Backgrounder:
Hajj Amin al-Husseini
October 30, 2015
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Hitler
and Husseini in Berlin, November 1941
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused a storm of
controversy on October 20 by quoting Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the infamous
grand mufti of Jerusalem during the interwar years, as having told Adolf
Hitler in 1941 to "burn" rather than deport the Jews of Europe,
insinuating that this influenced the unfolding Nazi genocide.
While the veracity of this quote is in question, few dispute that
Husseini could well have said something to this effect given his
genocidal hatred of Jews, penchant for blood-curdling rhetoric, and
determination to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine. However,
opinions differ sharply, even among MEF staff and fellows, as to the
degree of Hussein's influence, both in Nazi Germany and the Middle East.
MEF Hochberg Family Writing Fellow Wolfgang G. Schwanitz,
coauthor of Nazis,
Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2014),
argues that two components of this question are unmistakably clear.
First, Husseini's over-arching goal prior to and during Hitler's reign,
he notes,
was that "whatever happens with Jews under Hitler's reign in Europe,
they should not come to the Middle East." At the very least, the
Germans understood that deportation as a solution to Europe's
"Jewish Question" risked alienating their top protégé in the
Arab world – a region they expected in 1941-42 to be invading soon.
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Husseini
(left), Indian nationalist leader Subhash Chandra Bose, and Iraqi
leader Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in Berlin, 1943
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Second, Schwanitz notes that the
historical record shows the mufti to be unquestionably the "foremost
extra-European adviser in the process to destroy the Jews of
Europe." Adolf Eichmann and his subordinates frequently briefed
Husseini as the genocide unfolded, "as if to reassure him that
Hitler had not changed his mind," he writes in a forthcoming
article.
In contrast, MEF fellow Jeffrey Herf, author of Nazi
Propaganda for the Arab World (2010), contends that the
Husseini's "importance in Nazi Berlin lay far more in assisting the
Third Reich's Arabic language propaganda ... and in mobilizing Muslims in
Eastern Europe to support the Nazi regime." Although these
achievements surely facilitated Nazi atrocities, Hitler "made the
decisions to implement the Final Solution and had communicated those
decisions to key actors in the Nazi regime at the latest a month before
his [1941]meeting with Husseini."
Whatever his role in the Holocaust, MEF staff and fellows widely agree
that Husseini was a critical ideological progenitor of Middle Eastern
extremism today. The mufti was among the first to "exploit the draw
of the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem to find international Muslim
support" for the anti-Zionist cause, notes
MEF President Daniel Pipes, a theme very much in evidence today
among Palestinian Islamists.
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Hitler's
Mein Kampf has been a bestseller in the Middle East since the
1930s.
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Moreover, Husseini "can be largely held responsible for the
Middle East's endemic antisemitism," writes
Daniel Pipes in a recent Washington Times op-ed, pointing
to his postwar tutelage of Yasser Arafat and other rising Palestinian
figures, as well the Muslim Brotherhood during his stay in Egypt after
the Nazi defeat.
As Boris Havel illustrates
in a recent Middle East Quarterly article, Husseini's propaganda
traced "alleged Jewish power and ambitions" in the here and now
"to supposed Jewish activities at the time of Muhammad," a
theological innovation that is today a staple of Islamist discourse.
Because of Husseini, there remains an "inescapable and
inextricable connection between Islamists ... and the Nazi movement"
today, MEF Director Gregg Roman told Al-Jazeera
English on October 22. In an early Middle
East Quarterly article, famed Princeton University historian
Bernard Lewis notes (without specific reference to Husseini) the
"astonishing degree" to which "the ideas, the literature,
even the crudest inventions of the Nazis and their predecessors have been
internalized and Islamized" in the Middle East.
At the same time, it is important not to overstate Husseini's
influence. When the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) placed ads
on Philadelphia buses displaying a photo of Husseini and Hitler with a
caption reading "Adolf Hitler and his staunch ally, the leader of
the Muslim world," Daniel Pipes cautioned that the
"text is factually inaccurate," calling Husseini "a
British appointee in the Mandate for Palestine, where Muslims constituted
less than 1 percent of the total world Muslim population."
Compiled by Middle East Forum web
editor Gary C. Gambill
Related
Topics: Antisemitism, History, Palestinians This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its
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