[BIOGRAPHY] Who is Amin al-Husseini? A Look at the Palestinian Mufti Who Aligned Himself with Hitler

In the early hours of the current Israel-Hamas War, there have been celebrations from some pro-Palestinian protesters celebrating the Hamas fighters who slaughtered innocent Israeli and foreign civilians and took around 200 of them hostage.

With these celebrations came chants and slogans such as "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," and calling Israel an "apartheid" state that allegedly discriminated against Arabs.

The term for discrimination and prejudice against Jews is called "antisemitism," with cases of such skyrocketing since the latest war in Israel and Gaza began, where Jews were discriminated against, harassed in schools, their properties robbed, vandalized, or damaged, verbally or physically assaulted, or - in at least one case in the US since October 7, 2023 - killed in an alleged hate crime despite police saying they did not find evidence of such.

Since the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, antisemitism has become a term exclusively used to describe sympathizers of the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.

However, an Arab Muslim cleric made the decision to pick up where Hiter and the Nazis left off, sparking 75 years of tensions in the Middle East.

His name was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini and modern Palestinian and Arab militancy and hatred against the Jews could be traced back to him.

Early Years and Military Service

Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was born in around 1897 in Jerusalem as the son of the city's mufti and anti-Zionist Tahir al-Husayni.

Early on, he was educated in Islamic, Ottoman, and Catholic schools before entering an Islamic seminary under the tutelage of Salafist theologian Muhammad Rashid Rida.

He later served in the Ottoman Army during the First World War before defecting to the Entente side and joining the Arab Revolt, which at the time, was supported by the British and French.

It was also during this time that the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration were published, which angered the Arabs to this day.

Mufti and Instigator

By the end of the war, al-Husseini made his first public condemnation of Zionism - an ideology of repatriating Jews after the Romans drove them out from the area that the Abrahamic faiths call the Holy Land - as early as the 1920s

In 1921, the British High Commissioner of Mandatory Palestine appointed al-Husseini Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a position he held for most of his life.

As mufti, he promoted the concept of Arab nationalism to oppose Zionism and the concept of establishing a Jewish state in what he called Arab lands. Al-Husseini's opposition to the establishment of both a Jewish homeland and the British occupation at that time came to the point that riots and pogroms were unleashed against the Jewish settlers, with most of the riots involving the ownership of the Temple Mount, which both the Jews and Arab Muslims claim as their own.

The tensions came to a head in 1929 when Zionists and Arab Muslims were involved in a series of murders and violent incidents. However, the British mandate allegedly favored the Jews, something Palestinian terror organizations like Hamas still remember to this day.

It was also under al-Husseini's tenure as grand mufti that the Arabs of Palestine organized a series of protests, strikes, and attacks against both British authorities and Jewish settlers between 1936 and 1939.

Because of these riots, al-Husseini was stripped of all his administrative roles by the British government in 1937, except his position as grand mufti of Jerusalem.

Nazi Connection

Countries in the Arab world have different perspectives regarding Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. But as far as Palestine is concerned, they were heavily influenced by al-Husseini's dealings with the Nazis.

However, the alliance the mufti had with Hitler and the other Axis powers was purely strategical, with his memoirs explaining that his dealings with the Nazis were because they were the "enemy of [his] enemy" - the Jews.

Eventually, al-Husseini made a tour of Nazi-occupied Europe to convey his dream of a Palestine free of Jews. The highlight of his trip was his meeting with Hitler himself on November 28, 1941.

Hitler described the mufti as having "more than one Aryan among his ancestors and one who may be descended from the best Roman stock."

As for the Holocaust, al-Husseini took a different approach regarding how to deal with it. Unlike the German Nazis who denied the occurrence of the extermination of six million Jews, the mufti and his close collaborators were intending to encourage and endorse the eradication of Jews settling in the Middle East and the prevention of Jews fleeing the Holocaust from entering British Palestine.

Al-Husseini has also made speeches over the radio about why Arab Muslims should oppose and eradicate Zionism and Jews.

However, Operation Atlas, the Nazi operation in 1944 which was partially his attempt of instigating another riot between Jews and Palestinians, failed.

Disgrace, Exile, Death

Al-Husseini's dealings with the Nazis were the pivotal nail in the coffin of his career.

He was arrested in 1945 while he was in the southern German city of Konstanz by French occupying troops while attempting to seek asylum in Switzerland. He eventually escaped to Egypt where he was granted political asylum thanks to contacts connected with the Muslim Brotherhood - the organization Hamas was an offshoot of.

While he became a very important figure in Palestine in opposing the establishment of a Jewish state, with his final influential role being the president of an All-Palestine Government in 1948, his involvement in the Second World War as a Nazi collaborator was his downfall.

Ultimately, King Abdullah I of Jordan stripped al-Husseini of his muftis of Jerusalem and was replaced by his long-time rival, Husam al-Din Jarallah. He and many other Arab Palestinian leaders were also exiled as Israel was established in 1948.

Even in exile - first in Egypt and later in Lebanon - al-Husseini still exerted some form of influence in subsequent Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, the last major one in his lifetime was the Six-Day War of 1967.

Al-Husseini died on July 4, 1974. He wished to be buried in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Temple Mount, but the Israeli government refused requests for his wish to be granted.

Legacy of Hatred

Given the life and work of al-Husseini, many Jewish observers recalled how he and those who followed him, including Hamas, were purportedly continuing Hitler's legacy by copying and refining the Nazi playbook.

Most recently, Pakistani senator and staunch Islamist Afnan Ullah Khan shared and later deleted a tweet on X, formerly Twitter, a photo of Hitler while suggesting the world now knew "why he did what he did" during the Holocaust when he killed millions of Jews.

He has since been removed from the platform.

This continuation of the Nazi legacy is what Israeli mental health professional and military veteran Ron Jager described the anti-Israel movement as "Nazism 2.0."

In his opinion piece for the JNS, he particularly referred to Iran and Qatar as the main instigators of what could be perceived as Jewish hate, but it could also be the same for the rest of the Arab world.

"The murder, torture, mutilation of bodies and sexual assaults against innocent Jewish children, women, men and the elderly are nothing less than a pogrom reminiscent of the Holocaust and the Nazis' genocidal war against the Jewish people," he wrote.

"Hamas's ideology echoes classic European antisemitism and Nazi ideology, which incited the genocide of the European Jews. The Hamas terrorists are modern-day torchbearers of Nazism."

A few days before the October 7 attack, several Jewish intellectuals warned of the alleged nazification of the Palestinian leadership structure and why it should be eradicated to attain peace in the region.

One of them was former US prosecutor and author Henry Kopel, who offered a solution to achieve the dream set out in the Oslo and Abraham Accords.

"[I]f one asks what needs to change in order to find better options, an answer emerges: A new and thoroughly de-Nazified Palestinian leadership," he said.

'Enemy of My Enemy'

In 2021, TimeGhost History also featured a video about al-Husseini and his double dealings with rival factions to suit his agenda on their YouTube channel dedicated to the Second World War.

TimeGhost producer and presenter Spartacus Olsson detailed that Hitler despised organized religion, but used them as political tools to further the Nazi dream.

"He tolerates the Catholic and Protestant churches for political reasons, but he regards both as a threat to Nazi control of society," he explained. "One would assume that makes Amin al-Husseini - a religious leader of the Islamic faith - an unlikely ally. But perhaps it is here, as they say, that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.'"

Meanwhile, social media users - especially in the TimeGhost video - observed that a younger picture of Al-Husseini looked like Canadian actor Ryan Gosling, whose most recent film was the live-action film "Barbie," with some of them suggesting the actor could portray the controversial mufti in a hypothetical biopic.

"Is it just me, or does al-Husseini kind of look like an older Ryan Gosling?" one comment wrote.

Tags

Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Adolf Hitler, Nazi, Holocaust, Antisemitism