Shabazz and the Hitler smear

posted at 10:33 pm on July 16, 2007 by Bryan
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On Hannity & Colmes tonight, the increasingly absurd Malik Zulu Shabazz, last seen getting his arms and legs and head handed to him by Michelle, backed up Rep. Keith Ellison’s claim that 9-11 = the Reichstag fire. Shabazz also tried to argue that Bush may be worse than Hitler because the US had good relations with Hitler prior to the invasion of Poland. That isn’t true — FDR was anti-Hitler long before the war started.

But suppose what Shabazz said was true about the US being friendly to Hitler prior to the war. Like, to people like Shabazz, it would be a bad thing to be on Hitler’s good side or something.

If we’re going to play the Six Degrees of Separation game, perhaps Shabazz should look into the history of his fellow Muslims. Consider, for example, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the WWII era, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Al-Husseini, who was Yasser Arafat’s uncle, wasn’t just a Nazi sympathizer. He went to Germany in 1941 to try and get Hitler to send the SS death squads into the Middle East to wipe out all the Jews there. If you’re keeping score at home, this was 7 years before the founding of the state of Israel. The “occupied territories” weren’t even a glimmer in Ariel Sharon’s eye.

Bosnia’s Muslims volunteered in droves for the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian):

Georges Lepre wrote that “Himmler endeavoured to restore what he called ‘an old Austrian’ tradition by reviving the Bosnian regiments of former Austo-Hungarian army in the form of a Bosnian-muslim SS Division. Once raised, this division was to engage and destroy Tito’s Partisan forces operating in North-eastern Bosnia, thus restoring local ‘order’. To be sure, Himmler’s primary concern in the region was not security of the local Muslim population, but welfare of ethnic German settlers to the north in Srem. ‘Srem is the breadbasket of Croatia, and hopefully it and our beloved German settlements will be secured. I hope that the area south of Srem will be liberated by … the Bosnian division … so that we can at least restore partial order in this ridiculous (Croatian) state.’ (ibid. p17)

Hitler formally approved the project on 10 February 1943 and SS-Obergruppenführer Arthur Phelps, a Romanian ethnic German commander, was charged with raising the division.

Al-Husseini had his fingers in this pie as well:

In Spring of 1943, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, (aka Amin al-Husseini), was recruited by the Nazis to assist in the organization and recruitment of Bosniaks into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units in Yugoslavia. He was successful in convincing the Bosniaks to go against the declarations of the Sarajevo, Mostar, and Banja Luka Clerics, who had since 1941, forbidden Bosnian Muslims to collaborate with Croat-Nazis (Ustashe).

The 13th was primarily responsible for hunting down partisans who resisted Hitler’s rule in Yugoslavia.

Let’s move to the Middle East, where in Iraq in 1941, the locals rebelled against British colonial rule. Their eventual aim was to defeat the British and unite with the Nazis.

On April 2, 1941, the anti-British Rashid Ali became prime minister as a result of the 1941 coup d’etat. [1] He did not overthrow the monarchy. But Rashid Ali did install a more compliant Regent. He also attempted to restrict the rights of the British under the 1930 treaty. In 1941, Rashid Ali had already made covert contacts with the Nazi representatives in the Middle East but was not yet openly pro-Nazi.

Rashid Ali became openly pro-Nazi, quickly lost the war and ended up fleeing to Germany. How surprising.

To the east in Persia, the Shias there tried a novel approach to making alliance with Hitler: They changed the name of the country to show ideological sympathy with him in 1935.

In 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi announced that all Western countries should use the name of “Iran” in their languages too. Opponents claim that this act brought cultural damage to the country and separated Iran from its past in the West, and caused many people to confuse it with Iraq (an Arab state west of Iran). During World War II, in fact, Winston Churchill ordered that the name “Persia” be used for all government documents so as to avoid this confusion. For many westerners, “Persia” became a dead empire that does not exist anymore. Members of the Persian intelligentsia were not happy with this decree either, because of the pro-Nazi incentive behind it.[1] After Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi Economics minister, commented on the Aryan origin of Persians, Reza Shah’s ambassador in Germany encouraged him to issue the above mentioned decree asking all foreign delegates to use the word “Iran” (meaning “Land of the Aryans”) instead of “Persia” in formal correspondence.[2]

As the New York Times explained at the time, “At the suggestion of the Persian Legation in Berlin, the Tehran government, on the Persian New Year, March 21, 1935, substituted Iran for Persia as the official name of the country. In its decision it was influenced by the Nazi revival of interest in the so-called Aryan races, cradled in ancient Persia. As the Ministry of Foreign Affairs set forth in its memorandum on the subject, ‘Perse,’ the French designation of Persia, connoted the weakness and tottering independence of the country in the nineteenth century, when it was the chessboard of European imperialistic rivalry. ‘Iran,’ by contrast, conjured up memories of the vigor and splendor of its historic past.”

The majority of Muslims in the Middle East subscribed to the Nazi “Final Solution” and either covertly or openly supported the Third Reich during the war. Taking a look at the obvious blood libels, calls to genocide and threats to resume the holocaust (that many in the Middle East deny ever happened),

it’s beyond obvious that at least a siginificant number in the Middle East and Muslims worldwide still subscribe to core elements of the Nazi ideology. Shabazz himself is an anti-Semite. I wonder, why doesn’t Malik Zulu Shabazz ever bring any of this up?

Update (AP): Beyond The News has the video of Shabazz’s segment on H&C.

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