Iraq and Amin al-Husseini: Deja vu all over again
By Miguel Guanipa (09/16/06)
Born in 1895 to an aristocratic family in Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini -the British appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem- is arguably one of the most notorious Arab leaders whose memory is greatly revered in Palestine today; and fewer alliances with such enormously tragic consequences are offered by the seemingly fortuitous trajectory of history than that which the Mufti forged with Adolph Hitler.
Based on what he felt was a natural alliance towards a common purpose - the annihilation of the Jews - Amin al-Husseini had already begun cultivating an ideological kinship with the FĂĽhrer long before the latter rose to power in 1933. That year he sent a telegram to the German Consul-General in Berlin offering his services in the pursuit of spreading their common ideology by implementing the Jewish final solution in the Middle East.
After numerous written proposals, and several other public overtures to the leader of the Third Reich, al-Husseini began receiving financial and military assistance from Nazi Germany. By 1941 he had already instigated a pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq against the British occupiers which forced the governing regent to flee Baghdad as German air forces attacked the British air base near Fallujah.
In November of that same year he was received by Hitler in Berlin, in which he asked him to make an official declaration supporting the “elimination of a national Jewish homeland”. The Führer assured him that as soon as he had accomplished the successful obliteration of the “last traces of the Jewish-Communist European Hegemony” he would shift his energies toward the destruction of the “Jewish element” living in Arab lands under British protection.
One of the driving forces behind the Mufti’s zealous hatred for the Jews was a firm belief in the testimony of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a literary source that has been declared a hoax, which purports to describe the Jewish people’s clandestine strategy to achieve global domination. It is the same inspiration that drives Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, to proclaim that the state of Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.
Adolph Hitler also happened to have an affinity for these conspiracy laden texts. In fact, he was so impressed with their perspicacity that he paid them literary homage in his own magnum opus: Mein Kampf.
During the 1946 war crimes Adolph Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry”. In fact, the Mufti’s friendship with the chief architect of the Holocaust entitled him to visitation rights to view the process in the gas chambers in Auschwitz where he was heard advising Eichmann to “accelerate” the extermination measures.
On one particular occasion in 1943 the Red Cross offered Adolph Eichmann a trade of several German civilians in exchange for 5,000 Jewish children. When Amin al-Husseini heard of the proposal he voiced his strong opposition to Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS). The exchange was cancelled and the children were transferred to Auschwitz.
Al-Husseini was also not adverse to using chemical warfare against the Jews. In 1944 he organized a parachuting squad to release a toxin into Tel Aviv’s water system. The Jericho district police commander Fayiz Bey Idrissi, who caught the saboteurs, reported that “each container held enough poison to kill 25,000 people, and there were at least ten containers.”
Ironically, al-Husseini left the most damning evidence of his utter contempt for the Jews in his own memoirs, remarking that he had “asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow me to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews”. The answer he claims to have received from the Führer was: 'The Jews are yours.'
Amin al-Husseini died in Beirut, Lebanon in 1974.
Yasser Arafat, the late Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and co-recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize often referred to Amin al-Husseini as his uncle and proudly claimed to have been one of his troops. Our own Saddam Hussein was raised in the house of a leader in the Mufti's 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Iraq, his uncle Khayrallah Tulfah, whom Saddam later appointed mayor of Baghdad.
Evidently, it is not merely his blood, but al-Husseini’s hateful vision, that runs in the veins of many of his ideological successors.
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