The Nazis, the Palestinian Arabs, and the Holocaust 315
Contrary to the story told by Rep. Rashida Tlaib that the Arabs of Palestine tried “to create a safe haven” for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, they supported and actively aided Hitler’s massacre of the European Jews with passionate enthusiasm, and did all they could violently to keep the region from becoming the Jewish homeland promised by the Balfour Declaration.
Karin McQuillan writes at American Greatness:
Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and the Democratic Party leadership defending her indefensible comments on the Holocaust are now promoting the Big Lie about Arabs as innocent victims of World War II. Nazism was widely popular among Palestinians, who played a key role in the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann himself went to Cairo to train the Muslim Brotherhood in anti-Semitic propaganda, military sabotage, and terrorism—launching the modern jihadi movement in the process. Without Arab Nazism, 6 million Jews would not have been murdered.
Not sure about that. But it’s a plausible conjecture. And certainly the Arab role in the Nazi ‘s attempted genocide can hardly be overestimated.
This is a history Americans should know, since it is a war we are still fighting today.
Tlaib and her colleague, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), are not on America’s side in this battle. Nor, it seems, is the Democratic Party.
Are they on America’s side at all?
Before Hitler adopted the Muslim Brotherhood, its Islamist message focused on the sexual decadence of the West, the evil of treating women as equals, and calls to reject modernity. This got them exactly nowhere, languishing with a membership of 800 cranks. With Nazi funding and training, the Brotherhood adopted the Third Reich’s obsession with anti-Semitism.
But – as the author goes on to acknowledge – Arab Muslims already hated the Jews as the Koran commanded them to:
Hitler’s message was fused with the Koran’s anti-Semitic teachings into a toxic mix. The Muslim Brothers grew a thousand-fold during the war, emerging triumphant with 1 million members. Thus the jihadi movement was born. The history of the Middle East was changed forever.
The Democrats’ embrace of multicultural anti-Semites such as Tlaib, Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) poses a danger to our country—both morally and politically. No nation has ever embraced anti-Semitism and remained a decent country for its own citizens. This is a path we do not want to go down, because down it leads.
We have a warning about our forgetfulness, like words in a bottle, launched right after the war by members of the Greatest Generation.
Years ago, I was poking around in the basement of Brandeis University’s library and came across a slender volume that changed my understanding of the Palestinian role in the Holocaust forever. In 1947, with memories of Nazism fresh in their minds, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, along with Fiorello LaGuardia, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and two dozen other prominent citizens, published a report titled “The Arab War Effort.”
Their words from 72 years ago would be well directed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and all the other Democrats appeasing the anti-Semites in their ranks today.
“The tendency to forget the lessons of the past has always been one of man’s most dangerous characteristics,” the report begins. The authors continue:
One of those hard-earned lessons is simply this: that appeasement does not work. The enemies of human freedom could neither be bribed nor cajoled. . . . Yet now in 1947 we seem to be returning to the policy of appeasement in dealing with precisely those Arab leaders who did their utmost to aid the Axis powers. . . . It is not claimed that the facts stated in this document constitute a revelation. They do not appear to be in dispute in any responsible quarter. There seems, however, to be a tendency to ignore them as no longer politically relevant. This [is] unfortunate, for the data herewith presented point to conclusions that are still valid with regard to the political reasoning prevalent among the Arab peoples.
The authors’ stated goal was to record for posterity—that is, for us living today—that the Arab populace, not simply a few leaders, were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis. They were wise enough to foresee we would reap the whirlwind from politicians’ foolish appeasement and erasing of the Arab Nazi past. Pelosi and company, under pressure from the black and socialist caucuses, are repeating the mistakes of past appeasement.
The message to us from 1947:
[S]ympathy with the Axis powers were widespread among the common people of the Arab countries… these feelings permeated the majority of the population, while the leaders often cooperated directly with the Axis. Fascist and Nazi ideologies were not so much imitated as paralleled in the Arab world; they fitted into modes of thought already in being and were taken up by existing political clubs and associations.
Palestinian involvement in the Final Solution was crucial to Hitler’s success. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust published by Yad Vashem (Israel’s famous Holocaust Museum) devotes more pages to the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini elevated by British appeasement to become the Mufti of Jerusalem, than to any Nazi leader other than Hitler himself. This indicates how important the Palestinian role was in the genocide of Europe’s Jews.
Winston Churchill spoke against the appeasement of Palestinian Nazism, and Britain restricting Jewish immigration, while allowing Arabs to pour in to the Jewish Homeland from their impoverished, backward countries all around, trying to outnumber the Jews there. “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. …We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.”
The most famous Palestinian Nazi, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini traveled to Germany to meet Hitler in 1941. They shook hands on a plan to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East. The Reich preserved the memo, the minutes, and a photo of their handshake.
The Mufti returned to Berlin the next year for the duration of the war. Goebbels recruited him as the Nazi voice to the Middle East, with a radio program broadcast daily into every café. This Nazi station was listened to by practically the entire male population during the long war years. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini recalled it fondly. Listeners enjoyed the mix of music, jihad, and anti-Semitism.
According to testimony from the Nuremberg trials by Dieter Wisliceny, Adolf Eichmann’s deputy: “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of the plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”
A popular Arab song during the war went, “Allah in heaven, Hitler on earth.” Palestinians founded a division of the Nazi Scouts.
Unlike Germans, following the war Palestinian Arabs did not end their Nazi propaganda and terrorism. Members of the PLO often use noms de guerre such as Hitler and Rommel. Arafat’s personal bodyguard named his two sons Hitler and Eichmann.
Arafat took the name Yasser in memory of a leader of the Mufti’s terror campaign of the 1930s funded by Hitler. They murdered thousands of moderate Palestinians who were willing to live peacefully with Jews. They threw live victims into pits of scorpions and snakes. They drove 40,000 Arabs into exile. The corpses of their victims would be left in the street for days, a shoe stuck in their mouth, as a lesson for any Arab who believed in tolerating a Jewish homeland.
The Mufti boasted of visiting the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He pressured the Nazis to let no Jew escape, focusing especially on Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia—Axis countries that were willing to allow Jews to flee.
Palestinian participation in the Nazi cause posed a genuine threat to the British. They created espionage, parachute and sabotage networks covering Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine that reported to German Intelligence. They formed Muslim legions in the Balkans, Crimea, Azerbaijan, and Turkistan for the Wehrmacht and a plan to recruit half a million soldiers.
The most threatening accomplishment of the Palestinians on behalf of the Axis came in 1941, the darkest days of World War II when Britain was battling alone and seemed to be losing. Seizing Iraq was a major German goal. It would have deprived Britain of her chief source of oil, cut the sea lanes to India, a crucial source of raw materials, and cut the British empire in two. It would also have allowed the Axis to invade Russia along a second front from Iraq.
In the words of the American Christian Palestine Committee:
In the spring of 1941 Britain’s forces were at their lowest ebb. Neither Russia nor the U.S. had yet entered the war. … It was indeed a critical moment that the Iraqi rebels, prodded and aided by the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem [Haj Amin al-Husseini], chose for their uprising. For two months the fight hung in the balance. British troops were rushed to Basra from India… At the call of Haj Amin …subversive elements throughout the Middle East were touched off into activity. Looking back, one sees that it was by sheer miracle … most of all by the heroic Greek and British resistance in Greece and Crete…preventing the Germans from transporting reinforcements of men and material to Iraq—that the Iraqi revolt was quelled.
The Palestinian’s efforts to cut England off from the oil fields and the sea lane to India were foiled, but the British were now frightened of the Palestinian’s alliance with the Third Reich. The news of the Final Solution and the gas chambers reached Britain in 1942 and led to a public outcry to help Jews escape, but the British government remained adamant that the doors of the Jewish National Home, mandated by international law, must remain shut to Jews.
The enormity of Arab Nazism is sanitized, hidden and justified as nationalism—much as German Nazi Jew-hatred was during the 1930s. Far from occupying a moral high ground, Palestinian Arabs worked alongside and for Hitler with all the means available to them, and they succeeded in helping him destroy European Jewry.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, visiting his friend Adolf Hitler