Further to this post from a couple of days back on Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi ally, there's a piece in the Jerusalem Post today by Edwin Black (via the comments here) on the moment in history, back in 1928, when al-Husseini first rose to prominence:
For centuries, Jews and Christians in Arab lands were allowed to exist as dhimmis, second-class citizens with limited religious rights. These restrictions were enforced by the Turks who, until World War I, ruled the geographically undetermined region known as Palestine, which included Jerusalem.
When the Ottoman Empire fell, after World War I ended in 1918, the British were obligated by the Mandate to maintain the Turkish status quo at the Western Wall. That status quo, according to numerous decrees under Shari’a, maintained that Jews could pray at the Wall – the last remnant of the Temple – only quietly and never sit, even in the heat. Nor were Jews allowed to separate men from women during prayer.
The Jews revered the Wall as their holiest accessible place and a direct connection to God. But under Turkish and Arab tradition, the Wall was not the Jews’ holy site.
Rather, it was revered by Muslims as al-Buraq, the place where Muhammad tethered his winged steed during his miraculous ascent to heaven. During that miraculous journey, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad flew through the air on his magnificent horse to the farthest mosque. The farthest mosque was in Jerusalem, hence al-Aksa, meaning “the farthest.” Therefore, the Western Wall became preeminently a Muslim holy place, only available for Jewish visitation with permission and under strict guidelines that would not connote independent worship or ownership.
In 1928, on Yom Kippur, Jews decided to bring benches and chairs to sit on while they prayed, and they also brought a mehitza, in this case a flimsy portable partition to separate men from women. This provoked outrage among Arabs, and the British even tried to pull chairs out from under people to force them to stand. The offense catapulted Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, to sudden international Islamic importance, as Muslims everywhere – from India to London – objected to Jews sitting. Husseini even convened an emergency international conference of Muslims in Jerusalem to stop Jews from sitting at the Wall to pray.
The mufti and his machinery also began a nonstop protest movement against the perceived Jewish encroachment on the Wall. As the chief religious authority, it was Husseini who directed that the muezzin, the man who calls Muslims to prayer from the minaret, position himself within earshot of the Western Wall pavement, and then dial the volume up to rile Jews during prayer and prove Islamic dominance.
At the same time, it was Husseini who directed the revival of the cacophonous dhikr ceremony, complete with repetitive shouts of “Allahu akbar,” as well as loud gongs and cymbals, once again disrupting Jewish prayers with strategic noise. The mufti also was the one who permitted mules to be herded through the Jewish prayer area, dropping dung and creating the feel and smell of what one Jerusalem newspaper termed “a latrine.”
On August 15, 1929, when Jews again marked Tisha Be’av by sitting, as well as chanting “The Wall is ours,” the Arabs began yet another in a series of bloody massacres.
The massacres in several cities culminated in unspeakable atrocities at Hebron.
It began in Jerusalem. “Itbach al-Yahood! Itbach al- Yahood!” Slaughter the Jews. Slaughter the Jews. With knives and clubs, the mob attacked every Jew in sight, burned Torah scrolls and yanked supplication notes to God from the cracks in the Wall and set them aflame.
Attacks spread throughout the land. Jews were stabbed, shot, beaten with rocks, maimed and killed in various towns and suburbs. The chaos continued for days. [...]
The mufti used the Wall controversy to continue his campaign against the British and the Jews. As part of that war, he led a broadly accepted, international and popularly accepted Arab and Islamic alliance with Nazi Germany. Eventually, when the British tried to arrest him, he fled to Iraq. There, the mufti and Nazi agents helped inspire the 1941 Farhud, a two-day spree of killing, looting and raping the Jews of Baghdad.
Once the British finally helped restore order, the mufti fled again, this time to Germany, where he was taken under the personal auspices of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. He formed a 8,000-man plus Muslim Waffen-SS division, which partnered with the bloodthirsty Ustasha in Croatia to commit the most heinous crimes in the hell that was the Holocaust. The Ustasha wore Jewish eyeballs on necklaces.
The alliance with the Nazis spanned every aspect of the war, from intelligence offices in Paris to plans, to parachute units, to artillery battalions, to a plan to exterminate all Jews in Palestine. This alliance was more than one man, the mufti of Jerusalem – it was a movement of popular international Islamic fervor that stretched across the Middle East and Europe.
After the fall of Hitler, the legacy of hate continued in the postwar expulsions of a million Jews from Arab lands.
Periodically, the fervor that ignited the massacres of 1929 surfaces even today. Intifadas arise, riots erupt and the Arab rallying call, spoken and collectively remembered, continues to be in Jerusalem – where Jews should not be permitted to sit at the Western Wall when they pray.
I've left out the horrific details of the massacres. You can read about them in the article, or in The Farhud: The Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust.
This is, as author Edwin Black notes, "forgotten history".
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