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Arab and Muslim Anti-Semitism:
The propaganda of hatred

Hal Joffe

This speech was initially delivered to a Community Forum held by the Calgary Jewish Community Council on February 26/06. The issue then at hand was the publication of the Mohamed Cartoons by an independent Calgary newspaper, the Jewish Free Press. I have added other materials to this work since that time. The information was subsequently presented to a Board of Directors meeting of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews on June 8, 2006.

Many of these materials have been taken directly from a variety of sources. These sources are listed in the footnotes. A great deal more information regarding these issues is contained in them. Please read them together with the main body of this piece. Copyright in all reprinted materials, and the cartoons referred to, remains with the original copyright owner. Otherwise, all other material © 2006, Hal Joffe.

In the article, accompanying the republication of some cartoons depicting the Muslim Prophet Mohamed, publisher Richard Bronstein of the Jewish Free Press raised the issue of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism. He discussed the Mohamed Cartoon issue within the context of the routine publication of anti-Semitic and racist materials in the Arabic and Muslim press. That issue was all but ignored by the media and by our own Jewish Community leaders as the discussion centered on the hurt felt by the Muslim community. I felt then, and still feel, that it was an appropriate discussion to have, both within the Jewish community, with the Muslim and other faith communities and with our neighbours generally.

Palestinian, Arab and Muslim leaders and media outlets have long compared Israel to the Nazi regime. They routinely question the extent of the Holocaust or deny it altogether. Hitler's Mein Kampf ranks sixth on the best-seller list among Palestinian Arabs 1 and accusations of deicide and Jewish designs on world domination permeate the Arab and Muslim media and many of their school systems. Newly minted versions of the age-old blood libel are the subject of newspaper cartoons and mini-series on Arabic television. Arab and Muslim leaders routinely blame Jews or Zionists for terrorist acts which real, and often overwhelming, evidence points to originating within their own co-religionists.2

The day before Pope John Paul II visited the Temple Mount during his Holy Land pilgrimage in 2001, Shaikh Sabri, the Palestinian Authority appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem told the Associated Press: "The figure of 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust is exaggerated and is used by the Israelis to gain international support… It's not my problem. Muslims didn't do anything on this issue. It's the doing of Hitler who hated the Jews," The Mufti, who was appointed by Yasser Arafat, also told an Italian newspaper: "It's not my fault if Hitler hated the Jews. Anyway, they hate them just about everywhere." And he told Reuters "We denounce all massacres, but I don't see why a certain massacre should be used for political gain and blackmail."3

In the first months of 2006 alone we have the President of Iran denying the Holocaust and calling for the extermination of Israelis. Hamas was elected on a platform that includes genocide4 and declares that the Jewish plot for world domination is revealed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.5 And a Syrian government controlled newspaper proclaims that Israel created the avian flu virus in order to damage "genes carried only by Arabs."6

Where does this hatred come from? The status of Jews- and Christians- in Arab and Muslim lands prior to the last century was not ideal but most writers agree that it was not as harsh as the historical treatment of Jews under Christian rule. If we look at the considerable literature available about the position of Jews and Christians in the Islamic world, we find two well-established myths. One is the story of a golden age of equality, of mutual respect and cooperation, especially, but not exclusively, in Moorish Spain; the other is of “dhimmi”-tude, of subservience and persecution and ill treatment. Both are exaggerations. Like many myths, both contain significant elements of truth, and the historic truth is in its usual place, somewhere in the middle between the extremes.7 Jews and Christians were second class citizens in Muslim lands and were forced to acknowledge same. They were forced to pay special taxes and wear distinct clothing.8 Pogroms did occur but the myth of the blood libel, and accusations of Deicide, both of which were common forms of anti-Semitism in Christian lands at that time, were largely unknown in the Muslim world.9 Neither were Jews accused in Muslim lands of seeking world domination or associating with the devil as they were in Christian lands.10

Themes rooted in age-old Christian anti-Semitism began to spread in the Muslim world in the nineteenth century11 and gained traction as the Zionist movement grew in the late 19th and early 20th century.12 The themes of historical Christian, and ultimately Nazi anti-Semitism fully fused with traditional Muslim anti-Semitism under the reign and encouragement of Grand Mufti Sabri's very own predecessor, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammed Said Haj Amin al-Huseini.

In 1920, the 27 year old Haj Amin el-Husseini organized fedayeen13cells to terrorize Jews and further his efforts to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine. He was appointed as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 192114 and became President of the Supreme Muslim Council.15 Al-Husseini thereby became the religious and political leader of the Arabs of Palestine.16

Once in power, he continued his campaign of terror and intimidation against Jews and extended it to anyone opposed to his rule and policies.17

Al-Husseini’s propaganda , --- including a new translation into Arabic of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,18 --- precipitated major Arab riots in 1929 resulting in massacres of Jews in Hebron and Safed.19

In the early 1930s, al-Husseini made overtures to the new Nazi government of Germany and from then the influence of Nazi ideology grew significantly throughout the Arab Middle East.20 In 1933, al-Husseini contacted the German consul general in Jerusalem and requested German help in eliminating Jewish settlements in Palestine—offering, in exchange, a pan-Islamic jihad in alliance with Germany against Jews around the world.21 Around 1936 Adolf Eichmann visited Palestine and met with al-Husseini and subsequently maintained regular contact with him. 22

In 1941 his increasing role as a loyal Axis ally led the Nazis to invite the Mufti to base his activities in Berlin. On his arrival Husseini met with the German foreign minister.23 Three weeks later, he met for the first time with Hitler24 to whom he offered to raise an Arab Legion to help carry out Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. 25

In a speech announcing his arrival in Germany, Al Husseini called the Jews the “most fierce enemies of the Muslims” and an “ever-corruptive element” in the world. From his Arab Bureau office in Berlin, al-Husseini mobilized political and military support for the Nazi regime and organized networks of spies and saboteurs throughout the Arab world.26

There is also much evidence that the Mufti advised, encouraged and even assisted his German hosts in the destruction of European Jewry.27

In 1943 al-Husseini traveled several times to Bosnia, where he helped recruit two divisions of Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen S.S.’s28 notorious “Hanjar troopers,” who slaughtered 90 percent of Bosnia’s Jews and burned “countless Serbian churches and villages.”29

Possibly the most powerful tool of the Mufti’s Nazi propaganda was shortwave radio. From 1939 to 1945 Radio Zeesen broadcast daily Arabic-language programs to the Islamic world.30 The constantly repeated message was that “the Jew has been the eternal enemy of the Muslims since the time of Mohammed. It is pleasing to God to kill him”.31 Between 1939 and 1945, no other radio station enjoyed similar popularity in public places in the Arab world as this Nazi broadcast which, from 1941 onwards, was directed by the Mufti.32

After the defeat of the Axis powers, Haj Amin al-Husseini was placed under house arrest in France33 but escaped while under indictment as a war criminal at Nuremberg and fled to Egypt.34 From there he continued his incitement against the Jews of Palestine and his involvement with, and leadership of, the growing Muslim Brotherhood movement. His place as leader of the radical, nationalist Palestinian Arabs was then taken by his nephew35 and protégé Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Al Qudwa al-Hussaeini, better known to us as Yasser Arafat.36

From the seeds planted by the Mufti, anti-Semitism in the Arab world spread and flourished. We can draw a straight line from the Nazis and the Mufti to the anti-Semitism of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority and to that of other Arab and Muslim states. The Muslim Brotherhood movement was either directly involved in, or was an inspiration for, the creation of organizations such as Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Queda.

Radio Zeesen was closed down in April 1945. Today, other and newer technologies have added to radio and expanded the message’s reach. While the actual message continues to evolve the core of the message, including calls to genocide37 remains consistent.38 And one of their common tools of propagating the message is cartoons.

I wish to reiterate at this point that I am speaking about regimes in the Arab and Muslim world and the media and organizations they control, inspire and spawn. I am not speaking about the ‘men and women on the street’ in those countries who are manipulated by those regimes and are quite often the victims of their own governments.

Just before the Six Day War, cartoons published in the Arab press depicted Israelis using traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes although often with the drawing style of Nazi propaganda. But still the Jew was represented as being short, ugly and cowardly - someone who’s elimination would hardly require any effort on behalf of the Arab nations.39

This image of Israel and the Jews then changed. Since the Arab armies had been unable to drive the Jews into the sea, the Jews must be in league with the devil. The midget had mutated into a giant through a pact with Satan.40 This notion has permeated the Arab and Muslim world since 1967.

Belgian political scientist Joel Kotek recently completed a research project where he searched the Internet daily - for over two and a half years - to track anti-Semitic cartoons in the Arab media. He found about 2,000 of them. 2,000 in 2 1/2 years.41 That is more than 2 per day.

There are a number of recurring themes in these cartoons. One common motif is "the devilish Jew." Many others of these images convey the idea that Jews behave like Nazis, kill children and love blood. The similarity with themes and images promulgated by the Nazis is evident.42

According to Professor Kotek, Palestinian cartoonists often place emphasis on the accusation of "ritual murder". The blood libel first appeared as a 12th century accusation that Jews murdered Christians to obtain their blood for making Passover matzo. It was oft repeated by the Nazis as a pretext for their anti-Semitism and has since then found currency throughout the Arab and Muslim world. It is routinely alleged that Jews use victims blood for matzoh although this has been varied to include Hamentashen or Purim pastry. Most often the alleged victims are children. This imagery often underscores the claim that Israelis target Palestinian children.

In one of the most outrageous examples, the Arab world has in the past couple years experienced multi episode Television Series’ based upon the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and repeating the blood libel lie in very graphic detail.43 In 2002 a 41-part blockbuster Egyptian Ramadan special, Knight Without a Horse, spread The Protocols' defamation to a vast new audience and creating new legions of anti-Semites. In 2003 a different but similar Syrian produced series ran on Al Manaar Television – the television Network of Hizballah in Lebanon- during Ramadan. This is not unique to the Middle East- in 2002 the New Jersey based Arabic language newspaper, Arab Voice, serialized an Arabic-language version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its pages.44

Al-Ahram, the leading government-sponsored daily in Egypt, has expounded in great detail on how Jews use the blood of gentiles to make matzos.45 The blood libel has been repeated on Al Jazeera television.46An Egyptian intellectual, wrote about this in Al-Akhbar less than a year ago, claiming that the preference is for the blood of youths after raping them.”47 The blood libel has been repeated a number of times in Saudi and Syrian newspapers.48 It has also been repeated in European newspapers, such as the cartoon in the Guardian newspaper mentioned in the Jewish Free Press which was named Britain’s best Political Cartoon of 2003.

Within this context of constant repetition, we can understand the cartoons that run in media throughout the Arab world. From medieval Christian imagery, through to Alfred Rosenberg’s Nazi propaganda imagery of the Jew as the sucker of Aryan blood,49 we now have Jews as drinker of Arab blood, and a variety of lurid images of Israelis and their leaders with blood being a common theme. These are not purely political statement about Israel and the Palestinian struggle but rather are a calculated and constant reminder to the viewer of the blood libel and the inhumanity of the Jews.50

There is also an element of classic scapegoating learned directly from the Nazis- with the various regimes of the Arab and Muslim world attempting to create a boogey-man on whom to blame the ills of their regimes and the sorry plight of the people who live under those regimes. ‘Whatever is happening is not our fault - we do no wrong - it’s the Jews’. And haven’t we heard that song before.

Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim leaders, clerics, intellectuals, and writers, have also not hesitated in recent years to dismiss or distort the historical reality of the Holocaust, even as they accuse Zionism of being as bad or worse than Nazism. An article in the official Palestinian newspaper in 2001, asserted that “the figure of six million Jews cremated in the Nazi Auschwitz camps is a lie,” while pretending that this hoax was promoted by Jews as part of their international “marketing operation.”51

The current Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, wrote his doctoral thesis denying the Holocaust.52 Although he has recently recanted this, the lie is continually repeated in the media controlled by his Palestinian Authority and from pulpits by Palestinian Authority appointed clerics. Iranian media responded to the cartoon flap by announcing a holocaust cartoon contest. The European Arab League responded by publishing cartoons belittling or denying the holocaust. Even here, we have heard holocaust denial on Calgary phone in radio shows as a means of delegitimizing Israel.

Haj Amin al Husseini did his best during the Holocaust to see that none of its intended victims were diverted to Palestine from their journey to the gas chambers.53 His successor as Mufti had no compunction about lying to the media about the Holocaust and his predecessor’s involvement in it.

Sometimes, too, Holocaust denial and the claim that “Zionism-is-Nazism” are joined as it was at the United Nations sponsored so-called anti racism conference in Durban, which became an anti-Semitic hate fest. The message conveyed was that the Holocaust did not happen, the Jews used the myth of their extermination to shame the world into giving them a state at the expense of the Palestinians who the Israelis now commit genocide against in a way that is far worse than the Nazis are alleged to have committed against the Jews. The Jews are the new Nazis.54

In July 2006 this was taken one step further. In an article in the English-language edition of the London Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat, columnist and former editor of the paper Jihad Al-Khazen claims that Israeli political military leaders are actually grandsons of Nazi killers who assumed Jewish identities and fled to Israel.55 He then slanders specific individuals with this allegations and states, about them: “Ehud Olmert's government perpetrates definite Nazi practices against the Palestinians and the Lebanese. He is a young Führer, and his generals, like Dan Halutz and Moshe Kaplinsky, are commando generals.”56

A similar- and to me related, historical fabrication is the newer myth that the Jews have no claim to Jerusalem. As with Arab and Muslim Holocaust denial, the denial of a historical link between Judaism and Jerusalem is a fabrication of history built and used to support the Palestinian political narrative since 1967.57 According to former US Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, during the 2000 Camp David Summit, Yasser Arafat said that no Jewish Temple ever existed on the Temple Mount.58 A year later, the Palestinian Authority-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Sabri, who we met earlier in my talk, told the German publication Die Welt, "There is not [even] the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history."

These views are contradicted by a book entitled A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif, published by the Supreme Moslem Council in 1930. The Council, ironically then under the leadership of our other old pal, Haj Amin al-Husseini, said in the guide that the Temple Mount site "is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings."59

Indeed, For centuries until 1967, the story of the Jewish Holy Temple - details about its construction, traditions surrounding its existence, and even details of the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar - was a deeply rooted and undenied motif found in Muslim and Arabic literature. Classical Arab sources identify the place where Al-Aqsa stands with where the Temple of Solomon stood.60

These recent fabrications are repeated time and again, in a variety of media and forums. While they may not gain cachet within the western world, they do gain traction within the Arab and Muslim world and become common belief, or at least common expression of belief.61

Even in the 20th century, the Palestinian historian Araf al-Araf wrote (before 1967) that the site of the Haram al-Sharif is that of Mount Moriah, which David purchased in order to build the Temple. This Palestinian historian even added that the remains of the structures underneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque date to the period of Solomon. Nevertheless, these statements were written at a time when the Old City of Jerusalem was part of the Kingdom of Jordan, and they barely echo in the Arab history books written since 1967 or in contemporary discourse.62

Such Arab and Muslim ‘Jerusalem Denial’ or ‘Temple Denial’ is akin to Holocaust Denial in that it is a denial of Jewish history for Muslim political purposes. But Temple Denial is even broader than Holocaust denial- denying that there was a Temple on the Temple Mount is also a denial of Christian history. The Christian gospels relay that Jesus overturned the tables of the money lenders at the Temple in Jerusalem. Other parts of those Gospels relate Jesus’ ministry to Temple activity and practice. Denying the Jewish Temple and Jewish history in Jerusalem is also a denial of Christian history in that holy city.

This continual propaganda has been effective on the streets of the Middle East. It also seems to have had an impact in Europe and at the United Nations and has gained some acceptance in North America, particularly on the left.

In contrast to what we have seen in the Middle East, the Near East and also in Europe, the reaction of the Muslim community in North America - and Calgary in particular- to the publication of Muhamed cartoons was outrage but outrage expressed within legitimate democratic bounds. That is a good thing. We must assume, however, that many of the recent immigrants to Canada from Arab and Muslim countries were brought up on a steady diet of state sponsored anti-Semitism in their home countries. We all know how difficult it is to change notions that have been part of one’s mindset since early childhood, particularly when those views are often repeated and reinforced by sources and media we choose to view. Given this, as a community, it is incumbent on Jews to frankly dialogue with our Arab and Muslim neighbours, to educate them about us, to dissect and debunk the stereotypes and myths, to build reciprocated respect for each other while at the same time being very prepared and willing to confront those who would use these lies for their own propaganda purposes. In addition, we must continue to build relations with all of our other neighbours in order to educate them on our sensitivity to these issues and to inoculate them from these often repeated lies.

  1. Paul Longgrear, Raymond McNemar, http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/antiholo/arabnazi.html
  2. When the Syrian president, Bashar Al-Assad, welcomed Pope John Paul II on his historic visit to Damascus in early May 2001. Assad did his best to cobble together the core message of European Christian and Islamic anti-Semitism. In a single sentence he publicly told the Pontiff that the Jews and Israelis try to kill all the principles of divine faiths, they betrayed Jesus Christ and tortured Him in the same way they committed treachery against the Prophet Muhammad. Various conspiracy theories, too numerous to cite, blame Jews and Zionists with the 2001 World Trade Centre destruction. More recently, within hours of the destruction of a major Shiite shrine in Iraq, the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, blamed the United States and Zionists- without providing any evidence- and used it as a pretext to threaten retalliation for the outrage to Islam
    (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/23/AR2006022300158.html). "They invade the shrine and bomb there because they oppose God and justice," Ahmadinejad said, alluding to the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq. "These passive activities are the acts of a group of defeated Zionists and occupiers who intended to hit our emotions," he said in a speech that was broadcast on state television. Addressing the United States, he added: "You have to know that such an act will not save you from the anger of Muslim nations."
  3. Syrian News Agency, May 5, 2001.
  4. Hamas Charter, Article 7: http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm. According to http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/european-roots-of-anti-Semitism-in-current-islamic-thinking: The Protocols are in fact an instrument of war. They project all the supposed evils of modernity onto one single enemy, the Jews, dividing the world on Manichean lines: on the one side the endangered Good, on the other, the Jewish Evil, leaving as the only choice either the destruction of this Evil or one’s own downfall. In Russia, this pamphlet triggered pogroms, while in Germany it was the textbook for the Holocaust; no other forgery had greater influence on Hitler’s policy towards the Jews.[ Stephen Eric Bronner, Ein Gerücht über die Juden. Die ‘Protokolle der Weisen von Zion’ und der alltägliche Rassismus (Berlin, 1999), pp. 129ff]
  5. Hamas Charter, Article 32: http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm
  6. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) digest 1094; http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD109406
  7. Bernard Lewis, The New Anti-Semitism, The American Scholar - Volume 75 No. 1 Winter 2006 pp. 25-36
  8. See, for example, Fadiey Lovsky, anti-Semitisme et mystere d’Israel (Paris, Albin Michael, 1955), p. 246. Yellow cloth was reserved for Jews, Blue for Christians.
  9. Ibid., p. 150.
  10. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites,(New York: Norton, 1986) p. 122, 132.
  11. Lewis, op. Cit., pp. 132-133.
  12. http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/anti-Semitism-in-the-middle-east-abbas-and-hamas: Also considered in historical terms, Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism is not an immediate result of the present Middle East conflict. As far back as 1894, before a Zionist movement even existed, the first translation of the German antisemite August Rohling’s The Talmud Jew appeared in Arabic. The publication of this book – which popularized the concept of the “Jewish threat” – can be considered as the starting point of modern Arab anti-Semitism. In 1920, there followed the first Arabic translation of one of the most repugnant anti-Jewish publication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (See: The Development of Arab anti-Semitism. An interview with Meir Litvak in: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism No. 5, February 2 2003, p 2.). One year later, on March 14, 1921, when Winston Churchill, at the time Britain’s Colonial Minister, paid a visit to Jerusalem, he was handed an antisemitic document by the Palestinian Arab Congress, led by Musa Kasim el-Husseini, which the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg could easily have written himself: “… Jews have been amongst the most active advocates of destruction in many lands”, this memorandum claimed without saying a single word about the actual conduct of Zionist settlers, “… It is well known that the disintegration of Russia was wholly or in great part brought about by the Jews, and a large portion of the defeat of Germany and Austria must also be put at their door. … The Jew is a Jew all the world over. He amasses the wealth of a country and then leads its people, whom he has already impoverished, where he chooses. He encourages wars when self-interest dictates, and thus uses the armies of the nations to do his bidding.” See: Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume IV Companion Part 2 Documents July 1919 – March 1921, pp.1386 – 1388.
  13. "one who sacrifices himself". Myths and Facts, Michael Bard, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf2.html#39, Haj Amin hoped to duplicate the success of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey by driving the Jews out of Palestine just as Kemal had driven the invading Greeks from his country. Arab radicals were able to gain influence because the British Administration was unwilling to take effective action against them until they finally revolted against British rule. (Jon Kimche, There Could Have Been Peace: The Untold Story of Why We Failed With Palestine and Again With Israel, (England: Dial Press, 1973), p. 189.)
  14. The son of the Mufti of Jerusalem and the child of a wealthy and influential Palestinian Arab family, al-Husseini was born in Jerusalem in 1893. Amin al-Husseini studied religious law at al-Azhar University, Cairo, and attended the Istanbul School of Administration. In 1913 he went to Mecca on a pilgrimage, earning the honorary title of "Haj". He voluntarily joined the Ottoman Turkish army in World War I but returned to Jerusalem in 1917 and expediently switched sides to aid the victorious British. Living in Jerusalem during the 1920s, he quickly emerged as the recognized leader of the Arabs under the British government in Palestine. From his earliest years, Kenneth R. Timmerman recently noted, al-Husseini was “a ferocious opponent of Jewish immigration to Palestine,” with an unrelenting hatred of the Jews and the British. His career as an anti-Semitic agitator and terrorist began on April 4, 1920, when he and his followers went on a murderous rampage, attacking Jews on the street and looting Jewish stores. He was subsequently convicted by a military tribunal of inciting the anti-Semitic violence that had resulted in the killing of five Jews and the wounding of 211 others. Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, former head of British military intelligence in Cairo, and later Chief Political Officer for Palestine and Syria, wrote in his diary that British officials “incline towards the exclusion of Zionism in Palestine.” In fact, the British encouraged the Palestinians to attack the Jews. According to Meinertzhagen, Col. Waters Taylor (financial adviser to the Military Administration in Palestine 1919-23) met with Haj Amin a few days before Easter, in 1920, and told him “he had a great opportunity at Easter to show the world...that Zionism was unpopular not only with the Palestine Administration but in Whitehall and if disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at Easter, both General Bols [Chief Administrator in Palestine, 1919-20] and General Allenby [Commander of Egyptian Force, 1917-19, then High Commissioner of Egypt] would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish Home. Waters-Taylor explained that freedom could only be attained through violence.” (Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary 1917-1956, (London: The Cresset Press, 1959), pp. 49, 82, 97. Haj Amin took the Colonel’s advice and instigated a riot. The British withdrew their troops and the Jewish police from Jerusalem, allowing the Arab mob to attack Jews and loot their shops. Because of Haj Amin's overt role in instigating the pogrom, the British decided to arrest him. Haj Amin escaped, however, and was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in absentia. Myths and Facts, Michael Bard, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf2.html#39, A year later, some British Arabists convinced High Commissioner Herbert Samuel to pardon Haj Amin and to appoint him Mufti. By contrast, Vladimir Jabotinsky and several of his followers, who had formed a Jewish defense organization during the unrest, were sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.( Samuel Katz, Battleground-Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, (NY: Bantam Books, 1977), pp. 63-65; Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 97). Samuel met with Haj Amin on April 11, 1921, and was assured “that the influences of his family and himself would be devoted to tranquility.” Three weeks later, riots in Jaffa and elsewhere left 43 Jews dead. (Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, (NY: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 438).
  15. The first Palestine High Commissioner. Sir Herbert Samuel arrived in Palestine on July 1, 1920. He was a weak administrator who was too ready to compromise and appease the extremist, nationalistic Arab minority led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. When al-Huseini’s father, the existing Arab Mufti of Jerusalem (religious leader) died in 1921, Samuels, himself a Jew, was influenced by anti-Zionist British officials on his staff. He pardoned al-Husseini and, in January 1922, appointed him as the new Mufti, and even invented a new title of Grand Mufti. See also Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem, Simon & Schuster, 1973, p.47.
  16. William Ziff, "The Rape of Palestine,", p. 22. Haj Amin consolidated his power and took control of all Muslim religious funds in Palestine. He used his authority to gain control over the mosques, the schools and the courts. No Arab could reach an influential position without being loyal to the Mufti. His power was so absolute “no Muslim in Palestine could be born or die without being beholden to Haj Amin.”35 The Mufti’s henchmen also insured he would have no opposition by systematically killing Palestinians from rival clans who were discussing cooperation with the Jews. (Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem!, (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 52).
  17. http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_grand_mufti.php. Husseini was not willing to negotiate or make any kind of compromise for the sake of peace. Prior to his rise to power, there were active Arab factions supporting cooperative development of Palestine involving Arabs and Jews. But al-Husseini would have none of that; he was devoted to driving Jews out of Palestine, without compromise, even if it set back the Arabs 1000 years. As the spokesman for Palestinian Arabs, Haj Amin did not ask that Britain grant them independence. On the contrary, in a letter to Churchill in 1921, he demanded that Palestine be reunited with Syria and Transjordan. (Jon Kimche, There Could Have Been Peace: The Untold Story of Why We Failed With Palestine and Again With Israel, (England: Dial Press, 1973), p. 211). The Arabs found rioting to be an effective political tool because of the lax British attitude and response toward violence against Jews. In handling each riot, the British did everything in their power to prevent Jews from protecting themselves, but made little or no effort to prevent the Arabs from attacking them. After each outbreak, a British commission of inquiry would try to establish the cause of the violence. The conclusion was always the same: the Arabs were afraid of being displaced by Jews. To stop the rioting, the commissions would recommend that restrictions be placed on Jewish immigration. Thus, the Arabs came to recognize that they could always stop the influx of Jews by staging a riot. Myths and Facts, Michael Bard, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf2.html#39, This cycle began after a series of riots in May 1921. After failing to protect the Jewish community from Arab mobs, the British appointed the Haycraft Commission to investigate the cause of the violence. Although the panel concluded the Arabs had been the aggressors, it rationalized the cause of the attack: “The fundamental cause of the riots was a feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews, due to political and economic causes, and connected with Jewish immigration, and with their conception of Zionist policy....”37 One consequence of the violence was the institution of a temporary ban on Jewish immigration. (Ben Halpern, The Idea of a Jewish State, (MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 323.)
  18. http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0508/opinion/dalin.html
  19. ibid. As before, the British Administration made no effort to prevent the violence and, after it began, the British did nothing to protect the Jewish population. After six days of mayhem, the British finally brought troops in to quell the disturbance. By this time, virtually the entire Jewish population of Hebron had fled or been killed. In all, 133 Jews were killed and 399 wounded in the pogroms. (Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 174) After the riots were over, the British ordered an investigation, which resulted in the Passfield White Paper. It said the “immigration, land purchase and settlement policies of the Zionist Organization were already, or were likely to become, prejudicial to Arab interests. It understood the Mandatory’s obligation to the non-Jewish community to mean that Palestine’s resources must be primarily reserved for the growing Arab economy....” This, of course, meant it was necessary to place restrictions not only on Jewish immigration but on land purchases. (Ben Halpern, The Idea of a Jewish State, (MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 201.)
  20. The alliance between Adolf Hitler and the Muslim fundamentalist world was initiated and forged by the Grand Mufti at the very beginning of the new Nazi regime. In late March 1933, al-Husseini contacted the German consul general in Jerusalem and requested German help in eliminating Jewish settlements in Palestine—offering, in exchange, a pan-Islamic jihad in alliance with Germany against Jews around the world. However, it was not until 1938, in the aftermath of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous capitulation to Hitler at Munich, that Haj Amin al-Husseini’s overtures to Nazi Germany were officially reciprocated. In 1934, when the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws were promulgated, telegrams of congratulations to Hitler were sent from all over the Islamic world—especially from Morocco and Palestine, where the German propaganda machine had been most active. Paul Longgrear and Raymond McNemar in their 2003 essay, “The Arab/Muslim Nazi Connection,”. Several of the Arab political parties founded during the 1930s were modeled after the Nazi party, including the Syrian Popular Party and the Young Egypt Society, which were explicitly anti-Semitic in their ideology and programs. The leader of Syria’s Socialist Nationalist Party, Anton Sa’ada, imagined himself an Arab Hitler and placed a swastika on his party’s banner. The pro-Nazi mood and increasingly anti-Jewish worldview of al-Husseini and his cohorts among the new Arab leadership was described this way by a leader of the Baath party in Syria: “We were racists, admiring Nazism, reading its books and the sources of its thought, particularly Nietzsche, Fichte, and H.S. Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which revolves on race. We were the first to think of translating Mein Kampf. Whoever lived during this period in Damascus would appreciate the inclination of the Arab people to Nazism, for Nazism was the power which could serve as its champion, and he who is defeated will by nature love the victor.” According to http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/antiholo/arabnazi.html Husseini represents the prevalent pro-Nazi posture among the Arab/Muslim world before, during and even after the Holocaust. The Nazi-Arab connection existed even when Adolf Hitler first seized power in Germany in 1933. News of the Nazi takeover was welcomed by the Arab masses with great enthusiasm, as the first congratulatory telegrams Hitler received upon being appointed Chancellor came from the German Consul in Jerusalem, followed by those from several Arab capitals. Soon afterwards, parties that imitated the National Socialists were founded in many Arab lands, like the "Hisb-el-qaumi-el-suri" (PPS) or Social Nationalist Party in Syria. Its leader, Anton Sa'ada, styled himself the Führer of the Syrian nation, and Hitler became known as "Abu Ali" (In Egypt his name was "Muhammed Haidar"). The banner of the PPS displayed the swastika on a black-white background. Later, a Lebanese branch of the PPS – which still receives its orders from Damascus – was involved in the assassination of Lebanese President Pierre Gemayel. The most influential party that emulated the Nazis was "Young Egypt," which was founded in October 1933. They had storm troopers, torch processions, and literal translations of Nazi slogans – like "One folk, One party, One leader." Nazi anti-Semitism was replicated, with calls to boycott Jewish businesses and physical attacks on Jews. Britain had a bitter experience with this pro-German mood in Egypt, when the official Egyptian government failed to declare war on the Wehrmacht as German troops were about to conquer Alexandria.
  21. http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0508/opinion/dalin.html
  22. In 1936 the Arab Higher Committee, led by the Grand Mufti, organized a campaign of terror - known as the Arab Revolt – against Jewish and British targets. According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the Nazi SS helped finance the revolt. Following an assassination attempt on the British Inspector-General of the Palestine Police Force and the murder by Arab extremists of Jews and moderate Arabs, the Arab Higher Committee was declared illegal by the British. The Grand Mufti was forced into exile in 1937 and he eventually moved his base of operations to Iraq in 1939, where he aided the pro-Nazi coup of 1941. The Mufti helped establish the strongly pro-German Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as prime minister of Iraq. The coup, and the new pro-Nazi government were subsequently overrun by the British, resulting in the Mufti fleeing Iraq.
  23. The Grand Mufti met with te foreign minister, Ernst von Weizsacker, on November 6, 1941.
  24. November 28, 1941.
  25. As Kenneth R. Timmerman argues, “al-Husseini owes his place in history” to this meeting, where he offered to raise an Arab legion to help carry out Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. “The mufti’s close ties to Hitler, and his total embrace of Hitler’s Final Solution,” concludes Timmerman, “provides the common thread linking past to present. If today’s Muslim anti-Semitism is like a tree with many branches, its roots feed directly off of Hitler’s Third Reich.” According to “Myths and Facts”, Michael Bard, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf2.html#39, on November 1941, the Mufti met with Hitler, who told him the Jews were his foremost enemy. The Nazi dictator rebuffed the Mufti's requests for a declaration in support of the Arabs, however, telling him the time was not right. The Mufti offered Hitler his “thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches....The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely....the Jews....” Hitler replied:
    Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine. ...Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle. ...Germany's objective [is]...solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere. ...In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. The Mufti thanked Hitler profusely.
    See also: Record of the Conversation Between the Fuhrer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941, in the Presence of Reich Foreign Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin, Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Series D, Vol. XIII, London, 1964, p. 881ff in Walter Lacquer and Barry Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, (NY: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 51-55.
  26. From the outset of his stay in Berlin the Mufti was portrayed in Nazi propaganda as the spiritual and religious leader of Islam. On January 8, 1942 Radio Berlin reported that the Mufti had “announced in a telegram to the German Führer before the whole world his adherence to the Tripartite Pact against Britain, Jews, and Communists.” As Bernard Lewis has reminded us, even Anwar Sadat, “by his own admission, worked as a German spy in British-occupied Egypt” for al-Husseini. According to http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/antiholo/arabnazi.html the only condition the Mufti set for his help was that after Hitler won the war, the entire Jewish population in Palestine should be liquidated. After the war, Husseini fled to Switzerland and from there escaped via France to Cairo, were he was warmly received. The Mufti used funds received earlier from the Hilter regime to finance the Nazi-inspired Arab Liberation Army that terrorized Jews in Palestine.
  27. “It is hardly accidental that the beginning of the systematic physical destruction of European Jewry by Hitler’s Third Reich roughly coincided with the Mufti’s arrival in the Axis camp,” Joseph B. Schechtmann pointed out in his 1965 book The Mufti and the Führer. And much of the Arab-Muslim leadership in the Middle East learned to share al-Husseini’s ideas about the Jews during the Second World War. As early as 1940, al-Husseini requested the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right:
    ... to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy.
    This was a common request of the Mufti. According to “Myths and Facts”, Michael Bard, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf2.html#39, the Mufti sent Hitler 15 drafts of declarations he wanted Germany and Italy to make concerning the Middle East. One called on the two countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine. Furthermore, “they accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of the Arabs and, by the same method, that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries.” See also “Grand Mufti Plotted To Do Away With All Jews In Mideast,” Response, (Fall 1991), pp. 2-3.
  28. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem, Simon & Schuster, 1973, p.44; http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/antiholo/arabnazi.html,
  29. Various sources including http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0508/opinion/dalin.html. According to http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/antiholo/arabnazi.html to show gratitude towards his hosts, in 1943 the Mufti travelled several times to Bosnia, where on orders of the SS he recruited the notorious "Hanjar troopers," a special Bosnian Waffen SS company. These Bosnian Muslim recruits rapidly found favor with SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who established a special Mullah Military school in Dresden.
  30. http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/european-roots-of-anti-Semitism-in-current-islamic-thinking
  31. Ibid.
  32. Ibid., citing Matthias Küntzel, ‘Von Zeesen bis Beirut. Nationalsozialismus und Anti-Semitismus in der arabischen Welt’, in D. Rabinovici, U. Speck, N. Sznaider, Neuer Anti-Semitismus? Eine globale Debatte (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), pp. 271ff. On November 2, 1943, less than three weeks after the initial Nazi roundup of Roman Jews and the beginning of the Nazi occupation of the Italian capital, he broadcast one of his most virulently anti-Semitic messages: “The overwhelming 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” makes them “incapable of being trusted. They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals.” “Kill the Jews wherever you find them,” the Mufti told his growing Arab radio audience in 1944. “This pleases God, history, and religion.”
  33. Who was Who in World War II, John Keegan, Ed., Bison Books, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1984, p. 116.
  34. With the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Mufti moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero (www.palestinefacts – op.cit.) and received political asylum (Dalin, op. cit.). After the war al-Husseini was indicted by Yugoslavia for war crimes, but escaped prosecution. The Mufti was never tried because the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if the hero of Arab nationalism was treated as a war criminal. According to http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/antiholo/arabnazi.html after the war, a member of Young Egypt named Gamal Abdul Nasser was among the officers who led the July 1952 revolution in Egypt. Their first act – following in Hitler's footsteps – was to outlaw all other parties. Nasser's Egypt became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals, among them the SS General in charge of the murder of Ukrainian Jewry; he became Nasser's bodyguard and close comrade. Alois Brunner, another senior Nazi war criminal, found shelter in Damascus, where he served for many years as senior adviser to the Syrian general staff and still resides today. Sami al-Joundi, one of the founders of the ruling Syrian Ba'ath Party, recalls: "We were racists. We admired the Nazis. We were immersed in reading Nazi literature and books... We were the first who thought of a translation of Mein Kampf. Anyone who lived in Damascus at that time was witness to the Arab inclination toward Nazism." These leanings never completely ceased. Hitler's Mein Kampf currently ranks sixth on the best-seller list among Palestinian Arabs. Luis Al-Haj, translator of the Arabic edition, writes glowingly in the preface about how Hitler's "ideology" and his "theories of nationalism, dictatorship and race… are advancing especially within our Arabic States." When Palestinian police first greeted Arafat in the self-rule areas, they offered the infamous Nazi salute - the right arm raised straight and upward.
  35. Others report a more distant relationship with, for example, Arafat’s mother being the daughter of al-Husseini’s first cousin - http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0508/opinion/dalin.html. The Mufti’s mission was continued by Arafat. In 1969, for example, the PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a leader of the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section, and Willy Berner, an S.S. officer in the Matthausen extermination camp. Another former Nazi, Johann Schuller, was caught supplying arms to the Fatah. The Belgian Jean Tireault, secretary of the neo-Nazi La Nation Européenne, also went on the Fatah payroll. Still another Belgian, the neo-Nazi Karl van der Put, recruited the PLO. So, too, the German neo-Nazi Otto Albrecht was arrested in West Germany with PLO identity papers, after the PLO had given him $1.2 million to buy weapons. Arafat always revered al-Husseini, who died in 1974, as his beloved hero and mentor. In a major address in April 1985, Arafat said he took “immense pride” in being the Mufti’s student, declared it an honor to follow in his footsteps and emphasized that the PLO “is continuing the path” he set. Close to thirty years after al-Husseini’s death, Arafat referred in an August 2002 interview to “our hero al-Husseini” as a “symbol of withstanding world pressure, having remained an Arab leader in spite of demands to have him replaced because of his Nazi ties.” In addition to Arafat, the Husseini family continued to play a role in Palestinian affairs, with Faisal Husseni, whose father was the Mufti’s nephew, regarded as one of their leading spokesmen in the territories until his death in May, 2001 (“Myths and Facts”, Michael Bard, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf2.html#39).
  36. The Grand Mufti, went so far as to bring a former Nazi commando to Egypt to teach Arafat and others how to fight and Arafat first shed Jewish blood during terrorist raids against Israel in 1947. From Egypt al-Husseini was among the sponsors of the 1948 war against the new State of Israel. Spurned by the Jordanian monarch, who gave the position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to someone else, Haj Amin al-Husseini arranged King Abdullah's assassination in 1951, while still living in exile in Egypt. King Tallal followed Abdullah as king of Jordan, and he refused to give permission to Amin al-Husseini to come into Jordanian Jerusalem. After one year, King Tallal was declared incompetent; the new King Hussein also refused to give al-Husseini permission to enter Jerusalem. King Hussein recognized that the former Grand Mufti would only stir up trouble and was a danger to peace in the region.
  37. http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/european-roots-of-anti-Semitism-in-current-islamic-thinking: Kuentzel gives, as an example, the sermon of Sheikh Madiras, an Imam from Palestine. In September of 2004, he addressed the following to the faithful: “The Resurrection will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims kill them. The Muslims will kill the Jews, rejoice [in it], rejoice in Allah’s Victory.… The Prophet said: the Jews will hide behind the rock and the tree, and the rock and the tree will say: oh servant of Allah, oh Muslim this is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!… Everything wants vengeance on the Jews, on these pigs on the face of the earth.”[ Itamar Marcus & Barbara Crook, Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin, 14 September 2004] No-one protested when the Palestinian Authority’s official TV station broadcast this call for genocide. The story of the rock and the tree is a popular one and a standard item on the Hamas propaganda menu. The second example is that of Sheikh Tantawi, the Head of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University and thus the most renowned spiritual authority in Sunni Islam. The fourth edition of his standard work “The people of Israel in the Koran and in the Sunna” appeared in 1997. In it, Tantawi writes that the Jews instigated the French Revolution and October Revolution; that they provoked the First and Second World Wars; that they control the world’s media and economy; that they endeavour to destroy morality and religion and run brothels worldwide. Tantawi, the highest Sunni Muslim theologian, quotes Adolf Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf that “in resisting the Jew, I am doing the work of the Lord”. He praises the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, noting without the slightest trace of regret that “after the publication of the Protocols in Russia, some 10,000 Jews were killed.”[ Wolfgang Driesch, Islam, Judentum und Israel, Deutsches Orient-Institut, Mitteilungen Band 66 (Hamburg, 2003), pp. 76ff. The Hitler quotation is from „Mein Kampf“, München 1934, p. 70.]
  38. As Robert S. Wistrich argues (MUSLIM ANTI-SEMITISM - A Clear and Present Danger, published by the American Jewish Committee) the anti-Jewish legacy of Nazism “has proven to be especially potent” in the Arab-Islamic world, “where anti-Semitism is once again acquiring a potentially lethal charge.” This new and insidious Islamic anti-Semitism, with its roots in the virulently anti-Jewish ideology of Nazism, has become pervasive throughout the Arab world. In point of fact, as Wistrich demonstrates, “there is currently a culture of hatred that permeates books, magazines, newspapers, sermons, video-cassettes, the internet, television, and radio in the Arab Middle East which has not been seen since the heyday of Nazi Germany.” Portions of the tradition of Muslim anti-Semitism date from as far back as the Middle Ages, but in recent decades, as Wistrich has suggested, the dehumanizing images of Jews and Israel that have penetrated the body politic of Islam have been sufficiently radical in tone and content to constitute a new “warrant for genocide.” Something different, something new, entered the Arab mind in the twentieth century. And its origins are not particularly hard to trace.
  39. Kotek, Anti-Semitism in Caricatures: Graphic Art in the Service of Hatred, http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/instwjc_polstudies.html.
  40. Ibid., page 7 citing Raphael Israeli, “Une image demoniaque du Juif,” L’Arche (Paris) 253, September 2001, p. 92.
  41. Joël et Dan Kotek, Au nom de l'antisionisme: L'image des Juifs et d'Israël dans la caricature depuis la seconde Intifada (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2003). (Published in French, its title translates as In the name of anti-Semitism: The image of the Jews and Israel in the caricature since the second Intifada.1).
  42. Ibid. By extension, these images suggest that the Jewish religion must be diabolic, and the entire Jewish people evil. To dehumanize Jews, Arab cartoonists often depict them as malevolent creatures: spiders, vampires or octopuses. But given time limitations I will address only two- the blood libel and holocaust denial.
  43. Arab TV: Jews ate Christian's blood; Syrian-produced prime-time show airs anti-Semitic libel- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35712
  44. Daniel Pipes, The Paterson 'Protocols', New York Post , November 5, 2002
  45. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=15098
  46. Ibid.
  47. Mahmoud Al-Said Al-Kurdi, Al Akhbar, Mar. 25, 2001.
  48. See: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28990; also see: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26802 where the process is described in gory detail. On the eve of the new millennium, the Arab writers’ weekly organ in Damascus brought the blood libel up to date with the following literary gem: The [Passover] Matzo of Israel is soaked with the blood of the. Iraqis, descendants of the Babylonians, the Lebanese, the descendants. of the Sidonese, and the Palestinians, the descendants of. the Canaanites. This Matzo is kneaded by American weaponry and the missiles of hatred pointed at both Muslim and Christian Arabs (Zbeir Sultan, “The Peace of Zion,” in ibid., Jan. 1, 2000 (Memri 67, Jan. 6, 2000).)
  49. Kotek, Anti-Semitism in Caricatures: Graphic Art in the Service of Hatred, http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/instwjc_polstudies.html, page. 9.
  50. Likewise- and in a similar vein (no pun intended) the age old claim that Jews poisoned wells and food, another pretext used by the Nazis in their propaganda. Israel is repeatedly alleged by Egyptian (and Jordanian) news sources to be distributing drug-laced chewing gum and candy, intended to make women sexually corrupt and to kill children. Ibid. On the first day of the third Christian millennium, the Syrian. weekly escalated its Israelphobic attacks on the “notorious Camp. David Accords” and the “dirty Satanic methods used [by the Zionist. Entity] ... to destroy the fabric of Egyptian society.” These “Zionist” methods included spreading AIDS among Arab youngsters by sending. “pretty HIV-positive Jewish prostitutes to Egypt and dispensing chewing gum to arouse sexual lust.” See also Al Ahram, Apr. 29, 2001, which recalls Mu’ammar Al- Qadhafi’s “revelations” that Libyan children had been injected with AIDS by foreign nurses. The government daily echoes the accusations of those who believe the CIA or Israeli Mossad was behind this crime. At the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva on March. 17, 1997, Palestinian delegate Nabil Ramlawi stunned delegates by declaring that “Israeli authorities ... infected by injection 300 Palestinian children with the HIV virus during the years of the intifada.” The commander of the. Palestinian General Security Service in Gaza blamed Israel for encouraging “Russian Jewish girls with AIDS to. spread the disease among Palestinian youth.” The PA minister of. supplies, Abdel Hamid al-Quds, even had the gall to inform the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that: Israel is distributing food containing material that causes cancer and hormones that harm male virility and spoiled food products ... in order to poison and harm the Palestinian population.( Yediot Aharonot, June 25, 1997). Suha Arafat, then the wife of the PA president, at a press conference in the presence of Hillary Clinton (then the US first. lady), accused Israel of deliberately poisoning Palestinian air and water. Yassir Arafat himself, at the 2001 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, shocked his distinguished audience by insisting in front of Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres that Israel was using depleted uranium and nerve gas against Palestinian civilians. Film clips from official PA television were suitably fabricated to show the. alleged victims racked by convulsions and vomiting. In other cases. there were scenes of rape and murder that had supposedly been carried. out by Israeli soldiers “reenacted” for the cameras. Fiamma Nirenstein, “How Suicide Bombers Are Made,” Commentary, September 2001, pp. 53–55. The following are some other examples of the blood libel. (Myths and Facts, Michael Bard, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf2.html#39:
    “The Talmud says that if a Jew does not drink every year the blood of a non-Jewish man, he will be damned for eternity.” — Saudi Arabian delegate Marouf al-Dawalibi before the UN Human Rights Commission conference on religious tolerance December 5, 1984.
    “During this holiday [Purim], the Jew must prepare very special pastries, the filling of which is not only costly and rare –– it cannot be found at all on the local and international markets....For this holiday, the Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare the holiday pastries....Before I go into the details, I would like to clarify that the Jews' spilling human blood to prepare pastry for their holidays is a well-established fact, historically and legally, all throughout history. This was one of the main reasons for the persecution and exile that were their lot in Europe and Asia at various times....during the holiday, the Jews wear carnival-style masks and costumes and overindulge in drinking alcohol, prostitution, and adultery. ....”— Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faysal University, Saudi government daily Al-Riyadh, March 10, 2002.
    “Christian Europe showed enmity toward the Jews when it transpired that their rabbis craftily hunt anyone walking alone, [tempting] him to enter their house of worship. Then they take his blood to use for baked goods for their holidays, as part of their ritual.” — Columnist Dr. Muhammad bin S’ad Al-Shwey’ir, Al-Jazirah (Saudi Arabia), September 6, 2002.
    “With the establishment of the State of Israel, the entire Muslim nation was lost because Israel is a cancer that spread in the body of the Islamic nation; because the Jews are a virus similar to AIDS, from which the entire world is suffering.” — Sheikh Ibrahim Mudayris PA TV sermon, May 13, 2005.
    “1883, about 150 French children were murdered in a horrible way in the suburbs of Paris, before the Jewish Passover holiday. Later research showed that the Jews had killed them and taken their blood. This event caused riots in Paris back then, and the French government found itself under pressure. A similar incident took place in London, when many English children were killed by Jewish rabbis.” — Iranian political analyst Hasan Hanizadeh Jaam-e Jam 2 TV (Iran), December 20, 2005.
  51. Ibid., Apr. 13, 2001. Hiri Manzour’s article, published on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, was provocatively entitled “The Fable of the Holocaust” to cause maximum offense.
  52. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Abbas: Abbas was born in 1935 in Safed, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine. His family became refugees during the war of 1948 and settled in Syria. In Syria he taught school and graduated from the University of Damascus before going to Egypt where he studied law. Subsequently, Abbas entered graduate studies at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, where he earned a Ph.D. in history. In 1982, Abbas wrote a doctoral dissertation, referring to so-called "Holocaust deniers", claiming secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist movement. In 1984, a book based on Abbas' doctoral dissertation was published in Arabic by Dar Ibn Rushd publishers in Amman, Jordan. His doctoral thesis later became a book, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, which, following his appointment as Palestinian Prime Minister in 2003, was heavily criticized as an example of Holocaust denial. In his book, Abbas raised doubts that gas chambers were used for the extermination of Jews, and suggested that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was "less than a million." In an interview with Haaretz in May 2003, he claimed merely to have been quoting the wide range of scholarly disagreement over the Holocaust, but no longer harbored any desire to argue with the generally accepted figures; he further affirmed his belief that "the Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind".
  53. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem, Simon & Schuster, 1973, p.44.
  54. A prime example was the response of state-owned Syrian radio in late February 2000 to Israel’s then-foreign minister David Levy’s stern warning to Lebanon from the rostrum of the Knesset to rein in the Hizballah. Syrian radio promptly accused Israel of “playing the role of the Nazi executioners, who, according to the Zionists, burned the Jews in Auschwitz.” The state-run Lebanese television on February 28, 2000, echoed this Syrian propaganda by running an ad, showing images of casualties from IDF attacks in Lebanon juxtaposed with Nazi concentration camps, followed by the words “Same hatred. Same racism. Same criminality. Same history.” The following are some other examples of Holocaust denial. (Myths and Facts, Michael Bard, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf2.html#39:
    “...Lies surfaced about Jews being murdered here and there, and the Holocaust. And, of course, they are all lies and unfounded claims. No Chelmno, no Dachau, no Auschwitz! [They] were disinfection sites... They began to publicize in their propaganda that they were persecuted, murdered and exterminated... Committees acted here and there to establish this entity [Israel-Ed.], this foreign entity, implanted as a cancer in our country, where our fathers lived, where we live, and where our children after us will live. They always portrayed themselves as victims, and they made a Center for Heroism and Holocaust. Whose heroism? Whose Holocaust? Heroism is our nation's, the holocaust was against our people... We were the victims, but we shall not remain victims forever...” [emphasis added] — Dr. Issam Sissalem, history lecturer, Islamic University Gaza, PA TV broadcast, November 29, 2000.
    “The issue of the holocaust rises again. It defies disappearing over its half-century because the Zionist propaganda has converted it into a means to produce political and economic benefit, besides exploiting it for the advancement of occupation and settlement...”
    “A recently published book by an American researcher discusses the holocaust. Employing scientific and chemical evidence, it proves that the figure of six million Jews cremated in the Nazi Auschwitz camps is a lie for propaganda, as the most spacious of the vaults in the camp could not have held even one percent of that number.” — Hiri Manzour in the official Palestinian Authority daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 13, 2001.
    “One of the Jews' evil deeds is what has come to be called 'the Holocaust,' that is, the slaughter of the Jews by Nazism. However, revisionist [historians] have proven that this crime, carried out against some of the Jews, was planned by the Jews' leaders, and was part of their policy... These are the Jews against whom we fight, oh beloved of Allah.” — Sermon broadcast on Palestinian Authority television, September 21, 2001.
    “Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces... Although we don't accept this claim.” — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, December 14, 2005.
  55. Al-Hayat (London), July 24, 2006 .
  56. See: The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI),
    http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD121906.
  57. Nadav Shragai, Haaretz, 27 November 2005.
  58. Interview with Dennis Ross, Fox News Sunday, (April 21, 2002).
  59. (Myths and Facts, Michael Bard, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf2.html#39: In its description of the area of Solomon's Stables, which Islamic Waqf officials converted into a new mosque in 1996, the 1930 guide states: "...little is known for certain about the early history of the chamber itself. It dates probably as far back as the construction of Solomon's Temple... According to Josephus, it was in existence and was used as a place of refuge by the Jews at the time of the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70 A.D."( Jerusalem Post, (January 26, 2001)).
    More authoritatively, the Koran – the holy book of Islam – describes Solomon’s construction of the First Temple (34:13) and  recounts the destruction of the First and Second Temples (17:7).
    The Jewish connection to the Temple Mount dates back more than 3,000 years and is rooted in tradition and history. When Abraham bound his son Isaac upon an altar as a sacrifice to God, he is believed to have done so atop Mount Moriah, today’s Temple Mount. The First Temple’s Holy of Holies contained the original Ark of the Covenant, and both the First and Second Temples were the centers of Jewish religious and social life until the Second Temple’s destruction by the Romans. After the destruction of the Second Temple, control of the Temple Mount passed through several conquering powers. It was during the early period of Muslim control that the Dome of the Rock was built on the site of the ancient temples.
    Strictly observant Jews do not visit the Temple Mount for fear of accidentally treading upon the Holy of Holies, which housed the original Ark of the Covenant, since its exact location on the Mount is unknown. Other Jews and non-Muslims do visit with the full knowledge and consent of the Waqf, respecting prayer schedules and dress codes and providing no threat of “desecration” to the site.
  60. Ibid.
  61. “The Zionist movement has invented that this was the site of Solomon's Temple. But this is all a lie.” — Sheik Raed Salah, a leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel. (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, (February 12, 2001).
  62. Ibid.
© 2006, Hal Joffe

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