Multi-culturalists distort Nazi past to placate Muslims in Germany

Robin Shepherd

Think Tank Blog

27 September 09

What happens when multi-culturalist, anti-Israeli pieties clash with a full and rounded rendition of the Nazi past? If recent events in Berlin (of all places) are anything to go by the answer may be as follows: important truths will be denied so that those multi-culturalist, anti-Israeli pieties may be preserved.

In the most important commentary on the subject for quite some time, Daniel Schwammenthal of the Wall Street Journal Europe relates a story about such events which everyone should read and internalise. It is not only shocking in itself, it holds up an image of one of Europe’s possible futures.

Schwammenthal’s piece pegs off an attempt by a German journalist, Karl Rössel, to stage an exhibition at a state funded multi-cultural centre in an Arab and Turkish dominated area of Berlin. The exhibition was entitled “The Third World in the Second World War” and included a small section on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini — the Palestinian leader and national hero who was an admirer of Hitler, a prolific propagandist for the Nazi cause and an active recruiter for the SS in wartime Yugoslavia where he participated in genocide.

Such facts, unfortunately, do not fit with the multi-culturalist narrative in which the people of the third world can only be counted as victims. Nor do they fit with important elements of the anti-Israeli narrative in which, as Schwammenthal notes, the notion that the Palestinians are “paying the price for Germany’s sins” as “the second victims” of the Holocaust is deeply rooted. The event was, therefore, cancelled. The Berlin authorities initially supported the decision but then belatedly and reluctantly backed down following accusations they were pandering to historical revisionism.

In Schwammenthal’s words:

“Mr. Rössel [the author of the exhibition] says this episode is typical of how German historians, Arabists and Islam scholars deny or downplay Arab-Nazi collaboration. What Mr. Rössel says about Germany applies to most of the Western world,where it is often claimed that the mufti’s Hitler alliance later discredited him in the region. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the Mideast, Nazis were not only popular during but also after the war—scores of them found refuge in the Arab world, including Eichman’s deputy, Alois Brunner, who escaped to Damascus. The German war criminals became trusted military and security advisers in the region, particularly of Nazi sympathizer Gamal Nasser, then Egypt’s president. The mufti himself escaped to Egypt in 1946. Far from being shunned for his Nazi past, he was elected president of the National Palestinian Council. The mufti was at the forefront of pushing the Arabs to reject the 1948 United Nations partition plan and to wage a “war of destruction” against the fledgling Jewish state. His great admirer, Yasser Arafat, would later succeed him as Palestinian leader.

“The other line of defense is that Arab collaboration with the Nazis supposedly wasn’t ideological but pragmatic, following the old dictum that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This “excuse” not only fails to consider what would have happened to the Jews and British in the Mideast had the Arabs’ German friends won. It also overlooks the mufti’s and his followers’ virulent anti-Semitism, which continues to poison the minds of many Muslims even today.”

But not, it seems, if you listen to the BBC or read the Guardian or most other bien pensant organs of the media in western Europe. The inconvenient truths about Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism must be denied even if this means providing a distorted picture of the Holocaust and its participants and collaborators.

The other significant part of this story, of course, is that the furore arose in large part because of the location of the planned exhibition in an area dominated by Muslims. But since any discussion of potential problems arising from Europe’s soaring Muslim populations has been a prioridesignated as “racist” by multi-culturalist ideologues, that issue cannot be properly discussed either.

I’m afraid that this is the way things are going in modern Europe. And, be warned, this is just the start of it.

To read Schwammenthal’s excellent piece, click here:

http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com/2009/09/mufti-of-berlin.html#links

For a broader discussion of such issues as they relate to Israel, click here to purchase my recently published book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/State-Beyond-Pale-Europes-Problem/dp/0297856642/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254042089&sr=8-1

Israel Can And Must Act In Her Own Best Interests.

Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero – “Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.” Horace.

Ted Belman
Israpundit
12 September 09

As I read Ettinger’s excellent piece, I was reminded of other historical facts having to do with limiting Jewish settlement, emigration or immigration. Even before the British Mandate, Britain was actively limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine. Stalin also prevented Jewish emigration. The Mandate didn’t change much. Britain continued to limit immigration and so so did Russia/USSR right up to its downfall. Remember the “Let my people go” campaign in the seventies.

Haj Amin el Husseini, the grand Mufti of Jerusalem and confidant of Hitler, led a full scale Arab revolt against the Jews between 1936 and 1939 causing much Jewish bloodshed. In response the Peel Commission was set up and recommended limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine. Just what the Arabs wanted. In fact, the Peel Commission even recommended the abolition of the Mandate and recommended two states. Ben Gurion fought hard to maintain Jewish immigration and even supported partition while most of the Zionist movement did not. To his chagrin, friends of Zionism in England including Churchill, Lloyd George persuaded the British Parliament to vote against partition.

In 1938, Ben Gurion commented on Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” and said “They handed Czechoslovakia over. Why shouldn’t they do the same with us?”

Shortly thereafter Ben Gurion made his case to Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, who suggested, that the Arab and Muslim world could rise up and threaten the British Empire and therefore to prevent this, Britain had to make sure that the Jews in Palestine remained a minority. In other words Britain was against the creation of a Jewish state.

During the war, the world conspired to prevent Jews from escaping Europe to Palestine. Britain, even after the war, actively attempted to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine. Remember the DP Camps in Cypress and Exodus.

It was due to Jewish resistance after the war that the British turned the matter over to the UN which ultimately voted for the partition that the British Parliament had turned down.. Ben Gurion preferred half a loaf to no loaf and so declared the State of Israel.

The Law of Return was quickly passed welcoming all “Jews” to come to Israel. All you needed to be eligible was one Jewish grandparent.

After the Six Day War in ‘67 the World attempted to prevent Jewish settlement of Judea and Samaria even though Jews had the legal right to do so stemming from the British Mandate. Neither Res 242 nor the Oslo Accords made mention of restricting such settlement, so the international community tried to brand the settlements as illegal pursuant to the Geneva Convention. Many legal scholars beg to differ with this and argue convincingly that the Convention doesn’t make settlements illegal.

Prior to the Roadmap, in response to atrocities the Arabs committed with their suicide bombers, Senator Mitchell rewarded them by recommending a settlement freeze just like the Peel Commission did. This freeze was incorporated into the Roadmap which came into existence in 2003.

Another refrain that developed particularly after the Roadmap, was that no one, meaning Israel, should do anything, meaning settle the land, to prejudge the outcome. Of course the Arabs could do anything they wanted to prejudge the outcome and the US cooperated with them. A case in point is opening her Consulate in Jerusalem to serve the Arabs while at the same time refusing to open her Embassy in Jerusalem to serve the Israelis. The US also supports illegal Arab construction and condemns Jewish construction, legal or otherwise.

The demand in the Roadmap that Palestine be “viable” and “contiguous” also prejudges the outcome as does the demand that Jerusalem be divided.

And now Obama is demanding a settlement freeze. Fortunately he doesn’t have the support in the US or in Israel to bring it about.

As Ettinger points out, Israel can and must resist the pressure and act in her own best interests.
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Anti-Jewish Violence in Pre-State Palestine

Ricki Hollander
CAMERA
23 August 09

Arab violence against Jews is often alleged to have begun with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 or as a result of Israel's capture in 1967 of territories occupied by Jordan. But even before the Mandate for Palestine was assigned to Great Britain by the Allies at the San Remo Conference (April 1920) and endorsed by the League of Nations (July 1922), Palestinian Arabs were carrying out organized attacks against Jewish communities in Palestine. Systematic violence began in early 1920 with murderous assaults by groups of local Arabs against settlements in the north and by Muslim pilgrims against Jerusalem's Jews. Again in 1921, Arab rioters attacked Jews in Jaffa and its environs. The primary agitator behind these attacks was Haj Amin al Husseini, who marshalled Arab discontent over Jewish immigration into violent riots.

In 1929, Husseini and his associates fomented a violent jihad as they called upon Muslims to "defend" their holy places from the Jews. As a result, pogroms were carried out across Palestine. Arab villagers sympathetic to Jews were often targets of murderous attacks by their Arab brethren as well. British forces were sharply criticized for not policing the territory adequately, for sympathizing with the Arabs, and for standing by and allowing havoc to be wreaked upon Jewish communities in Palestine.

In 1936, the Arab Higher Committee, led by Grand Mufti Husseini, launched a campaign of anti-Jewish violence across Palestine. Accompanied by a six-month-long strike, the campaign became known as "The Arab Revolt." As the British increasingly became targets of Arab violence, they used massive force to suppress the aggression. The revolt was finally quashed in 1939. The resulting White Paper of 1939 reversed British commitment to a Jewish State (the raison d'etre of the Mandate) and drastically limited Jewish immigration into Palestine.

1920-21: Attacks and Riots

Josef Trumpeldor

Organized anti-Jewish violence began in earnest at the beginning of 1920. In January, Arab villagers attacked Tel Hai, a Jewish settlement in the Galilee near the Syrian border (then under French control), killing two members. Two months later, on March 1, 1920, hundreds of Arabs from a nearby village descended on Tel Hai again, killing six more Jews. Among them was Josef Trumpeldor — a Russian wartime hero who had fought in the Russo-Japanese war and who organized the defense of the settlements in the Galilee.

During the months of March and April, over a dozen Jewish agricultural settlements in the Galilee were attacked by armed Palestinian Arabs. These included Kfar Tavor, Degania, Rosh Pina, Ayelet Hashahar, Mishmar Hayarden, Kfar Giladi and Metulla. (Four of these — Hamara, Kfar Giladi, Metulla and Bnei Yehuda were evacuated after being repeatedly attacked, and the latter was completely abandoned.)

Around the same time, during the Passover and Easter holidays, a group of Palestinian Arab "Nebi Musa" pilgrims (making their annual pilgrimage from Jerusalem to the site they believed was Moses' tomb), were incited by Haj Amin al Husseini's anti-Jewish rhetoric to ransack the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and launch violent anti-Jewish riots. The violence, which took place between April 4 and April 7, claimed the lives of nine people — five Jews and four Arabs — and left 244 wounded, the vast majority Jews. The British military administration, sympathetic to the Arabs, did not allow the Jews to arm themselves.


Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Ze'ev (Vladimir ) Jabotinsky, a Russian journalist and Zionist activist, organized the defense of the Old City Jews with demobilized soldiers from the Jewish Legion who had participated in the British military campaign against the Ottomans. (Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor had organized and helped lead the Jewish volunteer military units that had fought with the British.) When the British authorities finally quelled the riots, Jabotinsky and 19 associates were arrested for possession of illegal weapons. Jabotinsky was stripped of his commission in Palestine, and was sentenced to 15 years of penal servitude. The Arab aggressors, by contrast, received much lighter sentences. Worldwide protests, however, forced the British to shorten and eventually revoke the sentences of Jabotinsky and his associates (as well as the incarcerated Arabs).

Haj Amin al Husseini

Meanwhile, Haj Amin al Husseini and other Arab leaders continued to incite against the Jews. On May 1, 1921, Arab rioters and policemen with knives, pistols and rifles took to the streets of Jaffa, beating and murdering Jews, and looting Jewish homes and stores. Twenty-seven Jews were killed and 150 were wounded. Attacks by Arab villagers spread to the Jewish communities of Petach Tikvah, Rehovot, Hadera, and as far north as Haifa. According to an Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine to the League of Nation, dated June 1921:


Troops were employed and suppressed the disturbances, and the attacks on the [Jewish] colonies were dispersed with considerable loss to the [Arab] attackers. Martial law was proclaimed over the area affected, but much excitement prevailed for several days in Jaffa and the neighbouring districts, and for some weeks there was considerable unrest. 88 persons were killed and 238 injured, most of them slightly, in these disturbances, and there was much looting and destruction of property. There were no casualties among the troops…
A commission of inquiry, led by Sir Thomas Haycraft, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Palestine, was set up to investigate the causes and circumstances of the riots and concluded that the violence was due to Arab resentment of Jewish immigrants to Palestine. As a result, the British High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, ordered a temporary halt to Jewish immigration. Ships carrying Jews were not allowed to land in Palestine.

In November 1921, another Arab attack on the Jewish quarter of the Old City was repelled by the Haganah, Jewish defense volunteers.

1928-1929: Jihad against Jews

Between 1918 and 1928, the Jewish population in Palestine doubled, to about 150,000. Palestinian Arabs were concerned about this and their leaders, with Haj Amin al Husseini at the forefront, fanned the flames of hatred and suspicion. Husseini, now the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, used the Western (Wailing) Wall — the last remnant of the Jewish Holy Temple compound — as a focal point for his anti-Zionist campaign.

(Read full article)

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The Shepherd Hotel in Jerusalem: An End to the Arabs’ Wars of Limited Liability?

There Are Consequences for Choosing Aggression

By Lenny Ben-David

Published by The Jerusalem Post, August 7, 2009

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s resolute response to a State Department official’s objection to a Jewish building development in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem may actually close a 90-year-old chapter of the Arab-Israeli conflict and bring about a measure of justice. "We cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and buy (homes) anywhere in Jerusalem," Netanyahu said.

For way too long Arab states, terrorist groups and the Palestinian Arabs believed that they could wage “wars of limited liability” first against the Jews of Palestine and then against the State of Israel. They embraced a fantasy that they could unleash attacks with impunity in an attempt to wipe out Israel, convinced that if they were defeated they could return to a status quo ante, or even achieve diplomatically what they couldn’t win on the battlefield. Territories captured by Israel would be returned and not annexed, terrorist leaders would be honored and not condemned, and Jews/Israel would be blamed and never indemnified. Tragically, that fantasy became reality.

In 1920, the Balfour Declaration, written three years earlier, was a very pertinent and relevant document in Palestine. The Turks were gone from Palestine after 400 years, and the British were attempting to establish their authority. Jews who had fled the Turkish regime began to return, and they were joined by other Jews – “Zionists” from Russia and eastern Europe -- eager to build the promised “national home for the Jewish people.”

Arab clans and local groups began to coalesce and compete to fill the vacuum left by the Turks. They found sympathetic British authorities who opposed the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine and sought to rescind the Balfour Declaration. Together, they opposed the Jewish immigration into Palestine and the Jewish purchase of large tracts of land. The British authorities placed limitations on the formation of Jewish self-defense groups, some of whom included veterans of the British army’s Jewish Legion and Zion Mule Corps.

The Jewish settlement of Tel Chai in the Galilee was overrun by local Arab marauders in early 1920, and within months, riots and pogroms against Jews erupted across Palestine. According to witnesses, the ax and sword-wielding mobs, emboldened by their perception of supportive British authorities, yelled, “Addowlah ma’anah! The government is with us! Itback el yehud! Slaughter the Jews!” as they attacked Jewish communities. They were led by the nephew of Jerusalem’s mayor, a young rabble-rouser named Haj Amin el Husseini. Rather than throw Husseini in prison or hang him, the British chose an appeasement policy and appointed him as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti would later incite more bloody pogroms against Jewish communities in 1929 and launch the Arab Revolt (1936-1939) against the British, Jews and fellow Arabs. The anti-Semitic terrorist leader used his position to garner a following and a status that he would wield for the next 25 years, culminating in his collaboration with Adolf Hitler in World War II.

[Santayana’s admonition, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” was tragically proved true. Britain’s policy of appeasement in Palestine was copied years later when Chamberlain met Hitler at Munich in 1939. And the honors and adulation bestowed upon Haj Amin al-Husseini were later granted to his cousin Abdul Kader al-Husseini, a leader of the attacks against Jews in the 1940s. Similar tributes were paid to another terrorist cousin, Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, AKA Yasir Arafat.]

When the British attempted to arrest the Mufti in 1937 he fled Palestine, and the British made do with confiscating his property. The Husseini clan owned several well-known buildings in Jerusalem, among them the Palace Hotel on Mamilla Street (later Israel’s Ministry of Trade, and now being rebuilt as a hotel), the Orient House (the site of Palestinian Authority attempts to establish its rule in east Jerusalem), and the Shepherd Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah on a plot of land known as Karam al Mufti, named for Husseini.

(Full article)