Free Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam by David G. Dalin, John F. Rothmann Page A

closely with Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, the mufti organized and planned Nazi propaganda broadcasts throughout the Arab world. Throughout the war, al-Husseini appeared regularly on German radio broadcasts to the Middle East. He began making pro-Axis radio broadcasts from Berlin as early as December 1941. 51 In February 1942, he asked the Japanese to broadcast his Berlin-based radio addresses to Muslim areas in the South Pacific and to India. 52
    From his Arab bureau office in Berlin, the mufti was able to coordinate and broadcast daily radio messages. All the German and Axis radio stations were placed at his disposal, and Arabic radio programs were broadcast daily to every country with a Muslim population. 53 These broadcasts were vital to al-Husseini as a method of maintaining an active, live, audible presence throughout the Muslim world while he resided in Germany. Through these broadcasts, he was able to assert his leadership despite his physical separation from the Middle East and, in so doing, reach out to his extensive Arab constituency to further develop and expand his personal and political network in support of the German war effort.
    Many of the mufti’s pro-German propaganda broadcasts to the Middle East were directed specifically against the British. Arabs in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt were called upon, “in the name of the Koran and for the honour of Islam, to sabotage the oil pipe lines, blow up bridges and roads along British lines of communication, kill British troops, destroy their dumps and supplies, mislead them by false information [and] withhold their support.” In these exhortations, the mufti frequently reiterated to his Muslim listeners that they could achieve eternal salvation by rising up and killing the Jewish infidels living in their countries. 54 The mufti addressed a similar but special radio message to the Muslims of India, demanding that they rise up in rebellion against the British raj. Al-Husseini’s frequent radio addresses to the Middle East also warned his fellow Arabs to prepare for the moment when the German invasion force would come to liberate them. He, the mufti, would let them know when that moment had arrived. 55
    In several of the mufti’s radio broadcasts, he shared his microphone with Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, who had accompanied him to Berlin in the aftermath of their failed pro-German coup in Iraq and often joined him on German radio in issuing public calls for jihad against the British and their Western allies. On May 10, 1942, in one of their shared radio broadcasts commemorating the first anniversary of the outbreak of their pro-Nazi Iraqi coup, al-Gaylani ended his speech with the appeal “I call on you, O Arabs, to unite as one, to organize and fight for your independence and your rights. Unite, O Arabs, and rise against our common enemy, treacherous England.” 56
    For the mufti, as for al-Gaylani, however, the common enemy was not just Great Britain, but the entire Allied cause. The mufti often called upon the Muslims of the world to help Germany in the holy war it was waging against the British and their Western allies, especially the United States. Some of his radio broadcasts were devoted specifically to condemning American policy in the Middle East. In a radio broadcast from Berlin in March 1944, he denounced American policy with regard to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine: “No one [would have] ever thought,” he thundered, “that 140 million Americans would become tools in Jewish hands…. How could the Americans dare to Judaize Palestine?” 57
    Many of his most passionate radio broadcasts were classically anti-Semitic, designed to incite hatred and violence against radical Islam’s greatest enemy, the Jews. On November 2, 1943, at the public rally to protest the Balfour Declaration, al-Husseini used German radio to broadcast one of his most virulently anti-Semitic messages: “The overwhelming