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  

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