As the chief propagator of Nazi ideology in the Muslim world, Haj Amin al-Husseini certainly belongs in Yad Vashem.
The Yad Vashem chairman recently released a statement defending the Israeli Holocaust museum’s decision no longer to display a photograph of an infamous meeting in 1941 between Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler.
The chairman argued that being forced to include the contested photograph is “tantamount to partaking in the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
In fact, the move, which glosses over the role that the mufti played in recruiting troops for the Nazis and personally helping to spread Nazi ideology throughout the Middle East and North Africa, prevents museum visitors from viewing a primary source with deep historical and present-day relevance.
Throughout Hitler’s rise to power, the mufti remained a leading figure in the Arab world, and his vehement anti-Semitism and contribution to organized war crimes against Jews have been and will remain significant facts in Holocaust history.
The mufti is best known for directly forming and training Arab refugees and Arab-Europeans in Waffen-S.S. (combat) divisions. He was tasked in 1943 by the S.S. with recruiting Bosnian Muslims in an effort to establish the “Mountain division.”
Muslims from working alongside the Nazis. Due to the mufti’s commitment to the program and robust propaganda efforts, an estimated 27,000 recruits signed up.
In addition to his endeavor to recruit Arabs into Axis armies, al-Husseini wholeheartedly supported Hitler’s master plan for Jews and had personal knowledge of how Nazi concentration camps operated. In a series of photographs sold at a Jerusalem auction in 2017, the mufti is seen alongside a handful of other global leaders at the Trebbin concentration camp in 1942. This serves as proof that the mufti understood the fate of Jews in Europe and hoped to emulate that path for Jews in the Arab world.
While recruiting for the Waffen-S.S. and visiting concentration camps certainly aided Hitler’s wartime agenda, the mufti’s most profound contribution to Nazism was in the propaganda realm. He spearheaded efforts to politicize Islam through radio interviews, pamphlets and newspapers that ultimately helped facilitate the emergence of a new Islamic anti-Semitism.
In his constant broadcasts on the Arabic-language Nazi network Radio Zeesen, he manipulated texts from the Quran to attack Jews as enemies of Islam. Between April 1939 and April 1945, Radio Zeesen broadcast in Arabic every day and al-Husseini was its key clerical voice.
The radio segments were professionally broadcast daily in various Arabic dialects to amass the widest range of listeners possible. The program severed as a significant tool for the mufti to propagate this new Islamic-based anti-Semitic narrative. By providing a religious justification for Jew-hatred, he was able to secure the Muslim supporters that the Nazi Party otherwise would have struggled to acquire.
In addition to Radio Zeesen, anti-Semitic Islamic literature spread like wildfire throughout Arabic-speaking communities. The manifesto Islam and Jewry combined anti-Jewish motifs in the Quran with modern European anti-Semitic tropes in a form that can be characterized as “Islamic anti-Semitism.”
As Matthias Küntzel explains in Nazi Propaganda in the Middle East and its Repercussions in the Postwar Period, the text exaggerated and highlighted classically minimal episodes of anti-Jewish moments in the Quran to appear to be central themes in the religious text. This propaganda disseminated among Muslims helped fuel the Jew-hatred on which Hitler would eventually capitalize.
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