Trump, CNN, the Kurds, Normandy - and Israel? - by Alex Safian PHD

...So while the Jews of the Palestine Mandate (later Israel) fought on the British side, the leader of the Palestinians, Haj Amin al-Husseini, did everything in his power to help the Nazis defeat the Allies, and to murder the Jews. Perhaps Brooke Baldwin and her colleagues at CNN might want to consider tweeting about that — and covering it.

Alex Safian PHD..
CAMERA..
14 October '19..

After President Trump announced his controversial decision to pull some US troops from Northern Syria near the Turkish border, opening the way for a Turkish offensive against Kurds who had been allied with the US, the president attempted to explain his policy by noting that the Kurds are:

… fighting for their land, and as somebody wrote in a very, very powerful article today, they didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example, they mentioned names of different battles …

The president was apparently referring to a column by writer and US Army veteran Kurt Schlichter, which in its relevant section said:

Let’s be honest – the Kurds didn’t show up for us at Normandy or Inchon or Khe Sanh or Kandahar.

So the president wasn’t just referring to Normandy, he was following Schlichter in citing a number of notable US battles in World War II, the Korean and Viet Nam wars, and the post-911 battles against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Which brings us to CNN – covering the controversy, anchor Brooke Baldwin approvingly quoted a CNN contributor’s tweet:

BALDWIN: Before we talk about what President Trump said last night, there was a tweet that caught my eye this morning from one of our standing contributors, Wajahat Ali. And I just wanted to read it for you. He said, here are the countries that did not fight with the U.S. at Normandy whose leaders Trump nonetheless helps or praises, Saudi Arabia, Russia, North Korea, Israel, Turkey, Philippines, Egypt, Hungary. But he decides to single out the Kurds.

There are two notable things about the tweet that Baldwin approvingly cites:

1. The president didn’t just refer to Normandy, so harping on who fought at Normandy is a distraction from the larger point the president was making, whether one feels it is a valid point or not.

2. Why bring in Israel?

Some who have criticized President Trump’s rationale pointed out that in fairness to the Kurds, they don’t have a state now and didn’t have one during World War II either, so it would have been impossible for them to fight at Normandy or in the other cited battles as if there had been a country of Kurdistan.

Of course, Israel also didn’t have a state, and so organized Jewish forces didn’t fight at Normandy either. But what Baldwin and most of her viewers don’t know is that organized Jewish forces did fight in World War II, on the side of the Allies. Under the British-ruled Palestine Mandate (which ended in 1948), some 30,000 Jewish volunteers from the territory fought with British forces during the war, and in 1944 the British finally agreed to form a Jewish Brigade of some 5000 soldiers, which fought alongside British forces in Europe, and therefore also alongside United States forces.

While the British also attempted to enlist Arabs from the Palestine Mandate to serve the war effort, in the end very few did.

Perhaps this is because the founder and first leader of the Palestinian national movement, Haj Amin al-Husseini, known as the Grand Mufti, was an ally of Nazi Germany almost from the inception of Nazi rule, and fled to Berlin at the outbreak of World War II, where he closely collaborated with the Nazi leadership. Among the Mufti’s notable achievements during his Nazi years was his creation of a special Muslim Waffen SS Division in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Known as the Handschar Division, it committed brutal war crimes against Serbian Christians and Jews, leading the postwar Yugoslavian government to indict the Mufti as a war criminal.

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