Well, it’s new to me, anyway, if it’s accurate.
D.J. FRASER asks what did the Palestinian people have to do with the Holocaust (Letters, 14/3).
Muhammed Amin al-Husseini was a violent anti-Zionist jailed by the British in 1920 for an Arab attack against Jews praying in Jerusalem. Pardoned in January 1922 he was appointed grand mufti of Jerusalem and president of a new supreme Muslim council. Al-Husseini was thus the religious and political leader of the Palestinian Arabs.
Devoted to driving Jews out of Palestine, he instituted a campaign of terror and intimidation against anyone opposed to his rule and policies. He killed Jews at every opportunity and eliminated Arabs who did not support his campaign of violence.
In 1937 he expressed his solidarity with Germany asking the Nazis to oppose establishment of a Jewish state. Evidence at the Nuremberg trials showed that Nazi Germany helped finance al-Husseini’s efforts in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann visited Palestine and met al-Husseini at that time and thereafter maintained regular contact with him.
In 1940 al-Husseini asked the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right
to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy’’. He spent the rest of the war as Hitler’s guest in Berlin - advocating the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts. At Nuremberg, Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that the muftiwas one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan … I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz’’.With the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, he moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero. He was among the sponsors of the 1948 war against Israel.
Dr Bill Anderson
School of Historical Studies
University of Melbourne,