Grand Mufti Amin al-Husaini - Nazi collaborator and emulator

This brief excerpt, from GLORIA, by Wolfgang G. Schwanitz May 13, 2008, refers to a critically important piece of history that goes a long way towards explaining the Arab attitude to Jews today. Follow the link to the full article.

Amin al-Husaini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem...implemented the German idea of organizing jihad and terror behind enemy lines....Later, he led the resistance against the British mandate authority in Palestine during uprisings in 1929 and in 1936. He fiercely opposed Jewish settlement.

... From 1941 to 1945, he lived for the most part in Berlin as a guest of the German government. The Nazis provided office space, vehicles and money, so that the Mufti and his entire entourage could stay active. In return, the Mufti used his influence in the Middle East on the Nazis' behalf and recruited Muslims for the Nazi war effort. On the airwaves of Nazi Germany's Arab language radio service, he called for a Holy War, a jihad, against the Allies and the Jews.

...Memoirs of the Grand Mufti, edited by Abd al-Karim al-Umar, were published in Damascus in 1999. (See cover photo click here.) In the memoirs, al-Husaini openly discusses his close relationship to SS chief Heinrich Himmler....[and] describes what Himmler said to him in that summer of 1943 about the persecution of the Jews.... Himmler told him that "up to now we have liquidated [abadna] around three million of them" (p. 126 -- to see Arabic excerpt click here).

There is evidence, moreover, that the Grand Mufti knew about the Nazis' plans still earlier. In 1946, Dieter Wisliceny, a close collaborator of Adolf Eichmann in the "Jewish Affairs" division of the Reich Central Security Office, provided a written statement on the Grand Mufti to the Nuremberg Tribunal.

According to Wisliceny, at the beginning of 1942 Eichmann made a detailed presentation to al-Husaini on the "solution of the European Jewish question." ...The Grand Mufti, Wisliceny recalls, was "very impressed." Furthermore, al-Husaini is supposed to have put in a request to Himmler to have Eichmann send one of his assistants to Jerusalem after Germany had won the war. The representative of Eichmann was to serve as the Grand Mufti's personal advisor: i.e. when the Grand Mufti would then set about "solving the Jewish question in the Middle East."

We can infer from other documentation that this was not just a vague idea. A declassified document on Nazi war crimes from the National Archives in Washington indicates that as of mid-1942 a special SS commando unit had plans to liquidate the Jews of Cairo following the capture of the city by German forces. ...