Playing Putin’s Game. By Walter Russell Mead.

Playing Putin’s Game. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, April 15, 2014.

Forgetting Freedom on Passover. By Caroline Glick.

Forgetting Freedom on Passover. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, April 10, 2014. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

The Putin Doctrine: Myth, Provocation, Blackmail, or the Real Deal? By Lilia Shevtsova.

The Putin Doctrine: Myth, Provocation, Blackmail, or the Real Deal? By Lilia Shevtsova. The American Interest, April 14, 2014.

The Arabs’ 1848. By Azar Gat.

The Arabs’ 1848. By Azar Gat. The National Interest, April 14, 2014.

The Red Wedding: Game of Thrones Season 3, Episode 9, The Rains of Castamere.

The Red Wedding: Game of Thrones Season 3, Episode 9, The Rains of Castamere. Video. randeDANDE, June 2, 2013. YouTube. Also here.

Elite Canaanite Burial Discovered in the Jezreel Valley. By Robin Ngo.

Elite Canaanite Burial Discovered in the Jezreel Valley. By Robin Ngo. Bible History Daily, April 11, 2014.

Syria’s Lost Generation. By Khaled Hosseini.

Syria’s Lost Generation. By Khaled Hosseini. New York Times, April 11, 2014.

Vladimir Putin, Man of Mystery? Hardly. By Mark D. Steinberg.

Putin, Man of Mystery? Hardly. By Mark D. Steinberg. History News Network, April 13, 2014.

The Folly of War: Europe 1914, Ukraine 2014. By Walter G. Moss.

The Folly of War: Europe 1914, Ukraine 2014. By Walter G. Moss. History News Network, April 13, 2014.

Why Germans are More Ambivalent About What’s Happening in Ukraine than Anybody Else? By Julianne Fuerst. History News Network, April 13, 2014.

Belle Knox Inspiring More NYC Co-eds to be Strippers. By Richard Johnson.

Belle Knox inspiring more NYC co-eds to be strippers. By Richard Johnson. Page Six. New York Post, April 11, 2014.

Acknowledging the Obvious: Presbyterian Aggression. By Michael Lumish.

Acknowledging the Obvious: Presbyterian Aggression. By Michael Lumish. Elder of Ziyon, April 13, 2014.

Placing the Colonial Boot on the Arab Foot. By Lyn Julius. NJBR, September 11, 2013.


Lumish:

Most Americans, particularly those of us with liberal inclinations, think of Arab peoples as persecuted minorities who are struggling, to this day, to free themselves from the ongoing social and economic implications of western imperial and colonial aggression in the Middle East. For centuries white-Anglo westerners dominated that part of the world and, therefore, progressives who care about universal human rights are not surprised at the Arab push-back, including the Palestinian-Arab push-back against Israel.

 

Certainly those of us who marched against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan largely perceived the peoples of those countries as innocent victims of western and American hostility. We understood that those wars were racist wars that needlessly slaughtered innocent Arabs in number of lives going to at least the hundreds of thousands, if not considerably more.

 

What we tend not to appreciate in the United States is that the great Arab-Muslim nation was one of the foremost imperial endeavors within recorded human history. The Arab peoples are not merely pawns batted around by powerful, racist, white westerners, but peoples with long and proud histories that cannot be reduced to a demeaning history of victimhood.

 

In a recent piece for Arutz Sheva we are reminded of this by the San Francisco-based non-profit organization, JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, which describes itself as “dedicated to educating and advocating on behalf of 850,000 Jewish refugees displaced in the 20th century, after the establishment of the State of Israel, from the Middle East and North Africa.”

 

As people who follow the ongoing Arab aggression against the Jews in the Middle East know, the Presbyterian Church (USA) recently published a booklet entitled “Zionism Unsettled” in which the American branch of that denomination condemns Israel and Zionism for the deterioration of relations between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.

 

As the JIMENA author of the piece writes:

But instead of recognizing the reality of rampant, deep-seated anti-Semitism in the Middle East & North Africa, “Zionism Unsettled” places blame on the State of Israel and presents a revisionist history of the Mizrahi refugee experience. Among many unfounded claims, the blooklet states that Mizrahis “share a history of largely harmonious integration and acculturation in their host countries. Sadly, this model of coexistence was destabilized by the regional penetration of Zionism beginning in the late 19th century.”

It staggers the imagination to realize the degree of hatred, ignorance and moral stupidity required of the Presbyterian Church for them to publish such toxic rubbish under their official seal. Whatever their reasonings or excuses or justifications or apologetics, this little “booklet” is nothing less than a true kick in the head to the Jewish people.

 

First, let it be understood that the Jews of the Middle East outside of Israel do not, and did not, live in “host countries.” That land is land that Jews have been living upon for thousands of years before the birth of Muhammad and the rise of imperial Islam. That land was conquered and controlled by the armies of Islam following the death of the founder of the faith in the 7th century – long after the Jewish presence – and the non-Islamic population were pressed into submission under the terms of dhimmitude as laid out in the seventh-century Pact of Omar.

 

There was, furthermore, never “largely harmonious integration” among Jews under Arab-Muslim domination. In some times and places the conditions of dhimmitude and submission represented lighter and more benevolent systems of oppression and in some times and places those systems of oppression were much worse. However, to describe the circumstances of dhimmitude throughout the history of the Jews under Arab-Muslim rule as “harmonious integration” would be something akin to describing the plight of black people living under Jim Crow in the American South as “harmonious integration.”

 

In other words, the very notion of it is total nonsense.

 

JIMENA writes:

In his “Open letter to the Presbyterian Church USA from an Iraqi Jew,” Joseph Samuels describes the ongoing brutality which culminated in the Farhud, a Nazi-incited riot in 1941 that claimed the lives of 180 Jews, destroyed Baghdad's Jewish quarter, and forced the couuntry’s Jewish population to live in absolute fear.

 

“The cause of the Farhud wasn’t Zionism . . . [it was] purely an anti-Jewish act. At 14, I was chased by two Muslim youths with a knife for stopping them from molesting my neighbor’s teenage daughter in broad daylight. At 18, after graduation from Al A’Adadiah High School, I was refused an exist visa to leave Iraq to study in American because I was Jewish. My story is not unique. I am one of 150,000 Iraqi Jews who was discriminated against, oppressed, and forced to escape religious persecution because of my faith.” The fear of impending violence dictated and suppressed Iraqi Jewish life.

So much for “largely harmonious integration.”

 

It’s doubtful that most westerners are familiar with the Farhud and most are probably unfamiliar with the fact that the Arabs, including the Palestinian-Arabs, generally allied themselves with the Nazis during World War II. The genocidal riots in Baghdad in early June of 1941 were because of pure genocidal racism and had nothing, or next to nothing, to do with the movement for Jewish national liberation.

 

In The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust, by Edwin Black, we read this:

Baghdad was a burning madhouse. It burned not just with ethnic hatred but with cries to murder and destroy the Jewish community who had lived peacably in the country for 2,600 years, since a millenium before the advent of Islam. The rampage would be forever seared uponn the collective Iraqi Jewish consciousness as the Farhud. In Arabized Kurdish, farhud means something beyond mere chaos, something more than a riot. Perhaps farhud is best translated as “violent dispossession.” Some translate it as “mass rape and killing.”

 

But the events of June 1 and 2, 1941, were not just the sudden frenzied carnage of local Arab hooligans against their neighbors. This was a well-planned Holocaust-era pogrom, organized by Arab Nazis in sympathy with, and under the direction of the Third Reich’s surrogates in Iraq, the Arab and Islamic world, as the ignition switch for an international Arab-Nazi alliance. This alliance, embraced by many ordinary Arabs, was led by Hajj Muhammmad Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti was acknowledged by Hitler himself as Berlin’s most important leader in the Arab nation.

 

(Black, Edwin, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust, Dialog Press, pg. 4, 2010.)

Finally, Zionism did not “penetrate” anything at the end of the nineteenth-century since it had been around in that part of the world since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD. All “Zionism” means is the longing of the Jewish people to reestablish our home on the land that we come from and that longing has been part of the Jewish soul for thousands of years, now. This is so in part because, like all peoples, the Jewish people wish to have sovereignty on the primary land of their history, and because of the remarkable mistreatment of Jewish refugees by majority populations throughout the diaspora over the course of millennia, whether in the Middle East or in Europe.

 

Shortly we are going to again celebrate Passover which, along with Thanksgiving, is one of my favorite holidays. We will celebrate the freedom of the Jewish people from oppression and submission.

 

At the very end we will raise our glasses and cry out, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

 

For two thousand years the Jews have yearned to restore our country and now we finally have.

 

I may like to return to Jerusalem next year, but for something approaching half the world’s Jews they do not have to wait until next year because they are home now.

 

They are home and they are going to continue to build their home and create lives for themselves and their children in their home.

 

Our home.

 

The restitution of the Jewish people upon traditional Jewish land is now an historical fact and if the Presbyterian Church (USA) does not like it, well, we all know what they can go do . . . pound sand.

Jewish Genius. By Charles Murray.

Jewish Genius. By Charles Murray. Commentary, April 2007. Also here.

Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence. By Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending. Journal of Biosocial Science, Vol. 38, No. 5 (September 2006).

The Ghetto of Talent. By Bryan Caplan. Library of Economics and Liberty, April 7, 2014.

Microsoft Windows 2-in-1 TV Spot, “I’m the Boss.”

Microsoft Windows 2-in-1 TV Spot, “I’m the Boss.” Video. Windows, April 8, 2014. YouTube. Also at Microsoft. iSpot.tv.

How Much Is a College Degree Worth? By Walter Russell Mead.

How Much Is a College Degree Worth? By Walter Russell Mead and Staff. The American Interest, April 13, 2014.

Bryan Caplan on College, Signaling, and Human Capital. Interviewed by Russ Roberts. Audio and transcript. Library of Economics and Liberty, April 7, 2014.

Crude Self-Interest: Why Kids Go to College. By Bryan Caplan. Library of Economics and Liberty, April 10, 2014.

It’s not just athletes — college screws everyone. By Naomi Schaefer Riley. New York Post, April 12, 2014.


Mead:

With student debt growing by the day, a discussion is raging about how much college degrees are actually worth. The Library of Economics and Liberty’s EconTalk podcast contributes to this conversation in a discussion with George Mason University’s Bryan Caplan. Caplan covers a number of subjects, focusing particularly on the oft-cited 83 percent wage premium for college grads, arguing that the number is vastly overstated as it doesn’t take into account the large number of students who attend college and don’t graduate or the fact that smarter students who graduate college would have likely fared better in the job market even without a degree. Instead, Caplan notes that the premium for students who attend but don’t graduate is somewhere closer to 10 percent, which makes the prospect of paying for college considerably dicier for those who aren’t sure they’ll graduate.

 

More generally, Caplan argues that the value of a college degree has little to do with the content that students actually learn, and instead is based mostly on the signal it sends to employers that a student is intelligent and hardworking. Among other things, this has interesting implications for federal education policy; if the value of a degree is mostly as a signal of preexisting attributes, policies that attempt to send a greater share of students to school will likely only result in increasing the work that talented students need to do to stand out from the pack, without significantly increasing prospects for less accomplished students. This also could spell trouble for MOOCs: If employers see colleges primarily as a grueling test for students to prove their determination rather than a learning experience, they may be less inclined to take MOOCs seriously, regardless of the actual quality of the education.

 

While we don’t fully agree with everything that is said, overall, this is an extremely engaging listen and worth hearing in full.

Carbonite Automatic Online Backup TV Spot.

Carbonite Automatic Online Backup TV Spot. Video. carbonitebackup, July 1, 2013. YouTube. Also at iSpot.tv.

Here’s What I Would Have Said at Brandeis. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Here’s What I Would Have Said at Brandeis. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2014.

Brandeis and the Real War on Women. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 11, 2014.

The Shame of Brandeis. By Charles C. W. Cooke. National Review Online, April 10, 2014.

Brandeis, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Hypocrisy. Elder of Ziyon, April 10, 2014.

Where is the feminist anger against Brandeis. By Jeff Jacoby. Boston Globe, April 11, 2014.

Why Brandeis Revoked Its Invitation for Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Receive an Honorary Degree. By Ben Armbruster. ThinkProgress, April 11, 2014. Also here.

The Roots of CAIR’s Intimidation Campaign. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, May 12, 2014.

“The Trouble Is the West”: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam, immigration, civil liberties, and the fate of the West. By Roger van Bakel. Reason, November 2007.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Kelly File Interview on Brandeis. Video. Jim Browski, April 9, 2014. YouTube.

In One Word: Poof! By Uri Avnery.

In One Word: Poof! By Uri Avnery. Gush Shalom, April 12, 2014. Also at Outlook India.

Why does Uri Avnery know so little about Palestinian citizens of Israel. By Jonathan Cook. Mondoweiss, October 29, 2013.

Do Unilateralists Own Israel’s Future? By Tom Wilson.

Do Unilateralists Own Israel’s Future? By Tom Wilson. Commentary, April 10, 2014.

ScarJo Tells the Truth About Anti-Semitism. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

ScarJo Tells the Truth About Anti-Semitism. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 10, 2014.

Demonizing Israel; Demonizing ScarJo. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, January 28, 2014. With related articles and video.

Pity the Palestinians? Count Me Out. By Norman Podhoretz.

Pity the Palestinians? Count Me Out. By Norman Podhoretz. The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2014. Also here.

Podhoretz:

Thousands of Arabs are dying in Syria and South Sudan. Where’s the outrage on behalf of those truly suffering?

Provoked by the predictable collapse of the farcical negotiations forced by Secretary of State John Kerry on the Palestinians and the Israelis, I wish to make a confession: I have no sympathy—none—for the Palestinians. Furthermore, I do not believe they deserve any.

This, of course, puts me at daggers drawn with the enlightened opinion that goes forth from the familiar triumvirate of the universities, the mainstream media and the entertainment industry. For everyone in that world is so busy weeping over the allegedly incomparable sufferings of the Palestinians that hardly a tear is left for the tribulations of other peoples. And so all-consuming is the universal rage over the supposedly monumental injustice that has been done to the Palestinians that virtually no indignation is available for any other claimant to unwarranted mistreatment.

In my unenlightened opinion, this picture of the Palestinian plight is nothing short of grotesquely disproportionate. Let me leave aside the Palestinians who live in Israel as Israeli citizens and who enjoy the same political rights as Israeli Jews (which is far more than can be said of Palestinians who live in any Arab country), and let me concentrate on those living under Israeli occupation on the West Bank.

Well, to judge by the most significant measure and applying it only to two instances of what is going on at this very moment: In Syria, untold thousands of fellow Arabs are starving, while according to the United Nations official on the scene in South Sudan, 3.7 million people, amounting to one-third of the population, are now facing imminent death by starvation.

And the Palestinians? True, when they wish to go from the West Bank into Israel proper, they are forced to stop at checkpoints and subjected to searches for suicide vests or other weapons in the terrorist arsenal. Once, when she was secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice bemoaned the great inconvenience and humiliation inflicted by such things on the poor Palestinians. Yet she had nothing to say about Palestinians dying of starvation on the West Bank, for the simple reason that there were none to be found.

Nor did anyone starve to death in Gaza when it too was under Israeli occupation. And despite propaganda to the contrary, neither is anyone facing the same fate in Gaza today because of the blockade the Israelis have set up to prevent clandestine shipments of arms intended for use against them.

Speaking of Gaza, it can serve as a case study of the extent to which the plight of the Palestinians has been self-inflicted. Thus when every last Israeli was pulled out of Gaza in 2005, some well-wishers expected that the Palestinians, now in complete control, would dedicate themselves to turning it into a free and prosperous country. Instead, they turned it into a haven for terrorism and a base for firing rockets into Israel.

Meanwhile little or nothing of the billions in aid being poured into Gaza—some of it from wealthy American Jewish donors—went to improving the living conditions of the general populace. Which did not prevent a majority of those ordinary Palestinians from supporting Hamas, under whose leadership this order of priorities was more faithfully followed than it was under Fatah, its slightly less militant rival.

As for the monumental injustice supposedly done to the Palestinians, it consists largely of losing territory in the war they themselves provoked in 1967, and the refusal of their demand that every inch of it be returned to them by the Israeli victors in that war. Such demands have always been known and universally denounced as revanchism or irredentism, most recently over the Russian seizure of Crimea. But where Israel is concerned, everything goes topsy-turvy, so that Palestinian irredentism is universally supported.

The accompanying and equally great injustice allegedly suffered by the Palestinians is that they have been denied a state of their own. But this hardly qualifies as unique, given that dozens of other ethnic groups—the Kurds being the most prominent—are in the same boat.

In any event, this “injustice” is also self-inflicted, since three times in the past 15 years the Palestinians have refused offers of a state on most of the territory taken by Israel in 1967 and with Jerusalem as its capital. They have justified these refusals by one pretext or another, but as anyone willing to look can see, what they truly want is not a state of their own living side by side with Israel but a state that replaces Israel altogether.

With this we come to the main reason I believe that the Palestinians do not deserve any sympathy, let alone the astonishing degree of it they do receive (and not least from many of my fellow Jews). It is that ever since the day of Israel’s birth in 1948, they have never ceased declaring that their goal is to wipe it off the map. In all other contexts, this would be called by its rightful name of genocide and condemned by all decent people. Yet—here we go topsy-turvy again—for any and every step Israel takes to defend itself against so shamelessly evil an intent, it is the Israelis who are obsessively condemned at the U.N. and by the increasingly strident propagators of what calls itself “anti-Zionism” but is also increasingly indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

Nor, alas, is it only the leaders of the Palestinians who harbor this evil intent. As revealed by poll after poll, as well as by the elections that led the way for Hamas to take power in Gaza, a decisive majority of the Palestinian people does so as well. No doubt this is the fruit of relentless indoctrination from above, but the damage has been done, and the end result is what it is.

Indeed, the best that can be said of both Palestinian leaders and led is that many of them no longer imagine—as did Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former president of Egypt—that they have the power to drive the Jews of Israel into the sea. Therefore they are now willing to give up pursuing the goal of genocide and to settle for the more modest objective of politicide—that is, to get rid of the Jewish state by transforming it, through various “peaceful” means like the “right of return,” into a state with a Palestinian majority.

I for one pray that a day will come when the Palestinians finally let go of the evil intent toward Israel that keeps me from having any sympathy for them, and that they will make their own inner peace with the existence of a Jewish state in their immediate neighborhood. But until that day arrives, the “peace process” will go on being as futile as it has been so many times before and as it has just proved once again to be. Another thing that never changes: When John Kerry testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, it was the Israelis he blamed for this latest diplomatic fiasco.

Life for Russia’s Liberals Just Got a Whole Lot Worse. By Anna Nemtsova.

Life for Russia’s Liberals Just Got a Whole Lot Worse. By Anna Nemtsova. Foreign Policy, April 9, 2014. Also here.

Moscow’s annexation of Crimea is fueling a surge of “patriotism” – and a new sense of claustrophobia.

Is a French Intifada Brewing? By Marc Hecker.

Is a French Intifada Brewing? By Marc Hecker. The American Interest, April 9, 2014.

Why the “Open” Internet Is So Closed to Women. By Astra Taylor.

Why the “Open” Internet Is So Closed to Women. By Astra Taylor. The Nation, April 10, 2014.

Putin Causing More Trouble in Ukraine. By Bill O’ Reilly and Ralph Peters.

Putin Causing More Trouble in Ukraine. By Bill O’ Reilly and Ralph Peters. Video. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, April 8, 2014. YouTube. Also here.

The Grand Mufti’s Nazi Connection. By Edy Cohen.

The Grand Mufti’s Nazi connection. By Edy Cohen. Translated by Hannah Hochner. Jerusalem Post, April 7, 2014.

Cohen:

It’s no coincidence that just a few months after Nazi Germany surrendered, on November 2, 1945, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, many synagogues were burned down in Egypt and dozens of Jews were killed on the streets of Cairo.

 

On November 5, 1941, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, arrived in Berlin. He was fleeing Iraq following the failure of the coup he was involved in there, and three weeks later he met with Adolf Hitler. The meeting took place despite Nazi Germany’s entanglement in Operation Barbarossa and the war against Russia.

 

The Nazis appointed the mufti “Das Arabische Buro Der Grossmufti” of Berlin and gave him a monthly allowance of tens of thousands of dollars a month. He was instructed to hire dozens of assistants, each of whom also received a salary directly from the Third Reich. Among the individuals with whom he worked closely during his time in Berlin was Hassan Salameh – the father of the Palestinian terrorist Ali Salameh (aka “the Red Prince”), one of the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.

 

In his new position, the mufti was placed in charge of the Nazi’s Arabic-language radio station, that broadcast anti-Semitic propaganda in Arabic from 1939 until the Nazi party collapsed in 1945. This radio station was highly popular and could be heard throughout the Middle East. The mufti was also responsible for disseminating written Nazi propaganda in Arabic designed to encourage protests against British and French occupation.

 

The mufti lived in Germany until May 1945, when the Second World War came to an end. Throughout this entire period, the mufti was involved in espionage, sabotage, terrorist activity against the British and the Jews, as well as anti-Semitic propaganda.

 

As part of his alleged struggle for independence for the Palestinian people, the mufti attempted to prevent the arrival of European Jews to Palestine, as well as the establishment of a national Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. At least that’s what he claimed in his memoirs.

 

But this is far from the truth. In actuality, the mufti was constantly engaged in the deportation and extermination of Jews from Arab countries and from Palestine.

 

I recently discovered documents that attest to the depth of the Arab world’s animosity toward the Jews and how the Arabs incited against the Jews and spread propaganda. Many people have asked just how closely the mufti identified conceptually and practically to the Nazi approach regarding the extermination of the Jewish people.

 

There are recordings of the mufti broadcasting from Berlin to the Arab world in Arabic, in which he says, “Kill the Jews wherever you find them – this is God’s will.”

 

On November 2, 1943 – the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration – the mufti organized a protest in Berlin in which thousands of Muslim immigrants to Germany participated. The following is an excerpt from the speech the mufti gave at the protest: “26 years ago the Jews received the Balfour Declaration so they could build a national Jewish homeland. The British betrayed the Arabs and Islam by supporting the Jews. Jews are selfish.”

 

“They think they are the chosen people and that all the other people of the world are meant to serve them. The Jews are the enemy of Islam – they are the ones killed the prophet Mohammad!” The Mufti continues, “The Jewish British minister [Benjamin] Disraeli bought the Suez Canal, thus paving the way for the British to conquer Egypt. And Algerian Jews helped France occupy Algeria. . . . The Arabs – and especially the Muslims – must expel the Jews from Arab countries.

 

“This is the ultimate solution.

 

“The prophet Mohammad used this solution 1,300 years ago.

 

“The Treaty of Versailles was a disaster for Germany and for the Arabs, but the Germans know how to get rid of the Jews, and this is why the Arab world has such close relations with Germany.

 

“Germany never harmed the Muslims and is fighting against our common enemy – the Jews.

 

“The most important thing is that they have found the final solution to the Jewish problem. Time is working against the Jews even though the Allies are helping them.”

 

According to the mufti’s memoirs, he was aware of the Final Solution already in the summer of 1943.

 

On March 19, 1943, the mufti made a speech from the Islamic Mosque in Berlin in honor of the prophet Mohammad’s birthday, during which he said, “The Jews have managed to use their influence to control the British and the Americans. This is proven by the recent passing of a bill in Congress allowing the Jews to build a national homeland in Palestine.

 

“The Jews took advantage of the previous war to settle in the Holy Land. The Jews are a threat not just in Palestine, but in every Arab country, since this is where the Allies plan to resettle the millions of Jews who were expelled from Europe. The Arabs must fight with all their strength to put an end to this plot.”

 

From the above, we can clearly conclude that the mufti was aware of the Final Solution and the plan to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe from the beginning of the war. There is also documentation showing that the mufti toured concentration camps in Poland with Heinrich Himmler. Killing European Jews was not good enough for the mufti, though, and so he planned to kill all the Jews in the Arab world and in Palestine. While the mufti publicly called for Arab countries to expel Jews living in them, he secretly planned to build extermination camps for Jews from Arab countries and Palestine, so that he could implement the Final Solution in the Middle East.

 

Haviv Kanaan, who was a researcher, journalist and police commander during the British Mandate, wrote many books about Nazi propaganda. After he retired from the Police, Kanaan began working as a journalist for Haaretz and researching the construction of the concentration camps in Palestine and uncovered the mufti’s plan to build incinerators in the Dotan Valley. Kanaan based his conclusion on the testimony of Faiz Bay Idrisi, who was a senior Arab officer in the Mandate Police and a Jerusalem area district commander.

 

Idrisi is quoted as saying, “Chills go through my body even today as I recall what I heard back then from police officials and mufti supporters [when General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was about to enter Egypt as part of the 1942 El Alamein campaign].

 

“Haj Amin Husseini was preparing to enter Jerusalem at the head of the Muslim Arab Legion squadron he’d created for the army of the Third Reich. The mufti’s grand plan was to build huge Auschwitz-like crematoria near Nablus, to which Jews from Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and North Africa would be sent and then be gassed, just like the Jews were by the SS in Europe.”

 

Kanaan also tells how once, when he was carrying out his research, he met a retired German diplomat who had refused to join the Nazi Party. He told Kanaan, “I cannot say with certainty what lay in store for the Jews living in the Land of Israel, but I do know that their entire existence would have been at stake had Rommel succeeded in conquering the Middle East.”

 

Kanaan’s full-length study was published in Haaretz on March 2, 1970. Kanaan wrote a book about the El Alamein campaign called 200 days of fear – the Land of Israel against Rommel’s Army, in which he describes how the Jews in Palestine prepared for a possible Nazi attack from Egypt.

 

To collect information about the mufti’s plans, Kanaan traveled to Germany where he met with officials who were knowledgeable about them. In fact, after the defeat in the summer of 1942 at El Alamein as well as on other fronts, the mufti realized that the Third Reich’s days were numbered, and so he prepared another plan: conquest of the Middle East by the Nazi army, whose first order of business would be the annihilation of the 250,000 Jews in Tel Aviv. The mufti believed that the extermination of the Jews would stimulate the Arabs in Palestine and Egypt to revolt against the British and carry out a jihad (holy war).

 

These holy warriors would release the Arabs from tyranny of British and French colonialism.

 

Kanaan uncovered proof that the Germans invested heavily in this program and even established spy networks throughout the Arab world. Kanaan describes how senior German officials such as Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering took part in these discussions, although Hitler himself was never involved. The fact that most Arab countries were pro-British made it quite difficult to implement this program, and then the Third Reich began to collapse on all fronts, making it practically impossible.

 

It’s no coincidence that just a few months after Nazi Germany surrendered, on November 2, 1945, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, many synagogues were burned down in Egypt and dozens of Jews were killed on the streets of Cairo.

 

And it was also no coincidence that on that same day, hundreds of Jews in Libya were killed, nine synagogues were desecrated, and hundreds of Jewish homes and shops were looted and burned down. There is no doubt that these attacks on Egyptian and Libyan Jews, which took place exactly on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, were the result of the mufti’s machinations and his influence on leaders of the Arab world. These events were the direct consequence of propaganda the mufti had been circulating for years. Generations of Muslims, including the Salameh family, were being raised on such beliefs. The mufti’s actions had prepared the ground for attacks on Jews in Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

 

A plan to compensate Jews who escaped from Arab countries due to harassment and persecution is currently being discussed in the Knesset and in coordination with the US government. It’s important that Israeli politicians not only understand the historical background that led up to the displacement of Jews from Arab counties, but also the direct connection between their fate and what the Palestinians call the Nakba.