Posted on Thursday, August 3, 2006 - 1:27 pm:

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If I understood Wendy correctly (and I'm not sure I do)

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Posted on Friday, August 4, 2006 - 11:46 am:

Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (ca. 1895 - July 4, 1974, alternatively spelt al-Husseini), the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and a Muslim religious leader. Known for his anti-Zionism, al-Husayni fought against the establishment of a Jewish state in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine. To this end, Husayni collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and helped recruit Muslims for the Waffen-SS. Recent Nazi documents uncovered in German Minstry of Foreign Affairs and the Military Archive Service in Freiburg [1] by two researchers from Stuttgart University found that the Nazis had planned to exploit Arab friendship for their planned landing in Palestine and murdering of about 500,000 European Jews who had taken refuge there. In their book the researchers concluded that "The most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem".[2].

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In 1933, within weeks of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, al-Husayni sent a telegram to Berlin addressed to the German Consul-General in the British Mandate of Palestine saying he looked forward to spreading their ideology in the Middle East [citation needed], especially in Palestine and offered his services. Al-Husayni's offer was rejected at first out of concern for disrupting Anglo-German relations by allying with an anti-British leader. But one month later, Al-Husayni secretly met the German Consul-General Karl Wolff near the Dead Sea and expressed his approval of the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany and asked him not to send any Jews to Palestine. Later that year, the Mufti's assistants approached Wolff, seeking his help in establishing an Arab National Socialist (Nazi) party in Palestine. Wolff and his superiors disapproved because they didn't want to become involved in a British sphere of influence, because the Nazis desired further Jewish immigration to Palestine, and because at the time the Nazi party was restricted to German speaking "Aryans" only.

On 21 July 1937, Al-Husayni paid a visit to the new German Consul-General, Hans Döhle, in Palestine. He repeated his former support for Germany and "wanted to know to what extent the Third Reich was prepared to support the Arab movement against the Jews." He later sent an agent and personal representative to Berlin for discussions with Nazi leaders.

In 1938, though Anglo-German relations were a concern, Al-Husayni's offer was accepted. From August 1938, Husseini received financial and military assistance and supplies from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. From Berlin, al-Husayni would play a significant role in inter-Arab politics.

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Upon al-Husayni's arrival in Europe, he met the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop on November 20, 1941 and was officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941 in Berlin. He asked Hitler for a public declaration that "recognized and sympathized with the Arab struggles for independence and liberation, and that it would support the elimination of a national Jewish homeland". Earlier, al-Hussayni submitted to the German government a draft of such a declaration, containing a clause:

Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries, as required by the national and ethnic (völkisch) interests of the Arabs, and as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.[2]

Hitler refused to make such a public announcement, but "made the following declaration, requesting the Mufti to lock it deep in his heart:

1. He (the Führer) would carry on the fight until the last traces of the Jewish-Communist European hegemony had been obliterated.
2. In the course of this fight, the German army would - at a time that could not yet be specified, but in any case in the clearly foreseeable future - gain the southern exit of Caucasus.
3. As soon as this breakthrough was made, the Führer would offer the Arab world his personal assurance that the hour of liberation had struck. Thereafter, Germany's only remaining objective in the region would be limited to the Vernichtung des...Judentums ['destruction of the Jewish element', sometimes taken to be a euphemism for 'annihilation of the Jews'] living under British protection in Arab lands.." [3]

The Mufti established close contacts with Bosnian and Albanian Muslim leaders and spent the remainder of the war conducting the following activities:

* Radio propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany
* Espionage and the fifth column activities in Muslim regions of Europe and the Middle East
* Assisting with the formation of Muslim Waffen SS units in the Balkans
* The formation of schools and training centers for Muslim imams and mullahs who would accompany the Muslim SS and Wehrmacht units.

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The Mufti's knowledge about the holocaust while living in Nazi Germany has been debated with the Mufti himself denying any such knowledge after the war. Testimony presented at the Nuremberg trials, however, accused the Mufti of not only having knowledge about the holocaust but of also actively encouraging the initiation of extermination programs against European Jews. Adolf Eichmann`s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified during his war crimes trial in 1946 that ... "The Mufti was 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... He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz."

When the Red Cross offered to mediate with Adolf Eichmann in a trade prisoner-of-war exchange involving the freeing of German citizens in exchange for 5,000 Jewish children being sent from Poland to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Husseini directly intervened with Himmler and the exchange was cancelled, although there is no evidence that his intervention prevented their rescue.[citation needed]

Among the sabotage al-Husayni organized was an attempted chemical warfare assault on the second largest and predominantly Jewish city in Palestine, Tel Aviv. Five parachutists were sent with a toxin to dump into the water system. The police caught the infiltrators in a cave near Jericho, and according to Jericho district police commander Fayiz Bey Idrissi, "The laboratory report stated that each container held enough poison to kill 25,000 people, and there were at least ten containers."[5]

Recent Nazi documents uncovered in the German Minstry of Foreign Affairs and the Military Archive Service in Freiburg [6] by two researchers, Klaus Michael Mallmann from Stuttgart University and Martin Cüppers from the University of Ludwigsburg, indicated that in the event of the British being defeated in Egypt by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps the Nazis had planned to deploy a special unit called Einsatzkommando Ägypten to exterminate Palestinian Jews and that they wanted Arab support to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state.