Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (23 page)

Hitler, al-Husseini, and the Terrorists of September 11

On November 18, 1947, Adolf Hitler’s close confidant Albert Speer recorded the following in his Spandau Prison diary:

I recall his ordering showings in the Chancellery of the films of burning London, of the sea of flames over Warsaw, of exploding convoys, and the rapture with which he watched those films. I never saw him so worked up as toward the end of the war, when in a kind of delirium he pictured for himself and for us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire. He described the skyscrapers being turned into gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the dark sky.

On September 11, 2001, this horrific vision became a terrible reality.

This new reality affirmed the unbroken line of continuity from generation to generation, an unbroken chain of terror from Adolf Hitler, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Sayyid Qutb, and Yasser Arafat to Hamas’s founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, and Ramzi Yousef, who planned the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, to Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the Pakistani Muslim terrorist who planned the kidnapping and murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, and to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The radical Islamic jihadists, like the Nazis before them, are simultaneously anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Jewish. The mufti’s close ties to Hitler and his inner circle, his role as a trusted confidant of Himmler and Eichmann, and his enthusiastic embrace of Hitler’s Final Solution provide the common thread linking past to present. Just as the mufti was and remains the link between the old fascism and the new, so has he been the inextricable link between the old anti-Semitism and the new radical Islamic anti-Semitism that has spread and metastasized throughout the Arab world in the decades since World War II.

The roots of present-day radical Islamic terrorism can, in many ways, be attributed to the mufti. Haj Amin al-Husseini has been, and remains, the inspiration for the leaders of the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, and other radical Islamic groups to continue their campaigns of violence and terror against Israel, the United States, and their allies and friends. The terrorism, fanaticism, and ruthlessness of the Palestine National Movement reflect the mufti’s enduring legacy and influence. Today, more than thirty years after his death, Haj Amin al-Husseini deserves recognition as the icon of evil that he was, as the father of radical Islamic anti-Semitism and political terrorism as we know it today. Al-Husseini’s notorious fatwas, calling for the defeat and destruction of Israel, Great Britain, and the United States—like the religious rulings of Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, Osama bin Laden, and other terrorists who would follow him—became new warrants for genocide in the clash of civilizations between radical Islam and the West and in the ongoing war of the mufti and his followers who sought to carry out, posthumously, Hitler’s war against the Jews. The radical Islam that the mufti and his followers promoted and espoused during the 1930s and 1940s has today become dominant in much of the Islamic world and has continued to be the ideological source and inspiration for global anti-Semitism, jihad, and terrorism throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

The challenge of terror from radical Islam is the great issue of our time. As Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini were decisively defeated in their day, the new icons of evil must be unconditionally vanquished in ours.

Acknowledgments

 In writing this book over the years, we have been helped along by the advice, encouragement, and cooperation of a number of people. We owe a special debt of gratitude to the late Eliahu Elath, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States and president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who first encouraged us to write a book about the life and legacy of the mufti, his role in the Holocaust and in the rise of radical Islam. In 1937, Elath had been an official working in the political department of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. At that critical time in the history of the Middle East, Elath prepared a manuscript for internal consumption on the mufti and his role in the struggle for Palestine. In 1968, this manuscript was published in Hebrew by the Office of the Prime Minister. Many years later, Dr. Elath authorized us to have his work translated into English. In a letter dated August 8, 1988, Dr. Elath wrote, “I congratulate you on the very idea of publishing such a book, as the Mufti’s role in the Shoah has never been fully done in a work of research and historic detail. Alas, there are still many of his followers around.” In subsequent communications, Dr. Elath continued to urge us to write such a book that would document the mufti’s unholy legacy as the founding father of Islamic anti-Semitism and terrorism, a legacy that tragically still endures. In this book, we have tried to tell the story of the mufti’s enduring legacy of evil, a story that Eliahu Elath believed needed to be more widely known and better understood. We only wish that he had lived to read this book, the writing of which he helped to inspire.

We wish to extend our deep appreciation to Sir Martin Gilbert for his extraordinary support and advice in the process of completing this book. Sir Martin, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, made a number of constructive suggestions and provided sources from his private archives and files. While we have incorporated many of Sir Martin’s suggestions, we realize that our conclusions and interpretations may not all be in complete accordance with Sir Martin’s views. He should not be held accountable for any errors of historical fact or interpretation. All of the conclusions and interpretations in this book are solely those of the authors.

We would also like to express our appreciation to three cherished friends, Professor Jonathan D. Sarna, Dr. Joseph R. Goldyne, and David Apfelbaum, who took time out of their busy schedules to read and comment on portions of this book. We are especially indebted to them for their invaluable comments on the chapters of this book that they read. David Dalin would additionally like to thank his Hoover Institution colleague and friend Douglas J. Feith for his continuing advice and encouragement on this book project.

The publication of this book provides us with a welcome opportunity to acknowledge our thanks to several other colleagues and friends who have spoken with us about material relating to the subject of this book. We would like to express our deep appreciation to each of the following individuals, whose sharing of their thoughts and general encouragement have helped to make this a better book: Professor Robert P. George, Sarah and William Stern, Professor Bernard Lewis, William Kristol, Dov Zakheim, Michael Novak, Tevi Troy, Andrew and Deborah Leeds, Brian and Rosalind Henning, Irvin Ungar, Joseph Bottum, William Doino Jr., David Wormser, Luis Fleischman, Reed Rubinstein, Dick Seeley, Charles Liebling, Leslie Kane, Michael Jankelowitz, Zvi Jankelowitz, Oded Yinon, and Rabbi Leonid Feldman.

Thirty years ago, Trish Bransten encouraged the authors to write this book. We are delighted to thank her and to acknowledge her inspiration. We would like to thank Professor David Engel, who many years ago translated for us Eliahu Elath’s manuscript on the mufti, as well as a little-known and long out of print German book about the mufti, written by Kurt Fischer-Weth, that was published in Germany in 1943. Antonia Clark and Monika Hunt were extremely helpful with additional translation work. Technical assistance was provided by Robyn Lipsky, John Moses Lewandowski, Diane Spagnoli, and Richard Lerner. Frances Stark, producer of
The John Rothmann Program
on KGO-810 AM, provided ongoing, extraordinary help and encouragement throughout the process of preparing this manuscript for publication.

We would like to acknowledge our appreciation to Judith Cohen, director of the Photographic Reference Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and to Caroline Waddell, the photo reference coordinator at the museum, for their gracious assistance in helping us to locate and secure the photographs that we have included in this volume.

We would also like to express our thanks and appreciation to our agent, Alexander Hoyt, who has had faith in this book project since its inception and has been a continuous source of encouragement throughout the research and writing of the manuscript.

We owe a special debt of thanks to Will Murphy, our editor at Random House, for his careful reading and editing of our book manuscript and his many excellent suggestions for its improvement. His continuing good advice and encouragement has been invaluable throughout. We are deeply grateful to Lea Beresford, editorial assistant to Will Murphy at Random House, for her unfailing patience and good humor in answering our many questions throughout the editing process. Dennis Ambrose, associate copy chief at Random House, was always available and extremely helpful during the proofreading and editing process. Thanks also to our copyeditor, Sona Vogel; our publicist, London King; her assistant, Maria Braeckel; and Courtney Turco.

This book evolved, in part, from an article, “Hitler’s Mufti,” written by David Dalin, that was published in the journal
First Things.
Dalin would like to thank Joseph Bottum and Richard John Neuhaus, the editor and editor in chief of
First Things,
for publishing this earlier article and for their ongoing encouragement of his writing.

As both authors and parents, we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to our children. David Dalin would like to express his deep thanks and appreciation to his daughter, Simona Dalin, and son, Barry Dalin, whose love and support continue to be a source of encouragement and inspiration for all that he does. John Rothmann would like to offer a special thank-you to his son Joel, who allowed him to use, not borrow, his laptop computer. Samuel Rothmann was always willing to help his technologically challenged father at critical moments along the way. Our children’s continuing love and support has been a blessing for both of us.

Chronology of the Mufti’s Life

1895 Born in Jerusalem.

1912 Attended Al-Azhar University in Cairo, studying Islamic philosophy.

1913 Made a pilgrimage to Mecca, entitling him to the title Haj.

1914 Returned to Jerusalem and enlisted in the Turkish army.

1918 Spent five months as a clerk in the office of Gabriel Pasha Haddad, Arab adviser to the military governor of Jerusalem. Worked for five months for Reuters Press Service translating press messages into Arabic.

1920 Arrested for his direct responsibility for the anti-Jewish riots in Jerusalem April 4–5. Let out on bail, jumped bail, was tried and sentenced in absentia to ten years’ imprisonment.

July 1—Sir Herbert Samuel becomes high commissioner for Palestine.

July 7—Samuel issues full amnesty for all prisoners sentenced by military courts, but not al-Husseini. Seven weeks later, a special pardon for al-Husseini is issued by Samuel.

1921 May 8—Selected as mufti of Jerusalem, succeeding his half-brother Sheikh Kamal al-Husseini.

1922 May 1—Selected to be president of the Supreme Muslim Council.

1929 August—Anti-Jewish riots break out in Palestine. The mufti’s involvement is directly established by the royal commission investigating the disturbances.

1931 December 7—The mufti establishes the World Islamic Congress at a meeting held in Jerusalem. Al-Husseini is elected president.

1934 Heads a delegation of the World Islamic Congress to Mecca to mediate between Saudi Arabia and Yemen during their border war.

1936 April 19—Two Jews killed in Jaffa.

April 21—General strike proclaimed in Nablus.

April 25—At a meeting in Nablus, the Arab Higher Committee is organized with al-Husseini as president.

1937 January 12—The mufti testifies before the royal commission. The commission establishes the direct responsibility of the mufti and the Arab Higher Committee for increasing violence. Mufti removed as head of the Supreme Muslim Council.

July 17—British attempt to arrest the mufti. The mufti hides in the Al-Aqsa Mosque area.

October 15—The mufti flees from Palestine to Beirut, to Damascus, and then to Iraq.