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•, a
B86
September 25 • 2008
iN
Hitler's Mufti from page B85
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 col-
laborator 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 lit-
erature 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 priori-
tized 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 destruc-
tion 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 every-
thing 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 national-
ism and the Muslim Brotherhood
movement and its current Islamist
identity in the form of Hamas, Al
Qaida and Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
The authors rightly see his kinsman's
Arafat's career in terrorism and rejec-
tion 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 char-
acter.
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. ❑
-
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of
the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia. He
can be contacted via e-mail at:
jtobingjewishexponent.com .