39 Fall 2024 Bloudan, Syria. In 1938, the speech “Islam and the Jews” was published in German in Berlin. It was not the result of Nazi propaganda, but of his own interpretation of the Quran and the biography of Mohammed. The battle between Jews and Islam began when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina… In those days, the Jewish methods were exactly the same as they are today. Then as now, slander was their weapon. They said Mohammed was a swindler… They tried to undermine his honor… They began to pose senseless and unanswerable questions to Mohammed… and then they tried to annihilate the Muslims. Just as the Jews were able to betray Mohammed, so they will betray the Muslims today… The verses of the Koran and the Hadith assert that the Jews were Islam’s most bitter enemy and moreover try to destroy it.10 Husseini argued that the Zionist project was only the most recent of seven centuries of Jewish attacks on the religion of Islam, and therefore the effort to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was a religious obligation of all Muslims. Husseini arrived in Nazi Berlin in November 1941. He met Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and then Hitler himself. The photo of the two was published around the world. My book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World drew on German archives and the translations done by American diplomats in Cairo to offer the fullest account of the four years of anti-Jewish hatred in Nazi Germany’s Arabic language broadcasts.11 Occasionally, Husseini spoke in his own name, as he did on December 23, 1942, in an address at the opening of the Islamic Institute in Berlin. He brought the themes of Islam and the Jews to bear on ongoing events in World War II. The [Quran] says that they [the Jews] heat the cauldron of war and bring corruption on the earth and God does not like those who corrupt. Such are their ways. Even in this war, they have brought about the clash between different opinions and as [Chaim] Weizmann said, this war is a Jewish war and in point of fact world Jewry dictates the war as was the case during the days of Mohammed. The Jews have spread their influence over Britain. They dominate America. The Jews are behind destructive and atheist communism. They have brought people against each other and the catastrophes and tragedies which are happening now are caused by the Jews. The first enemies of the Moslems are today the Jews and the British and Americans who support them.12 Here, Husseini was echoing Hitler and Nazi propaganda that World War II was “a Jewish war.” Hitler claimed that the Jews intended to exterminate the Germans. Husseini and others participating in the Nazi Arabic propaganda alleged that there was another element to the plans of “international Jewry.” On November 3, 1943, the Voice of Free Arabism in Berlin program’s episode was entitled “Palestine between the Bolsheviks and the Jews.” It asserted that “the Jews,” especially in Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, “kindled this war in the interests of Zionism… The world will never be at peace until the Jewish race is exterminated. Otherwise, wars will always exist. The Jews are the germs which have caused all the trouble in the world.”13 The accusation expressed the convergence of Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism that was a central aspect of Nazi propaganda.14 Although Franklin Roosevelt’s views on Zionism remained ambiguous, public support for the Zionist project grew in response to news of the mass murders of Jews in Europe. Husseini said the following in a broadcast in March 1944: 10. Cited in Jeffrey Herf, NAZI PROPAGANDA FOR THE ARAB WORLD (New Haven: Yale University Press 2009); see also Matthias Küntzel, NAZIS, ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM AND THE MIDDLE EAST: THE 1948 ARAB WAR AGAINST ISRAEL AND THE AFTERSHOCKS OF WORLD WAR II, 3438 (London: Routledge 2024); Jeffrey Herf, “Nazi AntiZionism,” in THREE FACES OF ANTISEMITISM, RIGHT, LEFT AND ISLAMIST 42-60 (London: Routledge 2024). 11. Id. Herf, NAZI PROPAGANDA FOR THE ARAB WORLD. 12. Id. at 153. 13. Id. at 184; see also Herf, “Nazi Anti-Zionism,” supra note 10, at 52. 14. Herf, supra note 9. See, for example, Alfred Rosenberg, DER STAATSFEINDLICHE ZIONISMUS (Hamburg: Deutschvoelkische Verlagsanstalt, 1922).
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