Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (39 page)

Yet on March io Roosevelt publicly assured American Jews that "full justice will be done [after the war] to those who seek a Jewish national home, for which our Government and the American People have always had the deepest sympathy and today more than ever in view of the tragic plight of thousands of homeless Jewish refugees."60 The election platforms of both the Democratic and Republican parties in 1944 included such views. There was no mystery and certainly no conspiracy needed to account for American support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was a direct response to the voluminous and accurate reports of the genocide of Europe's Jews and of their overwhelming helplessness in the face of the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Not a single one of the millions of leaflets and thousands of broadcasts produced by Nazi Germany and its Arab and Muslim collaborators during World War II and the Holocaust pointed out the obvious truth: if the Nazis had not carried out a genocide of Europe's Jews, there would have been far less political support in the United States and elsewhere for realization of Zionist hopes in Palestine. On March 21, VFA drew a different lesson from the decision to table the WagnerTaft resolution and from Stimson's and Marshall's arguments that the resolution would run counter to American interests. On one hand, these reservations were merely a maneuver to "dope the Arabs" and "throw dust in their eyes." Yet, the broadcast continued, the postponement was also a sign of American worry about "the impact of an Arab revolution at the present moment and its drastic effect on their war effort, especially at this fateful phase of the war." That was why the U.S. government found it "wiser not to stir up the Arabs."6'

Perhaps occasioned by the discussion in Washington about the WagnerTaft resolution, Husseini repeated his earlier incitement to murder the Jews. On Berlin in Arabic on March i, he stated that the "wicked American intentions toward the Arabs are now clearer, and there remain no doubts that they are endeavoring to establish a Jewish empire in the Arab world. More than 400,000,000 Arabs oppose this criminal American movement.... Arabs! Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This serves your honor. God is with you" (emphasis in original).62 As noted earlier, the incitement to murder Jews in the broadcasts of July 1942 (there may have been others not recorded by the Americans in Cairo) was different from the Nazi genocidal threats and boasts aimed at the Germanspeaking audience in Europe. Whereas Hitler, Goebbels, and other Nazi officials announced that the Nazi regime was exterminating the Jews of Europe, Husseini and other unnamed inciters used the Arabic radio broadcasts to appeal for audience participation in the killing of Jews "wherever you find them."

Like other totalitarian leaders of the twentieth century, whether of the radical left or radical right, Haj Amin el-Husseini brought considerable political skills and ruthlessness to the task of mobilizing mass sentiment. An indispensable aspect of Husseini's success lay in his ability to connect his political ambitions to the shared language, stories, myths, and emotions of religion as he interpreted it. His interpretation of Islam was as indispensable for his Arabic propaganda as Marxism-Leninism was for Lenin and Stalin and fascism and Nazi ideology were for Mussolini and Hitler. Marxism-Leninism, fascism, and Nazism all offered their believers the comforts, consolations, and confidence of theodicy, that is, the conviction that their own political projects were in accord with the larger trends of history. The religious dimensions of secular theodicy, which were explicit in Hegel's philosophy of history, receded into the background among the Communists and a bit less so among the fascists and Nazis. Though National Socialism selectively drew on Christian themes, it did not present itself first and foremost as part of fundamentalist religious revival. In one sense, the historical importance of radical Islam in these and subsequent decades lay in its revival of the emphatically religious dimension of political theodicy.

On March 7, Berlin in Arabic broadcast a speech by Husseini that addressed these themes. He spoke in Berlin on the occasion of the Prophet Mohammed's birthday.

Arabs and Moslems! The whole Moslem world celebrates today the Prophet's birthday. The Prophet who brought mercy to the peoples, who was the guide of the faithful, and who served the world, which was wandering in the dark and in the worship of idolatry. He set into the minds [sic] and preached peace and good, truth and sincerity, modesty and mercy, and all the supreme virtues. This guidance purified the souls and it overthrew tyranny. It was a system to guarantee the happiness of mankind to remedy the diseases and problems of the world. That system quickly spread to all parts of the world, spread with such a speed that a just historian said that history never knew worthier than that enunciated by the Moslem religion. This was the condition of the Moslems until they diverted from the dictates of God.

Then their condition changed. God never changes people until they change themselves. The result was that they were punished. They were invaded by merciless tyrants because they shut their ears to the orders of Islam. Britain and her allies dominated the fate of millions of Moslems, occupied their countries and exploited their resources .61

Husseini's view of causation put God's will at the center of events. When he said that "they were invaded because they shut their ears to the orders of Islam;" he was obviously calling for a return to the faith. Yet his logic was also in the tradition of political theodicy by strongly implying that British domination over the Arabs was God's punishment for having abandoned the faith.

Lest anyone believe he thought this punishment just, he quickly turned his rage at the British and the Jews. The "most wicked of their [British] crimes was what they did to sacred Palestine, where they plotted with the Jews to dismiss the Arabs from their country and to establish there a Jewish State." That was quite a breathtaking statement to make in spring 1944 in light of the crimes Nazi Germany was in the midst of committing and Britain's efforts to prevent more Jews from finding rescue in Palestine. It was the statement of a remarkably provincial political figure who tried to place his small country of origin into global significance. He did so by identifying his political goals with the demands of Islam as well as with the modern anti-Semitic attack on the Jews and America. He referred to the efforts by "the big number" of senators and members of the House of Representatives who supported an end to the restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The effort was not surprising because "where the germs of Jewry live one must expect all sort of danger. This is the ex perience of the whole world and of the Arabs in particular. America is full of those germs and she will suffer from the Jewish epidemic beyond all expecta- tions."64

Husseini reminded listeners that "we" had warned Arabs and Muslims not to trust the promises of the Allies, nations who were "directed by world Jewry." This "we" had drawn attention "to the fact that the Jews dominate the destinies of the Allies in the present war, which was described by [Chaim] Weizmann as a Jewish war." "We" said that there was "a conspiracy between the Jews and the Allies against our countries" and especially among "the British, the Americans and the Jews." He referred to statements by American members of Congress or by Winston Churchill expressing outrage at Nazi crimes and support for Jewish emigration to Palestine. For Husseini, "all this proves that the whole cause is a conspiracy between the British, the Americans and the Jews." It was, he said, "important to disclose this conspiracy, for the history of the Jews and the Allies is a long series of conspiracies." Moreover, and very importantly, because Palestine was an "Arab and Moslem and a sacred country," the challenge posed by the Allies was "directed to every Arab in every part of the world."

Arabs and Moslems! ... Remember Palestine, to which the Prophet made his Holy Pilgrimage, which Omar Iman El Khatab [Ibn al Khatib] defended, which Saladin defended, and the blood of millions of martyrs irrigated its soil. You will not have an excuse. God, the Prophet, history, your grandfathers and your grandsons will hold you responsible if you fail to help Palestine. Any leniency with the tyrants signifies that the rights of the Arab nation are wasted. It indicates high treason. Go on firmly and struggle to dismiss the Jews from Palestine and from all Arab and Moslem countries. Make every effort possible so that not a single Jew and not a single imperialist remains in the Arab countries.

Did history, he asked, ever record a "more wicked crime" than the proposal to establish a Jewish home in Palestine? Yet he expressed confidence that "God will defeat these tyrants and will help us to win, together with our allies, the Germans and the Japanese. We will have an independent Arab state in which no trace of Jewry will be found."65

Husseini's invocation of "God, the Prophet, history, your grandfathers and your grandsons" expressed the deep connection between the secular and religious dimensions of his attacks and of their appeal. Indeed, their intertwining was the precondition for their effectiveness. Strictly secular arguments would have bypassed millions of devout Muslims, and strictly religious assertions would have lacked a seemingly worldly connection to ongoing events. The March 17 Berlin in Arabic broadcast on "Moslem India and Palestine" stated, "Today the Palestine question is not only an Arab question, but is a question concerning all Moslems" because the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was "bound to lead to a Jewish exploitation all over the Moslem world," including India.66 The effectiveness of Nazism's Arabic radio broadcasts lay partly in their ability to introduce a radical message in ways that resonated with, yet deepened and radicalized, already existing sentiments. The rage and hatred that envisioned "not a single Jew" remaining in the Arab countries was hard to imagine without the added venom inspired by Husseini's version of Islam. That version received the benefit of transmission from the shortwave radio transmitters outside Berlin; hundreds of thousands of reichsmarks in salaries for Husseini, Kilani, and their entourage; and the support and ideological cross-fertilization that occurred as a result of cooperation and contact with the staffs at the highest levels of the German Foreign Ministry, the Propaganda Ministry, Himmler, and the SS. None of that would have happened without the approval of Husseini's admirer, Hitler himself.

The scope of the Islamist message from Berlin was by no means limited to Husseini. Justifications for engaging in violence against Jews in the Arab countries came from unnamed announcers as well. On March 18, displaying the logic of projection and paranoia that characterized Nazism's public threats to "exterminate" the Jews in Europe, Berlin in Arabic announced, "The Jews are armed."67 In fact, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in wartime Palestine, had organized an armed force, the Haganah. It consisted of 30,000 members with arms for 50 to 70 percent of them. Twenty-six thousand Jews in Palestine had joined the British army to fight against the Nazis. The purpose of these efforts was not to "exterminate" anyone but to fend off Arab attacks and to defend the entire community against the Nazis if the Panzerarmee should invade Pales- tine.68 For Berlin in Arabic, however, there could be "only one explanation" for this development, namely, that "the Jews are equipping themselves in preparation for the annihilation of all Arabs living in their neighborhood.... When the Jews discovered that it was impossible to expel the Arabs by peaceful means from Palestine, they equipped themselves in order to carry out a massacre aimed at the extermination of the Arabs. Afterwards the British would recognize Palestine as a Jewish state." The shamelessness of the broadcast is stunning even in retrospect. The Nazi regime and its collaborators had murdered 5 million Jews in Europe in the previous three years and were implementing plans to murder 500,000 Hungarian Jews in the spring, summer, and fall of 1944. Yet Berlin in Arabic insisted that the issue "between ourselves and the Jews"was not merely one of religious toleration. Rather it was "a question of the whole nation which the Jews are trying to wipe out." It called on the leaders of the Arab countries to "save Palestine before the Jews establish their ambitions and exterminate the Arabs."69

In March and April 1944, Berlin in Arabic continued to broadcast a steady stream of anti-Semitic propaganda, hammering away at the numbingly familiar theme that America was "in the hands of the Jews." American support, or rather support by some American political figures, for a Jewish state in Palestine was the result. Further, this plan was a core element of American imperialism's aims in the region.70 On April 17, Kirk sent the last of his dispatches to Washington. It included the text of a Berlin in Arabic broadcast of April 14 that told its listeners that Bolshevism was "incompatible with the Islamic spirit and neither the Bolsheviks nor the Jews could be the friends of Islam."71 On April 24, Berlin in Arabic falsely asserted that the British Labour Party proposed that Arabs be expelled from Palestine.72 That same evening it reminded listeners, "The Americans, the British and the Jews are all conspiring against Arab interests and are the real enemies of the Arabs. Needless to say the Jews are the real enemies of the Arabs and have been since the dawn of Islam."73

No public statement or action by an American, British, or Jewish leader was too mundane to avoid placement within a sinister web of conspiratorial actions. No quotation was too obviously absurd and no lie too outrageous to be kept off the air. Listeners in the Arab countries may have been skeptical of Berlin in Arabic and the Voice of Free Arabism.74 Yet they often had no alternative account, as British and American officials generally decided not to respond to anti-Semitic propaganda for fear that pointing out lies or challenging Nazi assertions about the Jews would only confirm Nazi assertions that they were stooges of the Jews. The listeners of Berlin in Arabic and VFA would receive the impression that in the midst of the largest war in modern history, when millions of soldiers were engaged in huge battles around the globe, the primary preoccupation of leaders in the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine and expel the Arabs. The broadcasts displayed a striking narcissism and flattery of their audience as if the world really did revolve around the fate of Arabs and Muslims. In fact, though the Allies did want to preserve Arab support or at least neutrality, following the defeat of the Axis forces in Tunisia in 1943, the Middle East remained a sideshow to the main events of the war.