A Reality Check: Palestinian Arab Volunteers in the British Army in WWII - by Col (Res.) Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen

A recent study recounts the purportedly unknown story of Palestinian Arab volunteers fighting the Nazis during WWII. Haaretz used this finding as an opportunity to mock PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who has pointed out that the Mufti of Jerusalem was a close ally of Hitler. Yet the Mufti’s position as “the most important Arab Quisling” is indisputable, while most of the study’s conclusions are dubious and inconsistent with historical facts.

Col (Res.) Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,367..
09 December '19..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/palestinian-arabs-british-army/

Israel’s Declaration of Independence notes the historic role played by Palestinian-Jewish volunteers to the British Army during WWII:

In WWII the Jewish Community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

It is hardly surprising that upon the British declaration of war on Nazi Germany, the Jewish Agency Executive and Vaad Leumi (National Council) rallied to the Allied standard. The two Jewish organizations jointly announced that everyone in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine) between the ages of 18 and 50 should aid the British army. Within the first week of the war, more than 130,000 members of the Yishuv had volunteered to join the British army.

This enthusiastic response was in spite of the May 1939 British White Paper, which reneged on London’s obligation under the 1922 League of Nations mandate to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine in line with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and instead envisaged a unitary state in Palestine in which Jews would be reduced to a position of permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, hoped simultaneously to reassure both the Yishuv and the Mandate government by stating, with Solomonic nuance, “We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper.”

Israeli professor Mustafa Abbasi views that history differently. In April 2019, he published an article (in Hebrew) titled “Palestinians fighting Against Nazis: The Story of Palestinian Volunteers in the Second World War” (Cathedra Quarterly). In the words of the article’s abstract:

During WWII about 12,000 Palestinian Arabs volunteered to serve in the British army. These volunteers participated actively in battles in North Africa and Europe. Many of them lost their lives, others were wounded, and many are still missing. It is interesting that despite this vital contribution of the Palestinian people and their leadership in the war against the Nazis, especially among the opposition parties, the attention of historians has been mostly directed toward the meeting held between the Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler.

Taking this claim for granted, the Israeli leftist daily Haaretz seized the opportunity to ridicule PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2015 assertion that the Mufti had urged Hitler to annihilate the Jews. In the wake of the criticism this statement had elicited, Netanyahu said his intention was not to absolve Hitler of culpability for the Holocaust but to note that “the Mufti played an important role in the Final Solution.”

This clarification is right on target. The Mufti’s contribution to the Nazi war effort was infinitely greater than his above-noted meeting with Hitler, in which he offered the formation of an Arab legion to fight on Germany’s side and the Nazi tyrant promised to destroy “the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power [i.e., the Yishuv]” with the Palestinian Arabs given an active role in this genocide. The Mufti’s contribution ranged from his involvement in the 1941 pro-Nazi military coup in Iraq, to his wartime broadcasting of Nazi propaganda to the Arab and Muslim worlds, to his recruitment of a Muslim SS division that fought on the Russian front, to his repeated incitement of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s murderous henchman with whom he established a close personal relationship, to exterminate European Jewry. So deep was Hajj Amin Husseini’s involvement with the Nazis that a contemporary British intelligence report described him as the “most important Arab Quisling” (after the infamous Norwegian Nazi collaborator).

Why and How International Farhud Day Stymies Invented Palestinian History - by Edwin Black

...Invented Palestinian history also asserts that present-day Israelis are almost entirely transplants from such alien regions as the Ukraine, Poland, Brooklyn, and Germany — or descendants thereof. Remembering the Farhud helps us understand that almost half the early Jewish families in newly-declared Israel were not from across the sea, but rather from across the river, across the bridge, down the road, and plucked from the same culture.

Edwin Black..
Algemeiner.com..
30 May '18..

When International Farhud Day was proclaimed at a conference convened at the United Nations headquarters on June 1, 2015, its proponents wanted to achieve more than merely establish a commemoration of the ghastly 1941 Arab-Nazi pogrom in Baghdad that killed and injured hundreds of Iraqi Jews. Farhud means violent dispossession. The Farhud but the first bloody step along the tormented path to the ultimate expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from across the Arab world. That systematic expulsion ended centuries of Jewish existence and stature in those lands.

Jews had thrived in Iraq for 2,700 years, a thousand years before Muhammad. But all that came to end when the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, led the broad Arab-Nazi alliance in the Holocaust that produced a military, economic, political, and ideological common cause with Hitler. Although Husseini spearheaded an international pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish Islamic movement from India to Central Europe to the Middle East, it was in Baghdad — a 1,000-kilometer drive from Jerusalem — that he launched his robust coordination with the Third Reich.

In 1941, Iraq still hosted Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which controlled the region’s oil. Hitler wanted that oil to propel his invasion of Russia. The Arabs, led by Husseini, wanted the Jews out of Palestine and Europe’s persecuted Jews kept away from the Middle East. Indeed, Husseini persuasively argued to Hitler that Jews should not be expelled to Palestine but rather to “Poland,” where “they will be under active control.” Translation: send Jews to the concentration camps. Husseini had visited concentration camps. He had been hosted by architect of the genocide Heinrich Himmler, and the mufti considered Shoah engineer Adolf Eichmann not only a great friend, but a “diamond” among men.

Nazi lust for oil and Arab hatred of Jews combined synergistically June 1–2, 1941, burning the Farhud into history.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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The New York Times and Hitler’s ‘Jolly Elf’ - by Sean Durns

The mufti not only escaped justice, he seems to have escaped judgment, as well. Except, perhaps, from those who see his methods as a model.

Sean Durns..
Algemeiner.com..
22 November '17..

Haj Amin al-Husseini was one of the seminal figures of the 20th century. He was a founding father of Palestinian nationalism and a Nazi collaborator, whose support for terror and rejection of social and political equality for Jews in their ancestral homeland are imprinted on today’s Middle East.

Despite — or perhaps because of — his crimes, al-Husseini was often celebrated in life and whitewashed in death. And an obituary from The New York Times offers some clues as to why.

Born to a ruling Jerusalem family in 1895, al-Husseini did a stint in the Ottoman Army during World War I, and later served as an Arabic translator for Reuters‘ Jerusalem bureau in 1918. Shortly thereafter, he became a leading figure in violently opposing Zionism — the belief in Jewish self-determination.

He helped orchestrate the so-called Nebi Musa riots on April 4 and 5, 1920, in which Jerusalem’s Arab residents attacked Jewish men, women and children. Prior to the riot, posters were placed in the city’s Muslim quarter, exhorting residents to “Kill the Jews: There is no punishment for killing Jews.”

Al-Husseini was convicted in absentia by the ruling British authorities of the Mandate, but he was subsequently pardoned and appointed in 1921 to be mufti of Jerusalem — the highest Muslim cleric in the land.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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What links the ‘Farhud’ to Sarona? - by Lyn Julius

...Herein lies the Sarona connection. When Hitler came to power, a wave of pro-Nazi support swept the German colonies. It is said that a third of all colonists became members of the Nazi party. For seven years, the swastika flag fluttered proudly on the Community House at Sarona. The Templars actively aided the Arab revolt of 1936 and were later deported from Palestine by the British. But their anti-Semitism found fertile ground among Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinian terrorists who sprayed bullets at Israelis drinking coffee at Sarona have squared the circle.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
14 June '16..
Link: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-links-the-farhud-to-sarona/

Last week, Palestinian Arab terrorists murdered four Israelis at Sarona. Seventy-five years ago on Shavuot, there occurred the Farhud: an armed mob went rampaging through cities in Iraq to kill Jews. What do the two events, 75 years apart, have in common?

By now, the word ‘Farhud’ will be familiar to many. The term means ‘violent dispossession’ in Arabic.

The Farhud‘s victims — loyal and productive Jewish citizens who had been in Iraq for 27 centuries — were murdered, mutilated, decapitated, poisoned, raped. The official death toll is 179, but was probably far higher.

The event has been termed the ‘Arab Kristallnacht’ because the massacre’s perpetrators were undoubtedly influenced by anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda. During the 1930s the German ambassador to Baghdad Fritz Grobba sought to ferment anti-British activity in Iraq. He spread Nazi propaganda, had Mein Kampf translated into Arabic and had Iraqi officers seduced by blond German secretaries. Although the Farhud was on a tiny scale compared to the catastrophe that befell the Jews of Europe, the intentions behind both were the same: the incitement against the Jews of Iraq stemmed from a Nazi mindset that considered Jews a nefarious fifth column in strategic control of Iraq, and therefore worthy of extermination.

Much of the blame for the Farhud slaughter of unparalleled brutality has, rightly, fallen on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. His wartime activities in Berlin as a guest of Hitler are well known. The Mufti was exiled by the British to Iraq in 1939 after they crushed the Arab Revolt in Palestine. For two years the Mufti incited and intrigued to overthrow the pro-British monarchy and government in Iraq. In April 1941 he and four pro-Nazi military officers seized power. The pro-Axis regime, under Rashid Ali Al Ghaylani, was short-lived and its leaders sent into exile just days beforehand, but weeks of intense anti-Semitic incitement had already laid the groundwork for the Farhud.

While the Mufti was a key factor in causing the Farhud, scholars have tended not to pay much attention to the Syrian and Palestinian emigres who were the driving force behind anti-Semitism in Iraq. By the time the Farhud broke out, there were more than 400 families in the country. They exerted an influence far beyond their numbers. They were doctors, teachers and intellectuals who had mainly escaped with the Mufti in 1936 and were to join him in Berlin after 1941.

Husseini’s Legacy Still Looms Large by Sarah Honig

..The Arab aggression against the Jews is based on an outright lie, which, once believed, becomes reality for the believers. Fraudulent reality then takes on a life of its own. If nurtured, it grows, multiplies and transforms into an axiomatic premise for a searing sense of injustice. The lie binds. Spurious grievances confine and scourge those they ensnare....Reminding the world over and over that visceral Arab enmity spearheaded by Husseini predated so-called occupation, the establishment of a Jewish state or the Holocaust – and indeed that it contributed significantly to the unparalleled tragedy of European Jewry – becomes an imperative rather than an esoteric preoccupation.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
29 October '15..

No one can accuse Israel’s Left of missing a beat. But the attentive ear of our homegrown self-appointed guardians of other people’s consciences is selective. All sorts of blood-curdling incitement throughout the Arab/Muslim realm fail to resonate with them. Yet they amplify with relish any aside by the true objects of their animus – Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu foremost.

And so, the other day Netanyahu had the temerity to remark that the Palestinians’ still-venerated Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini opposed Hitler’s initial plan to merely ethnically cleanse Europe of Jews and exile them to such exotic locations as Madagascar. Husseini insisted the Jews burn.

It’s important to note that at the time of Husseini’s meeting with Hitler in June 1941, the “final solution” hadn’t yet become official Third Reich policy (despite slaughter that had already begun in occupied Eastern Europe). The Final Solution would be formally adopted only on January 20, 1942 at the Wannsee Conference.

For outward appearances at least, Germany’s declared objective was to expel Jews from Europe. Husseini couldn’t abide the thought and railed against mere banishment. He clamored for the Jews’ physical obliteration instead. This doesn’t mean that he inspired Hitler or that he gave him the idea for wiping all Jews out but it does powerfully attest to the mindset of the then-principal leader of the Arab world.

But who cares about fine distinctions? Instantly, a great indignant outcry arose from the righteous ranks of the Left. Netanyahu, it was bewailed, is cleansing Hitler of guilt and pinning it on Husseini. It’s as if villainy can only reside in a single persona and the villain’s kindred ideologues and avid accomplices are therefore unjustly accused.

So let’s set the record straight – Husseini wasn’t just Hitler’s useful fool. His hands were stained with Jewish blood – lots of it – and the Allies indeed declared him a wanted war criminal at the end of WWII.

He reached Cairo by the skin of his teeth but with much Nazi loot, having fled Germany four days before its collapse. The Arab world not only harbored him (as they did numerous other fugitive Nazi mass-murderers) but Husseini was adulated.

On October 1, 1948, in the midst of the synchronized Arab military onslaught on newborn Israel, the Egyptians installed Husseini as president of the “All-Palestine government” they established in the Gaza Strip (with Jerusalem as its declared capital). It was formally abolished only in 1959.

Husseini’s quasi-state was recognized by all then-independent Arab states except Transjordan, which feared his ambitions vis-à-vis its own bit of Palestinian conquest – the West Bank. Husseini is widely considered responsible for the assassination of King Abdullah I (the current Jordanian monarch’s great-grandfather). He also recruited Bosnian SS-veterans as mercenaries to aid in the genocidal invasion of the Jewish state.

Yasser Arafat asserted that “it’s an honor to march in the path Haj-Amin carved.” In 2002 he told London’s Sharq al-Awsat that Husseini is “our hero.” Likening himself to his mentor, Arafat stressed: “I was one of his troops.”

Arafat’s successor, Holocaust-denier Mahmoud “Abu-Mazen” Abbas, is today’s highest-ranking Husseini fan.

Crazy like a fox by Caroline Glick

...No, the Holocaust was not Husseini’s idea. But he was a partner in perpetrating and promoting it. He also made it inevitable.

Caroline Glick..
Column One..
22 October '15..

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is crazy like a fox.

Netanyahu’s assertion on Tuesday before the World Zionist Congress that the founder of the Palestinian people, Haj Amin al-Husseini, convinced Adolf Hitler to eradicate rather than expel the Jews of Europe was an overstatement of Husseini’s role.

No, the Holocaust was not Husseini’s idea.

But he was a partner in perpetrating and promoting it. He also made it inevitable.

As I detailed in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, during the course of Husseini’s meeting with Hitler in Berlin in November 1941, Hitler told the Arab leader of his plan to eradicate European Jewry.

Husseini told Hitler that he would support the Nazis, and rally the Arab world to their side, if Hitler agreed to two conditions: that Hitler support his bid to rule over a postwar Arab state comprised of present-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel; and that Hitler support the genocide of Middle Eastern Jewry.

As both the official Nazi record and Husseini’s summary of the meeting in his diary report, Hitler accepted Husseini’s demands.

And it makes sense that he did.

Husseini proved his loyalty to the Nazis long before he arrived in Berlin. His romance with them began with Hitler’s election victory in 1933. From then on, Husseini’s followers in Mandatory Palestine greeted one another with the Nazi salute. Swastikas festooned their towns. The Nazis began directly funding Husseini’s terror war against the Jews of Israel and British Mandatory officials in 1937.

In 1937, the British forced Husseini to flee the country. In 1941, he organized and incited a pro-Nazi military coup in Iraq. The British were forced to invade Iraq in response to the coup.

Husseini then fled to Rome where he met with Mussolini and went on the Berlin, where he remained for the duration of the war.

As the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini invented and shaped the Palestinian national ethos in a manner that aligned with his pathological hatred of the Jews. Rather than providing the Palestinian Arabs with a positive vision of a future state that would safeguard and cultivate them as a distinct Arab nation, he shaped Palestinian society as a wholly negative phenomenon. It was seeded in a hybrid hatred of Jews that fused Koranic hostility to Jews with racism-based annihilationist European anti-Semitism rooted in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Husseini translated and published in Arabic.

The goal of Husseini’s nationalist drive was not to form a Palestinian Arab state, but to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state and to annihilate all aspects of the Jewish national liberation movement through a campaign a terror and political warfare.

Husseini’s goal of leading an Arab state that encompassed Iraq and the entire Levant shows that the founding father of the Palestinian national project did not view “Palestine” as a distinct territorial entity.

After Hitler agreed to both of Husseini’s conditions, Husseini began his active collaboration in the Nazi war effort. He participated in the Holocaust directly. In 1943, he formed the SS Handschar Division comprised of Bosnian Muslims. His troops exterminated 90 percent of Bosnia’s 14,000-member Jewish community.

Husseini used his position as well to scuttle British attempts to trade German prisoners of war for Jews. In one such documented episode, in 1943 Husseini appealed to SS commander Heinrich Himmler to cancel a deal to exchange 4,500 Jewish children and 500 Jewish adults from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria to cancel the deal and send the Jews to Auschwitz.

Himmler bowed to his appeal. The Jews were sent to the gas chambers.

Husseini contributed to the Holocaust indirectly.

Beginning shortly after his meeting with Hitler and extending through the end of the war, Husseini broadcast regular programs to the Arab world on Nazi short wave radio in Arabic. In those broadcasts he engendered support for the Nazis and the extermination of world Jewry. Using the mix of Islamic Jew-hatred and European annihilationist anti-Semitism he had developed in Jerusalem, Husseini cultivated a culture of support for the annihilation of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish (then nascent) state in the Land of Israel. That culture, bred through those broadcasts heard regularly by millions throughout the entire Arab world, still holds today.

Husseini was indicted as a war criminal in Nuremberg. Rather than try him, the allies allowed him to flee to Egypt in 1946. There he was greeted as a war hero by King Farouk.

It is true that Hitler didn’t need Husseini to convince him to annihilate European Jewry. By the time Husseini arrived in Germany, the Nazis had already murdered a million Jews.

But Netanyahu’s claim that Husseini made it impossible for Hitler to suffice with expelling the Jews from Europe is true. The only place that wanted the Jews of Europe was the nascent Jewish state in the Land of Israel.

The Middle East and the Ghosts of Auschwitz

...The ghosts of Auschwitz are still haunting Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Gaza, Iraq, Iran and a hundred other places. The victims are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Yazidis and numberless others. The Nazis began with the Jews. The Muslim saying is, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” Auschwitz is what happens when we fail to take threats like that seriously because we want peace at any price.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
04 February '15..

In exile in Argentina, the world’s most wanted man was writing a defense of the indefensible.

He rejected “so-called Western culture” whose bible “expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Instead he looked to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” whose good opinion of his crimes he wanted.

These millions of people were not in Germany. They weren’t even in Argentina.

His fellow Nazis had abandoned him after deciding that the murder of millions of Jews was indefensible and had to be denied instead of defended. But he did not want to be denied. He wanted to be admired.

“You 360 million Mohammedans to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust wrote. “You, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran, I call upon you to pass judgment on me.”

Eichmann knew he could expect a good verdict from a religion whose prophet had ordered the ethnic cleansing of Jews and which believes the end will “not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, it will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”

There was Eichmann’s Hadith Holocaust with even the rocks and trees finding Jews for the Islamic SS. A more literal judgment came Eichmann’s way five years later in Jerusalem when Israeli agents used extraordinary rendition to seize him and bring him to trial. But the Muslim world had issued its own verdict long ago when the Mufti of Jerusalem had come to Europe urging the extermination of the Jews. “This is your best opportunity to get rid of this dirty race… Kill the Jews,” the Mufti had ranted to fellow Muslims.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 
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Truth be told, the Holocaust was an Arab story too

...The ghost of Nazi-inspired, anti-Jewish bigotry was never exorcised from the Arab world. In fact Arabs became its torch-bearers. Adolph Eichmann himself hoped his “Arab friends” would continue his battle against the Jews who were always the “principal war criminals” and “principal aggressors.” He hadn’t managed to complete his task of “total annihilation,” but the Muslims could still complete it for him.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
31 January '15..






On the day that the world commemorated the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the UK liberal newspaper The Guardian declared in an editorial :

“The Arabs, meanwhile, cannot be blamed for feeling that Europe’s blood debt to the Jews was paid with what they see as their territory.”

The myth of the Arabs as innocent bystanders, who had no responsibility for the Holocaust — and indeed, paid the price for a European crime when Israel was established — is widely believed.

The Arabs, like other third-world peoples, are only ever seen as victims of western oppression and colonialism. They cannot themselves be guilty of oppressing others.

The West self-righteously deplores the old European anti-Semitism of the ‘far right’. But a new Green-Brown-Red anti-Semitism — encouraged by an alliance of the Far Left, the Greens and Islamist sympathizers — is studiously downplayed, ignored by the media, or blamed on Israel.

Truth to tell, the virus of Nazi anti-Semitism was exported to the Arab and Muslim world as early as the 1930s. It gave ideological inspiration to Arab nationalist parties like the Ba’athists in Syria and Iraq and paramilitary groups like Young Egypt, founded in 1933. Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are the central plank of the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, and their ideological cousins, Islamic State, who seek today to impose Allah’s kingdom on earth through jihad and forced conversion of non-Muslims.

The Holocaust was, in the words of author Robert Satloff, as much an Arab story as a European. In spite of efforts to trumpet the stories of individual ‘Righteous’ Muslims, who rescued Jews (particularly in Albania), scholars continue to uncover evidence of Arab sympathy and collaboration with Nazism.

Said Walter Doehle, German Consul in Jerusalem in 1937: ”

Palestinian Arabs in all social strata have great sympathies for the new Germany and its Führer. .… If a person identified himself as a German when faced with threats from an Arab crowd, this alone generally allowed him to pass freely. But when some identified themselves by making the “Heil Hitler” salute, in most cases the Arabs’ attitude became expressions of open enthusiasm, and the German gave ovations, to which the Arabs responded loudly.

When Tunisia came under direct Nazi occupation between November 1942 and May 1943, some 2,000 Jews were sent to work in labour camps. The reaction of Tunisia’s Muslim majority was, according to Robert Satloff, ‘widespread indifference.’

Gestures of support and active assistance for the minority being displaced, disenfranchised, plundered and conscripted into forced labour were very rare. Arab passers-by would publicly insult and physically attack individuals.

The ghosts of ethnic cleansing are still very much with us

...Nazism had a great following in the Arab world and influenced reactionary movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. Arab collaborators with the Nazis, such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, were never tried for war crimes in 1945. Instead, antisemitism in Arab states, much of it using Nazi tropes and memes, has soared to stratospheric heights. The ghosts of Nazi-inspired genocide and ethnic cleansing are still with us. The victims are still the same victims: the Jews and their state, heretical Muslims, Kurds, non-Muslim minorities. We can begin to exorcise these ghosts by learning about past wrongs – beginning on 30 November.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
25 November '14..

On 30 November, schools, ministries and organisations in Israel and worldwide will be marking a new day in the calendar — a day to remember the flight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and the destruction of their ancient communities.

It is often said that these Jews paid the price for the creation of Israel. In revenge for the mass exodus of Palestinian Arab refugees, Arab mobs and governments turned on their defenceless Jewish citizens. But in truth, there is sound evidence that even before the establishment of Israel, and before the great mass of Arab refugees had fled, Arab governments were conspiring to victimise their Jews and dispossess them of their land and property.

This week, 67 years ago, saw anti-Jewish tensions reach new highs in Palestine and the Arab world as Arab delegates ramped up their rhetoric at the UN, which was due to vote on the Partition of Palestine.

According to UN records the Egyptian delegate, Heykal Pasha, was already warning on 24 November 1947 about the consequences of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine:

“the United Nations…should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in Muslim countries…creating anti-Semitism in those countries even more difficult to root out than the anti-Semitism which the Allies tried to eradicate in Germany…making the UN…responsible for very grave disorders and for the massacre of a large number of Jews.”

Heykal Pasha’s words were prefaced with talk of ‘massacre’ ‘riots’ and ‘war between two races’. According to Yaakov Meron, Pasha’ s threats were not confined to Egypt but repeatedly mentioned Jews in other Muslim countries. They were not uttered on the intiative of Egypt but were ‘the outcome of prior coordination between Arab states then represented at the UN and the Arab league.”

The Palestinian delegate, Jamal Al-Hussayni, said the Jews’ situation in the Arab world “will become very precarious. Governments in general have always been unable to prevent mob excitement and violence.”

Syrian UN representative Faris Al-Khuri is quoted in the New York Times as far back as 19 February 1947 stating that: “Unless the Palestinian problem is settled, we shall have difficulty in protecting the Jews in the Arab world.”

A Jewish publication reported: “With the entire Arabic press fulminating against the perfidy of Zionism, and with Arab politicians rousing their underfed and enervated masses to a dangerous pitch of hysteria, the threats were certainly not empty.”

A Case of Selective Holocaust History by Dr. Mordechai Kedar

...According to Israel’s presumptive peace partner, Israel is doing unto the Palestinians what the Nazis inflicted upon the Jews. Is that so? Is Israel herding Palestinians onto trains like animals? Is Israel shoving the Palestinian people into gas chambers? Is Israel burning Palestinian bodies in crematoria? Is Israel capturing Palestinians and confining them in forced labor camps?

Dr. Mordechai Kedar..
Middle East Insights..
30 April '14..

To mark the 70th anniversary of the mass deportation and murder of over 585,000 Hungarian Jews, the Israeli government decided to observe this dark chapter in Holocaust history by making it the focus of the official Holocaust Memorial Day 2014 commemoration.

Beginning in May 1944, Hungary’s Jews were deported by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were killed upon arrival. Israeli President Shimon Peres described the destruction of Hungarian Jewry in bone-chilling detail in his speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem Sunday night.

The American Rabbi, the Palestinian President and Holocaust History

A few days before Israelis honored the six million Jews killed by the Nazis and their willing collaborators, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with American Rabbi Marc Schneier, a well-known proponent of interfaith dialogue. It was during this get-together that Abbas declared, “The Shoah was the worst crime in human history.” The “Holocaust was a reflection of a racist ideology as expressed in ethnic cleansing, which the Palestinian people reject,” the PA president added. “Indeed, the Palestinian people, afflicted and oppressed, are the first to demand the end of racism against other nations.”

Abbas subtly draws a parallel between the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ and today’s Israel. According to Israel’s presumptive peace partner, Israel is doing unto the Palestinians what the Nazis inflicted upon the Jews.

Is that so? Is Israel herding Palestinians onto trains like animals? Is Israel shoving the Palestinian people into gas chambers? Is Israel burning Palestinian bodies in crematoria? Is Israel capturing Palestinians and confining them in forced labor camps?

Yet, despite the fact there is zero similarity between what is happening now west of the Jordan River and the horrors experienced 70 years ago in Europe, Abu Mazen (Abbas) does not hesitate to implicitly equate Israel to Nazi Germany.

Grand Mufti: Founder of Palestinian Liberation, Nazi Collaborator

As disturbing as Abbas’s statements are, it’s what he does not say that is morally repugnant. Let’s not forget that the annihilation of Hungary’s Jews was aided by the founder of the Palestinian national liberation movement, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Nebi Musa Massacre - The Postulate of Illegitimacy, Then and Now

...Considering their penchant for distorting history, Israel’s detractors are doubtless tempted to describe 1920’s predators as oppressed Palestinian peasants protesting against usurper Jews. It must, therefore, be a whopping downer to discover that none of this homicidal fury was unleashed on behalf of Palestine. The Arabs loathed the very name introduced to this country by its new British overlords.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
04 April '14..

Something strikingly dramatic happened in this country exactly on this day 94 years ago. Cries of Itbach el-Yahud(slaughter the Jews) filled the air. It was the first coordinated mass-murder offensive launched by infamous Jerusalem Mufti Haj-Amin el-Husseini (who would in time become an avid Nazi collaborator, Hitler’s personal guest in Berlin during WWII and a wanted war-criminal).

Ever since, this land shook fitfully as rounds of massacres and wars followed each other in breathless succession. The past mustn’t be consigned to irrelevance. Unbroken historical continuities contextualize current events. Nothing springs forth from a vacuum. What now transpires began back then.

The pivotal murder-drive of 1920 and its aftermath are vital for understanding why John Kerry’s peace pageant is a flop and why Israel so profoundly displeases him, his boss Barack Obama and their pet-Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas. It established the prototype whereby Jews are punished for Arab crimes against Jews. It highlights the pattern of appeasing Arab wrath and of Jews paying – as if Jewish existence is in and of itself a casus belli.

The bias maddeningly came into play already in 1920. It’s the bias that has today burgeoned into the escalating extortion and shameless expectation that Israel release convicted murderers as a matter of course and injure its own interests to keep its enemies sweet. It’s as if Israel has no valid interests, no rights. This is the postulate of illegitimacy.

Western antipathy to Jewish self-preservation was already gallingly evident in 1920, as was indulgent acquiescence to Arab aggression. It’s scary to realize how little has actually changed.

Those deadly landmark rampages were kick started on April 4, 1920, exploiting Muslim celebrations to rally thousands of raiders at Nebi Musa in the Judean Desert. Serially inflamed by Husseini’s vitriolic harangues, they poured into Jerusalem, descended upon the Old City’s Jewish Quarter and began butchering, raping, pillaging and burning – all in the name of their God.

The premeditated atrocity lasted four days. Even passing reflections on its overlooked anniversary (it’s so uncool to recall crimes against Jews), can contribute considerably to our present-day perspectives.

This unprovoked killing-spree was launched before any of the excuses for Arab bloodlust – now so conveniently and commonly cited – had existed. There was no Jewish state to fulminate against and no Israeli occupation with which to justify any outrage against Jews in the Jewish homeland.

There was no hint of what the Palestinians market so effectively as their nakba – catastrophe. There wasn’t a single Arab refugee. There was no war, no displacement, no reason to rage.

The 1920 victims were largely members of the old-time, traditional, pre-Zionist Jewish community that had long before then constituted Jerusalem’s outright majority. Yet this ancient community was deemed fair game. The subtext was that Jews have no rights – not even indigenous non-Zionists.

Considering their penchant for distorting history, Israel’s detractors are doubtless tempted to describe 1920’s predators as oppressed Palestinian peasants protesting against usurper Jews. It must, therefore, be a whopping downer to discover that none of this homicidal fury was unleashed on behalf of Palestine. The Arabs loathed the very name introduced to this country by its new British overlords.

Ironically, it was the Jews who became known throughout the first half of the 20th century as Palestinians and it was the Arabs who scornfully rejected the moniker.

A reality check might be in order concerning "The Palestinian Refugees" (part 2)

...Misinformation and disinformation have dominated the diplomatic discourse on the Palestinian issue, misleading Western policymakers and public opinion molders, thus radicalizing Arab expectations and demands, fueling terrorism and minimizing the prospects of peace.

Yoram Ettinger..
Israel Hayom..
29 December '13..

The Palestinian refugee issue has been dramatically misrepresented, distorting circumstances and numbers, in order to delegitimize the Jewish state.

The root cause then and now

According to the German Middle East expert, Fritz Grobba ("Men and Powers in the Orient"), the 1948 Palestinian leadership, headed by Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini, wanted to apply Nazi methods to massacre Jews throughout the Middle East. In 1941, the mufti drafted a proposal requesting that Germany and Italy acknowledge the Arab right to settle "the Jewish problem" in Palestine and the Arab countries in accordance with national and racial Arab interests, similar to the practice employed to solve "the Jewish problem" in Germany and Italy. On Nov. 24, 1947, Acting Chairman of the (Palestinian) Arab Higher Committee Jamal Al-Husseini threatened: "Palestine shall be consumed with fire and blood," if the Jews get any part of it. On April 16, 1948, Jamal Husseini told the U.N. Security Council: "The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight."

On January 9, 2013, Mahmoud Abbas pledged allegiance to the Grand Mufti, who collaborated intimately with the Nazi leadership, particularly with Himmler, Hitler's most ruthless right hand man: "On the anniversary of Fatah, we renew the pledge to our fortunate martyrs. ... We pledge to continue on the path of the martyrs. ... Here we must remember the pioneers -- the grand mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin Al-Husseini."

Who is responsible?

PLO Chairman and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas admitted that "Arab armies forced Palestinians to leave their homes" (Filastin A-Thawra, March 1976). On May 13, 2008, Al Ayyam, the second largest pro-Abbas Palestinian daily, claimed: "[In 1948] the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) told Palestinians to leave their houses and villages, and return a few days later, so the ALA can fulfill its mission."

The head of Britain's Middle East Office in Cairo, John Troutbeck, reported in June 1949: "Arab refugees speak with utmost bitterness of Egypt and other Arab states. They know who their enemies are. Their Arab brothers persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes." Sir Alan Cunningham, the last British high commissioner in Palestine, wrote on April 28, 1948 that the total evacuation was urged on the Haifa Arabs from higher Arab quarters. The U.S. consul-general in Haifa telegraphed on April 25, 1948 that "reportedly, Arab Higher Committee is ordering all Arabs to leave."

The secretary-general of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, told the Lebanese daily Al Hoda on June 8, 1951: "In 1948, we were assured that Palestine's occupation would be a military promenade. ... Brotherly advice to Arabs in Palestine was to leave their homes temporarily." The London Economist wrote on Oct. 2, 1948: "The most potent of the factors [triggering the Arab flight] were the announcements by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit. ... It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades." Syrian Prime Minister Khaled al-Azam admitted in his 1973 memoirs that "we brought destruction upon the refugees, by calling on them to leave their homes."

According to the first U.S. ambassador to Israel, James G. McDonald ("My Mission in Israel"): "These Arabs ... fled from Palestine as the result of mass panic when the wealthy Arabs, almost to a man, began running away in Nov. 1947. ... The flight was provoked by lurid tales of Jewish sadism issued by the Mufti and his followers. ... Superstitious and uneducated, the Arab masses succumbed to the panic and fled. ... The refugees were on [Arab leaders'] hands as the result of a war, which they had begun and lost."

The demons awakened by the Farhud are still with us today

...The Mufti’s postwar legacy endured. Barely three years after the full horror of the Holocaust had come to light, the Arab states embarked on a programme of ethnic cleansing Hitler would have been proud of. The uprooting of the 140,000 Jews of Iraq followed a Nazi pattern of victimisation – dismantlement, dispossession and expulsion. Nuremberg-style laws criminalised Zionism, freezing Jewish bank accounts, instituting quotas and restrictions on jobs and movement.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
14 May '13..

Salim Fattal was just eleven when the two-day Baghdad pogrom known as the Farhud erupted on Shavuot 72 years ago, yet its memory is engraved deep in his soul. Despite the passage of time, the shrieks and wails of the pogrom’s 179 Jewish victims still echo in his ears.

On 1 June, the first day of Shavuot in 1941, Fattal, his widowed mother and four siblings witnessed unimaginable terror, as he describes in his vivid memoir In the Alleys of Baghdad:

Helpless Jews had been cornered in their homes and fallen easy prey to robbers, murderers and rapists, who abused their victims to their heart’s content, with no let or hindrance. They slit throats, slashed off limbs, smashed skulls. They made no distinction between women, children and old people. In that gory scene, blind hatred of Jews and the joy of murder for its own sake reinforced each other.

Salim’s uncle Meir was pulled off a bus by a raging mob baying for Jewish blood, and never seen again.

Salim and his family managed to get through the night unscathed by bribing a local policeman to stand guard over their house. Haggling over how much he would be paid for each bullet he fired at the rioters, the policeman finally settled with the family at a quarter of a dinar for each shot.

The Farhud (Arabic for “violent dispossession”) marked an irrevocable break between Jews and Arabs in Iraq and paved the way for the dissolution of the 2,600-year-old Jewish community barely 10 years later. Loyal and productive citizens comprising a fifth of Baghdad, the Jews had not known anything like the Farhud in living memory. Before the victims’ blood was dry, army and police warned the Jews not to testify against the murderers and looters. Even the official report on the massacre was not published until 1958.

Despite their deep roots, the Jews understood that they would never, along with other minorities, be an integral part of an independent Iraq. Fear of a second Farhud was a major reason why 90 per cent of Iraq’s Jewish community fled to Israel after 1948.

But the Farhud was not just another anti-Jewish pogrom.The Nazi supporters who planned it had a more sinister objective: the round-up, deportation and extermination in desert camps of the Baghdadi Jews.

Palestinian Innocence - The Myth

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
03 February '13..

My organisation, Harif, aims to tell the story of 2,500 years of Jewish history and culture in what is known as the Arab world. It’s a story with a dramatic ending : 99 percent of these Jews – numbering a million in 1948 – have fled, in the space of one generation.

When people learn about the Jewish expulsion – they usually respond with sympathy. Jews from Arab countries are entitled to recognition and redress, they acknowledge.

But that recognition and redress must come from Arab countries, they say.

Indeed, one of the most enduring myths is that Palestinians bear no responsibility for the exodus of the Jews from 10 Arab countries. The Palestinians are innocent of any wrongdoing.

Regrettably, that position is borne of ignorance and wishful thinking. From the outset, the Palestinian cause was a pan-Arab nationalist cause. It has also a powerful Islamist dimension: Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood do not aim to set up a Palestinian state, so much as reclaim Islamic wakf land from the Jews. From an early stage the campaign for Palestine took on an antisemitic hue. If the Fatah and Hamas unity deal lasts, there will be nothing to choose between nationalist and religious rejectionism of a sovereign Jewish state.

Yet the role of the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in inciting anti-Jewish hatred and violence as early as the 1920s and 30s is incontrovertible. Not only did the Mufti instigate deadly disturbances in Palestine in 1920 and 1929,it is well known that the riots which led to the murders of 133 Jews in Hebron and Safed were sparked by the lie that the Al-Aqsa mosque was in danger.

A moral inversion that conveniently ignores legacy of Nazi past

Bataween..
Point of No Return..
28 January '13..

Two events shook Jews the world over on or around Holocaust Memorial Day: The pronouncements of a British MP, David Ward, accusing the Israelis of failing to learn the lesson of the Holocaust by committing atrocities against the Palestinians'. The other was an antisemitic cartoon (above) in the Sunday Times by the controversial Gerald Scarfe showing Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall with the blood of crushed Palestinians. But for all the furore and the condemnations, critics have been guilty of moral inversion, failing to see in Palestinian and Arab exterminationist intentions the legacy of a pro-Nazi past.

*Take Matt Hill, who rightly condemned David Ward in his Telegraph Blog. But he also had harsh words for 'paranoid' Israelis (to use Amos Oz's words): "half-hysterical refugees and survivors, haunted by dreadful nightmares”, who see in the Arabs a reflection of their former oppressors."

But the Arabs are their former oppressors, not a reflection thereof, Matt! The Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem was an active collaborator in Hitler's Holocaust, and was responsible for causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews in Europe. In the Middle East too, he incited riots in Palestine and Iraq which cost hundreds of Jewish lives. He had a plan to deport Iraqi Jews to camps in the desert and planned death camps for the Jews of Palestine near Nablus. After the war, the Arab states colluded in Nuremberg-style laws to engineer the ethnic cleansing of their Jews.

Today's Palestinians nurse the same genocidal intentions as the Mufti, try as they might to cloak their aims in language acceptable to western ears. Just read the Hamas charter. The difference between then and now, is that today's Jews have the means to defend themselves.

The Arab states role in creating the refugee crisis of '48

The Arabs’ betrayal of the Palestinians

Robert Werdine..
Times of Israel..
12 October '12..

I have been much moved by Mr. Phillipe Assouline’s most recent contribution here at the Times on the subject of Jewish refugees, much as I have been similarly moved by Lyn Julius’ authorative and thought provoking contributions on the subject. Reading Mr. Assouline’s piece, I see that he has touched on a little-discussed subject that I here develop in a bit more detail: the role of the Arab states in creating and abetting the refugee crisis of 1948.

Palestinian Arab leadership at the time the partition was passed in November 1947, such as it was, was mostly localized and tribal, and this accounted for one of the principal factors behind the refugees’ exodus: the flight of so many high ranking Arab functionaries.

Said High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham in the spring of 1948:

“You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . For instance, in Jaffa the mayor went on four-day leave 12 days ago and has not returned, and half the national committee has left. In Haifa the Arab members of the municipality left some time ago; the two leaders of the Arab Liberation Army left actually during the recent battle. Now the chief Arab magistrate has left. In all parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large numbers over a considerable period and the tempo is increasing”

Arif al-Arif, a prominent Arab politician during the Mandate, described the prevailing atmosphere at the time:

“Wherever one went throughout the country one heard the same refrain: ‘Where are the leaders who should show us the way? Where is the AHC? Why are its members in Egypt at a time when Palestine, their own country, needs them?’”

This sorry and leaderless state of affairs in Arab Palestine in the months following the partition vote requires some explication. The Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husayni, was widely hated and feared among the Palestinians, and, indeed, it should be pointed out that the victims of the Mufti since the 1920’s were overwhelmingly Arab, not Jewish.

The British Mandate - A Missed Opportunity of Historic Proportions

Daniel Mandel..
American Spectator..
15 August '12..

Ninety years ago last month, the League of Nations, the precursor to today's United Nations, approved the Mandate for Palestine, out of which Israel was to emerge in 1948. Israel's neighbors have been in varying states of war and hostility with it from that date to this. As this conflict has flared up across the decades and is even cited, persistently but wrongly, as the root cause of regional and even global turbulence, its origins repay attention.

On July 24, 1922, all 51 member states of the League affirmed in the Mandate, conferred upon Britain, that "recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country." This reflected Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917, which "viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

Palestine was then sparsely populated -- fewer than 700,000 people at the end of World War One (512,000 Muslims, 66,000 Jews and 61,000 Christians). It had scant history of local nationalism -- a new, imported concept. The former Muslim overlords, the Ottomans, had been defeated and evicted. Britain and France, who had done the evicting, were preparing neighboring lands for Arab statehood. Surely Zionism in the biblical Jewish homeland, too, could be sponsored to the general good?

Admittedly, there were obstacles. Establishing a Jewish National Home in a territory where Jews were still a minority with a view to its evolving into an eventual Jewish state was always likely to incur majority opposition. Muslims were accustomed to centuries of undisputed and arbitrary rule over docile Christians and Jews, Arab nationalism was developing, and the old certitudes of Ottoman rule had vanished: a combination bound to produce suspicion, hostility and inflexibility towards Zionism.

Much depended on the British to steer a steady course. They failed.

Honig - Prelude to murder

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
09 March '12..

The word “occupation” invokes differing definitions in the Arab realm. All involve Israel but the precise connotation depends on the context.

Liberal-hearted foreigners, whose sympathy and political support is sought, are told that occupation refers to lands Israel took (obviously out of unadulterated malice) in 1967. Unless these arbitrarily usurped territories are ceded, Mother Earth will know no peace and harmony.

But Arab/Muslim listeners discern other undertones. For them any Jew’s presence, even inside Israel, amounts to sinful and insufferable occupation. Rectifying that wrong means terminating the existence here of all Jewish trespassers.

This ethos was given emotive lyrical expression by Mahmoud Darwish – the late “Palestinian national poet,” once an Israeli-Arab Communist, later a PLO luminary and author of the Palestinian “Declaration of Independence.” Even post-Oslo, with its derivative coexistence prattle and two-state propaganda, Darwish’s verses encapsulate the ideology of his fellow Fatah leaders – Ramallah chieftain Mahmoud Abbas foremost among them.

Jacobs - Echoes of Hitler's Mufti

Charles Jacobs..
Palestinian Media Watch..
PMW  the Media..
20 February '12..




"The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews," the grand mufti of Jerusalem told the crowd. "The Jew will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: 'Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Except the Gharqad tree [which will keep silent]."

These were not the words of the infamous Palestinian Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the one who visited Hitler during the Holocaust to plan the extermination of Palestine's Jews. These words - taken from an Islamic Hadith - were spoken last month - on the 47th anniversary of Fatah, by today's grand mufti, Jerusalem Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, spiritual head of Mahmoud Abbas' "moderate" Palestinian Authority.

Two days later, the Palestinian Authority's TV station aired the speech. That caught the attention of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an Israeli research center, which posted Hussein's sermon on YouTube. YouTube took it down a day later - and froze PMW's account - calling the posting "inappropriate" because of hate speech. But caving to the pressure of PMW supporters (myself included), YouTube almost immediately reinstated the account and the video.

Several days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the Mufti's comments - as well as the world's silence on the matter - and made the apt comparison of Abbas' mufti to Hitler's. Indeed, according to Islamic scholar Andrew Bostom, during WWII Al-Husseini had used the same Hadith to recruit Balkan Muslims into the Nazi ranks. And of course, this is the same kill-the-Jew Hadith that is also part of the Hamas Charter.

Following the PMW's exposure of the sermon, Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein ordered a probe of Hussein for seeming to call on Muslims to wage holy war against every Jew on the planet.

The Palestinians' spin control offers as many lessons as the murder decree. The mufti denied he was inciting violence, claiming his words were taken out of context. He told the Associated Press that he was only "speaking about the final signs of the day of resurrection. ... I did not incite, and I did not call for killing. We are not, at present, at the end of days." (Which is when, presumably, the order to kill the Jews would be religiously more appropriate.)

David Meir-Levi - ‘They Stole Our Land’ vs. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

David Meir-Levi
frontpagemag.com
25 November '11

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/25/%E2%80%9Cthey-stole-our-land%E2%80%9D-vs-the-grand-mufti-of-jerusalem/

The cornerstone argument in the Arab narrative against Israel is that the Zionists in the 19th and early 20th centuries came to the Land of Israel and stole Arab land. This is a very simple assertion, easy to visualize, seemingly logical and amenable to a brief presentation: after all, Zionists did come from Europe to what was then Palestine, and the Arabs were already living there. So obviously when the Jews came they took Arab land.

Although there exists voluminous evidence to the contrary in Arab and Turkish and British sources indicating the exact opposite, it is difficult to present this contrary evidence and explain its importance in as brief and simple a manner as is done with the Arab assertion. There are too many variables: Arab demographics, Jewish demographics, Zionist agrarian reclamation technology, land purchases, crown land vs. privately owned land, absentee landlords, etc. This imbalance puts the advocate on behalf of Zionism and Israel at a disadvantage, even though the evidence supporting the Israeli narrative and contradicting the Arab narrative is vast and thoroughly vetted. For an excellent compilation and analysis of this evidence, see Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (University of North Carolina Press, 1984, reviewed here and here).

However, there is one testimony from an unimpeachable source stating that the Jews stole no land, but rather bought land in vast quantities from willing sellers who were the legal owners of the land that was sold. This unimpeachable source is so unarguably innocent of any pro-Israel or pro-Jewish or pro-Zionist sentiment that there can be no rational question regarding the veracity of his testimony. That source is the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Hajj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini (1895 to 1974).