Charles A. Morse
Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2003

The Nazification of the Palestinian Arabs didn’t begin with the most recent suicide-bombing pogrom against the Jews of Israel.

The process began in 1921 when Herbert Samuels, the British Mandatory Governor of Palestine, appointed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti would proceed to introduce Hitler’s National Socialism into Palestine and much of the rest of the Arab world.

Al-Husseini had previously been an Ottoman officer when, upon arriving in Palestine in 1920, he played a major role in organizing riots against Jews. Al-Husseini also launched an assassination campaign against Muslims who refused to submit to his control. At the time, local Muslim leadership viewed him as a thug.

In 1921, for reasons that remain unclear, Herbert Samuels, the British governor of Palestine, himself Jewish, appointed al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in spite of a local Muslim plebiscite in which al-Husseini came in a distant fourth.

In 1929, the Mufti organized the annihilation of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron. The Mufti was a pan-Islamic believer in the unified Islamic motherland, or “Ummah,” which, according to traditional Islamic understanding, would be ruled by a Caliph and governed under Sharia, or Islamic law.

In the Caliphate envisioned by al-Husseini, Jews and Christians would be allowed to live only if they submitted to dhimmi status. All others would be put to the sword.

The Mufti, and many other Muslims who believed in the Dar al-Islam concept of a greater Islamic Empire, found resonance with Hitler’s unique brand of socialism, which emphasized a fatherland dominating Europe, a new social order and ethnic cleansing.

Pro-Nazi political groups began to spring up in the 1930s, including Young Egypt, led by Abdul Gamal Nasser, with its slogan “One Folk, One Party, One Leader,” and the Social Nationalist Party of Syria, led by Anton Saada, known as the Syrian fuehrer, a precursor to the Baath socialist parties of Syria, Iraq and Libya.

In 1936, Francois Genoud, later known as the Swiss banker of the Third Reich, traveled to Palestine, where he visited the Mufti. Genoud and the Mufti would continue the collaboration well into the 1960s.

After the Mufti met the Nazi-Swiss banker, he launched the 1936-38 riots against both the Jews of Palestine and Palestinian Muslims who opposed his Nazi-inspired agenda.

Palestinian Muslim and Christian leaders who were murdered for opposing the Mufti include Sheikh Daoud Ansari (Imam of Al Aqsa Mosque), Sheikh Ali Nur el Khattib (Al Aqsa Mosque), Sheikh Nusbi Abdal Rahim (Council of Muslim Religious Court), Sheikh Abdul el Badoui (Acre), Sheikh El Namouri (Hebron), Nasr El Din Nassr (Mayor of Hebron) and, between February1937 and November 1938, 11 Mukhtars (community leaders) and their entire families.

In 1937, Nazi Hauptschanfuehrer Adolf Eichmann and SS Oberscherfuehrer H. Hagen visited the Mufti in Palestine to discuss "the Jewish question."

Following this meeting, the Mufti received Nazi military and financial aid, would go on to inspire a Nazi coup in Iraq in 1940, would declare a fatwa against the British, and, after the collapse of the Iraqi coup, would flee to Berlin, where he spent the war years as head of a Nazi-Arab government in exile.

Operating from Berlin, the Mufti would finance his anti-Jewish activities in the Arab world and the training of Muslim armies in Europe from the Sonderfund, which consisted of funds that had been confiscated from European Jews by the Nazis.

Yasir Arafat, reportedly a nephew of the Mufti, would carry on the Mufti’s legacy in his goal of annihilating Israel.

Saddam Hussein is also a protégé of the Mufti through his uncle and father-in-law Khairallah Tulfah, who, along with Gen. Rashid Ali and the so-called "golden square" cabal of pro-Nazi officers, participated in the Mufti-inspired failed coup against the pro-British government of Iraq in 1941. (See "The Nazi Background of Saddam Hussein.")

Chuck Morse is a radio talk show host at WROL in Boston (http://www.chuckmorse.com). E-mail Chuck at chuckm@chuckmorse.com.

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