Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: un altro libro da leggere

From a review by Norman Goda (University of Florida) of Klaus
Gensicke's The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years,
1941-1945. Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010:-
 
...scholars and journalists have asked whether there exists a link
between Nazi thinking on the Jewish question and current discourse in
the Arab/Muslim world on Jews and on Western modernity. These
questions are of great importance. Current “anti-Zionist” rhetoric is
said to center on anticolonial narratives, which carry moral authority
with many on the political left in Europe and in formerly colonized
regions. But this moral authority would vanish should the roots of
anti-Israel thinking be shown to have its roots in Nazism.
 
...a key piece to the puzzle is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti
of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948. In 1941 the mufti, having triggered
failed revolts against the British in both Palestine and Iraq,
gravitated to Berlin, where for four years he tried to tighten bonds
between Nazi Germany and the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East.
After Germany’s defeat he fled to Paris, then Cairo, then Beirut,
while styling himself as a nationalist and anti-imperialist. Was the
mufti’s policy in Berlin simply a question of anti-British pragmatism?
Or was he the missing link between the Nazis’ war against the Jews and
more extreme forms of Muslim antisemitism today? And whom did the
mufti ultimately speak for in the Middle East?
 
...[the Mufti] endorsed Nazism’s war against the Jews on ideological
grounds, and contributed where he could to the Jews’
destruction...Husseini adopted an uncompromising antisemitism that
viewed Jews not just as Western interlopers in Palestine and not just
as religious infidels, but as an existential threat as per the modern
European antisemitic tradition...Husseini argued to German
interlocutors that, “Current Jewish influence on economics and
politics is injurious all over and has to be combated” (p. 29). Living
in exile in Baghdad after his failure in Palestine, he further
demanded the expropriation of the 135,000 Jews there--who were hardly
part of the European Zionist movement--and he instigated the pogrom
that eventually erupted in Baghdad after the failed anti-British
revolt in 1941.
 
Most crucial is the mufti’s period in Berlin from 1941 to the end of
the war...When he met personally with Hitler in November 1941, Nazi
propaganda on the Jews had been clear for two decades, and the
Germans, with local help, had been killing Jews in the Soviet Union
for four months.
 
Here indeed was the crucial link between the mufti and the Nazis.
Unable to agree on Middle Eastern geopolitics, they could agree that
Jews controlled the governments in Moscow, London, and Washington, and
that murder was a desirable policy by which to eradicate Jews from the
Middle East. The mufti was pleased to broadcast this message to the
Arab world through the use of German radio facilities, and the Germans
were pleased to have him do so, particularly after June 1942 when it
looked as though the Afrika Korps, with an attached SS murder squad,
would break through British defenses. As late as December 1942, with
the Allies having taken the offensive in North Africa, Husseini, on
the opening of the new Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, proclaimed
that “the Holy Koran ... is full of evidence of Jewish lack of
character and their insidious lying and deceitful conduct” and that
the Jews “will always remain a divisive element in the world ...
committed to devising schemes, provoking wars, and playing people off
against one another” (p. 108). As scholars have pointed out, the tone
and content of Arab propaganda from Berlin, speaking as it did of
Jewish global conspiracies, has much in common with extreme Arab
narratives today.
 
...regardless of the mufti’s frustrations with Hitler, the Jews
remained his existential enemy. In spring 1943 when gas chambers in
Poland murdered Jews from all over Europe, the mufti engaged in quiet
diplomacy with the Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian governments,
urging them not to allow a few thousand Jewish children to travel to
Palestine as was then being discussed in London. The Jews would be
better off, the mufti said, in Poland where the Germans could keep an
eye on them. Husseini enjoyed a close relationship with Heinrich
Himmler and knew what awaited deported Jews...he worked to ensure that
as many Jews were killed as possible. In the meantime he tried to fuse
Islam with Nazism, creating seven new “pillars” that included the
thesis that, “In the struggle against Jewry, Islam and National
Socialism come very close to one another” (p. 149).
 
...“The Mufti,” concludes Gensicke, “bore much of the blame for the
naqba,” by which the attack on Israel in 1948 created throngs of Arab
refugees (p. 189)...Yassir Arafat was among Husseini’s mourners when
he died in exile in 1974, and he referred to Husseini as “our hero” as
late as 2002 (p. 203). And as Gensicke shows in this important book,
the mufti threw a long shadow as a precursor to the Arab and Muslim
factions who reject all compromise with Jews in the Middle East and
whose brand of antisemitism borrows much from the Western traditions
that they otherwise despise.
 
And to all the progressives, the radicals, the anti-colonialists, the
liberals, Jews and otherwise, shame on you for not realizing what was
--- and what is in great part --- the local Arab principled opposition
to Jewish nationalism, Zionism, in the territory of the historic
Jewish homeland

 
 
amalric ha scritto:
 
Qui c'era il rantolo di un burino incolto, che non si intende di libri.

 Qui c'era il rantolo di un burino incolto, che non si intende di libri.
 
ma di DOC sì

 Am.
 
Ciao!