Hitler Returns

March 31, 2016

by: Brian Schrauger, News Bureau Chief

The world does not know it, or does not want to, but the historical record is undeniable: admiration of Adolph Hitler has been part-and-parcel of the Palestinian movement since the Fuhrer came to power in 1933. For this reason, it is a sober but not surprising reality that Hitler’s popularity is making a strong comeback among those who call themselves Palestinians. On the other hand, it is jolting to see his exploding popularity in today’s Europe and all across the internet. Hitler may be dead, but as Islamic Palestinianism gains ascendancy on the world stage, his rabid spirit of anti-Semitism has returned.

Hitler’s Palestinian Legacy

Jerusalem’s former Islamic Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, is regarded as the father of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Fatah, which later became the Palestinian Authority. Al-Husseini, already a leader of atrocities against Jews in the Holy Land, publicly aligned the movement with Hitler only days after his Nazi party came to power in 1933. He later visited Hitler in 1941. His role in provoking Hitler’s “final solution” cannot be verified, but his implicit endorsement is undeniable. He oversaw Muslim recruitment and training for Heinrich Himmler’s SS troops in Eastern Europe. In his own hand, he wrote numerous letters to European heads of state in that same region, entreating them to deny the immigration of any Jews to their biblical homeland.

Al-Husseini’s efforts on behalf of the Nazis during the Second World War were not gratuitous. He lived in Paris and was on Hitler’s payroll as a hired propagandist for the Islamic world. In today’s currency, his compensation was the equivalent of 12 million US dollars a year. He earned his income on the radio and in writing. In one pamphlet penned for Hitler’s SS, he wrote, “The Day of Judgment will come when the Muslims will crush the Jews completely: And when every tree behind which a Jew hides will say: ‘There is a Jew behind me, Kill him!'”

Hitler may have died in 1945, but his rabid anti-Semitism lived on in Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti who survived the war. Eventually making his way to Cairo, he spent the remainder of his life advocating the complete destruction of the newly reborn Jewish state and establishing the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps his most significant contribution to the movement was the recruitment and ideological training of a young Egyptian by the name of Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa.

Tutored by al-Husseini, the young man became the new leader of the Palestinian Authority. Accordingly, the spirit of Hitler was transferred into the visceral philosophy of the movement under a man who abbreviated his name to Yasser Arafat. In 1969 Arafat met and recruited a young man by the name of Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas Carries on the Legacy

Under Arafat’s direction, the young lawyer eventually made his way to a university in Moscow to earn a doctorate in philosophy. Abbas’s successfully defended dissertation was titled, “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.” In the dissertation, Dr. Abbas was nothing less than an apologist for Adolph Hitler, arguing that the Holocaust was a “fantastic lie” created by Zionists; that is, by patriotic Israelis and those who support the Jewish state.

Little wonder then, that in January of 2016, praise for Hitler was espoused on Palestinian television in the lips of Tawfiq Tirawi, a ruling member of the Palestinian Authority’s party, Fatah.

In a thoughtful discussion documented by the Israeli watchdog non-profit, Palestinian Media Watch, Tirawi argued with the host’s assertion that Hitler “was morally corrupt.”

“He was not morally corrupt,” Tirawi responded. “Let us talk logically. Hitler was not ‎morally corrupt. He was daring.”

As so-called Palestine wins global sympathy, its nostalgia for Hitler is being injected into the world’s spiritual arteries. Intrigue with Hitler is most keenly evidenced by the resurrection of his ideological tome, Mein Kampf. A runaway bestseller in the 1930s that personally enriched its author, by the end of the Second World War, it had sold some 10 million copies in eleven languages. Outlawed in most countries after Nazism’s defeat, today it is back on bookshelves and electronic devices, including a fully legal, annotated version published in Germany this year.

Fascination with Hitler Spreading

Signs are everywhere that intrigue with the Fuhrer is metastacizing into something much worse. In Austria’s courts, an argument was recently made that public posts quoting Hitler and calling for the murder of Jews is justifiable criticism of the State of Israel. Public demonstrations in England, France and even the United States in which Hitler’s genocidal intent is favorably evoked are becoming common. Iran regularly sponsors Holocaust cartoon contests that mock the unfathomable slaughter—and does so without rebuke from most of the world’s governments. But it is in cyberspace where Hitler’s resurrection is most obvious. Documented examples are sickening and endless.

How did such a man as Adolph Hitler rise to power and almost conquer the world with his rabid, murderous anti-Semitism? The answers are in today’s world. Hitler has returned.