The latest attempt to excuse or minimize the evils committed in the name of Islam comes in a new book by University of Maryland professor Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.  In an interview with the Telegraph, the author says:

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts.

This doesn’t even make any sense. If Muslim hatred of the Jews was “religiously inspired,” i.e., inspired by Islam, then why did it need to be “articulated” by the Nazis, who despised all religion? In reality, it is “articulated” in the Qur’an, which says that the Jews are accursed (2:89), are the Muslims’ worst enemies (5:82), and should be fought against (9:29). Muhammad says in a hadith that the end times won’t come until Muslims kill Jews wholesale, and when Jews hide behind trees, the trees will cry out, “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me – come and kill him!”

heft book

Muslims were not and are not inspired by Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler and the Nazis were inspired by Islam – just as modern-day Muslims hate Jews because the Qur’an and Islam tell them to. Islamic scholar Robert Spencer explains:

There is a strong native strain of anti-Semitism in Islam, which is rooted in the Qur’an. The Muslim holy book contains a great deal of material that forms the foundation for a hatred of Jews that has perdured throughout Islamic history. It is virulent and hard to eradicate. The Qur’an portrays the Jews as the craftiest, most persistent, and most implacable enemies of the Muslims — and there is no Islamic authority that has moved to mitigate the most destructive interpretations of all this. The Qur’anic material on the Jews remains the prism through which far too many Muslims see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–and Jews in general–to this day.

The Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was the Muslim Hitler. He continually coaxed, urged, and demanded Jewish annihilation. And it was not that he got with the Nazi program: he preceded it. He mentored it. His role is irrefutable, and is documented in thousands of pages of documents released after the war.

The Mufti, whom his nephew Yasser Arafat called “our hero,” was famous for his fanatical Jew-hatred. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he met Hitler and traveled in top Nazi circles (he even stayed in Hitler’s bunker toward the end of the war). Among his close friends was Adolf Eichmann, who is sometimes described as the “architect” of the Holocaust.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

But the Mufti may be more deserving of that title. According to the Arab Higher Committee, “in virtually identical letters, the Mufti, in the summer of 1944, approached Germany, Roumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary to speed the extermination of the Jews by sending them to Poland where the Nazi death chambers were located.”

These death chambers may have been his idea. Adolf Eichmann’s assistant, Dieter Wisliczeny, testified during the Nuremberg Trials that the Mufti:

… repeatedly suggested to the Nazi authorities – including Hitler, von Ribbentrop and Himmler – the extermination of European Jewry. … The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan… He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.

During World War I, Hajj Amin al-Husseini was an officer of the Ottoman Empire, which used primitive gas chambers to exterminate Armenians. The Nazis used these gas chambers as templates for their own, more sophisticated versions – maybe the Mufti gave them the idea while he was urging Eichmann to “accelerate the extermination measures.”


The Telegraph article makes much of Hitler’s radio broadcasts to the Arab world, but doesn’t mention the fact that Hitler gave the Mufti a radio station, which al-Husseini used to preach jihad genocide in Arabic. His appeal was explicitly Islamic. “According to the Muslim religion,” he said in one broadcast, “the defense of your life is a duty which can only be fulfilled by annihilating the Jews… Your sole hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews before they annihilate you.”

What is galling and repugnant is that the Mufti’s face is not an icon of evil, as is that of Hitler or Mussolini. Why did he escape prosecution after World War II? It is an outrage that the Mufti who exterminated hundreds of thousands of Jews was given the same status of The Jewish Agency at the UN in 1947, when it was debating the partition of the Jewish State — despite the stunning evidence (documents, files, etc.) against him that was presented to the UN.

Why were his sins washed clean then? Why did the State Department refuse to release its White Paper on the Mufti‘s actions during the war? Why weren’t we taught in school about Islamic Jew-hatred and its role in the Holocaust? Why wasn’t the tie-in made to Black September, the Beirut bombing, the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 and the September 11th attack on America?

The only difference between Hitler and the Mufti is that Hitler was defeated and punished. The slaughtering Mufti went on to spawn Yasser Arafat, inspire Saddam Hussein, and work to destroy the Jewish homeland and its people.

There is no statute of limitations on genocide. I indict the Mufti and the Muslim world. They were equal partners in mass death. Today’s Muslims hate Israel for the same reasons that the Mufti collaborated with the Nazis: because Islam teaches Muslims to hate Jews and want to kill them.

So why are Jeffrey Herf and so many others making excuses for the Islamic role in the Holocaust, and shifting the blame entirely to the Nazis?