Redstate

By Paul J Cella Posted in User Blogs — Comments (20) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

I have long been disdainful of the fashionable argument that formulates the problem of Islam almost exclusively in the terms of modern Western radicalism: the "Islamofascism" argument, in the shorthand of the day. This not so much because I doubt that Western radicalism has had an impact on the Mohammedan religion -- Western radicalism has been so potent and demonic a force that is it difficult to imagine anything untouched by its hideous strength -- but because I think it ultimately obscures more than it illuminates.It obscures difficult history by interposing a more familiar ideological narrative. Most perilously it prevents a full appreciation of the antiquity and permanence of jihad in the Islamic mind and civilization. Since the religion was founded, a fierce insistence on not merely the obligation, but also the piety of conquest has distinguished it. War is justly provoked not, as the Western tradition has always in principle maintained, by aggression, or, as the Western tradition has usually practiced, by interest, but by unbelief. To reject the revelation of Mohammed is to make oneself the just object of war, subjugation and even death.

Nevertheless, Western political radicalism has indeed added its own feverish energy to this incendiary doctrine. David G. Dalin's essay, "Hitler's Mufti," in the last number of First Things, is a fine example.

It is possible to trace modern Islamic anti-Semitism back along a number of different historical and intellectual threads, but, no matter which one you choose, they all seem to pass, at one point or another, through the hands of one figure--Hitler's mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the viciously anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of Muslim fundamentalists in Palestine, who resided in Berlin as a welcome guest of the Nazis throughout the years of the Holocaust. [. . .]

Then, in the early 1930s, al-Husseini began to make overtures to the new Nazi government of Germany. The alliance between Adolf Hitler and the Muslim fundamentalist world was initiated and forged by the grand mufti at the very beginning of the new Nazi regime. In late March 1933, al-Husseini contacted the German consul general in Jerusalem and requested German help in eliminating Jewish settlements in Palestine--offering, in exchange, a pan-Islamic jihad in alliance with Germany against Jews around the world. It was not until 1938, in the aftermath of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's infamous capitulation to Hitler at Munich, that Hajj Amin al-Husseini's overtures to Nazi Germany were officially reciprocated, but by then the influence of Nazi ideology had already grown significantly throughout the Arab Middle East.

We are not talking here about admiration from afar, a kind of sick intellectual crush. No -- far worse than that:

There is also evidence the mufti advised and assisted his German hosts in the destruction of European Jewry. His importance "must not be disregarded," insisted Adolf Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny in 1941. "The Mufti had repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he was maintaining contact, above all to Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry." At the Nuremberg Trials, Wisliceny was even more explicit: "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 that, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz." On this visit to Auschwitz, al-Husseini reportedly "admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently."

In 1943 al-Husseini traveled several times to Bosnia, where he helped recruit a Bosnian Muslim S.S. company, the notorious "Hanjar troopers," who slaughtered 90 percent of Bosnia's Jews and burned "countless Serbian churches and villages." Throughout World War II, al-Husseini preached regularly on radio broadcasts to the Middle East. On November 2, 1943, less than three weeks after the initial Nazi roundup of Roman Jews and the beginning of the Nazi occupation of the Italian capital, he used German radio to broadcast one of his most virulently anti-Semitic messages: "The overwhelming egoism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God's chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other people are animals" makes them "incapable of being trusted. They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals." "Kill the Jews wherever you find them," the Mufti told his growing Arab radio audience in 1944. "This pleases God, history, and religion."

We learn also that al-Husseini was a much beloved hero among the early leadership of the PLO, including the late Yasser Arafat, who described him as recently as 2002 as "our hero al-Husseini."

Such viciousness -- an import of the darkest dreams of Western nihilism into the heart of the Islamic world -- should not go unnoticed as we endeavor to look hard upon our enemies and see them for what they are; but neither should we allow it, in its familiarity, to blind us to the older strains of strife and ruin inherent in Islam proper.