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

egoism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God’s chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other people are animals,” al-Husseini declared, “makes them incapable of being trusted.” In this radio broadcast, which included an inflammatory tirade against both the Jews and the British, interspersed with citations of Koranic texts against the Jews, 58 the mufti said of the Jews: “They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals…. The divine anger and curse that the Holy Koran mentions with reference to the Jews is because of this unique character of the Jews.” 59
    In another Berlin radio broadcast, on March 1, 1944, the mufti urged his fellow Arabs to murder their Jewish neighbors: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” 60
    The mufti made it abundantly clear that he fully supported Hitler’s goal—the extermination of the Jews. “If, God forbid, England should be victorious, the Jews would dominate the world,” he said in a November 11, 1942, broadcast. “But if, on the contrary, England loses and its allies are defeated, the Jewish question, which for us constitutes the greatest danger, would be finally resolved….” 61 One year later, in his broadcast on Berlin radio, he praised Hitler for his results. “The Germans have never harmed any Muslim, and they are fighting our common enemy,” he explained. “But most of all they have definitely solved the Jewish problem.” 62
    On March 19, 1943, in a radio broadcast celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, the mufti invoked Muhammad as a pretext for inciting Muslim anger and violence against the Prophet’s enemy, the Jews. “Arabs and Moslems, on this occasion of the birthday of the Prophet, who crushed Jewish ambitions in the past and completely eliminated them from Moslem countries, thereby setting us an example, on such a day Moslems and Arabs should vow before God utterly to crush Jewish ambitions and prove that faith in God is greater than imperialism and far more powerful than the devilry which surrounds international Judaism.” 63
    His broadcasts provide irrefutable evidence that he knew about the extermination of the Jews. In a radio broadcast from Berlin on September 21, 1944, al-Husseini spoke of “the eleven million Jews of the world.” The mufti knew that in 1939 there were seventeen million Jews in the world. 64 The Israeli historian Moshe Pearlman, a contemporary of the mufti living in Jerusalem, concluded that the numbers used in this broadcast revealed the full extent of the mufti’s knowledge. “Why ‘eleven million’? No one outside Germany knew at the time the scale of Jewish extermination. It was known that before the war the Jewish population numbered nearly seventeen million. The ex-Mufti’s figure was written off at the time as a slip of the tongue, or an error in the script. But now the facts are known. It was no arithmetic error. Haj Amin knew then what only Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann knew: that more than five million Jews had been liquidated.” 65
     
    Haj Amin al-Husseini, Heinrich Himmler, and the Muslim Waffen-SS
     
    In 1943, Heinrich Himmler placed Haj Amin al-Husseini in charge of recruiting Muslims into elite units to serve in the Nazi-occupied Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East. It is an astonishing but often forgotten fact of history that as many as one hundred thousand Muslims in Europe were recruited by the mufti and fought for Germany during the course of World War II, 66 in divisions of the Waffen-SS. Under al-Husseini’s leadership and direction, two of the best-known and most infamous Waffen-SS Nazi-Muslim divisions were established in Nazi-occupied Bosnia and in Croatia, which had been given the status of a separate state after the German conquest of Yugoslavia. 67 In April 1943, at