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Last Updated: Jun 30, 2009 - 8:05:19 AM |
It is axiomatic that a knowledge of history is a prerequisite for
understanding the present. But the question is: How much weight should
we give to controversial figures from the past when deciding how to
think about current conflicts?
<http://image.aish.com/Mufti.jpg> According to the authors of a
new book about Haj Amin al-Husseini (1893-1974), the grand mufti of
Jerusalem, who played a key role in fomenting and exacerbating the
struggle between Jews and Arabs during much of the 20th century, the
answer is quite a lot.
The book, "Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam,"
by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothman, makes the case that you can draw
a direct line from al-Husseini to not only the Palestine Liberation
Organization and Hamas -- groups that took up his battle against
Zionism -- but to Iran, Al Qaeda and the 9/11 conspirators.
That's a searing indictment that both supporters of Israel and its foes
ought to examine closely. And if this book fails to deliver the
definitive account of the Mufti's life in English that students of this
period of history have been waiting for, it nevertheless shines a
spotlight on a figure who deserves far greater attention than he has
received in recent decades.
Appointed by a Jew
Husseini was a member of an elite landed-clan of Palestinian Arabs who
retain their status to this day (Yasser Arafat was a cousin). In the
aftermath of World War I, he rose to prominence as a fanatical opponent
of both the British and the Jews.
Ironically, it was a British Jew, Sir Herbert Samuel, who appointed
Husseini to the post of mufti, the putative Muslim religious leader of
Jerusalem.
Samuel became the first high commissioner of the territory in 1920.
Palestine had been given to Britain as a mandate by the League of
Nations in order for them to make good on their 1917 Balfour
Declaration promise to create a Jewish national home in the country.
While many in the British government were openly hostile to Zionism,
Samuels was not. But he was concerned about being seen as evenhanded
between Jews and Arabs. So when there was a vacancy in the office of
mufti, Samuels appointed the hard-line Husseini.
Husseini incited the riots of 1929 in which hundreds of Jews were
slaughtered.
This was a decision the Jews would rue for decades as Husseini used his
post as a platform to promote hatred against the Zionists, who were
transforming the country from a barren backwater into what would become
the modern State of Israel. Husseini incited the riots of 1929 in which
hundreds of Jews were slaughtered by Muslim pogromists and did his best
to better that record during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39.
Though the Mufti's gangs were defeated, his work paid dividends in 1939
when the British, as eager to appease Arabs and Muslims on the eve of
World War II as they were the Germans, issued a White Paper that placed
severe limits on Jewish immigration and land sales, effectively closing
the door to a Jewish state.
But Husseini did not seize this opening and instead continued his
Anglophobic campaign after the war began. Eventually, he wound up in
wartime Berlin where he was received by Adolf Hitler and housed in
luxury by the Nazi state as an honored collaborator of its elite
killers. Husseini made propaganda broadcasts for the Germans and
recruited Bosnians to serve in a special Muslim SS brigade that was
responsible for the murder of more than
12,000 Bosnian Jews. As such, he played a personal role in the
Holocaust.
After the war, Husseini evaded prosecution as a war criminal and, as
the birth of the Jewish state loomed, he sought to take command of the
Arab drive to destroy it. In that he failed, as Palestinians loyal to
the Mufti were routed by the Jews. When the Arab states invaded the
country on May 15,
1948, the Mufti was left on the sidelines of the conflict where he
fumed impotently for the rest of his life in exile in Damascus and
Cairo.
Unfortunately, Dalin and Rothman's book is hampered by a lack of
original research, leaving the authors to make sometimes uninformed
guesses about the Mufti's inner life that leave us with more questions
about his personality than answers. Instead, at times, they rely on
egregious speculation that adds little of value to the existing
literature on the subject.
In this vein, they go overboard in a chapter devoted to a "what if"
scenario in which their protagonist fantasizes about the mass slaughter
of Palestinian Jewry had Hitler prioritized the conquest of the Middle
East rather than that of Russia. Counter-factual fantasy fantasies can
be amusing, but it has no place in what promised to be a serious
biography. It is especially annoying when, as in this case, the authors
spin tales about what could not have happened as opposed to what might
have occurred.
In this case, the notion that Hitler would have passed on invading
Russia requires us to ignore everything we know about this mass
murderer's most important goals: the destruction of communism and
lebensraum for German colonists in the East. Their tale of the
Wehrmacht being transferred en masse to North Africa instead of to
Russia, also requires the British Navy, whose control of the
Mediterranean restricted Hitler's ability to reinforce Manfred Rommel's
Afrika Korps, to disappear.
While there's no doubt that everything we know about the Mufti shows us
that he would have liked to preside over a Palestinian Auschwitz, such
speculation about this nightmare obscures more important issues that
require no digression into fantasy.
What is important about the Mufti is that he is a human bridge between
early stages of a Palestinian nationalism, and the Muslim Brotherhood
movement and its current Islamist identity in the form of Hamas, Al
Qaeda and Iranian-backed Hezbollah. The authors rightly see his
kinsman's Arafat's career in terrorism and rejection of peace as being
inspired by the Mufti's example. And though some observers like to
pretend that Islamism is a recent aberration in Palestinian culture and
politics, Husseini's life is a testament to the fact that religious
fanaticism has always been integral to its character.
First Islamo-Fascist
Despite its flaws, Dalin and Rothman's book is on target when it
concludes that Husseini was a seminal figure not only in the history of
the Arab-Israeli conflict, but in the culture of the Muslim world.
Though contemporary Palestinian Arabs bear no guilt for the crimes of
the Nazis because the Mufti was one, it is both fair and reasonable to
assess the influence that his philosophy had on the movement he
spawned. Fatah, Hamas and the Palestinian media, as well as that of the
rest of the region, show that the Mufti's bloodthirsty Nazi-like hate
for Jews is alive and well today not only in Gaza and Ramallah, but
throughout the Islamic sphere.
Although some deprecate the use of the term "Islamo-Fascist," a study
of the life of the Mufti shows that the combination of these disparate
ideas into one ideology of hate is no Western invention. Amin
al-Husseini, Nazi collaborator and Palestinian religious and political
leader, may have been among the first Islamo-Fascists. The tragedy of
the Middle East and the Palestinians is that he was far from the last.
Source:Ocnus.net 2009
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