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Monday, July 09, 2012

Haj Amin al-Husseini, Part Three

"Arafat continued the mufti's legacy by recruiting Nazis and neo-Nazis for Fatah and the PLO.  In 1969, the PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a leader of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs section, and Willy Berner, who was an SS officer in the Mauthausen extermination camp.  Another former Nazi, Johann Schuller, was found supplying arms to Fatah.  Belgian Jean Tireault, secretary of the neo-Nazi organization La Nation Europeene, also went on the Fatah payroll.  Another Belgian, neo-Nazi Karl van der Put, recruited volunteers for the PLO.  During the 1970s, German neo-Nazi Otto Albrecht was arrested in West Germany with PLO identity papers after the PLO had given him $1.2 million to buy weapons. 
     Like al-Husseini, Arafat was a ruthless murderer whose career was built on terrorism and violence.  In continuing this tradition, Arafat introduced his longtime PLO associate Hani al-Hassan to Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu in October 1972, saying:  'This is my brother. . . He is the one who, just a few months ago, prepared our answer to the Olympic Committee's decision not to allow a team of Palestinian athletes to participate in the Munich games.  He is the brain who put our organization's name on the front page of every single newspaper.'
     Arafat was referring to the September 5, 1972, massacre of eleven Israeli athletes by a team of PLO terrorists during the Olympic Games in Munich, a brutal deed that shocked the world.  So did the murder the following year of Cleo A. Noel, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and his charge d'affaires, George Curtis Moore, another crime executed by Arafat's PLO.  Arafat was directly implicated in the October 1985 seizure by Palestinian terrorists of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in which a disabled Jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, was singled out for killing, a terrorist act that Pope John Paul II publicly condemned as 'a grave act of violence against innocent and defenseless persons(p134-35).' 
     In creating Hamas, the organization's founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, a devoted admirer of al-Husseini, formulated the concept that Palestine should 'become the central battlefield' between the forces of radical Islam and Israel and its Western allies, in a radical Islamic jihad against Israel, America, and the pro-Israel West.  Participation in the intifada, argued Yassin, the first stage of this holy war, would bring about Israel's eventual destruction and the establishment of a nationalist pan-Islamic state in Palestine.  The creation of this state, the very type al-Husseini had envisioned, would in turn be the precursor of a global holy war, waged by Hamas and the leaders of radical Islam against Israel's allies in America and the West.  Thirty-two years after his death, the vision of al-Husseini was to be affirmed as Hamas assumed the leadership of the Palestinian people.  Following the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections held on January 25, 2006, Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas, gave a speech in Damascus in which he declared:  'I bring good tidings to our beloved Prophet Muhammed:  Allah's promise and the Prophet's prophecy of our victory in Palestine over the Jews and over the oppressive Zionists has begun to come true.'  The leaders of Hamas continue to seek to undermine and reverse the work of the more moderate Palestinian nationalist factions, some of which have reluctantly accepted Israel's right to exist.  The opposition to Israel's existence is much more intransigent in Hamas than it is today among some secular Palestinian nationalists.  This is an intransigence that the mufti would have shared(p139-40)." From Icon of Evil:Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam, by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann  

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