assumption was shared by some, even after Mosley had founded his Union of British Fascists and achieved notoriety as the “Führer of British Fascism.” Indeed, the British Labour Party leader Hugh Dalton recalls in his memoirs how Winston Churchill as prime minister in 1940 told his first ministerial meeting that “if the Germans won the war, they would make Britain a slave state under Mosley….” (Cross,
The Fascists in Britain,
13–14.)

25. Ian Kershaw,
Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis and the Road to War
(New York: Penguin Books, 2005), xvii.

26. Shirer, “If Hitler Had Won World War II,” 29.

27. This is a point noted by William L. Shirer in his article “If Hitler Had Won World War II,” 28.

28. Ibid.

29. See, for example, the recent book by the British journalist Melanie Phillips,
Londonistan
(New York: Encounter Books, 2006).

30. The mufti’s prediction did, in fact, come true. As British editor and columnist Daniel Johnson has recently noted, in 2006 “London, with over 1000 mosques,” was “already Europe’s unofficial Muslim capital.” (Daniel Johnson, “Allah’s England?,”
Commentary
122, no. 4 [November 2006]: 46.)

CHAPTER
5:
THE MUFTI’S RETURN TO THE MIDDLE EAST

1. Elpeleg,
The Grand Mufti,
76.

2. Ibid., 75.

3. Ibid.

4. Roosevelt, “The Puzzle of Jerusalem’s Mufti,” 26.

5. Elpeleg,
The Grand Mufti,
77.

6. Ibid., 78.

7. Ibid.

8. Efraim Karsh,
Arafat’s War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest
(New York: Grove Press, 2003), 10.

9. “The Arab Higher Committee of Palestine,” 1.

10. Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian,” 30.

11.
Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab and British Policies,
1214.

12. Gilbert,
Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century,
198.

13. Izzat Tannous,
The Palestinians
(New York: I. G. T. Company, 1988), 656.

14. Melman and Raviv,
Behind the Uprising: Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians,
35. King Abdullah wrote to a friend in October 1947, “The Mufti and [Syrian president] Kuwatly want to set up an independent Arab state in Palestine with the Mufti as its head. If that were to happen, I would be encircled on almost all sides by enemies.” (Quoted in Melman and Raviv,
Behind the Uprising: Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians.
)

15. Helena Cobban,
The Palestine Liberation Organization
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 8.

16. Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein,
The New Anti-Semitism
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1974), 160.

17. Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian,” 36.

18. Anwar Al Sadat,
Revolt on the Nile
(New York: John Day Company, 1957), 51–57.

19. Anwar Al Sadat, “Letter to Hitler,”
Al-Mussawar,
no. 1510, September 18, 1953, reprinted in D. F. Green, ed.,
Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel
(Geneva: Editions de l’Avenir, 1976), 87. Sadat’s letter to Hitler is also cited in Lewis,
The Crisis of Islam,
60.

20. Anwar Al Sadat, “Speech at the El Hussein Mosque Celebrating the Birthday of the Prophet Muhammad,” broadcast on Radio Cairo, April 25, 1972, in Green, ed.,
Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel,
90 and 91.

21. Cooper, “Forgotten Palestinian,” 37.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 8.

25. Timmerman,
The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq,
109.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Robert S. Wistrich, “The Old-New Anti-Semitism,” in Ron Rosenbaum, ed.,
Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism
(New York: Random House, 2004), 84.

29. Ibid.

30. Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi,
Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography
(London: Brassey’s, 1991), 25.

31. Ibid., 34.

32. Ibid., 135–136.

33. Taysir Jbara,
Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni: Mufti of Jerusalem
(Princeton, NJ: Kingston Press, 1985), 191.

34. Yoav Gelber,
Palestine 1948
(Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), 16.

35. Ibid.

36. Collins and Lapierre,
O Jerusalem,
407.

37. Freda Kirchwey, et al.,
The Palestine Problem and Proposals for Its Solution: Memorandum Submitted to the General Assembly of the United Nations
(New York: Nation Associates, April 1947), 54.

38. Ibid., 53–54.

39. Dershowitz,
The Case for Israel,
76.

40. Benny Morris,
1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 219; also cited in Dershowitz,
The Case for Israel
.

41. Collins and Lapierre,
O Jerusalem,
340.

42. Dershowitz,
The Case for Israel,
80.

43. Ibid.