Haj Amin al-Husseini, Part Two

"In consultation with the mufti, the Nazi leadership had created a special Einsatzgruppen Egypt, a mobile SS squad, under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann, which was to carry out the mass murder of Palestinian Jewry.  By the summer of 1942, anticipating a German military victory in the Middle East, the Einsatzgruppen Egypt had been standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine, attached to German general Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, where it would have begun killing the close to half a million Jews then living in Palestine.  This Middle Eastern death squad was led by SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Walter Rauff, one of Eichmann's most trusted deputies and a confidant of al-Husseini's(p60).  The mufti never attempted to disguise his Nazi beliefs or his wartime role as a mouthpiece for Hitler's genocide in the Arab world.  His role in the extermination of the Jews of Bosnia, and his oft proclaimed desire to exterminate all the Jews of Europe and Palestine, cannot be excused simply as anti-Zionism.  It may be a coincidence that the decision to carry out the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe followed soon after his arrival in Germany.  From the mufti's perspective, it was providential.  In fact, only two months after his initial meeting with Hitler on November 28, 1941, the infamous Wannsee Conference took place, in which the Nazi leadership produced their plan to systematically exterminate European Jewry(p62).  So, too, Marshal Tito's government in postwar Yugoslavia did not demand al-Husseini's extradition and indictment as a war criminal at Nuremberg, despite overwhelming evidence of the mufti's collaboration with the Nazis, his role in the murder of thousands of Bosnian Croatians and Serbs, and his recruitment and formation of the Muslim Bosnian Waffen-SS Division that had been instrumental in the extermination of 90 percent of Bosnia's Jews.  Tito understood that if he was to forge a united Yugoslav nation, the Muslims in Bosnia--many of whom had fought under the mufti during the war as members of the Handschar Division of his Bosnian Waffen-SS, and who constituted a not insignificant portion of Marshal Tito's constituency--must not have any excuse to resist his plans.  The Muslim community of Bosnia, Tito recognized, remained unswervingly loyal to the mufti, even after the defeat of Nazi Germany.  Thus, although there was a consensus that Haj Amin al-Husseini was guilty of war crimes, a convergence of political realities in the postwar world prevented him from being brought to justice(p64).  The mufti himself was one of the first to call for a holy war, ordering his 'Muslim brothers to murder the Jews.  Murder them all.'  This same call was made by his friend the sheikh of Al-Azhar.  'The hour of the holy war has struck,' proclaimed the sheikh.  'All Arab fighters must look upon the struggle for Palestine as a religious duty.'  As the Arab League's secretary general, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam Pasha,  candidly put it:'This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.'  Al-Husseini's spokesman Ahmad Shuqairy, later to become the first chairman of the PLO, announced that the goal of the new Arab war against Israel was 'the elimination of the Jewish state.'  Jerusalem, the mufti told his supporters and friends, would soon become Judenrein(p93).  Much to the anger and outrage of al-Husseini and his allies in the militantly anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's moderate prime minister Mahmoud an-Nukrashi Pasha made it known that he did not want to send Egypt's army into combat against Israel.  For al-Husseini and the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, this was an unforgivable sin.  For this crime, Pasha fell to an assassin's bullet as he left his office in Cairo on December 28, 1948.  A member of the Muslim Brotherhood fired the shot.  Al-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood had conspired secretly in his assassination, as they would conspire together in the assassination of King Abdullah(p96).  The impact of the jihadist ideologue Sayyid Qutb on the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon has been well documented.  Qutb had a particularly important influence on terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.  As a student at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah in the late 1970s, bin Laden first became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood while studying religion with Sayyid Qutb's brother Mohammed, one of the university's most prominent teachers of Islamic studies and the chief interpreter of Sayyid Qutb's written works(p98).  Icon of Evil:  Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann

Update (7 JAN 2013) Tip of the petasus to Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag.  An article in the Egyptian newspaper Rose-El-Youssef lists six prominant members of the Obama administration with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of which is Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Policy Development Arif Ali Khan, whom is described by Rose-El-Youssef as being a Qutb-ist.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, Part One

"The Mufti's close working relationship and friendship with Adolf Eichmann, as well as with Heinrich Himmler, is well documented and indisputable.  Following the capture of Eichmann in May 1960, the speculation about the relationship between these two men became a subject of active public discussion.  In a press conference held at the time of the Eichmann trial, on May 4, 1961, al-Husseini denied any connection with Adolf Eichmann during World War II.  Indeed, he claimed at this press conference that he did not even know who Eichmann was until he read about his capture in the newspapers.  In fact, the mufti and Eichmann not only knew each other, but collaborated actively in their years of service to the Third Reich.  At the Nuremberg trials, Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann's senior deputies, would testify that the mufti "was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.  I heard him say that, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz."  On this visit to Auschwitz, al-Husseini reportedly urged the guards in charge of the chambers to be more diligent and efficient in their efforts.
     One can only imagine how the mufti must have rejoiced as he toured the Auschwitz death camp complex.  What he witnessed was indeed, in his mind, the final solution to his Jewish problem.  With a sweeping audacity that was almost too bold to grasp, Hitler had determined simply to eliminate his perceived enemies.  As he examined the details of the process that led to extermination, al-Husseini realized that he would not have to transport his Jews anywhere.  The Jews were concentrated in the Tel Aviv/ Jaffa region of Palestine.  No railroad cars would be needed for transport.  No "selection" would be necessary.  No Jew would be needed to work or labor in any way for his Arab state of Palestine.  All that the mufti would need would be the technical assistance of his good friends Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann to construct factories of death to eliminate the Jews from Palestine once and for all.
     As the mufti left Aushwitz to return to Berlin, he could only marvel at Germany's ruthless efficiency in solving its Jewish problem.  With a smug certainty, he marveled at his good fortune in living at a time when he was blessed with such a superb ally and friend in the person of Adolf Hitler.
     Eichmann and al-Husseini admired each other tremendously.  Eichmann, as Dieter Wisliceny recalled in his testimony at Nuremberg, "was very strongly impressed with the Mufti."  The mufti, in turn, reciprocated this admiration.  When he spoke of Eichmann in the presumed privacy of his diary, al-Husseini observed that he was a "very rare diamond, the best savior of the Arabs(p51-52)." 
     "For the mufti, as for al-Gaylani, however, the common enemy was not just Great Britain, but the entire Allied cause.  The mufti often called upon the Muslims of the world to help Germany in the holy war it was waging against the British and their Western allies, especially the United States.  Some of his radio broadcasts were devoted specifically to condemning American policy in the Middle East.  In a radio broadcast from Berlin in March 1944, he denounced American policy with regard to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine:  "No one {would have}ever thought," he thundered, "that 140 million Americans would become tools in Jewish hands. . . . How could the Americans dare to Judiaze Palestine?"
     Many of his most passionate radio broadcasts were classically anti-Semetic, designed to incite hatred and violence against radical Islam's greatest enemy, the Jews.  On November 2, 1943, at the public rally to protest the Balfour Declaration, al-Husseini used German radio to broadcast one of his most virulently anti-Semetic messages:  "The overwhelming egoism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God's chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other people are animals," al-Husseini declared, "makes them incapable of being trusted."  In this broadcast, which included an inflammatory tirade against both the Jews and the British, interspersed with citations of Koranic texts against the Jews, the mufti said of the Jews:  "They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals. . . . The divine anger and curse that the Holy Koran mentions with reference to the Jews is because of this unique character of the Jews(p53-54)."" Icon of Evil:Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann 

Battle of the Books: Liberty as the Absence of Force

Thus the word {liberty} is either a misleading appeal to passion, or else it embodies or rather hints at an exceedingly complicated assertion, the truth of which can be proved only by elaborate historical investigations.  'The cause of liberty, for which Hampden died on the field and Sydney on the scaffold,' means either that Hampden and Sydney were right in resisting Charles I and Charles II, respectively, or else merely that they did as a fact die in resisting those kings.  The first assertion obviously requires, before it can be accepted, a full account by way of proof.  The second tells us nothing worth knowing except a bare matter of fact, and would be consistent with Hampden's having been shot when trying to rob on the highway and Sydney's being hanged for highway robbery(p121).  Yet this definition of liberty, which is in exact agreement with Mr. Mill's own views as expressed in his chapter on Liberty and Necessity, in the 2nd volume of his Logic,  is the very foundation of my book.  Liberty is a eulogistic word;  substitute for it a neutral word--'leave', for instance, or 'permission'--and it becomes obvious that nothing whatever can be predicated of it, unless you know who is permitted by whom to do what.  I would ask Mr. Morley whether he attaches any absolute sense whatever to the word liberty, and if so, what it is?  If he attaches to it only the relative sense of 'permission' or 'leave,' I ask how he can make any affirmation at all about it unless he specifies the sort of liberty to which he refers?  Of course, liberty may have positive effects.  Give all men leave to steal, and no doubt some men will steal, but this does not show that liberty itself is a definite thing, with properties of its own, like coal or water(p233, James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Liberty Fund ed.) 

Catholic Marxism

Petasus tip to Catholic Herald.UK.  Bishop Reinhard Marx, author of Das Kapital (not to be confused with the Das Kapital written by Karl Marx) says that it is time to abandon capitalism.  The article did not give any specifics about how or where Bishop Marx was educated.  If his education was, as is typical for clergymen, in theology, one wonders why the Bishop is holding forth on a topic he lacks familiarity in.  This is an all too common problem with the Catholic episcopacy, which holds forth strongly held opinions about biology, economics, law, politics, and other topics they really shouldn't specialize in.  A good example of this is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), who offer an opinion about virtually every topic under the sun, which only means that their emphasis on vital issues like abortion is drowned out by the plentitude of remarks they make about everything else.

Estase actually has something positive to say about an Illinois Democrat.  Dan Lipinski voted to outlaw sex-selection abortions, something that putative pro-life "Republican"  Ron Paul voted against.  While I still consider the Democrats The Abortion Party, at least the idea of targeting little girls for abortion strictly because of their sex gives some people pause.