The Mufti linked the Nazi and Arab wars agains the Jews
It is 80 years since the Nazi top brass met at the villa of Wannsee to plan the Final Solution – the extermination of the Jews. The figure put forward for France was 700,000 – inevitably including the Jews of North Africa and beyond. But Matthias Kuntzel, writing in The Times of Israel, suggests that an earlier protocol committed Hitler to extermination all the MENA Jews, and the Mufti of Jerusalem pronounced himself a willing participant in their annihilation. Nowadays, the baton of genocidal antisemitism has passed to Iran.
It is widely known that the protocol of the Wannsee Conference talks about 11 million Jews in Europe who are to be killed. Less well known are the plans for the murder of Jews outside Europe. A few weeks before the Wannsee Conference Hitler, in a face-to-face meeting, had promised Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, that he also wished to take the earliest opportunity to kill the 700,000 Jews living in North Africa and the Middle East.
A special concern during this meeting was the destruction of Zionism and the annihilation of the Jews in Palestine. In the event, the Allies proved able to defeat the Nazis. However, the idea of thwarting a Jewish state at any cost lived on and found a new home in Egypt, where, after 1945, the Muslim Brotherhood built the world’s largest antisemitic movement. The Brotherhood defended the alliance between el-Husseini and Hitler, declaring in 1946 that, “This hero [el-Husseini] fought Zionism with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin el-Husseini will continue the struggle.
The Mufti did indeed actively continue the Nazi struggle, playing a crucial role in inspiring the effort by the armies of several Arab states to snuff out the nascent Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Amin el-Husseini embodies the link between the Nazis’ big war against the Jews and the subsequent small war of the Arabs against Israel – a link that is described in detail in my latest book.
As we know, the Arabs too failed to defeat Israel. However, the idea of abolishing the Jewish state lived on. The Muslim Brotherhood passed on the baton to an Iranian cleric named Ruhollah Musavi, who would later become famous under the name Ruhollah Khomeini. Since the revolution led by Khomeini in 1979, Tehran has pursued the aim of destroying Zionism by force.
Leave a Reply