Image courtesy of Thomas Hawk under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Yasser Arafat’s hatred of Jews, one that animates many Palestinian Arabs today, is traceable to the influence of his uncle, Nazi war criminal Haj Amin Muhammad al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Husseini was a leader of the 1920 Arab riots where terror against Jews was introduced into a previously peaceful Palestine. British Mandate Governor General Herbert Samuel subsequently appointed him Mufti of Jerusalem. As Mufti, he instigated murderous pogroms against Jews in 1921, 1929, and during the 1936-1939 rebellion. Husseini consolidated his control over the Palestinian Arabs with a campaign of murder against Jews and Arabs, the recruitment of armed militias, and the raising of funds from around the Muslim world by means of promulgating anti-Jewish propaganda. Certainly there are echoes of Husseini today in his nephew Arafat.
Husseini became a supporter of the Nazi “final solution” to the “Jewish question” in the early days of Hitler’s regime. In 1939, when his Nazi sympathies came to the attention of the British, he fled to Berlin where Adolf Hitler personally welcomed him. The Nazi’s lodged Husseini comfortably, for the duration of the war, in a confiscated Hebrew School and set him up as Prime Minister in exile of a pro-Nazi pan-Arab government. His foreign minister in exile was Iraqi exile Rashid Ali al-Kilani and his war minister Fawsi al-Kaukji. The Nazi Foreign Ministry paid him $10,000 per month and Himmlers SS transferred portions of the “sonderfund,” funds confiscated from Jews, for his use in setting up pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish activities in the Arab world.
According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the SS helped finance Husseini’s efforts in the 1936-39 uprising in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann actually visited Palestine and met Husseini at that time and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, took Husseini on tours of Auschwitz and financed his Moslem academy in Dresden, set up by the Nazis as a training ground for their envisioned Nazi/Muslim puppet government. Husseini recruited Bosnian Muslims in Nazi occupied Yugoslavia in his efforts to ethnically cleanse their country of Jews. When the Red Cross offered to mediate with Eichmann in a trade between German citizens and 10,000 Jewish children being sent from Poland to the Theresienstadt death camp, Husseini directly intervened with Himmler and was successful in canceling the exchange.
After the 1942-allied victory against Nazi Field Marshall Erwin Rommel at El Alamein, Egypt, Husseini, broadcasting in Arabic, implored his Arab followers to continue supporting a potential Nazi conquest of Palestine. The Mufti was planning a triumphant return and had plans to construct a death camp, modeled after Auschwitz, near Nablus. Husseini incited his pro-Nazi followers in his broadcast with the words “Arise, o sons of Arabia. Fight for your sacred rights. Slaughter Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history and religion. That will save our honor.” In late 1944, in a final desperate attempt to trigger a pro-Nazi Arab rebellion, Husseini’s agents, a German-Arab commando unit, parachuted into Palestine and poisoned Tel Aviv’s wells.
Husseini, declared a war criminal at Nuremberg and sought by Yugoslavia after the war, fled to Egypt where he spent the rest of his life, he died in 1974, contributing to an Arab network of espionage, sabotage, and anti-Jewish propaganda that involved many former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. In his memoirs, he wrote, “Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us 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 I got was: ‘The Jews are yours.”