Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (22 page)

These fatwas were new warrants for genocide in the ongoing war of the mufti and his protégés who seek to complete, posthumously, Hitler’s war against the Jews.

The Mufti and Arafat: The Fathers of Modern Islamic Terrorism

During the 1950s, with al-Husseini’s encouragement, Yasser Arafat began recruiting followers for Fatah, his Palestinian terrorist guerrilla group, which took its name from the Koranic word for “conquest.”
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In 1965, Arafat’s Fatah terrorists began attacking Israelis, shortly after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser created the Palestine Liberation Organization.
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In 1969, Arafat merged Fatah with the PLO, and in that same year he succeeded his mentor al-Husseini as leader of the Palestine National Movement.

Arafat continued the mufti’s legacy by recruiting Nazis and neo-Nazis for Fatah and the PLO. In 1969, the PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a leader of the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section, and Willy Berner, who was an SS officer in the Mauthausen extermination camp.
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Another former Nazi, Johann Schuller, was found supplying arms to Fatah. Belgian Jean Tireault, secretary of the neo-Nazi organization La Nation Européenne, also went on the Fatah payroll. Another Belgian, neo-Nazi Karl van der Put, recruited volunteers for the PLO.
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During the 1970s, German neo-Nazi Otto Albrecht was arrested in West Germany with PLO identity papers after the PLO had given him $1.2 million to buy weapons.
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Like al-Husseini, Arafat was a ruthless murderer whose career was built on terrorism and violence. In continuing this tradition, Arafat introduced his longtime PLO associate Hani al-Hassan to Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu in October 1972, saying: “This is my brother…. He is the one who, just a few months ago, prepared our answer to the Olympic Committee’s decision not to allow a team of Palestinian athletes to participate in the Munich games. He is the brain who put our organization’s name on the front page of every single newspaper.”
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Arafat was referring to the September 5, 1972, massacre of eleven Israeli athletes by a team of PLO terrorists during the Olympic Games in Munich, a brutal deed that shocked the world. So did the murder the following year of Cleo A. Noel, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and his chargé d’affaires, George Curtis Moore,
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another crime executed by Arafat’s PLO. Arafat was directly implicated in the October 1985 seizure by Palestinian terrorists of the Italian cruise ship
Achille Lauro,
in which a disabled Jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, was singled out for killing, a terrorist act that Pope John Paul II publicly condemned as “a grave act of violence against innocent and defenseless persons.”
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In his almost four-decade career as leader of the PLO, Arafat was involved in innumerable terrorist attacks against Israeli and other Jewish civilians, ranging from the hijacking of planes to the recruitment and training of terrorist bombers. Arafat, like al-Husseini, targeted Jews just because they were Jews: Jews at prayer in synagogues throughout Israel and Europe and even helpless children in nurseries and on school buses. His direction and sponsorship of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians as well as Jewish students and tourists in Israel became an almost daily occurrence during the intifada that raged between 2000 and 2002. More than 640 Israeli civilians were killed in 2001 and 2002 alone. It was also during this intifada that Arafat and his Palestinian National Authority were implicated in the bombing of French synagogues and other acts of anti-Semitic violence and terrorism against Jewish communal leaders and institutions in France. During the last three months of 2000 alone, Arab-Muslim violence aimed at French Jews, inspired by Arafat’s intifada, included forty-five fire bombings, forty-three attacks on synagogues, and thirty-nine assaults on Jews as they were leaving their places of worship.
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This was in fact the fifth intifada in eighty years. In orchestrating the first intifada of the twenty-first century, Arafat was following in the footsteps of al-Husseini and continuing the tactics and legacy of terror that the mufti had introduced.

The Arab response to the Israeli War of Independence had been inspired and promoted by Islamist jihadists, led by al-Husseini, the young Yasser Arafat, and their allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, whose express purpose was genocidal: They had called for a holy war against the Jews of Palestine. Their objective had been, as the mufti candidly put it and reiterated throughout his political career, to “murder the Jews,” to “murder them all.” In the aftermath of Israel’s War of Independence, the mufti and Arafat continued to mobilize Palestinian Arab terrorists, who throughout the 1950s and early 1960s targeted the Jewish civilian population of Israel for attack and extermination. Haj Amin al-Husseini had first established his credentials as a terrorist leader by organizing and carrying out terrorist attacks against the civilian Jews of Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s. The mufti’s enduring influence and legacy as one of the founding fathers of modern Islamic terrorism was widely felt throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first: The targeting of innocent Jewish civilians, which he pioneered, became a hallmark of all radical Islamic terrorist activity against Israel from the 1950s to the present. In his policy of targeting Jews just because they were Jews, al-Husseini provided the inspiration and precedent for a new generation of radical Islamic terrorist leaders, all of whom advocated suicide bombing attacks inside Israel as a religiously mandated and justified tactic in their ongoing holy war against Israel and its Jews.

Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor as head of the Palestinian National Authority, also frequently justified and glorified suicide bomber attacks in the name of jihad against Israel and its allies in the West. In January 2005, Abbas publicly praised Palestinian suicide bombers, saying that “Allah loves the martyr,”
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and in May 2006 he paid homage to the Palestinian terrorists who had carried out suicide bomber attacks against Israel as “our heroes.”
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On January 11, 2007, addressing a rally of 250,000 Palestinian Arabs in Ramallah in honor of the forty-second anniversary of the founding of Fatah and commemorating the first terrorist attack by Fatah against Israel on January 1, 1965, Abbas called for Palestinians to turn their guns and rifles on Israeli Jews, saying that “we have a legitimate right to direct our guns against Israeli occupation…. Our rifles, all our rifles, are aimed at the Occupation.”
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As Islamist jihadists who had called for a holy war against the Jews of Palestine and their allies in the West, Haj Amin al-Husseini and Yasser Arafat shared a common goal both had failed to achieve: to destroy Israel and create a Palestinian Arab state in its place. In truth, Arafat’s enduring legacy was merely a continuation of the failed legacy of al-Husseini. Both were determined to liberate Palestine from the Zionists. But in their rejection of political compromise and moderation, both failed to achieve their dreams of Palestinian Arab statehood. Both chose to align their Palestine Liberation Movement with a superpower. The mufti chose Nazi Germany. Arafat chose the Soviet Union. Both lived to witness the demise of their chosen patron.

Both seized on terror as a vehicle for achieving their political ends, justifying and glorifying acts of terror in the name of Palestinian Arab statehood and jihad. Both al-Husseini and Arafat internationalized terrorism, using it as an effective political strategy to gain widespread recognition and support for their Palestinian Arab cause.
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Only in his attire did Arafat differ profoundly from his beloved mentor as a terrorist leader. As if created by central casting, Arafat personified the public’s image of the murderous Islamic terrorist. While al-Husseini always wore the long traditional robes and red tarboosh headdress of his clerical office, Arafat was invariably attired in his military fatigues, wearing a gun dramatically visible in his holster, his photogenic symbol of revolution until victory. Arafat, who was bald, always wore his trademark kaffiyeh headdress, draped down over his stomach and chest in such a fashion that it resembled the map of Palestine.

From his leadership of the first murderous intifada against the Jews of Palestine in 1920 until his death in 1974, Haj Amin al-Husseini remained an unrepentant terrorist leader. Until his death in 2004, Yasser Arafat, who often paid homage to the mufti as his hero and mentor, also remained a terrorist leader, equally unrepentant. Arafat—implicated in the murders of thousands of Christians, Jews, Israelis, Europeans, and Americans—well deserved the reputation that he shared with the mufti as one of the fathers of Islamic terrorism in our time.

Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Terrorists of Hamas

While Haj Amin al-Husseini may be best remembered as the revered mentor of Yasser Arafat, it must not be forgotten that he was also the inspiration for the leaders of Hamas, which continues its ongoing campaign of terror and violence against the state of Israel. Following in the footsteps of the PLO, Hamas ushered in a new era in radical Islamic terrorist violence by launching suicide bomber attacks inside Israel, a new and more violent tactic in anti-Jewish terror and violence that al-Husseini would undoubtedly have applauded. The ideology of Hamas, which reflects the legacy of al-Husseini with an unmistakable clarity, may be found in the words of its covenant, adopted on August 18, 1988:

The enemies [the Jews] have been scheming for a long time…and have accumulated huge and influential wealth. With their money, they took control of the world media…. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the globe…. They stood behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about…. With their money they formed secret organizations—such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions—which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests…. They stood behind World War I…and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains…. There is no war going on anywhere without them having their finger in it…. The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: “O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.”
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Hamas leaflets, widely distributed in recent years, further promote this view. They vilify Jews as “the Brothers of the Apes, the killers of the Prophets, blood suckers and warmongers,” the “enemy of God and mankind,” the “descendants of treachery and deceit,” “the Zionist culprits who poisoned the water in the past, killed infants, women and elders,”
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and openly proclaim “the war is open until Israel ceases to exist and until the last Jew in the world is eliminated.”
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In creating Hamas, the organization’s founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, a devoted admirer of al-Husseini, formulated the concept that Palestine should “become the central battlefield” between the forces of radical Islam and Israel and its Western allies, in a radical Islamic jihad against Israel, America, and the pro-Israel West. Participation in the intifada, argued Yassin, the first stage of this holy war, would bring about Israel’s eventual destruction and the establishment of a nationalist pan-Islamic state in Palestine. The creation of this state, the very type al-Husseini had envisioned, would in turn be the precursor of a global holy war, waged by Hamas and the leaders of radical Islam against Israel’s allies in America and the West.
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Thirty-two years after his death, the vision of al-Husseini was to be affirmed as Hamas assumed the leadership of the Palestinian people. Following the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections held on January 25, 2006, Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas, gave a speech in Damascus in which he declared: “I bring good tidings to our beloved Prophet Muhammad: Allah’s promise and the Prophet’s prophecy of our victory in Palestine over the Jews and over the oppressive Zionists has begun to come true.” The leaders of Hamas continue to seek to undermine and reverse the work of the more moderate Palestinian nationalist factions, some of which have reluctantly accepted Israel’s right to exist. The opposition to Israel’s existence is much more intransigent in Hamas than it is today among some secular Palestinian nationalists. This is an intransigence that the mufti would have shared.

In the aftermath of these elections, a civil war erupted between Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority let by Mahmoud Abbas. In June 2007, Hamas was victorious, seizing power in Gaza. Just as the mufti had viewed his All-Palestine government as a mere prelude to the conquest of all of Palestine, the Hamas triumph in Gaza is viewed today by radical Islam as only the first step in the creation of an Islamic state in all of Palestine. Both the mufti and Hamas based their dreams and hopes on the belief in the inevitable triumph of radical Islam over the Jews and the West.

The mufti and Hamas were both willing to kill fellow Palestinians who stood in the way of their ultimate triumph. The brutal killings portrayed graphically in the news media from Gaza in 2007 were entirely reminiscent of the mufti’s elimination of his rivals in the 1920s and 1930s. The mufti and Hamas both cited
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in their war against the Jews. Their willingness to believe and promulgate the most vicious forms of anti-Jewish rhetoric became a hallmark of their pursuit of victory. The decisions to align their struggles with world powers whose views were antithetical to peace and international goodwill were clear and equally dangerous. The mufti’s decision to align with Hitler’s Germany found its contemporary analogue in Hamas’s decision to align itself with Iran. Both claimed as their objective the goal to “wipe Israel off the map.” From the mufti’s All-Palestine government in Gaza to the Hamas government in Gaza of today, it is clear that the aims and goals of radical Islam have remained consistent through the years.