The Grand Mufti's War Against the Jews - by Sean Durns

In 1937, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini released an “Appeal to All Muslims of the World,” urging them “to cleanse their lands of the Jews” and laying the foundation for the anti-Semitic arguments used by radical Arab nationalists and Islamists to this day.

Sean Durns..
JNS.org..
24 July '19..

This month marks the 45th anniversary of the death of Amin al-Husseini, the one-time Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi collaborator. Hailed as a “pioneer” by current Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, during World War II al-Husseini raised SS regiments in the Balkans, promoted the Reich’s propaganda in the Arab world, toured death camps and plotted the genocide of Middle Eastern Jewry. After he escaped justice, conventional wisdom has it that the Mufti ceased to be a political force in the post-war years. But conventional wisdom is wrong.

Declassified CIA documents—many revealed for the first time—and a recent book tell a different story, one in which al-Husseini continued to be influential more than a quarter-century after the war’s end. Although he would never regain the power that he once wielded, the Mufti remained a force to be reckoned with. Intelligence agencies closely monitored him, and Arab regimes variously sought his support or his assassination. Through it all he remained not only an unapologetic anti-Semite, but also an inveterate schemer.

The Mufti’s rise to power was itself owed to intrigues. The British, who ruled Mandate Palestine after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, made al-Husseini the grand mufti of Jerusalem in 1921, making him both the country’s highest Muslim cleric and leading Arab political figure.

As Wolfgang Schwanitz and the late Barry Rubin revealed in their 2014 book Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East, the 24-year-old with no religious training was likely chosen in recognition of his service as a spy for the British in the final years of World War I. The decision, the historians conclude, “was one of the most remarkable errors of judgment ever made in a region rife with them.”

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The writer is a senior research analyst for the Washington, D.C. office of CAMERA, the 65,000-member Committee for Accuracy and Middle East Reporting and Analysis.