Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu created a lot of controversy and news recently by claiming that Hitler merely wanted to deport Jews from Europe, but that the Mufti of Jerusalem, in Palestine, at the time, was the originator of the “final solution”. The Mufti, seeing the Jews coming to Israel in large numbers, and he didn’t want the Jews in Palestine, so he suggested to Hitler to burn the Jews instead.
Even German Chancellor of Germany – Merkel challenged this and said the Holocaust was wholly the responsibility of the German Nazi-dictatorship at the time and he have also been vehemently denied by any scholar with knowledge of this horrible period. So after a short time he had to admit that it was Hitler and his entourage of Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann that were the main instigators that caused the Holocaust.
But who were the Mufti and why would Netanyahu bring him up ? Was it a cause of confusion about lack of knowledge about history and the mufti, or maybe a public relations campaign against Palestine, in a time of increasing tension in Israel and fear in the civilian population because of repeated killings and injuries over a long time, by terrorists stabbing random people or driving them over with cars.
The news coverage about this have been low in a time with massacres in Paris and California, and the treat to Europe and USA posed by ISIS, and a massive wave of refugees from Syria. This time however there were at least frantic reactions by news agencies the Israeli Prime-Minister appearing to question the guilt of Hitler in the Holocaust, and instead some obscure Palestinian figure from the past. There were a lot of follow up news about the Mufti, and thus a lot of knowledge about the role of him in the Holocaust.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini
Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (1897– 4 July 1974) was a Palestinian Arab nationalist, anti-Zionist and Muslim leader in Mutasarrifate, the former municipality of Jerusalem, that included today’s Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Palestine
. He were a member of the most esteemed families of Jerusalem, who trace their origins to the grandson of Muhammad. He achived later the highly important recognition as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Among other things he made Middle-East Muslim countries collect gold for the roof of the Dome of the Rock.
He studied Turkish and French and Islamic law, among other things in many different schools.
With the outbreak of WWI in 1914, he took part in the Axis power, as an artillery officer, assigned to be stationed in and around the city of Izmir. He was then sick and on leave for 3 months, when the British conquered Jerusalem. He fought on the British side and they completed their conquest of Ottoman-controlled Palestine and Syria by 1918. He assisted the British, and joined the military administration in Jerusalem and Damascus, for the Arab Revolt. The English recruiting officer, Captain C. D. Brunton, found al-Husseini, with whom he cooperated, “very pro-British”.
This were however from the British side an example of psychological warfare to gain support to defeat the Turks both by assistance from Jews and Arabs, for example by dropping pamphlets with propaganda to the Arabs from airplanes, where there were given grand promises of freedom and prosperity by British rule. The same types of promises were given to Jews. Where the goal seemed to be colonial.
After the Ottoman Empire Collapsed, the Turks were limited to Anatolia, their heartland. The Remaining Middle-East, the French and the British sliced up into partitions of the former Empire. Lebanon (a Christian country then) and Syria went to France, and Palestine and Jordan, and Mesopotamia with the almost limited supply of oil, to the UK. Palestine became a mandate of the United Kingdom from 1920–1948, or commonly known as Mandatory Palestine. The rest of the former Ottoman Empire were divided into different nations and kingdoms, that still remain in most of the Middle-East. For example Mesopotamia became Iraq. The Suez Canal were also vital for the British Empire at the time, along with the fuel to make quick voyages, and most of all, to avoid the long trip around Africa to get to their Crown Jewel – India. so also Egypt had not yet become a sovereign kingdom, but were controlled by the British troops.
Mandatory Palestine
Before WW1 things were different, Jerusalem were firmly in the hands of the 4th Caliphate, but still then, the “sick man of Europe” – the Ottoman Empire – that had gradually lost more and more control, with the Western Industrial Revolution, and increasingly superior Weapon-Capability, and also with Arab Nationalism. Arab Newspapers now appeared uncensored and became gradually more and more an effective tool to nourish deepening a Nationalistic and anti-Zionist feelings in the Arab population.
Jews had been present, along with Christian and Arabs, as Ottoman citizens for centuries, but began to immigrate in large numbers to Palestine, specially in waves during Russian Pogroms, bringing along the Zionist idea of it’s founder Theodor Herzl, that Jews would never be safe as long as they didn’t have their own state, something that both had been proven right in the past and would be proven beyond comprehension in the years ahead.
The Russian Jew were often Communists and Socialists and also founded militia to protect the land – and their model of communes with people working together for the welfare of everyone actually worked, with their kibbutzim. Jews became aware of the deepening anti-Zionist and Nationalist Arab hostility to the steady growth of immigration, on the other hand Jewish Politicians negotiated with the Ottoman Rulers, for example by referring to the European expertise and economic benefits this would bring. They were seeking to develop a proto-state with Jews began buying up large areas of land from absentee land-owner that were happy to sell at prices high above market-value, with villages and kibbutzim seeking to connect and concentrate their position on the map, something that later became influential in the map for the partition plan for Palestine, with the N on the top, with Jewish settlements, that was planned to become such an connected state.
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However, before this became reality however, and after the War, al-Husseini, became heavily involved in in the anti-Zionist, Arab Nationalism against the Jewish Immigrants.
There had been skirmishes for a long time, but during the annual Nabi Musa procession in Jerusalem in April 1920, violent rioting broke out in protest at the implementation of the Balfour Declaration which supported the establishment in Palestine of a homeland for the Jewish people, that did great damage both on Jewish lives and property.
When there were declared a general Amnesty for those who had taken part in the riot in Jerusalem in 1920, he took part in politics in Palestine, where he lost an election for becoming mufti. However in 1922 he was elected President of the Supreme Muslim Council and demanded to become Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
The Supreme Muslim Council and its head al-Husseini, who regarded himself as guardian of one of the three holy sites of Islam, launched an campaign in Muslim countries to gather funds to restore and improve the Haram ash-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) or Temple Mount, and particularly the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the shrine Dome of the Rock (which houses the holiest site in Judaism). He accused the Jews that wanted access to the Western Wall of planning to take possession of the Western Wall and build a Temple over the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Something Jews are still considered to be conspiring to want to do. It’s difficult to know when the mufti became an ardent anti-Semite, but this period of his life seem a fair guess.
He was ceaselessly involved in political activities and many Pan-Arabic riots until WW2 broke out.
As to Palestine, so too in Germany many Jews fled from Russian Pogroms, these rootless people with their strange customs thought Cultural Germany must had been a safe place.
After loosing WW1, veterans made the “backstab” be hated, that is the resistance from the homefront against the continuation of that horrible war, with terrible shortages in all goods by the British naval blockade. An Austrian of the German Side at the front began crying with the loss, and temporarily lost his eye sight in a shocks from gas and trauma from the defeat, would – like the mufti – gradually become far more and more anti-Semitic, being groomed by such groups as “the Thule Society” using Nordic National Romanticism as to a lost, greater time, when the Aryan were super-men, but now, with social-Darwinism, evolution made clear that we held life in potential bad humans, not attributing to society and would gradually become less pure Aryan, by thoughts like this from social-Darwinism arrived also Eugenics in many countries, and practiced it widely with, make those that seemed not fit enough, sterile.
This “backstab” were a deep one, and the organizers behind it were often socialists (and defeated by a group of veterans coming back from the war, organizing against them) and the Bolsheviks in Russia had many Jewish leaders, so there were being created an extreme hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks in much of the population, but the opposite were also true in a influx of both a fervor to Revolution, and Jews fleeing from massacres into Cultured Germany. Also a forgery from Russia, translated, called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion about how Jews gradually planned to take over the world, had a catastrophic effect in creating antisemitism. There were a fear of Communism that created extremism on both sides, left and right, but most of all gradually the right-wing would win and to the horror of the world it was this Austrian front-soldier having seen industrial mass-death and dealt with it bravery that gave him the Iron Cross, as a fanatic supporter of the carnage, just as long it gave German victory, and as long as the Untermensch where rooted away from Germany . Enough is said about ww2 and Nazi-Germany, that most should know enough.
The Clash of Civilizations 