ARABS AND NAZISM(continued from p.6)criminals, among them the SS General who commanded the Einsatzgruppen in charge of the murder of Ukrainian Jews, who became his close companion and bodyguard. Hundreds of Nazis were harnessed in the Arab effort to liquidate Israel, through developing means of destruction or indoctrinating the armed forces. Alois Brunner, one of the most brutal war criminals, found shelter in Damascus, where he served for many years as the senior adviser of the Syrian general staff. The Mufti Haj Amin el Husseini was the equal of any of the war criminals. In postwar testimony, a senior aide to Eichmann described el-Husseini's appetite for destruction. He said that the Mufti visited the Auschwitz gas chambers, in disguise, and reproved the Germans for their lack of diligence in the destruction of the Jews. He loudly protested the proposed Nazi deal to save 4,000 Bulgarian Jewish children or to exchange trucks for Hungarian Jews. The Mufti was never tried because the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if its national hero were to be treated as a criminal. The Mufti was received as a national hero in Egypt where he was among the sponsors of the 1948 war. Indeed, the Mufti represents the link connecting the two attempts to destroy the Jews, that of the Nazis and that of the Arabs. It is thus not surprising that the Mufti has a lofty place in the PLO's pantheon. Arafat saw the Mufti as an educator and leader, declaring in 1985 that he deemed it an honor to walk in his footsteps. Arafat stressed that the PLO continued to march in the path carved out by the Mufti. During the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Arab world rose to his defense and his capture by Israel was described as a crime against humanity. On April 24, 1961, Jerusalem Times, the English-language Jordanian daily, published an open letter to Eichmann congratulating him on the slaughter of the Jews and promising that the remaining six million would be destroyed when the time came. The daily Saudi al-Bilad crowned its March 31, 1960 masthead with the words "Eichmann seized, who had the honor to liquidate six million Jews." The PLO's ties with proto-Nazis and neo-Nazi organizations are well-documented. Recently, because of its close relationships with the Israeli and American Jewish left, the PLO has downplayed its worship of the Nazis. But old habits are difficult to uproot and so, in August 1995, when the PLO police (the core of the future army) completed their course, the graduates were sworn in with the Nazi salute. Fawsi Salim el Mahdi, a commander of "Force 17," Arafat's praetorian guard, is known by his nickname 'Abu Hitler' because he called his two sons Eichmann and Hitler. Like Nazi Germany in 1936, which built up an unprecedented store of weaponry, there is currently a massive arms buildup going on in Arab countries, particularly in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Egypt, a poor state with a gross national product of 750 dollars per person, after the peace treaty with Israel, faced no strategic dangers. Hence, one might have expected that like NATO states after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Egypt would reduce its defense budget to about 2% of GNP. Instead it vastly accelerated |
its arms buildup, spending between 14-18% of its GNP on defense, 7-9 times what NATO members do. Today, Egypt's army numbers half a million soldiers, making it the fifth largest in the world! Egypt assembles the American battle tank Abrams M1A1, the
most expensive battle tank of the Western alliance, and is building an airport which will soon be the largest and most sophisticated in the region. Egypt's weapon expenditures are those of a state at war.
The Arabs are also rapidly developing atomic/biological/chemical weaponry. Syria's store of chemical
For Arabs, this Holocaust is the failure of the Arabs to destroy the Jews three years after the Holocaust. weapons is the third largest in the world, after Russia and the United States. Egypt and Libya are not far behind. William Safire called Libya's poison gas stores "Auschwitz in the desert." By the year 2000, the Arabs will have more than 2,000 ground to ground missiles with a range of more than 1,200 kilometers. Two NATO capitals, Athens and Rome, will be within the range of Arab ballistic missiles with chemical or biological warheads. We should remember Muammar Qadaffi's words in 1986 after the American navy staged punishing raids on Tripoli: "If I had had missiles with which I could have attacked London and New York, I would have destroyed both of them." The most important link between Nazism and Islam is the hatred of Israel. The redemption of Aryan man from the epidemic of Judaism was held to depend on the "final solution" and so is the destruction of Israel put forth as a condition for the salvation of Islam and the unity of the Arab nation. While, in the West, the Holocaust is seen (for the time being) as the deepest moral crisis in the history of Western civilization, and the deniers of the Holocaust are (for the time being) marginal figures, in the Arab world the situation is totally different. The very expression "Holocaust" refers to the "Holocaust of the Arabs in Palestine and the Arab world" brought about by Israel. For Arabs, this Holocaust is the failure of the Arabs to destroy the Jews three years after the Holocaust. While this may sound macabre to Western ears, it goes to the heart of Arab morality and anti-Semitism. In the Arab world, the attitude toward the destruction of the Jews swings between two poles: justification and denial. The justifiers see the Holocaust as an appropriate punishment for the Jews. The deniers say the Holocaust was a myth created by Zionism to extort money from the Germans and to serve as an alibi for the slaughter the Jews have conducted against the "Palestinians." |