Free The Jew is Not My Enemy by Tarek Fatah Page A

School of Economics who volunteered in the Indian army’s Palestine Regiment and saw action in Syria and Libya. Few people have heard of the Palestine Regiment, a unit in which Jew and Muslim fought side by side against Hitler’s Afrika Korps in Libya.
    At the time of Kristallnacht, in 1938, the only Muslim monarch in Europe, King Zog of Albania, issued four hundred passports to German Jews so that they could escape Germany as Albanian citizens. Another Muslim monarch, the Arab King of Morocco – a direct descendant of Prophet Muhammad – went out of his way to protect the lives of his Jewish subjects. When the German-influenced Vichy government of France announced that it had prepared 200,000 yellow stars for the Jews of Morocco, King Mohammed v replied that he would need fifty morefor himself and other members of his royal family. He refused to make any distinction between his Muslim and Jewish citizens.
    Muslims from places as diverse as Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan in central Asia and France’s Tirailleurs Senegalese in Africa fought and gave their lives to end the Holocaust. Tens of thousands of Indian Muslims fell in such far-off battlegrounds as Singapore and the Sahara. Muslims contributed to the victory in battles from Stalingrad, where Hitler’s advance into the Soviet Union was blunted, to North Africa, where they helped send Hitler’s Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, scurrying back to his den in Berlin.
    In the cemeteries of El Alamein, Egypt, lie the dead Muslims – the Muhammads, the Khans, and the Ismails – who gave their lives so that Nazism could be defeated. The cemeteries of Stalingrad bear the names of the young central Asian Muslims whose tombstones remind us of the human spirit that came together to stop the Nazi war machine.
    But while the Muslim King Zog of Albania smuggled Jews out of Germany and King Mohammed of Morocco was giving them protection, there were other Muslims actively serving Nazi Germany.
    Most were recruited from among the Muslim soldiers of the Red Army taken prisoner during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941–42.
    The architects of this recruitment of Muslims into the Nazi army were two men with very different backgrounds. The first was a Muslim German of Uzbek ancestry, Veli Kayum Khan, who had fled communism and made Germany his home in 1922. Khan was the head of Operation Tiger B, assigned to form an exclusive Muslim regiment to aid the Nazi war effort on the Eastern Front. He was armed with an Islamic endorsement from one of the most prominent figures of the Muslim world, the Grand Mufti of Palestine.
    Operation Tiger B soon expanded, and the Wehrmacht established the 450th Infantry Battalion. By 1943, Veli Kayum Khan’s effortswould result in three more regiments that were all amalgamated to form a new division under the SS known as the East Turkestan Armed Formation. 2
    The Muslim soldiers in this division wore the regular German army uniforms but with one addition: an armpatch outlining the historic Chah-I-Zindeh mosque in Samarkand, with the phrase, Biz Allah Bilen (God be with us) under the mosque emblem.
    Veli Kayum Khan may have spoken the Turkic languages of the former Soviet soldiers, but it is unlikely he would have met the same success in his recruitment without the Islamic endorsement by the Grand Mufti of Palestine.
    Hajj al-Husayni was a guest of the Führer assigned the task of whipping up anti-Jewish sentiment among Muslims around the world. While Muslims from India to Senegal were dying fighting the Wehrmacht, Mufti Hajj al-Husayni was photographed with Hitler and often dined with Himmler. The Nazis even had him preside over the opening of the Islamische Zentral-Institut (Islamic Central Institute) in Berlin in December 1942.
    Hajj Al-Husayni’s flirtation with Hitler could be dismissed as trivial in the larger scheme of things, but his fascination with fascism did not end with the fall of Berlin. He was lucky. He had the distinction of