As Much an Arab Story as a European

Well known for her Point of No Return blog, Lyn Julius has recently authored Uprooted: How 3,000 years of Jewish Civilisation in the Arab World Vanished Overnight, published in London by Vallentine Mitchell. 

Now she has written searingly as follows:

 On the day that the world commemorated the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the U.K. liberal newspaper The Guardian declared in an editorial : “The Arabs, meanwhile, cannot be blamed for feeling that Europe’s blood debt to the Jews was paid with what they see as their territory.”

The Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, meets with Adolf Hitler in 1941. Credit: German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons.

The myth of the Arabs as innocent bystanders, who had no responsibility for the Holocaust—and indeed, paid the price for a European crime when Israel was established—is widely believed.

The Arabs, like other third-world peoples, are only ever seen as victims of Western oppression and colonialism. They cannot themselves be guilty of oppressing others.

The West self-righteously deplores the old European anti-Semitism of the “far right.” But a new Green-Brown-Red anti-Semitism—encouraged by an alliance of the Far Left, the Greens and Islamist sympathisers—is studiously downplayed, ignored by the media, or blamed on Israel.

Truth be told, the virus of Nazi anti-Semitism was exported to the Arab and Muslim world as early as the 1930s. It gave ideological inspiration to Arab nationalist parties like the Ba’athists in Syria and Iraq and paramilitary groups like Young Egypt, founded in 1933. Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are the central plank of the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, and their ideological cousins, Islamic State, who sought to impose Allah’s kingdom on Earth through jihad and forced conversion of non-Muslims.

The Holocaust was, in the words of author Robert Satloff, as much an Arab story as a European. In spite of efforts to trumpet the stories of individual “righteous” Muslims who rescued Jews (particularly in Albania), scholars continue to uncover evidence of Arab sympathy and collaboration with Nazism.

Said Walter Doehle, German Consul in Jerusalem, wrote in 1937:

“Palestinian Arabs in all social strata have great sympathies for the new Germany and its Führer..…If a person identified himself as a German when faced with threats from an Arab crowd, this alone generally allowed him to pass freely. But when some identified themselves by making the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, in most cases the Arabs’ attitude became expressions of open enthusiasm, and the German gave ovations, to which the Arabs responded loudly.”

When Tunisia came under direct Nazi occupation between November 1942 and May 1943, some 2,000 Jews were sent to work in labor camps. The reaction of Tunisia’s Muslim majority was, according to Satloff, “widespread indifference.” He wrote:

“Gestures of support and active assistance for the minority being displaced, disenfranchised, plundered and conscripted into forced labour were very rare. Arab passers-by would publicly insult and physically attack individuals.”

Although he was not the only collaborator with Nazism—Fawzi al-Qawuqji, Rashid Ali al-Kelani, Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir, Hassan Salama and Arif Abd al-Raziq spring to mind—the role played by Palestinian leader and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini in fomenting anti-Jewish incitement and violence, not just in British Palestine but across the Arab world, is key. From 1931, he conflated “Zionists” with “Jews.” Any Jewish community became fair game for collective punishment—and still is.

The Mufti met with Hitler in Berlin in November 1941 to discuss the extermination of the Jews in the Middle East. He spent the rest of the war as a guest of the Nazis.Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny (later executed as a war criminal) in his Nuremburg Trials testimony stated, “the Mufti was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”

On a visit to Auschwitz, the Mufti reportedly admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently. Throughout the war, he broadcast regularly on German radio to the Middle East, preaching his pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic message to the Arab masses back home.

Had the Allies not liberated Tunisia from the Nazis, Libya from the Italian fascists, and Algeria and Morocco from the Vichy regime in 1943, it is a fair bet that the local Arab population would not have lifted a finger to halt the deportation of the Jews of Palestine and the Arab world to death camps.

Arguably, North African states, having not yet achieved independence, were not responsible for Jewish suffering: anti-Jewish measures were implemented by the Vichy regime and the Italian fascists. But the Iraqi government cannot so lightly be let off the hook. Iraq, independent since 1932, was the scene of a pro-Nazi coup in 1941, leading inexorably to the Farhud, the Iraqi-Jewish Kristallnacht. In this two-day orgy of murder, rape, mutilation and looting, up to 600 Jews were killed, according to British archival records. The exact figure will never be known.

The Palestinian Mufti played a central role in plotting the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq.

The Mufti was personally responsible for the deaths of 20,000 European Jews murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. He organized the killing of 12,600 Bosnian Jews by Muslims, whom he recruited to the Waffen-SS Nazi-Bosnian division.  He personally stopped 4,000 children, accompanied by 500 adults, from leaving Europe and had them sent to Auschwitz and gassed; he prevented another 2,000 Jews from leaving Romania and 1000 from leaving Hungary for Palestine—they too were sent to death camps.

Only three years after the end of World War ll, the members of the Arab League were bent on emulating the Nazis. They set about making the Arab Middle East judenrein (free of Jews). They applied Nuremberg-style laws, criminalising Zionism, freezing Jewish bank accounts, instituting quotas, imposing restrictions on jobs and movement.

The result was the mass exodus and spoliation of a million Jews. Yet very few Arabs acknowledge they are to blame for the so-called Jewish nakba (catastrophe). Holocaust denial goes hand-in-hand with Jewish nakba denial.

In 1945, the Mufti of Jerusalem should have been tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg. He was indicted, judged and convicted by Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity, arising from his pivotal role in the Handschar and Skandeberg SS divisions which deported Balkan Jews from Kosovo, Macedonia and Thrace. But the Allies shrank from offending the Arabs.

Not only has the virus of Nazi anti-Semitism never left the Arab and Muslim world, it has grown exponentially. Muslim immigrants have carried the virus of Jew-hatred back into European countries. Saudi petrodollars have financed the spread of Islamism, with its implicit anti-Semitism, worldwide.

That is why today, in the Arab and Muslim world, Holocaust denial is alive and well.

The ghost of Nazi-inspired, anti-Jewish bigotry was never exorcised from the Arab world. In fact Arabs became its torch-bearers. On Jan. 14, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose university thesis was an exercise in Holocaust denial, shocked all right-thinking individuals with a speech dripping with anti-Semitism, and blaming the Jews for their own deaths in the Holocaust.

Eichmann himself hoped his “Arab friends” would continue his battle against the Jews who were always the “principal war criminals” and “principal aggressors.” He hadn’t managed to complete his task of “total annihilation,” but the Muslims could still complete it for him.

Enough said.

(Images added by Daphne. For the original article and its links go here)

Professor Efraim Karsh: "Adherence to Islamist ideals has subordinated Palestinian identity to the far wider ambition of Islamic world domination"

Professor Efraim Karsh's typically learned yet typically lucid and accessible article in the current (Summer 2014) Middle East Quarterly deserves to be widely read and widely shared.

Titled "Palestinian Leaders Don't Want An Independent State", it traces the sorry sinister saga of Arab rejectionism, its causes, and its implications.

Inter alia, Efraim Karsh's article observes:

'The Palestinian leadership's serial rejection of the numerous opportunities for statehood since the Peel Commission report of 1937 casts a serious doubt on its interest in the creation of an independent state. Instead of engaging in the daunting tasks of nation-building and state creation, all Palestinian leaders without any exception—from the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin Husseini, who led the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to the late 1940s; to Yasser Arafat, who dominated Palestinian politics from the mid-1960s to his death in November 2004; to Mahmoud Abbas—have preferred to immerse their hapless constituents in disastrous conflicts that culminated in their collective undoing and continued statelessness. At the same time, of course, these leaders have lined their pockets from the proceeds of this ongoing tragedy.

It can be shown that the main sources of this self-destructive conduct are pan-Arab delusions, Islamist ideals, and the vast financial and political gains attending the perpetuation of Palestinian misery....

If subscription to the pan-Arab dream has made the Palestinian cause captive to inter-Arab machinations, stirring unrealistic hopes and expectations in Palestinian political circles and, at key junctures, inciting widespread and horrifically destructive violence that has made the likelihood of Palestinian statehood ever more remote, adherence to Islamist ideals has subordinated Palestinian identity to the far wider ambition of Islamic world domination....

Nor is this supremacist worldview limited to Hamas. Since its rise in the early seventh century, Islam has constituted the linchpin of Middle Eastern politics, and its hold on Palestinian society is far stronger than is commonly recognized. Contrary to the received wisdom in the West, the PLO is hardly a secular organization. Arafat was a devout Muslim, associated in his early days with the Muslim Brotherhood, as were other founding fathers of Fatah, the PLO's foremost constituent organization. And while the new generation of Fatah leaders in the territories may be less religious, they, nevertheless, have a draft constitution for a prospective Palestinian state stipulating that "Islam is the official religion in Palestine" and Shari'a is "a main source for legislation."

 They have, moreover, utilized the immense inflammatory potential of Islam to discredit the two-state solution—and by implication, the prospect of Palestinian statehood—and to express their grandiose supremacist delusions....

Within these grand overlapping schemes of pan-Arab regional unity and Islamic world domination, the notion of Palestinian statehood is but a single transient element whose supposed centrality looms far greater in Western than in Islamic and Arab eyes....

For nearly a century, Palestinian leaders have missed no opportunity to impede the development of Palestinian civil society and the attainment of Palestinian statehood. Had Hajj Amin Husseini chosen to lead his constituents to peace and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, the Palestinians would have had their independent state over a substantial part of mandate Palestine by 1948, if not a decade earlier, and would have been spared the traumatic experience of dispersal and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation instead of turning it into one of the most murderous and corrupt terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state could have been established in the late 1960s or the early 1970s; in 1979, as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; by May 1999, as part of the Oslo process; or at the very latest, with the Camp David summit of July 2000. Had Abbas abandoned his predecessors' rejectionist path, a Palestinian state could have been established after the Annapolis summit of November 2007, or during President Obama's first term after Benjamin Netanyahu broke with the longstanding Likud precept by publicly accepting in June 2009 the two-state solution and agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

But then, the attainment of statehood would have shattered Palestinian leaders' pan-Arab and Islamist delusions, not to mention the kleptocratic paradise established on the backs of their long suffering subjects. It would have transformed the Palestinians in one fell swoop from the world's ultimate victim into an ordinary (and most likely failing) nation-state thus terminating decades of unprecedented international indulgence. It would have also driven the final nail in the PLO's false pretense to be "the sole representative of the Palestinian people" (already dealt a devastating blow by Hamas's 2006 electoral rout) and would have forced any governing authority to abide, for the first time in Palestinian history, by the principles of accountability and transparency. Small wonder, therefore, that whenever confronted with an international or Israeli offer of statehood, Palestinian leaders would never take "yes" for an answer.'

Read the entire (footnoted and illustrated) article here
On the same topic, see also here

"Palestine Soccer Team. Sending Out A Few Terrorists to Play Against You in Australia"

Streuth! How shall we Zionists, we-so-called hasbarafiosos, ever live this one down?  There was a Palestinian soccer team that visited Australia in 1939.  More irrefutable evidence that there was indeed a people known as "The Palestinians" well before Yasser Arafat snatched that term for propaganda purposes in the 1960s and ran with it.

To quote the original uploader onto YouTube:

"This video is one of endless evidents [sic] which prove that Palestine was inhibted [sic] by the Palestinaians before the jewish people came from all around the world to occupy this land ,demolish the cities and villages of Palestinians slaughter the people of this land and force them to leave their homes and property.

the result of this match : Palestine 1-0 Australia

this video was taken from the historian Ahmad Mrowat Mroueh Facebook page ..."

Not so fast, Ahmad, and those who have been misled along with you.  Have a listen to what the Aussie commentator says at 34 seconds and you'll learn that the "Palestinians" aren't Arabs, as you assume, but Jews:

"Wham! Saved! But then the Jews were always a saving race."

 But don't just take the commentator's word for it.

(Melbourne) Argus, 27 June 1939

Here's some background on the team (read the entire thing here, it's quite fascinating):

".... Ironically it was Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938 that put a Palestine tour of Australia back on the agenda.

The Australian Association had been in correspondence with Austrian club, Rapid, and the Indian National team about touring Australia. In June they rejected a proposal to bring out a Palestine team despite the Melbourne Jewish community backing the tour with £1000 and providing accommodation.

However when Rapid applied to the German Football Association for permission to tour it was rejected.

With little hope of any European side touring Australia, the Association eventually changed it's previous stance and in early 1939, agreed for Palestine to tour, as long as the financial backing was guaranteed.

Before leaving for Australia, the touring party laid a wreath on the Australian War Memorial, opposite the entrance gates of the British War Cemetery, at Mount Scopus, Jerusalem in memory of fallen Australian soldiers.

The players, who were mostly from the powerful Maccabi Tel-Aviv club side with a few players from other teams included to create a 'Palestine' banner under which to play. The Grand Mufti had a message for Australia, when placing this ad  in a newspaper upon the arrival of the tourists in Western Australia.

 The visitors were officially welcomed to Australia by the chairman of the board of control of the West Australian Soccer Football Association (Mr.F. Smith) and members of the board. Following the official reception, the Palestine players had their first practice run since leaving Ceylon at the Stephen street Reserve, after which they were brought to Perth and entertained at a luncheon tendered by the board of management of the Perth Hebrew Congregation. They then sailed for Melbourne in the evening...."

Also this:

Sydney Morning Herald, 1 July 1939

"An interesting soccer tour took place during this time of increased tension. In 1939 The Maccabi-Palestine team arrived in Australia for 5 test matches. Overall media response was very negative with suggestions that future tours should only be accepted from members of the Empire. The Sydney Morning Herald of 7th August 1939 described play as ‘wretched’ and stated that it ‘caused resentment among paying spectators’. This assessment is bemusing as although the tourists lost the test series they won 11 and drew 3 of their 19 matches – including big wins over Queensland, Victoria, Melbourne, South Australia and Western Australia.

Despite the negativity Avrah[a]m Reznik, Avrah[a]m Beit HaLevi and Menaham Mirmvotich remained in Australia. According to records at the Australian War Memorial two were killed in action serving Australia:

Menaham Mirvotich (2/11th Battalion - Infantry) died 12 May 1945 in New Guinea

 Abraham Bezalel Beth-Helevy [Anglicised] (2/12th Battalion - Infantry) died 21 January 1944."

http://www.ozfootball.net/museum/index.php/en/tours/253-1939-palestine-tour-of-australia

Sorry to disappoint you and your cohorts, Ahmad. But that's the situation as it was, and not as the Israel-delegitimising movement wishes it had been.

(Cross-posted to News and Jews from Jews Down Under here)

(Talking of matters historical, I see there are renewed calls to boycott the planned Oral History Conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Here's a list of  boycott advocates: what an obnoxious bunch of wretches.) 

Nazis & Islamists: People of a new book

During the course of an article in the Times of Israel, the respected British journalist and researcher Lyn Julius of the well-known Point of No Return blog mentions a book about the Jews of Iraq entitled New Babylonians by historian Orit Bashkin.

Writes Ms Julius, inter alia:

‘.... Until the late 1940s. Bashkin views Iraqi Jews as ‘patriots’ building the new independent state of Iraq – or seeking a universalist solution in Communism – until Zionism tore their relationships with their Muslim partners asunder. 

After the vast majority of Iraqi Jews had voted with their feet, joining the airlift to Israel, how does Orit Bashkin explain why Iraq continued its ‘misguided policies’ against the few thousand Jews ..., who remained behind? From the mid-1960s, these Jews were forced to carry special ID papers, were not allowed to travel or leave the country, had their bank accounts frozen and their telephones cut off. Such was the anti-Jewish campaign of terror unleashed by Saddam Hussein and his thugs, that the Jews were compelled to risk arrest by escaping the country....

By pegging the start of the Jews’ troubles to the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bashkin downplays the deleterious effects of the 1941 Farhud [see here]. The rising influence of Nazism in 1930s, resulting in the sacking of hundreds of Jewish public servants, quotas and restrictions and a deadly antisemitic cocktail of propaganda and incitement culminating in the 1941 pogrom, hardly feature in Ms Bashkin’s book. For her, the Farhud was most notable for the numbers of Muslims who saved the lives of Jews from the raging mob, demonstrating age-old friendship and shared coexistence.

In reality, the Jews of Iraq had a sense of foreboding about their place in an independent Iraq as soon as the British had marched into Iraq after the defeat of the Ottomans in World War l. Between 1918 and 1921 a delegation of Baghdad Jewish notables visited Sir Percy Cox, the British High Commissioner, on three occasions. They requested British nationality, fearful of what Arab rule might bring. This significant episode barely rates a mention in Bashkin’s book....

....As evidenced by a recent conference at the Yale Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Ms Bashkin is ... but one of a new crop of rising young stars in the field of Middle Eastern Studies. These scholars emphasise the points of connection between Arab and Jews, while erasing from the historical record, or glossing over, politically-incorrect human rights abuses. Some are eagerly redefining the identity of Jews in Arab countries as ‘hyphenated’ Arab-Jews, conflicted by the Arab-Israeli dispute, itself an aberration after centuries of peaceful coexistence. So desperate are post-modern academics to believe in the pre-Zionist ‘dominant mood of coexistence and friendship’ between Jews and Arabs, that they are willing to give ideological, Nazi-inspired, Arab Muslim antisemitism a free pass...."

My eye fell on Ms Julius's article just after I learned of the forthcoming publication of a new book co-authored by renowned Middle East specialists Professor Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, that's scheduled to appear in February.  Here's the blurb:

"During the 1930s and 1940s, a unique and lasting political alliance was forged among Third Reich leaders, Arab nationalists, and Muslim religious authorities. From this relationship sprang a series of dramatic events that, despite their profound impact on the course of World War II, remained  secret until now. In this groundbreaking book, esteemed Middle East scholars Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz uncover for the first time the complete story of this dangerous alliance and explore its continuing impact on Arab politics in the twenty-first century.

 Rubin and Schwanitz reveal, for example, the full scope of Palestinian leader Amin al-Husaini’s support of Hitler’s genocidal plans against European and Middle Eastern Jews. In addition, they expose the extent of Germany’s long-term promotion of Islamism and jihad. Drawing on unprecedented research in European, American, and Middle East archives, many recently opened and never before written about, the authors offer new insight on the intertwined development of Nazism and Islamism and its impact on the modern Middle East." 

Professor Rubin adds that the book contains a wealth of material never before published, much of it having only recently become available to researchers.  It includes items from Himmler's diary, the Mufti's SS speeches, reveals the money paid by Germany to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and sheds light on the refuge given to ex-Nazis by Muslim countries...

I for one shall place an order forthwith!

The Nazis & The Palestinian Movement (video)

Hat tip: reader Shirlee:

"The Delusionary Mirage Of A Moderate Palestinian Arab Leadership" (with video)

Michael Kuttner, who's on the staff of the Jerusalem-based Israel Resource News Agency, notes that during his speech of 4 January (excerpt above from MEMRI.org), Mahmoud Abbas

"spoke glowingly of the legacy of the infamous Mufti of Jerusalem who during the 1930’s instigated pogroms against the Jews of Palestine and who during his residence in Nazi Germany actively plotted a Final Solution to be carried out once his German friends had conquered the Allied armies. The “moderate” Abbas praised the Mufti as a great man whose ways should be emulated by all Palestinian Arabs. This amazing piece of advice which was part of a tribute to Fatah seems to have vanished from the media. Apart from The Israel Resource News Agency and Arutz Sheva which picked it up, this paean  of praise for an unrepentant Nazi supporter, has been ignored by not only the media but also by Israeli & Jewish leaders."

Muses Mr Kuttner:

"Where is the media in all this? Strangely silent it seems. Given the track record of many of them is it a case of sweeping inconvenient facts under the carpet lest it disturbs the prevailing political correctness which has been successfully peddled by those who see Israel guilty of all crimes and the Palestinian Arabs as angelic harbingers of peace?  The delusionary mirage of a moderate Palestinian Arab leadership promoted by Mr. Peres and fellow dreamers of a new Middle East is surely shattered by this praise of Amin All-Husseini, a symbol of the unending hate towards Jews and the Jewish State. The problem of course is that there are those who despite the murder and maiming of thousands of Israelis since the failed Oslo Accords, still hallucinate that all we have to do is shrink back to the legally non existent borders of 1948 & 1967, divide Jerusalem and reward those who murder Jews in Israel, in order for brotherly love and genuine peace to miraculously arrive."

See Michael Kuttner's entire article here

Hamas's War On Israel & The Mufti's War On The Palestinian Jews (videos)

Here's an action-packed video that conveys in brisk fashion something of Hamas's aggression against Israel, aggression that is not always as well-reported as it should be, certainly by the left-liberal MSM.  Among the snippets featured are the views of that steady friend of Israel, Jon Voigt:

And here, thanks to the same uploader, is a look at the Mufti of Jerusalem's links with National Socialism.  Such celebrated historians as Robert Wistrich and Sir Martin Gilbert are among the experts who appear in this video between the segments of historical footage:

Hat tip for both videos: islamatoon

The Farhud against Iraq's Jewry and Nazi Influences in the Middle East

It's the 70th anniversary of the Farhud (Arabic for "violent dispossession" or "pogrom"), which occurred in Baghdad on the afternoon of Sunday, 1 June 1941 (the Jewish festival of Shavuot) and continued until noon the following day when troops brought it under control.

As Lyn Julius, co-founder of Harif, an association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, reminds us in an article in the Jewish Chronicle (27 May 2011), the Farhud claimed more Jewish lives than did the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938,"yet has not become part of Holocaust memory.  Indeed, the Washington Holocaust Museum had to be vigorously lobbied to include the Farhud as a Holocaust event."

There's a good online account of the Farhud and what led to it and transpired from it here:  http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007277

As that account points out:

"In the 1940s about 135,000 Jews lived in Iraq (nearly 3 percent of the total population), with about 90,000 in Baghdad, 10,000 in Basra, and the remainder scattered throughout many small towns and villages. Jewish communities had existed in this region since the 6th century BCE, hundreds of years before Muslim communities established a presence in Iraq during the 7th century. The Jews shared the Arab culture with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, but they lived in separate communities. Jewish assimilation into Muslim society was rare.

With the establishment of the Iraqi state under the British Mandate in 1921, Jews became full-fledged citizens and enjoyed the right to vote and hold elected office. The Jewish community had between four and six representatives in the Parliament and one member in the Senate.... Its elite included also high-ranking officials, prominent attorneys and dignitaries, and wealthy merchants. This status of the Jews did not change in 1932, when Iraq gained independence under The British informal rule."

However, during 1933-34 Hitler's Mein Kampf (translated into Arabic) appeared in instalments in a Baghdad newspaper, Al Alam al Arabi.  The translator, Yunis al-Sabawi, headed the Futtuwa, a para-military youth organisation modelled on the Hitlerjugend. In October 1939, following the failure of the Arab revolt in Mandate Palestine that had broken out in 1936, the notorious Hajj Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, arrived in Baghdad, where he indulged in pro-Nazi, anti-British activity. On 2 April 1939 an anti-British nationalist politician, Rashid Ali al-Kailani, supported by al-Husayni, overthrew the pro-British authorities in a coup, and al-Sabawi became a member of his pro-German government, which, was destined to be shortlived, collapsing in May.

When, on 1 June 1941, Baghdad's Jews turned out onto the streets to celebrate Shavuot, they were set upon by nationalist elements who believed that they were celebrating the restoration of pro-British rule:

"Iraqi soldiers and policemen who had supported Rashid Ali al-Gailani's coup d'etat in April and Futtuwa youths who were sympathetic to the Axis incited and led the riots. Unlike in previous incidents, rioters focused on killing. Many civilians in Baghdad and Bedouins from the city's outskirts joined the rioters, taking part in the violence and helping themselves to a share in the booty. During the two days of violence, rioters murdered between 150 and 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes. The community leaders estimated that about 2,500 families - 15 percent of the Jewish community in Baghdad - suffered directly from the pogrom. According to the official report of the commission investigating the incident, 128 Jews were killed, 210 were injured, and over 1,500 businesses and homes were damaged. Rioting ended at midday on Monday, June 2, 1941, when Iraqi troops entered Baghdad, killed some hundreds of the mob in the streets and reestablished order in Baghdad."

By 1951, 124,000 Iraqi Jews, no longer comfortable in the land where countless generations of their ancestors had dwelt, had fled to Israel.

Owing to strict wartime censorship, the Jewish Chronicle did not learn of the Farhud until weeks later.  Its issue of 15 August 1941 revealed:

'Little more than two months ago there took place a horrible pogrom in the Middle East.  It occurred in Baghdad on the two days before the entry of the British troops, and some details of it are furnished by Mr Edward Kennedy in an Associated Press dispatch from that city.  According to him, some of the local policemen joined in the looting of the Jewish quarters which was started by deserters from the retreating Iraqi relief army.

"Shooting locks off or battering doors, pillagers rushed in shooting  or knifing anyone in their way.  Mutilated bodies were flung out of windows.... Furniture was pulled apart and tiles torn up from the floors in the quest for gold pieces.  Some Moslem homes were sacked, and in many cases Moslem looters killed one another.  Almost all the British homes also were plundered."

In all the loot is valued at £500,000 [about £25million in today's money - D. A.].

Two particular points about this ghastly incident are to be noted.  The first is that just as the Serbs in Croatia are today compelled, like the Jews, by local quislings to wear a distinctive armlet, so the Jews had non-Jews as fellow-sufferers in Baghdad.  Hatred and trouble begin with Jews but do not stop there.  

The second point is that the subversive and lawless class in Iraq is sufficiently large for the dispassionate observer to discount some of the effusive flattery lavished on Arab civilisation but so mysteriously withheld from Middle East Jews. And the best way to promote, even unintentionally, ill-will and outbreaks of violence against Jews of that area is for the government publicly and almost ostentatiously to discriminate against them.  [My emphasis]' 

A week later the Jewish Chronicle carried an extract from an editorial in the Manchester Guardian, one of the most pro-Zionist - if not the most pro-Zionist - of all the newspapers in Britain:

"After the last war we gave the Arabs freedom and great possessions, keeping only a corner for the Jewish National Home.  But when that great constructive idea justified itself, we allowed the small and timid minds of our own rulers to go back on it in the White Paper policy.  Now that the forge of war is again open, we ought to have it clear in our minds that any scheme which gives still further satisfaction to the Arabs must include justice to Palestine, the abandonment of the White Paper (which has neither legal nor moral validity) and the establishment of a well-based independent Jewish State.

The British policy of the National Home would stand even if there were no persecutions or pogroms of the Jews.  But of them, in the East as in the West, there is no end. Events recently took place in Iraq which passed almost unmentioned in this country: we maintain a drastic censorship in the Middle East, but news eventually comes from Cairo, Jerusalem, and the United States ... there was a pogrom against the Jews ....

Well might the daughter of Zion bewail herself, saying 'Woe is me now! For my soul is wearied because of murderers.'  The Baghdad Arabs were 'taking it out of' the Jews because we in Britain had carried out our promise to create a Jewish National Home in Palestine.  But we for our part ought to let the Jews fight for our cause as Jews (as the Poles do and the Czechs) to organise them more thorughly for the defence of their own country - a little more of this is now being done - and to establish a Jewish Palestine that can live, defend itself, and bring home its people, free or persecuted, from any part of te world.  Without such a State, which it is our duty to assure, there can be no lasting settlement."

And what of the Mufti,  Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who had been one of the fomenters of the Baghdad pogrom?

That dyed-in-the-wool Nazi sympathiser and blue-eyed "honorary Aryan" fled to Berlin, where he was cordially received by Ribbentrop and Hitler.  He requested a declaration of support for the right of the Arabs "to solve the question of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries ... as the Jewish question was solved in Germany."

After the Fuehrer promised him that Germany would bring about "the destruction of the Jewish element" in Arab lands presently under British control the old demon went to the Balkans, and in Bosnia recruited Muslims into units of the Waffen SS that slaughtered Serbs and gypsies as well as Jews in Croatia and Hungary.

In 1942, following the fall of Singapore, a broadcast in Arabic from Rome reported that he and Rashid Ali al-Gailani had sent a message to the Japanese Emperor congratulating him on that event, declaring that it "greatly encouraged" the Arab world, and that the Arabs hoped that the Axis Powers would soon liberate them from "the British-Jewish yoke".

He died in 1974, having evaded prosecution by finding asylum in Egypt and Lebanon.

Of course, his poisonous legacy, and that of other Arab pro-Nazi sympathisers like al-Gailani and al-Sabawi, lives on, as seen in the Der Stuermer-style antisemitism that still circulates in the Middle East.

Muffling the Mufti's Malevolence – "an Arab-role-in-the-Holocaust-denier"?

You may recall my post back in July headed “It’s an Unfair Cop, Guv! – Mr Plod shows some muscle”, which told how the prominent pro-Israel blogger Richard Millett, having been recognised as a supporter of the Zionist Entity, was denied access to a talk at the House of Commons and escorted off the premises by police. In his latest piece Mr Millett draws attention to a talk on Tuesday of this week at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) by Professor Gilbert Achcar. Professor Achcar, who occupies the Chair in International Relations at SOAS – which I’ve seen described as the most anti-Israel campus in Britain – was speaking about his new book, The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, to what Richard Millett, who was present, terms “a very receptive audience of 200 students”.

According to Mr Millett, Professor Achcar made such “outlandish claims “ as:

1. The Arabs bear no responsibility at all for the Holocaust.

2. The Israelis have Nazified the Palestinian people.

3. This Nazification has come about by Israel's broadcasting of the Mufti’s connections with Hitler during WW2.

4. The Israelis must apologise for the Nakba if there is to be peace.

5. The Israelis are today still frozen with fear by the Holocaust.

6. Any anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Arab world is purely a result of Israel's aggression.

What hope is there [asks Millett] when students applaud nonsense like this?

Millett adds: “If it wasn't bad enough having Ilan Pappe lecturing students full time at Exeter University his ideological twin is now doing the same at SOAS. The Arabs had a significant enough role in the Holocaust which makes Gilbert Achcar an Arab-role-in-the-Holocaust-denier.”

To read more, go to
http://richardmillett.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/arabs-and-israelis-facing...