Posted on 08/02/2012 12:59:22 PM PDT by Milagros
Hamas Blasts PA Official's Auschwitz Visit Thursday, August 02, 2012 By Tzippe Barrow Christian Broadcasting Network JERUSALEM, Israel -- Maybe if he had to do it all over again, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' advisor for Christian affairs would not visit the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Perhaps Ziad al-Bandak would think about the potential backlash for touring the gas chambers and crematorium, laying a wreath and lighting a memorial candle in remembrance of the 1.5 million who died there. But it's too late now.
It's not clear why al-Bandak made the trip since many Palestinians and Islamists deny the Holocaust ever took place. It seems likely though that Abbas may have known about the trip even though he wrote his doctoral thesis on the Holocaust. Published as The Other Side: the Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism, it's used in the P.A. school curriculum.
But the fury came from Hamas, the Palestinian faction ruling the Gaza Strip.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum accused al-Bandak of helping "spread the lie of the Holocaust."
"The visit helped Israel to spread the lie of the Holocaust and does not serve the Palestinian cause," Barhoum said on a website affiliated with the terror group. "It has been clearly proven that the Israeli narrative [of the Holocaust] is fraudulent. [The Israelis] exaggerated what happened to gain international sympathy, which for years has come at the expense of the Palestinians."
MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) translated several excerpts from posts on Hamas-affiliated websites.
Journalists Issam Shaur and Faiz Abu Shamala slammed al-Bandak's "misguided visit."
"What sort of wisdom was it on the part of [Abbas'] advisor to make this misguided visit, which supports the Jews and their crimes?" Shaur asked. "Who among us believes that Hitler burned six million Jews? We do not believe it and neither do the Jews," he wrote.
"The entire world is living [with] a hypocritical deception called the Holocaust and it is even worse when a senior Palestinian official goes to weep over the fabricated remains of the Holocaust while ignoring the crimes of the occupation state and its sins against his own Palestinian people," Shaur continued.
"Ziad al-Bandak's tears, shed openly or not, imply that the Jews are the victims. A senior Palestinian official has testified before the whole world that the Jews' tragedy and we know this is perjury that must be rejected.
"It reflects only the feelings of Ziad al-Bandak, not the feelings of the Palestinian people toward the terrorist occupation state "Israel," which is cordoning Gaza, Judaizing the holy places, and seizing lands in front of Abbas and all his advisors, including al-Bandak," Shaur concluded.
Another journalist, Faiz Abu Shamala, said al-Bandak should be tried for treason.
"The Palestinian people should prosecute 'Abbas's advisor Ziad al-Bandak for high treason and punish him for granting official recognition to the Jewish lie that has been refuted by intellectuals and writers, first and foremost among them the French philosopher Roger Garaudy," Shamala wrote.
"The Palestinian people should punish Ziad Al-Bandak for committing treason, for acknowledging the Jews' right to rule all of Palestine as compensation for their mass extermination at the hands of the Nazis in the camps of Auschwitz and Dachau.
"The Palestinian people should thwart Ziad al-Bandak's [attempt to] infiltrate [the circle of] Palestinian decision-makers after becoming friendly with the Jews and weeping over their graves," he concluded.
No words.
He be a dead man walking now.
Palestinians are very tolerant people — EXCEPT for Jews and Christians and all the other Infidels. Right!
as Romney said, “Culture”
ping for later use. How sad and disgusting.
They admire Hitler for the holocaust they say didn’t happen and which they promise to repeat at the first opportunity.
Dishonesty fused with insanity and steeped in evil.
Sure it is. He was researching the technological possibilities that the PA could use if the Arabs ever got the upper hand over Israel. /S
Evidence that the Grand Mufti conspired to exterminate European Jewry is given in the testimony of Dieter von Wisliczeny, a deputy fuehrer who held the title of adviser on Jewish affairs in Slovakia, Greece and Hungary. He states:
"In my opinion, the grand mufti, who has been in Berlin since 1941 played a role in the decision of the German government to exterminate the European Jews, the importance of which must not be disregarded. He had repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with who had been in contact, above all before Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this as a comfortable solution of the Palestinian problem.
In his messages broadcast from Berlin, he surpassed us in anti-Jewish attacks. He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say that, accompanied by Eichmann. he has visited incognito the gas chamber in Auschwitz."
It goes further than that. During WWII, Haj Amin Al-Huseini, the founder of the “Palestinian” movement, delivered a speech in Berlin chiding Hitler for not killing Jews quickly enough.
There is a word for muslim integrity — TAQQIYA.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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This is an improvement over the pre-Gdansk days, when a PLO rep was invited to the annual observance, and was given mike time during which he shouted that “the Jews are the new Nazis”. Thanks Milagros.
The Grand Mufti and the Nazi Protectorate of Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1941-1945
[Published 2011/5/10]
Enlarge Close The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem
Haj Amin el Husseini arrived in Europe in 1941 following the unsuccessful pro-Nazi coup which he organized in Iraq. He met German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and was officsially received by Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941 in Berlin. Nazi Germany established for der Grossmufti von Jerusalem a Bureau from which he organized the following: 1) radio propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany; 2) espionage and fifth column activities in Muslim regions of Europe and the Middle East; 3) the formation of Muslim Waffen SS and Wehrmacht units in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo-Metohija, Western Macedonia, North Africa, and Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union; and, 4) the formation of schools and training centers for Muslim imams and mullahs who would accompany the Muslim SS and Wehrmacht units. As soon as he arrived in Europe, the Mufti established close contacts with Bosnian Muslim and Albanian Muslim leaders. He would spend the remainder of the war organizing and rallying Muslims in support of Nazi Germany.
Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el Husseini was born in 1893 in Jerusalem, then the capital of Palestine, which was then a part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. His grandfather Mustapha and his half-brother Kemal had been the Muftis of Jerusalem in the 1890s. Husseini attended the Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, where he studied Islamic philosophy, but he never completed his studies and left after a year. In 1914, he obtained a commission in the Ottoman Turkish Army as an artillery officer, stationed in Smyrna.
On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour declared that Britain was committed to establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the so-called Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Balfour Declaration was initially contained in a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron of Rothschild, of the Jewish banking family, who was the leader of British Jewry. Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, prominent Jewish Zionist leaders in London and the World Zionist Organization, sought to obtain such a commitment in exchange for Jewish support of British war aims. The global Zionist movement had pressured the British government to support a Jewish homeland at the expense of the indigenous Muslim Arab Palestinians, dismissed as “Arab inhabitants”. The powerful and influential Jewish banking house Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann demanded a quid pro quo for global Jewish support of the British war effort against Germany. The modern platform for the Zionist movement was established at the World Zionist Congress held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland by Hungarian Jew Theodor Hertzl.
In 1917 the British occupied Palestine and established the British Mandate for Palestine.
The Mufti rejected the British policy of settling Palestine with European Jews. At the time of World War I, there were only approximately 60, 000 Jews in Palestine compared to approximately 800, 000 Palestinian Muslims. Husseini saw Jewish immigration and settlement in zero-sum terms. Each Jewish settler displaced a Palestinian Muslim, diluted the Palestinian population, and in time, would lead to the genocide of the Palestinian people. Husseini perceived the issue in these terms. He rejected both the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate over Palestine, which was meant to lead to the implementation of the Balfour Zionist agenda. Husseini devoted his entire life and career to the preservation of a Palestinian state and opposed the establishment of a proposed Jewish homeland on Palestinian land and sought to prevent Jewish immigration into Palestine. .
He formed a Society of Palestinian Youth and wrote articles in Arab newspapers arguing against the British Mandate occupation and British immigration policies. On April 4, 1920, he was accused of inciting riots against Jewish crowds in Jerusalem. He was tried by a military court with incitement to violence. He subsequently absconded from his bail and was tried in absentia and sentenced to ten years imprisonment.
On July 1, 1920, Sir Herbert Samuel, himself a British Jew, appointed the first British High Commissioner for Palestine, assumed control. Samuel sought to reconcile with the Palestinian population by pardoning Husseini. Sir Robert Storrs, the then governor of the city, appointed him Mufti of Jerusalem. He was also the president of the Supreme Muslim Council, and, later, the Arab Higher Committee. He was thus the religious and political leader of the Palestinian Muslims. Husseini was one of the most influential and powerful leaders in the Islamic world because of the fact that Jerusalem was a holy city and contained many Islamic holy sites, including the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, the third most sacred Islamic site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.
Husseini detested the decadent modern European materialistic way of life and modern secular Western civilization. He was then what would today be called a Muslim fundamentalist and was the precursor of Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Hendi Khomeini, Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, planned with the assistance of Bosnian Muslims, but initially blamed by the FBI on the so-called Serbian Liberation Army, Afghani Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, and Saudi Ossama Bin Laden. Husseini can justly be credited for being a visionary Islamic firebrand and one of the founders of the Muslim resistance to the British-French, later US, colonial/imperial/economic occupation and exploitation of the Muslim Arab world.
Husseini was at the forefront of Islamic militancy and “terrorism” directed against the British/French/US occupation. Hassan el Banna formed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. The Muslim Brotherhood had links to the Grand Mufti and worked with him in Palestine, sending volunteers in support of the Palestinian uprisings in 1936, 1939, and during the 1948 war. The Muslim Brotherhood sought to establish Muslim states based on the Sharia, Islamic law, and the Caliphate system of political rule, wherein each Islamic state would be ruled by a Caliph. Islam is “creed and state, book and sword, and a way of life.” In Pakistan, Syed Abdul Ala Maududi founded the Jamaat Islami movement with the goal of establishing Muslim theocratic states based on Koranic law. Egyptian Sayed Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood continued the movement after World War II. The Muslim Brotherhood had offshoots: the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Haj Amin el Husseini, the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat Islami, Islamic Jihad, all form the roots and historical background for the emergence of the Al Quaeda network, the mujahedeen of Afghanistan, and Ossama Bin Laden. Ayatollah Khomeini and Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic would be influenced by the anti-secular, anti-Western, radical Muslim nationalist movements. In his book The Islamic Declaration, (Islamska Deklaracija, 1970; republished, 1990), Izetbegovic rejected the secular conception of an Islamic state espoused by Kemal Ataturk. Izetbegovic sought to create an Islamic state based in the Sharia, a state where religion would not be separate from the state, i.e., an Islamic theocratic state. Izebegovic established close links to Ossama Bin Laden and al-Qeada and invited mujadedeen forces to join the Bosnian Muslim Army. Izetbegovic later would give Ossama Bin laden a special Bosnian passport and the mujahedeen “freedom fighters” would receive Bosnian citizenship and passports. One of the hijackers of the second attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, possessed a Bosnian passport.
Yasser Arafat was introduced to Mufti and the Mufti would subsequently become the role model and mentor for Arafat. In biographies of Arafat, whose real name is Mohammed el Husseini, the Mufti is stated to be a “distant relative” of Arafat, although this claim has been denied as well. For two years, beginning at the age of 16, Arafat worked for the Mufti and his covert terrorist network and organization, helping to smuggle and buy weapons in the war against Jewish settlers of Palestine. Sheik Hassan Abu Saud, the mufti of al-Shafaria, was worked with the Mufti. The Grand Mufti was a precursor of both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and of the Palestinian national struggle and movement to maintain a Palestinian state. The terrorism, fanaticism, and ruthlessness of that movement reflect the enduring legacy and influence of the Grand Mufti.
At the 1921 Cairo Conference, Britain and France divided up the Arab lands to suit their colonial/imperialist objectives by forming spheres of influence, in a region formerly ruled by Muslim Turkey. In the Sykes-Picot Treaty, negotiated by Sir Mark Sykes and Charles Picot, these British-French colonial spheres were formally established. Since 1875 when Britain gained the Suez Canal, the Middle East was regarded as a key strategic region in safeguarding naval routes in the British colonial empire.. The British/French created Jordan under Emir Abdullah and installed King Faisal in Iraq. Syria was placed under French control. The Balfour Declaration was endorsed. The Islamic Arab Middle East was placed under British/French imperial/colonial occupation/control. The British had occupied Palestine since 1917. On July 7, 1922, the League of Nations approved the British Mandate which had the goal of settling Muslim Arab Palestine with European Jewish settlers.
The Mufti instigated and organized Muslim riots against Palestinian Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936. In 1921, the Muft organized the fedayeen, Muslim suicide squads. Following the 1936 riots, fearing imprisonment, he fled to Lebanon. In 1939, the Mufti established his headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, where he set up a “political department” that maintained ties to Germany and Italy. Germany sought to create a Berlin-Baghdad Axis and instigated a pro-Nazi coup. Iraqi General Rashid Ali el Gailani, a militant Muslim nationalist, and the Golden Square, a group of pro-Nazi Iraqi officers, took over the Iraqi government. The Mufti sent representatives to Berlin and a letter to Adolf Hitler. In a reply by German State Secretary Freiherr von Weizsaecker, the Mufti was told that “the Fuehrer received your letter dated January 20th…He took great interest in what you wrote him about the national struggle of the Arabs… Germany … is ready to cooperate with you and to give you all possible military and financial help… Germany is prepared to deliver to you immediately military material.” Abwehr, German intelligence, established contacts with the Mufti at this time.
Nazi Germany sent arms and aircraft to the Mufti’s forces in Iraq but the British were able to reoccupy Iraq, forcing the Mufti and el Gailani to flee to Teheran. The Mufti then flew to either Afghanistan or Turkey “where he is known to have many friends”. From there he arrived in Albania and on October 24 he reached southern Italy. On October 27, 1941, the Mufti arrived in Rome. The Mufti would subsequently play a major role in organizing Muslim support for Nazism in Europe.
On May 9, 1941, the Mufti broadcast a fatwa announcing a jihad, an Islamic holy war, against Britain and he urged every Muslim to join in the struggle against the “greatest foe of Islam”: “I invite all my Muslim brothers throughout the whole world to join in the holy war for Allah…to preserve Islam, your independence and your lands from English aggression.” The Mufti envisioned a vast Arab-Muslim union which would unite Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and Egypt with Germany and Italy creating a Pan-Muslim/Arab Bloc of countries.
In December, 1931, the Grand Mufti organized an All-Islamic Conference in Jerusalem. This would be the first time the Mufti would come in contact with Bosnian Muslim political and religious leaders. Present at the Mufti’s All Islamic Conference were Bosnian Muslim leader Mehmed Spaho, the president of the Yugoslavian Muslim Organization or JMO, Uzeiraga Hadzihasanovic, and hadzi-Mujaga Merhemic. The Mufti was elected president of the Conference.
Franz Reichert, the director of the Palestine branch of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro (German News Bureau) from 1933 to 1938, established the first contacts between Nazi Germany and Muslim leaders in the Middle East. The Mufti approached representatives of the Nazi regime and sought cooperation on July 21, 1937, when he visited the German Consul in Jerusalem. He later sent an agent and personal representative to Berlin for discussions with Nazi leaders.
SS Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich was second in command to Heinrich Himmler in the SS hierarchy and was the chief of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) and was the head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS Security Service. In Septemper, 1937, Heydrich sent two SS officers, SS Hauptscharfuehrer Adolf Eichmann and SS Oberscharfuehrer Herbert Hagen on a mission to Palestine, one of the main objectives being to establish contact with the Grand Mufti. During this period Husseini received financial and military aid and supplies from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
After meeting Hitler and Ribbentrop in Berlin in 1941, the Mufti was approached by Gottlob Berger, head of the SS Main Office in control of recruiting, and by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, who made him a part of the SS apparatus. In May, 1943, the Mufti was moved to the SS main office where he participated in the recruiting of Muslims in the Balkans, the USSR, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Grand Mufti was instrumental in the organization and formation of many Muslim units and formations in the Waffen SS and Wehrmacht. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims fought for Nazi Germany in the following formations and units: Two Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS Divisions, an Albanian Waffen SS Division in Kosovo-Metohija and Western Macedonia, the 21st Waffen Gebirgs Division der SS “Skanderbeg”, a Muslim SS self-defense regiment in the Rashka (Sandzak) region of Serbia, the Arab Legion (Arabisches Freiheitskorps), the Arab Brigade, the Ostmusselmanische SS-Regiment, the Ostturkischen Waffen Verband der SS made up of Turkistanis, the Waffengruppe der-SS Krim, formations consisting of Chechen Muslims from Chechnya, and a Tatar Regiment der-SS made up of Crimean Tatars, and other Muslim formations in the Waffen SS and Wehrmacht, in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Balkans, North Africa, Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, and the Middle East.
The SS Muslim State: The Nazi Protectorate of Bosnia-Hercegovina
On April 10, 1941, Slavko Kvaternik proclaimed the creation of the Independent State of Croatia, Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, NDH, a Great or Greater Croatia, Velika Hrvatska, following the German invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia. Ironically, Croat and Muslim propaganda and policy sought to create for their respective nationalities what they accused the Serbs of seeking, Greater Croatia and Greater Muslim Bosnia. The NDH consisted of the territories of Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and parts of Serbia and was a Nazi-fascist puppet state created by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and ruled by the Ustashi (”insurgents”), Croatian Catholic nationalists and Bosnian Muslims. The Vatican-supported NDH embarked upon a massive and systematic program of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Serbian Orthodox populations, the Jewish populations, and the Gypsy or Roma populations. The Ustasha regime doctrine was based on the intolerant fanaticism of Roman Catholicism and the racist precepts of the 19th century Croatian nationalist Ante Starcevic, regarded as the “father of his country”, he called for the extermination of the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, “a race fit for the slaughterhouse”. The President or Poglavnik of the NDH was Ante Pavelic, born in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and the Vice-President, from November, 1941 to April, 1945, was Dzafer Kulenovic, a Bosnian Muslim born in Bihac. From April to November, 1941, the Vice-President had been his brother, Osman Kulenovic. The Minister of the Interior was Andrija Artukovic, born in Ljubuski, Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Minister of Justice was Mirko Puk; Slavko Kvaternik was Minister of the Army; Mile Budak was Minister of Education and Cults. Artukovic and Budak personally received the Grand Mufti in Zagreb when Husseini was en route to Sarajevo to oversee the formation of the Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS Division in 1943.
Dzafer Kulenovic, the Bosnian Muslim Vice-President of the NDH, had been the president of the Yugoslavian Muslim Organization (JMO, Jugoslovenska Muslimanska Organizacija) and was the political leader of the Bosnian Muslims. Eleven Muslim political leaders of the JMO were invited to be part of the Ustasha NDH parliament in Zagreb. The Ustasha Commissioner for Bosnia-Hercegovina was Bosnian Muslim Hakija Hadzic. The NDH was a Croatian Catholic and Bosnian Muslim state which sought the extermination or genocide of the Serbian Orthodox, Jewish, and Roma populations. The Serbian Orthodox population was referred to as grkoistocnjaka in the NDH and were de-recognized as a nationality group. On April 25, 1941, under Decree Law, No. XXV-33Z, the Serbian Orthodox Cyrillic alphabet was outlawed and Orthodox Serbs were forced to wear a blue band with the letter “P” for Pravoslavac, Orthodox. In Belovar, Serbs were forced to wear a red armband with the word “Serb”. The NDH adopted the Nuremberg racial laws and began the incarceration of Jews., who were forced to wear a yellow band with the letter “Z”, for Zidov, Jew.
On September 25, 1941, under decree-law, No. 1528-2101-Z-1941, the creation of “assembly or work camps for undesirable and dangerous persons” was authorized, which was the basis for the establishment of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia.
From the beginning of the German invasion of Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Muslims had sought to convince the Germans that Bosnia-Hercegovina should be a Nazi Protectorate, that is, have an autonomous political existence, a Greater Islamic Bosnia, a Greater Muslim State. In 1941, over 100, 000 Bosnian Muslim conscripts were available to fight in the military formations of the Third Reich. Roman Catholic Croatian and Bosnian Muslim soldiers were in the Ustasha death squads, the Domobranci (Home Guards), and the Croatian Army.
Bosnian Muslim soldiers were in the Nazi-Ustasha German-Croatian “Legion” units, the 369th, 373rd, and 392nd Infantry Divisions. The 369th German-Croatian Infantry Division, formed in 1942, was known as the Vrazja Divizija or Devil Division commanded by Generalleutnant Fritz Neidholt. The 373rd German-Croatian Infantry Division was known as the Tigar Divizija or Tiger Division. The 392nd German-Croatian Infantry Division was known as the Plava Divizija, or Blue Division. The 369th Reinforced Croat Infantry Regiment, made up of Croats and Bosnian Muslims, fought at Stalingrad where it was destroyed. The NDH also sent the Italian-Croat Legion, attached to the Italian 3rd Mobile Division, to the Russian front where it was destroyed during the Don retreat. The 369th Reinforced Infantry Regiment, formed at Varazdin, consisted of three battalions, two from Croatia, one from Sarajevo. The Regiment left Zagreb on July 15, 1941 for the Doellersheim Training Camp near Vienna, Austria. From here, the troops were transferred by railroad to the USSR. The Regiment was deployed on various points on the Russian Front: Krementchug, Jasy, Kirovograd, Permomaysk, Poltava, the Dnieper River, Kharkov, Stalino. On May 15, 1942, the Regiment was deployed on the Voronezh Front. On September 27, the Bosnian Muslim/Croat troops deployed to Stalingrad where they fought to take the city. By February, 1943, the Regiment was totally annihilated and obliterated by the Russian Red Army. The German/Axis forces were encircled and surrendered en masse in Stalingrad.
The Bosnian Muslims formed purely Muslim formations as well, the most important of which was the Muslim Volunteer Legion, led by Mohammed Hadzieffendic. Other Muslim formations were the Zeleni Kadar/Kader (Green Cadres), Nazi formations created by deserters from the Home Guards (Domobranci), led by Neshad Topcic, the Muslim nationalist group, the Young Muslims (Mladi Muslimani), Huska Miljkovic’s Muslim Army, and the Gorazde-Foca milicijas (policing units). Alija Izetbegovic was a key member of the Young Muslims (Mladi Muslimani) group.
The Bosnian Muslim political and religious leaders, known as Muslim autonomists, continued to argue for the establishment of a autonomous Nazi Protectorate for Muslim Bosnia. They wrote Adolf Hitler a Memorandum and interceded with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in Berlin to support their goal of creating a Nazi protectorate for Bosnia. The German commanders in Croatia, the NDH, Foreign Minister Siegfried Kasche and General Edmund Gleise von Horstenau, however, opposed the creation of a Protectorate for Bosnia, supporting instead a unitary NDH.
On October 15, 1942, Bosnian Muslim religious and political leaders sent a delegation from Mostar to a meeting in Rome with the Grand Mufti and Benito Mussolini, who sought to gain influence in the Muslim countries and who assumed the title of “Protector of Islam”. The Bosnian Muslim delegation consisted of the grand mufti of Mostar, Omer Dzabic, Ibrahim Fejic, hadzi-Ahmed Karabeg, and Oman Sehic. The goal of the delegation was to convince Mussolini to sponsor a Fascist Protectorate for Bosnia-Hercegovina, an Italian-sponsored Greater Islamic State, like the Greater Albania made up of Kosovo and Western Macedonia, which Italy did sponsor. A Fascist Protectorate for Bosnia, however, did not result.
The Bosnian Muslim leadership remained determined to secure political autonomy for Bosnia-Hercegovina by interceding with the Grand Mufti to use his influence to create a Protectorate By 1943, the Mufti and the Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler became convinced that the Bosnian Muslims could be organized in Nazi formations to advance the objectives of the Third Reich and of Islam. Himmler became a sponsor of the Muslim autonomists, the Greater Muslim Bosnia ideology, and their movement to achieve autonomy for Muslim Bosnia. Bosnian Muslim Reis-el-Ulema Hafiz Mohammed Pandza was a key recruiter for the division and was himself a prominent Muslim autonomist, a key proponent of the Great or Greater Muslim State of Bosnia, even though the Serbian Orthodox were the largest population in Bosnia. Himmler explained how he decided to form the Handzar Division as follows:
I decided to propose to the Fuehrer that we establish a Muslim Bosnian Division. Many believed the notion to be so novel that they scoffed at it … Such is the fate of all new ideas. I was told, “You’re ruining the formation of the Croatian state” and “No one will volunteer”…. Germany and the Reich have been friends of Islam for two centuries, owing not to expediency but to friendly conviction. We have the same goals.
Himmler wanted to re-establish the continuity with the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, which had formed Bosnian Muslim military formations. Himmler sent the Mufti to Zagreb and to Sarajevo to prepare for the formation of the Bosnian Muslim units. Himmler’s SS representative in the NDH, Konstantin Kammerhofer, was told to begin recruiting a Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS Division of 26, 000 men, which if realized, would make it the largest of all the SS Divisions.
In forming the Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS Division, Himmler overruled the objections of the Pavelic regime, which considered such formations and infringement on the sovereignty of the NDH. Himmler, as the second most powerful leader in the Third Reich after Hitler, was able to create a de facto Protectorate for Bosnia. He wanted to create an “SS recruiting zone”, an SS State administration in northeastern Bosnia to “restore order”. Two Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS Divisions would be created by 1944 to serve this purpose.
Genocide in Bosnia-Hercegovina
On July 22, 1941, Mile Budak declared that the goal of the NDH was to create a Croat Catholic and Bosnian Muslim state by the extermination of “foreign elements”, which were Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies (Roma). His statement is as follows: “The basis for the Ustasha movement is religion. For minorities such as Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, we have three million bullets.” He emphasized in a speech on July 6, 1941, that the Bosnian Muslims were to be an integral part of the NDH: “The Croatian state is Christian. It is also a Moslem state where our people are of the Mohammedan religion.” Orthodox churches and synagogues were plundered and destroyed and Serbian Orthodox priests and Jewish rabbis were murdered.
On August 14, 1941, Ante Pavelic, a “Bosnian” by birth, in a speech in Vukovar, in Srem, announced the official policy of the NDH:
This is now the Ustashi and Independent State of Croatia, it must be cleansed of Serbs and Jews. There is no room for any of them here. Not a stone upon a stone will remain of what once belonged to them.
Pavelic’s speech and the law passed in Srem were published in the Ustasha Hrvatski Narod newspaper of August 15 and 16, 1941.
In 1941, Pavelic declared: “The Jews will be liquidated within a very short time.” Following the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, where the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was formulated, the German regime proposed through SS Sturmbannfuehrer Hans Helm that the Croats transfer Jewish prisoners to German camps in the East. Eugen Dido Kvaternik, chief of the NDH security services, agreed that the NDH would arrest the Jews, take them to railheads, and pay the Germans 30 Reichsmarks per person for the cost of transport to the extermination camps in the east. The Germans agreed that the property of the Jews would go to the NDH government..
SS Haupsturmfuehrer Franz Abromeit was sent to supervise the deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oswiecim-Brzezina). From August 13-20, 1942, 5, 500 Jews from the NDH were transported to Auschwitz of five trains from the NDH concentration camps at Tenje and Loborgrad and from Zagreb and Sarajevo. Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler was on a state visit to Zagreb in May, 1943 when two trains on May 5 and 10 transported 1, 150 Jews to Auschwitz.
The largest concentration camp in Bosnia was the Kruscica camp near Travnik, established in April-May, 1941, where many of Bosnia’s Jews were killed.
On February 26, 1942, NDH Interior Minister Andrija Artukovic, gave a speech before the NDH Parliament or Sabor in Zagreb in which he claimed the Jewish question had been settled in the NDH:
The Croatian people, having re-established their independent state of Croatia, could not do otherwise but to clean off the poisonous damagers and insatiable parasites—-Jews, Communists, Freemasons. The independent state of Croatia, as an Ustashi state...settled the so-called Jewish question with a decisive and healthy grasp.
The Serbian Orthodox population was the largest ethnic group in Bosnia-Hercegovina. According to the 1931 Yugoslav census, out of a total population of 2, 487, 652, 40.92% were Serbian Orthodox, 36.64% were Muslim, and 22.44% were Roman Catholic Croats. The total Jewish population of Bosnia-Hercegovina was approximately 14, 000 in 1941, 10, 500 of whom lived in Sarajevo. In the 1931 census, there were 73, 000 Yugoslav Jews; in 1941, there were 80, 000 Jews, including over 4, 000 Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, and other countries. The Jewish population was broken down as follows: 60% were Ashkenazic and 40% were Sephardic. Due to the Serbian Orthodox policy of fostering multi-ethnic and religious diversity and religious and ethnic tolerance, interwar Yugoslavia had a thriving and vibrant Jewish community. German-occupied Serbia had a population of 16, 000 Jews. The NDH had a total population of 40, 000 Jews, 11, 000 of whom lived in Zagreb.
On April 16, German forces occupied Sarajevo and with local Bosnian Muslims, looted and destroyed the Sephardic synagogue.
Entire Serbian Orthodox and Jewish communities in the Sarajevo region were destroyed and Serbian, Jewish, and Roma, men, women, and children were massacred by Bosnian Muslims and Croats. Numerous massacres occurred in the Bosnian towns of Bihac, Brcko, and Doboj. Even the Germans began protesting the bestiality and brutality of these massacres against Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Serbian Orthodox churches and Jewish synagogues were plundered and destroyed and Serbian Orthodox priests and rabbis were tortured and brutally murdered.
A large percentage of the Bosnian Serbian, Jewish, and Roma communities was deported between September and November, 1941, to Jasenovac, and Djakovo, and the Loborgrad camp for women from the Kruscica camp, located south of Zenica and Travnik in central Bosnia. From the Kruscica concentration camp, which functioned as a collection and transit camp, Orthodox Serbs, Roma, and Jews, mostly from Sarajevo, were transported to the northern extermination camps of the NDH, Jasenovac, Loborgrad, Stara Gradiska. Survivors were later transferred to Auschwitz where they were gassed. Those who remained alive in the NDH concentration camps were later transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
http://www.siotw.org/modules/news_english/item.php?itemid=315
Behind The British Bludgeonhttp://news.google.com/newspapers?id=TgFPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=jEwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2751,1591402
By Bernard Lerner
Canadian Jewish Chronicle - Jul 12, 1946
Out in Jerusalem, in an office situated ironically on Bethlehem road, where according to Jewish legend Mother Rachel weeps at mid-night over the plight of her children, the people of Israel, I met Achmed Shukeiri, chief of the Arab Office, who restituted in his conversation the words of Goebbels, justified the murder of six million Jews of Europe "because Hitler could not have been all wrong," and warned that his side was ready to "play along with Moscow". They always are ready to play along, the boys of the Husseini-Shukeiri mob.
Outside the Young Men's Christian Association building in Jerusalem, where the hearing of the Anglo-American Inquiry Committee were being held at the time, I met Jamal el Husseini; he issued the same warning as Shukeiri (he being Shukeiri's chief) of playing along with Moscow, and reiterated his justification of the mass murder of six million Jews "for Hitler couldn't be all wrong . . . you have got to see both sides of a question, my man, both sides of a question. . ."
Jamal Husseini saw both sides so well that he joined in igniting, at a time most critical for the allies, the Iraq coup d'etat in an effort to gauleiter the Middle East into Hitler's Welt-Raum scheme.
And now these gentlemen have been joined by a third. It is a matter of minutes and they get straight through to Cairo for instructions from Haj Amin el Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti, the man who plotted the Iraq uprising,...
Having been introduced to the Arab-fascist co-plotters... you must now meet the Jewish leaders detained in Latrun: Moshe Shertok -- When Haj Amin el Husseini, former Mufti of Jerusalem was igniting rebellion in Iraq against the war-shattered Allies, when his aide-de-camp, Jamal el Husseini, assisted the Mufti in a coup d'etat to help the Axis wrest the Mediterranean from the democratic powers, Moshe Shertok, chief of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, was travelling across the face of Palestine calling upon Jews to volunteer for the British forces, irrespective of Britain's past and present policy towards the Jews of Palestine. Moshe Shertok as an individual, and his Jewish Agency colleagues as a group, recruited, rallied, mobilized the thousands of Jews who held Rommel back in the western desert, and the reserve guerilla forces who took up battle stations in the hills of Judaea and Galilee, even as the British were burning Government papers and evacuating Palestine.
The Mufti, the man who plotted the Iraq uprising and the arch-author of the plan ... as the British were burning Government papers and evacuating Palestine. ...
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