Nazism and Islam share common values and, more importantly, a common enemy in the Jews, World War II-era Palestinian Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini is cited as telling his German benefactors in the latest survey of declassified US wartime documents.
Prepared by the UN National Archives, the report titled “Hitler’s Shadow” references thousands of declassified intelligence and diplomatic reports in detailing Husseini’s active cooperation with the Nazi leadership in its quest to rid the world of the Jewish people.
According to the report, Husseini was paid an enormous salary for fomenting hatred of the Jews in “Palestine” and for helping to recruit Muslims as Nazi soldiers. His contract with the Nazis also promised Husseini rulership over Palestine at the successful conclusion of the war.
One document cites Adolf Hitler as telling Husseini that Nazi Germany’s only aim in conquering Palestine was to eradicate the Jewish presence there. After that, the country would be Husseini’s to rule as he saw fit.
During a later recruitment trip to a Muslim-dominated part of Croatia, Husseini praised new Muslim recruits to the Nazi military, and stated that “the entire Muslim world ought to follow their example.”
Amazingly, or perhaps no so amazingly, as the war came to a close and it was clear the Nazis were going to lose, the British authorities in the Middle East were actually open to letting Husseini return and lead the Palestinian Arabs there.
One of the diplomatic cables has the British head of Mandatory Palestine’s Criminal Investigation Division telling the US assistant military attache in Cairo that Husseini could unite the regions Arabs and “cool off the Zionists. Of course, we can’t do it, but it might not be such a damn bad idea at that.”
The report concludes by noting that despite the mountain of evidence against him, the Allied powers allowed Husseini to flee to Syria after the war and did not pursue a criminal investigation. Husseini died in Beirut in 1974 as a hero among his people.
The international community’s lenient treatment of Husseini even though he had openly collaborated with modern history’s most brutal and criminal dictatorship was again repeated when the world decided to take the most blood-soaked terrorist in history, Yasser Arafat, and reward him by making him a head of state.
