QUALITY KOSHER CATERING INC Spotlight COMPLETE CARRY-OUT AND FULL SERVICE CATERING FOR SHIVA MEALS LUNCH OR DINNER • Meat, Dairy or Lactose free •Dessert Trays • Glatt Kosher at a competitive price! Available any time and anywhere you need us! Call 248-352-7758 DELIVERY AVAILABLE www.qualitykosher.com I E-mail - info@qualitykosher.com 1432930 MONUMENTS & MARKERS • MONUMENT DUPLICATING HEBREW MEMORIALS BY: HEBREW MEMORIAL CHAPEL SERVING ALL CEMETERIES 248.543.3874 FAX: 248.543.7421 26640 Greenfield Road, Oak Park. MI 'Expert Consultation - Select Quality Granite Shiva Trays.. Same Day Express Delivery ..- 0 , Creative Gifts anicaSkos For Any Occasion 4 Rift. 4r k -4.. . . _ 0- ' ,-.7:, t . * Kosher Nuts, Chocolates & Baked Goods ,.. Blooms Jewish Cuisine Fish, Salad, Deli Tray and Shiva Dinners 248-737-8088 WE DELIVER NibblesAndNuts.com. The Family of the Late RAE FRIEDMAN announces the unveiling of a monument in her memory at 11:30 am, on Sunday, September 28, 2008 at Hebrew Memorial Park cemetery. Family and friends are invited to attend. 1434350 Send your college student news from home! College kids love mail from home - the JN will help keep them in touch with everything that is happening while they are away! Call us today and we'll take care of the rest 800.875.6621 SPECIAL COLLEGE PRICING $20per year •, 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 .