In 1941, the Mufti went to Germany to meet with Nazi leaders and gave them drafts of a resolution he wanted to be passed by German and Italy declaring the illegality of the concept of a Jewish state in Palestine. Hitler told the Mufti that the policy of the Nazi regime was the elimination of all Jews, including those living in the British controlled territory of Palestine. According to an article in Catholic.com titled “Hitler’s Mufti,” The Nazis gave the Mufti a luxurious mansion that was confiscated from a Jewish family. According to Adolf Eichman’s chief Deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, the Mufti encouraged rapid implementation of the Final Solution against Europe’s Jews, and Eichman considered the Mufti a valuable advisor. When the war was over, in 1945, Yugoslavia attempted to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for recruiting 20,000 Muslim soldiers who killed Jews in Croatia and Hungary. He was put under house arrest in Paris, but escaped and managed to get to Cairo. Before his death, in 1974, he was thought to have planned the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan in 1951. He continued to carry speeches calling for the mass murder of Jews. The influence of Haj-Amin al-Husseini on radical Islam today has been immeasurable, and he is still revered by many Muslims.
The modern Muslim Brotherhood apparently is not trying to live down the anti-Semitism of the Mufti, but may even be doubling down on it. Former president of Egypt Mohammed Morsi referred to Jews as “Apes and pigs,” and that was mild compared to spiritual leader Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi who said on video that he desires another Holocaust against the Jews, this one carried out by Muslims.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been behind government overthrows, terror attacks and the popular condemnation of the West in Arab countries. In 1948, the assassination of Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi was thought to have been carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1949, the organization’s founder Hassan al-Banna himself was assassinated, and riots broke out. In 1965, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser carried out mass arrests over what he said was an assassination plot by The Muslim Brotherhood. As a result 27,000 were arrested and 26 were tortured to death. Anwar Sadat made some compromises with the Muslim Brotherhood, including the release of prisoners and a degree of freedom of expression, but no good deed goes unpunished: in 1981, Sadat was assassinated by an ex-Brotherhood member for his peace treaty with Israel. In 1984, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak recognized the Muslim Brotherhood as a political but not a religious organization, and the Brotherhood’s affiliate group Hamas was founded in Hebron. The Muslim Brotherhood gained control briefly in Egypt with the 2012 election of Mohammed Morsi, until he was overthrown by General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. In 2013, Egypt and then Saudi Arabia banned the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
Clearly, Adolf Hitler and Haj-Amin al-Husseini were birds of a feather, doing what they could, together and apart, to galvanize the discontented, the alienated and the willingly enthralled to carry out their fantasies of mass destruction. One man recently went out of his way to make just this one point and paid for it with his livelihood, at least temporarily: Former Red Sox pitcher and current ESPN baseball color commentator Curt Shilling was recently suspended from his network for tweeting a photo of Hitler captioned, “It is said that only 5-10% of Muslims are extremists. In 1940, only 7% of Germans were Nazis. How’d that go?” Shilling’s meme points out that it often doesn’t matter what the majority of people think or feel—if their rulers are crazy enough, we’ll go from a Nazi to an Islamic holocaust and won’t be able to tell the difference.
