The Arab Fuehrer: The Nazi connection to the PLO leadership
(Hawk- <<I'd appreciate it if you could assist me in expounding on the following subject.>> This is one of the articles that my son Rehan is presently working on for a newspaper that he contributes to.. I thought this may be useful for you, I asked him last night to fill me in although he did tell me that this is only half done but I had his permission send it to you)
No one characterises an ability to survive and adapt more than Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In the last 50 years of active politics he has managed to transform his image from terrorist to peace broker and now commands attention as a major global player. But this cannot hide his unsavoury past and perhaps one of the biggest obstacles in Palestine’s quest for a separate homeland has been the man himself.
His sincerity for peace must be questioned especially with a long history of anti Semitism and perhaps most important of all, an imbued talent of deception. Like other established Arab leaders he inflames the emotions of the Arab street with theatrics and propaganda however staunchly disclaiming any responsibility for terrorist acts committed by his followers.
In an interview with a London Arabic daily, Arafat called his mentor and predecessor Hajj Amin al-Husseini, "our hero" and drew an analogy between himself and al-Husseini who survived as a leader despite world pressure against him because of his Nazi ties saying: “We are not Afghanistan. We are the Mighty People. Were they able to replace our hero Hajj Amin al-Husseini? There were a number of attempts to get rid of Hajj Amin, whom they considered an ally of the Nazis. But even so, he lived in Cairo, and participated in the 1948 war, and I was one of his troops.”
Haj Amin al-Husseini was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921 and was key in engineering the bloody riots against Jewish settlement between 1929 and 1936. Most significantly during World War 2, Amin al-Husseini was also a Nazi sympathiser and met with Adolph Hitler in 1941. Hitler rebuffed the Mufti's requests for a declaration in support of the Arabs, however, telling him the time was not right. The Mufti offered Hitler his “thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab especially for the Palestinian cause and the Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely, the Jews.” He also appeared regularly on German radio broadcasts, with tirades approving Hitler's method of elimination of the Jewish problem. "Arabs! Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This saves your honor."
The Nazi mufti visited numerous death camps and on a visit to Auschwitz, he reportedly admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently. He also encouraged Hitler to extend the "Final Solution" to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine. In fact, on condition of a promise from Hitler to wipe out the Jews of the Middle East after the war, he also recruited tens of thousands of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania to the German SS. The "Hanjar troopers," as they were known, were a special Waffen SS company, which massacred Serbs, Jews and Gypsies and burned countless churches and villages. These recruits rapidly found favour with SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who established a special Mullah Military school in Dresden.
In 1967, Arafat succeeded the Mufti, after years of tutelage under the man that he called “Uncle.” Arafat would have done well to simply try and play down his notorious connection with the Arab Fuehrer but to draw comparison with him and inadvertently support one of the most ruthless regime in world history, shows an inherent inability to progress and perhaps this has come back to stall the peace process.
The Palestinian cause has bankrupted itself of any moral legitimacy through the pursuance of suicide tactics and it will not be resolved unless the current deadlock is broken through new impetus and fresh forward thinking. The 72-year-old dictator through his continual reference to a defunct past may soon have to realise that he has shed his final skin. |
