by Jerome du Bois
I've kept my promise to my wife and myself to stay away from news about Islam and Muslims, for my psychological health. But I came across some old news about Muslims, with contemporary reverberations, that I'm going to note for the record. It comes from an unlikely source --novelist Philip Kerr's superb new book, The One From The Other, featuring his German private eye, Bernie Gunther, in a mystery that takes place in 1949. (Ron Rosenbaum alerted me to Kerr and Gunther. And, by the way, Kerr's Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton --a 17th-Century mystery-- is also superb.)
In his Author's Note at the end of The One From The Other, Kerr includes some information about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem:
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a ferocious anti-Semite who led several pogroms in Palestine, which resulted in the deaths of many Jews. He had been canvassing a "final solution to the Jewish problem" as early as 1920. He met with Eichmann in 1937, and first met Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941. This was less than eight weeks before the Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi plans for the "final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe" were outlined by Reinhard Heydrich.
During the war, Haj Amin lived in Berlin, was a friend of Hitler's, and personally raised an SS Moslem Division of 20,000 men in Bosnia, which murdered Jews and partisans. He tried to persuade the Luftwaffe to bomb Tel Aviv. It seems quite probable that his ideas had a profound influence on the course of Eichmann's thinking. Numerous Jewish organizations tried to have Haj Amin prosecuted as a war criminal after the war, but they were unsuccessful, despite the fact that arguably he was as culpable as Heydrich, Himmler, and Eichmann in the extermination of the Jews. Haj Amin was a close relative of Yasser Arafat's. It is believed that Arafat changed his name in order to obscure his relationship with a notorious war criminal. To this day, many Arab political parties, most notably Hezbollah, have identified with Nazis and adopted symbols from Nazi propaganda.
Muslims and Nazis. Sometimes, it's hard to tell the one from the other.
Posted by Jerome at October 27, 2006 12:33 PM | TrackBack