The Mufti and America

So far as I know, nobody during the recent controversy over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks concerning the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Holocaust has written anything about the Mufti in relations to the U.S.

On March 19, 1943, on the traditional date for celebrating Mohammed’s birthday, the Mufti broadcast over the Rome wireless, not only that Jews had continuing designs on the Al Aqsa Mosque, but that Arab immigrants to the U.S. should try to sabotage the American war effort: “The Arabs and Moslems will not be deceived by Britain, for not only have they long known its true intentions but they have known those of its Ally—America. I want to draw the attention of the Arab emigrants in America to this fact, . . . I would remind them that their efforts will be wasted if, God forbid, America and her allies are victorious in this war. . . . I therefore am confident that those Arab emigrants in America will refrain from helping Roosevelt or from taking part in a war which he has brought on his country.”

On March 1, 1944, he declared from Berlin: “No one ever thought that 140,000,000 Americans would become tools in Jewish hands . . . . How would the Americans dare to Judaize Palestine while the Arabs are still alive? . . . . The wicked American intentions toward the Arabs are now clear, and there remain no doubts that they are endeavoring to establish a Jewish empire in the Arab world. . . . Arabs rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them.”

In September 1945, Congressman Emanuel Cellar approached Secretary of State James F. Byrnes with the request that Haj Amin el-Hussein be taken from his French villa and transferred to Nuremberg for trial. Byrnes evaded the request, responding that “The State Department has no information on the matter, and would not go into the question of whether the Mufti was a war criminal.”

In June, 1946, Bartley C. Crum, a member of the Anglo-American Inquiry Committee on Palestine, requested, again unsuccessfully, that Byrnes join the British in obtaining the Mufti’s extradition for trial from the Middle East, where he had fled from Paris on a contrived “escape” from house arrest. In response to the submission of documentary evidence about the Mufti’s war crimes, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, also in 1946,  responded that he “would be much interested to examine” such evidence, but that the Tribunal’s jurisdiction was limited “to try criminals of only European Axis countries,” and that it would require “a change of policy to include Asiatics.”

Finally in 1959, at the time that the Mufti was busy repeating his lie that he never had met Adolf Eichmann, he answered the question for the Middle East Forum: “Where do you think the Jews of Israel could go.” His answer: “They could go anywhere. Already there are 5,000,000 in the United States, which has the resources and space to take more. The Americans like them and they like the Americans, so I do not see why they should not have a state of their own.”