Nazi ally, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, is Arafat's “hero”

Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin | Augustus 05 2002 | Itamar Marcus

[knighthawk]

In an interview this week Arafat called the Arab leader and Nazi ally, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, “our hero”. Arafat referred to “our hero Al Husseini" as a symbol of withstanding world pressure, having remained an Arab leader in spite of demands to have him replaced because of his Nazi ties. This he compared to Palestinian withstanding of world pressure for reform of the Palestinian Authority today, which includes the American demand to replace Arafat.

Background:

“Hajj Amin Al Husseini (1895-1974) was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem... He supported the Nazis, and especially their program for the mass murder of the Jews. He visited numerous death camps and encouraged Hitler to extend the "Final Solution" to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine. In 1946 he escaped to Egypt.” [Simon Wiesenthal Center Web Site]

The following is the text from the interview:

Interviewer: “I have heard voices from within the [Palestinian] Authority in the past few weeks, saying that the reforms are coordinated according to American whims…”

Arafat: “We are not Afghanistan…We are the Mighty People. Were they able to replace our hero Hajj Amin al-Husseini? ... There were a number of attempts to get rid of Hajj Amin, whom they considered an ally of the Nazis. But even so, he lived in Cairo, and participated in the 1948 war, and I was one of his troops.”

[Al Sharq al Awsat, a London Arabic daily, reprinted in the Palestinian daily Al Quds, Aug, 2, 2002]

[PsyOp]

see post #40.

[PsyOp]

Those poor maggots! You should be ashamed of yourself for insulting them so egregiously!

Acutually, Muslim cooperation with the Nazi's was very widespread, extending from North Africa to the Balkans. When people refer to Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular, they are closer to the truth than they realize.

[PsyOp]

He also forgets that the Ford and GM plants in Germany were built under license before the war, and that when the war began, they became the property of the German goverment and run by the Nazi.

The idiot makes it sound like Frod and GM execs here in the US were running those plants in Germany and bringing profits home throughout the war - which is not the case.

Ford also built a truck plant in the soviet union during the war, Under license. After the Nazis were defeated and the Cold War flared up, royalty payment to Ford were stopped and the Russians continued to make Ford trucks in a Ford built factory under a slightly different name (one that still fit in the blue oval). It was the same thing in Germany.

[andy_card]

The same thing was said about Area bombing during WWII. It made Germans angry at first and steeled their resolve. Then, eventually, it demoralized them. Then it made even some of the more ardent nazis realize how futile the war effort was. Then we won.

I disagree. While there may be some reason to believe that strategic bombing hurt German morale (and even that is highly controversial), its pretty clear that, had the same resources gone into tactical bombing or even artillery, the war would have ended earlier, and Allied lives would have been saved. There's an oft quoted statistic that more British airmen lost their lives dropping bombs on occupied Europe, than Germans died having bombs dropped on them by the Brits.

Likewise, regardless of whether buldozing homes steels Palestinian morale or lowers it, its clearly not the most effective use of limited Israeli resources.

[PsyOp]

You can disagree all you want, and the only people its controversial to are people who weren't in Germany. Read any memoir of the war written by a German who fought at that time and you will hear the same sentiment expressed. Both Speers and Geobells diaries admit this fact as well. It only becomes controversial when people are trying to disavow how effective it was.

As for the casualties, the British are the ones who engaged in area bombing (at night) while the Americans attemtped precision bombing (by day). The Americans suffered far higher casualties than the British. Many senior American officers considered the area bombing of civilian structures barbaric and justified their higher casualties on that basis.

Speer, who was in charge of Germany's industrial production moved most of it underground, and by late '44 Germany's industrial output actually tripled, in spite of two years of daylight bombing campaigns against military targets. What Speer could not do was protect German workers. He describes the severe effect that the loss of their homes had on his workers mentally and physically. It also demoralized the troops at the front, and great pains were taken to keep the extent of the damage at home from them.

In addition to demoralizing German workers and soldiers, bombing their homes affected the productivity of the workers themselves, depriving them of, among other things, sleep and peace of mind. That, according to Speer, did more to harm German industrial productivity than the bombing of the factories did.

[freeforall]

Could you site me a source for this.

"Ford and GM plants in Germany were built under license before the war, and that when the war began, they became the property of the German goverment and run by the Nazi."

I am sure the commie I am debating will demand it.

[freeforall]

The commie replys;
Ahh.. Another post hoping its readers won't dig deeper.
You are right that my post did not dispute Husseini's connection to Hitler. However, your evidence (the meeting notes) are by no means proof of Husseini's unquestioning support. They merely note that Hitler ASKED for the Mufti's support. My claim was that Husseini's relationship with Hitler was less substantial/detrimental to Jews than the relationship American businessmen had with Hitler.

"You say he is somewhat right about the Mufti's views about the Jewish immigration, while 'forgetting to mention' that
Jews lived in that area long before Arabs did. Well, since the Arabs have been there since 635 AD and Jews well before 1300 BC"

Prior to 635AD the area of Israel and Palestine was ruled not by Jews, but by the Sassanian Empire (whose official religion was Zoroastrianism not Judaism). They had taken the land from the Roman Empire. Surveys of the area by the Ottoman Empire 1878 showed that there were 462,465 subject inhabitants of the Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre districts: 403,795 Muslims (including Druze), 43,659 Christians and 15,011 Jews. In addition, there were perhaps 10,000 Jews with foreign citizenship (recent immigrants to the country), and several thousand Muslim Arab nomads (bedouin) who were not counted as Ottoman subjects. By the outbreak of World War I (1914), the population of Jews in Palestine had risen to about 60,000, about 33,000 of whom were recent settlers. The Arab population in 1914 was 683,000.

Your claim that Jews lived in Palestine 2000 years prior to Arabs and thus have more right to the land is interesting. Native Americans have lived in Canada and the US since thousands of years before 1300BC while Europeans have only lived here since 1492AD. So are you suggesting Native Americans should be permitted to take the same liberties with the non-indigenous populations as the state of Israel does? To set curfews on Canadians, hold hundreds of thousands of them without trial or conviction of a crime, torture them, force them from the land they've lived on for over 1300 (oops Europeans have only been in Canada for slightly more than 400 years) years, and eliminate their political rights?

Do you believe Canada and the US should be given back to the Native Americans (or taken back with force)?

In response to Husseini's uproar against Jewish immigration you pose the question:

"Why would immigration cause such an uproar?
As a Canadian we welcome immigrants why counldn't the arabs of transjordan?"

The Zionist movement began in 1882 with the first wave of European Jewish immigration to Palestine. The World Zionist Organization, established by Theodor Herzl in 1897, declared that the aim of Zionism was to establish "a national home for the Jewish people secured by public law." A second form of Zionism was the Revisionist movement led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. They earned the name "Revisionist" because they wanted to revise the boundaries of Jewish territorial aspirations and claims beyond Palestine to include areas east of the Jordan River. In the 1920s and 1930s, they differed from Labor Zionists by declaring openly the objective to establish a Jewish state (rather than the vaguer formula of a "national home") in Palestine. And they believed that armed force would be required to establish such a state. Thus, immigration of European Jews into Palestine became the source of Arab "uproar." Not because they disliked Jews, as they had been living with Jews ever since 635AD, but because they knew the Zionist immigrants intended to take over their land.

Immigrants to Canada are not a threat to Canada's control of the land. And when they do become a threat (not even to sovreignty but to profits) Canada responds. In April, Citizenship and Immigration Canada announced that it is backing out of its policy which allowed Algerians residing in Canada without legal status to remain in the country for their own safety. As a result, hundreds of Algerian refugees residing in Canada will be deported within the next six months. While the Canadian government claims that the deportees will be safe in Algeria, it advises Canadian citizens against traveling there, warning of "continuous terrorist activity." Human rights organizations widely regard the situation in Algeria to be dangerous, leading many to question the real motives behind the deportations: a visit to Algeria by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien in the name of NEPAD has $1 billion in trade implications, and a $141 million deal between Canadian company SNC Lavalin and the Goverment of Algeria to build water-supply infrastructure was officially announced shortly afterward.

In the "free" US, Attorney General John Ashcroft has expanded the power of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain immigrants. Authorities can now keep detainees behind bars even after a federal immigration judge has ordered the individual released for lack of evidence. According to the latest figures released by the Justice Department, more than 1,100 immigrants have been rounded up and detained by the US government. Unfortunately in December of 2001, having come under criticism for refusing to release the identities of the detainees, where they were being held, and what charges, if any, had been brought against them, Ashcroft announced that the government would simply suspend giving out any figures on the detainment.

Israel itself has been more than anti-immigrant, it has even caused the exodus of many of the Arabs who had been living on the land it annexed. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The UN partition plan divided the country in such a way that each state would have a majority of its own population, although some Jewish settlements would fall within the proposed Palestinian state and many Palestinians would become part of the proposed Jewish state. The territory designated to the Jewish state would be slightly larger than the Palestinian state (56 percent and 43 percent of Palestine, respectively) on the assumption that increasing numbers of Jews would immigrate there. According to the UN partition plan, the area of Jerusalem and Bethlehem was to become an international zone. Fighting began between the Arab and Jewish residents of Palestine days after the adoption of the UN partition plan. In 1949, the war between Israel and the Arab states ended with the signing of armistice agreements. The State of Israel now encompassed over 77 percent of the Palestine territory. As a consequence of the fighting in Palestine between 1947 and 1949, over 700,000 Arabs living in the land Israel claimed became refugees. Israeli military intelligence indicates that at least 75 percent of the refugees left due to Zionist or Israeli military actions, psychological campaigns aimed at frightening Arabs into leaving, and direct expulsions.

On June 5, 1967 Israel preemptively attacked Egypt and Syria, destroying their air forces on the ground within a few hours. Jordan joined in the fighting belatedly, and consequently was attacked by Israel as well. The Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies were decisively defeated, and Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria

Israel established a military administration to govern the Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Under this arrangement, Palestinians were denied many basic political rights and civil liberties, including freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of political association.

After the 1967 war, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which notes the "inadmissability of the acquisition of territory by force," and calls for Israeli withdrawal from lands seized in the war and the right of all states in the area to peaceful existence within secure and recognized boundaries. The grammatical construction of the French version of Resolution 242 says Israel should withdraw from "the territories," whereas the English version of the text calls for withdrawal from "territories." (Both English and French are official languages of the UN.) Israel and the United States use the English version to argue that Israeli withdrawal from some, but not all, the territory occupied in the 1967 war satisfies the requirements of this resolution.

Since 1967, Israel has built hundreds of settlements and permitted hundreds of thousands of its own Jewish citizens to move to the West Bank and Gaza, despite that this constitutes a breach of international law. Israel has justified the violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and other international laws governing military occupation of foreign territory on the grounds that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not technically "occupied" because they were never part of the sovereign territory of any state. Therefore, according to this interpretation, Israel is not a foreign "occupier" but a legal "administrator" of territory whose status remains to be determined.

The Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles (the Oslo Accords) was signed in Washington in September 1993. The Declaration of Principles established that Israel would withdraw from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, with additional withdrawals from further unspecified areas of the West Bank during a five-year interim period.
The Oslo accords set up a negotiating process without specifying an outcome. The process was supposed to have been completed by May 1999.
During the protracted interim period of the Oslo process, Israel's Labor and Likud governments built new settlements in the occupied territories, expanded existing settlements and constructed a network of bypass roads to enable Israeli settlers to travel from their settlements to Israel proper without passing through Palestinian-inhabited areas. These projects were understood by most Palestinians as marking out territory that Israel sought to annex in the final settlement. The Oslo accords contained no mechanism to block these unilateral actions or Israel's violations of Palestinian human and civil rights in areas under its control.

In July 2000, President Clinton invited Prime Minister Barak and President Arafat to Camp David to conclude negotiations on the long-overdue final status agreement. Barak proclaimed his "red lines": Israel would not return to its pre-1967 borders; East Jerusalem with its 175,000 Jewish settlers would remain under Israeli sovereignty; Israel would annex settlement blocs in the West Bank containing some 80 percent of the 180,000 Jewish settlers; and Israel would accept no legal or moral responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The Palestinians, in accord with UN Security Council resolution 242 and their understanding of the spirit of the Oslo Declaration of Principles, sought Israeli withdrawal from the vast majority of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including East Jerusalem, and recognition of an independent state in those territories.

As for Ford and GM plants becoming German property when the war began, this is only partially correct. As I quoted previously a 1974 report printed by the US Senate Judiciary Committee stated, "The outbreak of war in September 1939 resulted inevitably in the full conversion BY GM and Ford of THEIR Axis plants to the production of military aircraft and trucks. On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored 'mule' 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich's medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as 'the backbone of the German Army transportation system.'" Ford lost control of it's Werke plant in Cologne, which used slave labor from the Buchenwald concentration camp WHILE Ford controlled it, after the US entered the war in 1941, when the Nazi government seized the factory's assets (Not when WWII began in 1939). The same is true of the GM plant in Berlin. It was while these factories were controlled by US businessmen that they manufactured war machines for the German Army. Henry Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, five years after Hitler's passing of Anti-semitism laws and three years after the Nuremberg Race laws.

You speak as if license to build plants alleviates moral responsibility for the management of them. Slave labor, Jewish slave labor, should not have been used by American businessmen to build German weapons. This doesn't mean Americans in general should be ostracized. Al Husseini shouldn't have been in a meeting with Hitler. Likewise, This doesn't mean Palestinians in general should be ostracized. Period. Enough for this evening.


-For liberation.

[PhilDragoo]

1. The Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini was later the notorious Nazi who mixed Nazi propaganda and Islam. He was wanted for war crimes and the slaughter of Jews in Bosnia by Yugoslavia. His mix of militant propagandizing Islam was an inspriation for both Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein: He was also a close relative of Yasser Arafat and grandfather of the current Temple Mount Mufti. "Arafat's actual name was Abd al-Rahman abd al-Bauf Arafat al-Qud al-Husseini. He shortened it to obscure his kinship with the notorious Nazi and ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini." Howard M. Sachar, A HISTORY OF ISRAEL (New York: Knopf, 1976). The Bet Agron International Center in Jerusalem interviewed Arafat's brother and sister, who described the Mufti as a cousin (family member) with tremendous influence on young Yassir after the Mufti returned from Berlin to Cairo. Yasser Arafat himself keeps his exact lineage and birthplace secret. Saddam Hussein was raised in the house of his uncle Khayrallah Tulfah, who was a leader in the Mufti's pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in May 1941.

[knighthawk]

He is beating around the bush again to promote his commie views. My claim was that Husseini's relationship with Hitler was less substantial/detrimental to Jews than the relationship American businessmen had with Hitler.

What does that all have to do with the story? The Mufti admired what Hitler did to the Jews, unlike Ford. The story is about what the Mufti thought and how Arafat looks at him.

Tell the commie that Stalin, his great leader, made a deal with Hitler and therefor in his views we need to treat the commies as bad as he wants to treat Ford. Thanks to that deal Hitler could start invading Europe, so in his view, thanks to Stalin the Jews could be massacred. The Stalin-deal did far more damage that anything he can come up with.

He won't like that and will come up with lengthy stuff or try to dodge it by saying it's irrelevant to the discussion.

[PsyOp]

Unfortunately I cannot give you a specific source for this information. I know it to be fact though. From a logical standpoint alone, do you think the Germans in control of that plant or the German government was still making their payments to Ford or GM after declaring war on us? Can anybody believe (except a tin-hatted conspiracy theorist) that execs here in the states were in contact with thier German counter-parts by phone, even, on a daily basis while the war raged?

Whether the plant was wholly owned or built under license, once the shooting started, that was it.

Another fact that bears on this is the point that was made concerning all these "trucks" that supposedly helped the Germans carry out their blitzkriegs. The German army, except for the Mechanized Spearheads, was primarily horse-drawn. On the Russian front, for example, the Armor often had to lager for days waiting for the infantry and horse drawn artillery to catch up. There are a number of great book that explode the myth of the extent of the German army's mechanization - much of which was myth propagated by Goebbels to scare Germany's enemies. That is why there was such a lull between the attack on Poland and France. The Germans had neither the fuel nor transport to carry on sustained mechanized operations. Blitzkrieg was a neccessity. Troops, even German troops used to 30 miles a day, need time to rest and recoup.

The dearth of motor transport was such that captured trucks were considered a great prize. France and the low-countries were stripped of almost all rolling transport (civilian and military) to support the war effort in Africa and Russia. Captured tanks, too, were used by the germans (there were quite a few T-34's and captured French tanks prowling the steppes with black crosses on them).

Now that I have been going on about this, I believe that the details I gave on the Ford and GM plants came from Speer's diaries. One of these plants was converted to Aircraft production, I think.

[Seydlitz]

Actually, the chacterization of the Grand Mufti is quite accurate. For a fuller appreciation of the Grand Mufti's pro-Nazi efforts, please read George Lepre's "Hitler's Bosnian Division" (about the 13th SS Mountain Division - a Muslim formation raised in Bosnia, Croatia and Albania), Antonio Munoz's "Lions of the Desert" (about Arab volunteers in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS) or Franz Kurowski's "The Brandenbergers" (covers German special forces operations during WW II, with much detail on the Middle East).

[Seydlitz]

For details on the Nazi's seizure of industrial assets, Ian Kershaw's two volume biography of Hitler covers the topic nicely. Alan Bullock's "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" also does an excellent job.

Foreign and domestic industrial assets were seized and incorporated into the Hermann Goering Reichswerks. Ironically, the Thyssen family, one of the few German industrial families to proactively support the Nazis in their early days, were the first to have their family company seized by Goering's cronies in the economics ministry.

Remember, the Nazis were on a crusade against what they called the twin evils of Zionism: Bolshevism and Capitalism. They were no fans of private industry, although election politics limited their seizures until the late 1930s.

[crazykatz]

Guess who else this grand mufti visited to encourage their alliance with the nazis.....the bosnian muslims...YES, they along with the croatians and albanians were nazi allies in WWII against Jews, Serbs and Romas.... 800,000 of those people were murdered by the croatian nazis alone.

In an interesting turn of events...Hitler promised them ALL that as his allies they would have their "own" countries...and by the way...he promised the Albanians, all of Kosovo and other parts of Yugoslavia.

Looks as if they all GOT their promised goods...just took a little longer than they had expected.

And, the Albanians are still working( terrorist activities in Macedonia and Presevo Valley, Serbia) to get the rest of the land that hitler promised to them.

[crazykatz]

Your precious croatian nazis almost killed an American Airman friend of my Dad's, when he was shot down over CROATIA during WWII. YOUR PEOPLE WERE NAZI ALLIES AND PROUD TO BE SO!!!! That's why your people ALWAYS sing, "THANK YOU GERMANY"!!

That little pissant country of yours, WHO WAS ALLIED WITH GERMANY .... very willingly, GLADLLY operated a concentration camp called jasenovac....and murdered thousands of Jews, Romas and Serbs.

LOOK, CANADIAN CROATIAN, If you do not STOP dening the holocaust that occurred because YOUR PRECIOUS CROATIA, NAZI ALLIE THAT IT WAS, very willing murdered over 800,000 JEWS, SERBS AND ROMAS....well, you will be known as a "holocaust denier and a nazi apologist".

Why don't you just give up....you live in a place in Canada that is known for it unrepentant old croatian nazis that fled through the ratlines to get away from that CROATIAN COMMIE, TITO and whatever revenge he was going to dish out to croatian nazis!!.

Belgrade was leveled by the nazi airforce because it was NOT an allie of Germany. Yugoslavia, not Croatia, was an occupied country and its people saved OVER 500 American airmen from the nazis....and their special little brothers, the CROATIANS.

Is that nazi croatian ante pavlic, still one of your heroes? Nevermind....we know already.

[The Right Stuff]

National Review had an interesting article about this. Hitler had no use for the Arabs, putting them one step above the Jews on his "racial ladder".

However, he saw the political necessity of having Arabs as his allies against the Brits and the US in North Africa, so he took that offensive part out when the book was marketed in Arabia.

[sleavelessinseattle]

Thanks for the ping...Nice to meet you...please don't get so hostile...I have decided not to encourage flame wars its too unpleasant to get into the facts of a thread through the noise...(Although it is fun!;-)