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.