Are Claims of Nazi Genocidal Treatment of Jews Affecting Islam True?

 

There are often claims made in editorials and historic allegories when attempting to explain the appearance of a similarity between the animosity and murderous intents against the Jewish People by many in Islam by comparing these effects to those from Nazism and their execution of the Final Solution and the concentration death camps. The ongoing supposition appears to lay the origins of the Islamic animosity towards the Jews as having its origins in Nazi Germany despite the verses in the Quran which dictate genocidal animosity against the Jewish People. Such a supposition crediting the Nazi hatred and attempted annihilation of all Jews within their borders ignore some of the earliest writings in Islam which demand treatment of the Jews which can only be described as genocidal. A pair of such writings can be found in the writings of Bukhari who wrote the Hadiths during the mid to late ninth century which included the verses which are of interest in Hadiths Volume 4 (52:176-7) which read as follows:

Bukhari 52:176
Allah’s Apostle said, “You (i.e. Muslims) will fight with the Jews till some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will (betray them) saying, ‘O ‘Abdullah (i.e. slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.’”

Bukhari 52:177
Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

These relatively well-known verses dictate an obvious animosity against the Jewish People and are not the only references from earliest Islam which impart a genocidal series of references regarding the Jewish People. These particular Hadiths are accepted completely by Hamas as they have incorporated a version of them within their charter as the concluding paragraph of Article Seven which reads:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (the Boxthorn tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.

The above quotes depict the early and the consistent overriding and driving impetus for hatred of the Jewish People as well as how these exact phraseologies were retained and carried virtually word for word to the present as they appear in the Hamas Charter echoing the Hadiths from the ninth century.

 

The fact is that Islam held a particularly viscous hatred against the Jewish populations around Medina which resulted in Muhammad making war against the two main tribal elements of Jews living around the areas of Medina. In the year 628 Muhammad attacked the Banu Qaynuqa tribe of Jews defeating them and sent them into exile northward out of the Arabian Peninsula. They were rumored to have eventually settled in the lands of Syria. The Banu Nadir battled with Muhammad’s forces and lost their claim to the oasis later in 628 forcing them to resettle with the neighboring tribe of Jews, the Banu Qurayza. The Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza were allied before becoming involved in the battle of Khaybar resulting in their final defeat in 629 leaving none of the males of fighting age and all the older Jews while taking the younger women and children who were young enough to be raised as Muslims without the threat of their revolting. The Islamic animosities towards the Jewish tribes surrounding Medina are evidence that such hatred was evident in early Islam.

 

Moving forward to the years leading to and including World War II we can trace some of the events and influences which shine some revealing light on the Nazi-Islam influences. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini fled from Jerusalem and the lands under the British Mandate journeying to Berlin in 1941. During the war, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husseini repeatedly made requests to “the German government to bomb Tel Aviv.” Grand Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husseini was involved in the organization and recruitment of Bosnian Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units and also blessed sabotage teams trained by Germans before they were dispatched to Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan to fight the British which the Grand Mufti held a hatred almost equal to his despising of the Jewish People. The most well remembered unit formed and virtually commanded by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husseini was the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, formed mostly of Muslims in 1943 and was the first non-Germanic Waffen SS division. The Grand Mufti was known to have had meetings with Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (also held Waffen-SS, Nazi Minister of the Interior and Commander over the Gestapo), Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders. Most of the Grand Mufti’s efforts were expended towards persuading them to extend the Nazis’ anti-Jewish program to the Arab world.

 

The Grand Mufti pressed the Nazi leadership to declare their objections to the formation of a Jewish state within the British Mandate lands and that they would negate all treaties which were being used to bring such into reality as well as to form an alliance with the Arab populations throughout the Middle East offering that they would gladly rise up and fight the British and French occupiers. There is one fact which damns the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini more than any other action he took and stands above all else he may have attempted in his lifetime, that he was instrumental in the proceedings at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had met previously with Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler to discuss the Jewish problem stating that it was most unacceptable for the Jews to be exiled to the areas under the British Mandate and they could not be simply put in camps and quarantined just to have them eventually make their way after the war to the Middle East. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini pressed for the extermination of the European Jews and demanded that the Nazis dedicate themselves and declare their intent to also exterminate the Jews across the Middle East after they defeated the Allies and took possession of the lands of the Middle East and beyond. This went hand in hand with his discussions with the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler about the Islamic concept of Jihad, of an all-out holy war which was all encompassing and how such was the dream of all Muslims which the Reich could use to their advantage by forming Muslim divisions and utilizing them to hunt down and exterminate undesirable groups such as Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other enemies of the Reich. There are those who claim that it was the persuasive arguments made by the Grand Mufti which pressed the Nazi decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Further evidence shows that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem toured Auschwitz concentration camp with Eichmann as well as later testimony at the Nuremburg Trials where top Adolph Eichmann aide SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny stated under oath during questioning that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husseini constantly urged greater haste in the Nazi’s rate of the killing of the Jews.

 

The Muslims did not take a page from the Nazis genocidal mania against the Jewish People and the slaughter of six-million or more Jews along with the totals of approaching fourteen-million undesirables which also included homosexuals, Roma (Gypsies), Christian ministers, Catholic Priests, Polish citizens and prisoners of war, Russian prisoners of war, Serbs and various others who were denoted as inferior or a threat to the purity of the master race. Another item of interest is it was during World War II and as a result of the claims by the German Nazis that they were members of a master race that the leadership of Persia changed their names to Iran, the Farsi pronunciation for Aryan, the so-called master race. This was likely the greatest influence the Nazis held over the Islamic peoples, both the peoples and their leaders. Such an effect pales when compared to the influence which Islam played in the Nazi actions during World War II as it was the input and persuasion coming from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini with Adolph Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler and speaking before the high ranking decision makers attending the Wannsee Conference both during meetings and potentially even more-so in private speaking between sessions and at the end or beginning of every day. There have been claims which have credited the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini with almost singlehandedly bending the direction of the Wannsee Conference into taking the genocidal elimination of the Jews of Europe. That summation alone quantifies the direction and degree of influence from the history of Jew hatred in Islam flowing into the Nazi camp and debunking the mainstream media myth that Islam has been corrupted by the Nazis and their implementation of the Final Solution. The mainstream media’s choice to whitewash the entirety of the history of Islam and the facts which prove beyond any doubt that the Holocaust and everything right down to the yellow Star of David Jews were required to wear having originated with the second Caliph of Iraq, Umar bin al-Khat’tab, who demanded not only that Jews wear the yellow star but the Jews were required to walk down the street on the opposite side of the Muslims. When all is taken into account and we have said all there is to say, it becomes obvious and beyond doubt that the Muslims have not learned very much about hatred of the Jews from the Nazis but rather the Nazis were schooled by Islam and took virtually everything they used against the Jews in the Holocaust and simply modernized the methods and introduced to the world industrialized slaughter of human beings simply because they were different, be it they were Jews, Roma, homosexuals, mentally challenged, physically handicapped, political prisoners, the wrong nationality or anything which caused one to catch a hateful glance from one of the politically correct in the society. The similarity between the Nazi persecuted classes and the historically persecuted under Islam have a frightening similarity, the Nazis were simply the first to use the assembly line as a means of murdering millions efficiently and speedily. Perhaps this was the one lesson the Islamic radicals may prove to have learned, and if they have, then G0d help us all.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

We Have Been Here Before; Never Again!

Russian Star, Ivan Okhlobystin, of the Russian version of the popular U.S. sitcom “Scrubs” came out with a horrifyingly offensive suggestion of how to address the Gay public. He was quoted saying, “I would have them all stuffed alive inside an oven. This is Sodom and Gomorrah, as a believer, I cannot remain indifferent to this, it is a living danger to my children!” He went on to state that homosexuality is “a clear sign of mental abnormality.” One needs to first ask what he is honestly a believer of Orthodox Christianity and then seek an explanation from the leaders of his faith as to how they feel about his suggestion. I am not an authority of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Christian faiths in general. But I seem to remember something about “abhor the sin, love the sinner.” The honest thing is that as a Russian, whose soldiers during World War II were sometimes sent to the death camps as the animosity between the Russians and German, especially the Nazis, was off scale, he should be more sensitive and aware of the horrors which befell the victims of the Nazis. The horrific tragedy that this reference could be offered within one century after twelve million plus people, the vast numbers being innocent civilians guilty only of belonging to some politically determined and despised minority, were gassed and their bodies placed into crematoria which more resembled ovens than anything else. There is nothing more filled with opprobrium than somebody making a suggestion that any group of people should be murdered simply for belonging to a group in which scorn or hatred may exist. Perhaps it is necessary to remind people of exactly how the death camps came to be acceptable to the people of Germany who were considered to have one of the most enlightened societies just a decade earlier and which had among their population many of the greatest minds in science both hard as in mathematics and physics as well as the social sciences such as psychology and political science. Still, facing economic collapse and severe unemployment the nation of Germany fell prey to a madman and the result was they were forced to accept his hatreds and inhuman social doctrines.

 

Many are not all that familiar with how the death camps were incorporated slowly after desensitizing the German population until they simply fell in line either out of fear or possibly even finding they agreed with the policies as the propaganda had performed as intended. The Nazis did not come to power and start the death camps the next day or month or year. They began slowly and carefully first establishing a euthanasia program for people whose lives were determined to not be worth living due to severe physical or mental disabilities. Then they progressed to forced sterilization of those who were determined to be mentally insane or so mentally challenged as to not even be capable of caring for themselves selling these as being merciful as these people too who were considered to not be living lives worth living as well as not contributing to society while taking from the society. All the while the Nazis also carried out a campaign of delegitimization and dehumanization of the Roma, Jews, Homosexuals and others who were considered enemies of the state. They claimed initially that they were relocating these people for their own safety and benefit. Slowly the people came to accept the deportation of these unsavory peoples who were no longer seen as being truly human but more as a subhuman species which needed to be separated from the regular, normal, decent people for the good of society and their own benefit. After they has transported the dehumanized victims of the Nazis to camps simply beginning to murder them with industrial efficiency was a small step which few ever believed was actually being committed as the government was only acting for the good of the whole, the society and was protecting these others who were incapable of normal existence and were a threat to society.

 

When the Nazis were considering how to dispose of the Jews they had considered deportation to the Middle East, strangely enough to an area around where Israel exists today, but ran into resistance from the British and the French who had colonial control of these areas. Meanwhile, there were the members of the Nazi high command who were anti-Semitic and wanted a final solution concerning the Jews and they had an ally who carried some weight who not only thought the Nazis should murder all the Jews in Europe but also demanded that once the Nazis won the war in the Middle East and North Africa he wished they also murder the Jews residing throughout the Arab and Muslim lands. This individual also promised that the Nazis could rely on the support of the Muslim Arabs in removing the Jews by any means necessary. This ally of the Nazis was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini. Grand al-Husseini would go on to be the mentor and role model for Yasser Arafat who considered him to be as a father and would claim him as a relative usually an uncle. Whether this claim by Arafat was valid is inconsequential as his stating this relationship is sufficient for all believe that this was the closeness of the two anti-Semites as they were of the same ilk. Considering that one of the groups persecuted originally were the homosexuals this comment by Ivan Okhlobystin concerning murdering them using ovens bringing such implications of Nazi similar treatment in the past makes his comment even more nauseating and offensive. One can only imagine where going down such a road would lead this time and who would eventually be included on the hate list for similar treatment should Ivan Okhlobystin and those who applaud his hate-filled remarks were allowed to have any real power. There is enough hatred and the current increasing rise on anti-Semitism makes such comments all the more dangerous. As I said, the human race went down this path countless times in history though the chosen hatreds sometimes varied; the results and the horrors were always the same and after the Holocaust we were supposed to remember and by remembering we also promised “Never Again!” We did not say almost never again or anything halfway but apparently there are those who did not learn from past horrors and who would commit them again and lead to steps that would unravel society from a humanism into barbarism once again. I can only repeat, please, never again!

 

Beyond the Cusp