Replies

The commie replys;
Ahh.. Another post hoping its readers won't dig deeper.
You are right that my post did not dispute Husseini's connection to Hitler. However, your evidence (the meeting notes) are by no means proof of Husseini's unquestioning support. They merely note that Hitler ASKED for the Mufti's support. My claim was that Husseini's relationship with Hitler was less substantial/detrimental to Jews than the relationship American businessmen had with Hitler.

"You say he is somewhat right about the Mufti's views about the Jewish immigration, while 'forgetting to mention' that
Jews lived in that area long before Arabs did. Well, since the Arabs have been there since 635 AD and Jews well before 1300 BC"

Prior to 635AD the area of Israel and Palestine was ruled not by Jews, but by the Sassanian Empire (whose official religion was Zoroastrianism not Judaism). They had taken the land from the Roman Empire. Surveys of the area by the Ottoman Empire 1878 showed that there were 462,465 subject inhabitants of the Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre districts: 403,795 Muslims (including Druze), 43,659 Christians and 15,011 Jews. In addition, there were perhaps 10,000 Jews with foreign citizenship (recent immigrants to the country), and several thousand Muslim Arab nomads (bedouin) who were not counted as Ottoman subjects. By the outbreak of World War I (1914), the population of Jews in Palestine had risen to about 60,000, about 33,000 of whom were recent settlers. The Arab population in 1914 was 683,000.

Your claim that Jews lived in Palestine 2000 years prior to Arabs and thus have more right to the land is interesting. Native Americans have lived in Canada and the US since thousands of years before 1300BC while Europeans have only lived here since 1492AD. So are you suggesting Native Americans should be permitted to take the same liberties with the non-indigenous populations as the state of Israel does? To set curfews on Canadians, hold hundreds of thousands of them without trial or conviction of a crime, torture them, force them from the land they've lived on for over 1300 (oops Europeans have only been in Canada for slightly more than 400 years) years, and eliminate their political rights?

Do you believe Canada and the US should be given back to the Native Americans (or taken back with force)?

In response to Husseini's uproar against Jewish immigration you pose the question:

"Why would immigration cause such an uproar?
As a Canadian we welcome immigrants why counldn't the arabs of transjordan?"

The Zionist movement began in 1882 with the first wave of European Jewish immigration to Palestine. The World Zionist Organization, established by Theodor Herzl in 1897, declared that the aim of Zionism was to establish "a national home for the Jewish people secured by public law." A second form of Zionism was the Revisionist movement led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. They earned the name "Revisionist" because they wanted to revise the boundaries of Jewish territorial aspirations and claims beyond Palestine to include areas east of the Jordan River. In the 1920s and 1930s, they differed from Labor Zionists by declaring openly the objective to establish a Jewish state (rather than the vaguer formula of a "national home") in Palestine. And they believed that armed force would be required to establish such a state. Thus, immigration of European Jews into Palestine became the source of Arab "uproar." Not because they disliked Jews, as they had been living with Jews ever since 635AD, but because they knew the Zionist immigrants intended to take over their land.

Immigrants to Canada are not a threat to Canada's control of the land. And when they do become a threat (not even to sovreignty but to profits) Canada responds. In April, Citizenship and Immigration Canada announced that it is backing out of its policy which allowed Algerians residing in Canada without legal status to remain in the country for their own safety. As a result, hundreds of Algerian refugees residing in Canada will be deported within the next six months. While the Canadian government claims that the deportees will be safe in Algeria, it advises Canadian citizens against traveling there, warning of "continuous terrorist activity." Human rights organizations widely regard the situation in Algeria to be dangerous, leading many to question the real motives behind the deportations: a visit to Algeria by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien in the name of NEPAD has $1 billion in trade implications, and a $141 million deal between Canadian company SNC Lavalin and the Goverment of Algeria to build water-supply infrastructure was officially announced shortly afterward.

In the "free" US, Attorney General John Ashcroft has expanded the power of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain immigrants. Authorities can now keep detainees behind bars even after a federal immigration judge has ordered the individual released for lack of evidence. According to the latest figures released by the Justice Department, more than 1,100 immigrants have been rounded up and detained by the US government. Unfortunately in December of 2001, having come under criticism for refusing to release the identities of the detainees, where they were being held, and what charges, if any, had been brought against them, Ashcroft announced that the government would simply suspend giving out any figures on the detainment.

Israel itself has been more than anti-immigrant, it has even caused the exodus of many of the Arabs who had been living on the land it annexed. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The UN partition plan divided the country in such a way that each state would have a majority of its own population, although some Jewish settlements would fall within the proposed Palestinian state and many Palestinians would become part of the proposed Jewish state. The territory designated to the Jewish state would be slightly larger than the Palestinian state (56 percent and 43 percent of Palestine, respectively) on the assumption that increasing numbers of Jews would immigrate there. According to the UN partition plan, the area of Jerusalem and Bethlehem was to become an international zone. Fighting began between the Arab and Jewish residents of Palestine days after the adoption of the UN partition plan. In 1949, the war between Israel and the Arab states ended with the signing of armistice agreements. The State of Israel now encompassed over 77 percent of the Palestine territory. As a consequence of the fighting in Palestine between 1947 and 1949, over 700,000 Arabs living in the land Israel claimed became refugees. Israeli military intelligence indicates that at least 75 percent of the refugees left due to Zionist or Israeli military actions, psychological campaigns aimed at frightening Arabs into leaving, and direct expulsions.

On June 5, 1967 Israel preemptively attacked Egypt and Syria, destroying their air forces on the ground within a few hours. Jordan joined in the fighting belatedly, and consequently was attacked by Israel as well. The Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies were decisively defeated, and Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria

Israel established a military administration to govern the Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Under this arrangement, Palestinians were denied many basic political rights and civil liberties, including freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of political association.

After the 1967 war, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which notes the "inadmissability of the acquisition of territory by force," and calls for Israeli withdrawal from lands seized in the war and the right of all states in the area to peaceful existence within secure and recognized boundaries. The grammatical construction of the French version of Resolution 242 says Israel should withdraw from "the territories," whereas the English version of the text calls for withdrawal from "territories." (Both English and French are official languages of the UN.) Israel and the United States use the English version to argue that Israeli withdrawal from some, but not all, the territory occupied in the 1967 war satisfies the requirements of this resolution.

Since 1967, Israel has built hundreds of settlements and permitted hundreds of thousands of its own Jewish citizens to move to the West Bank and Gaza, despite that this constitutes a breach of international law. Israel has justified the violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and other international laws governing military occupation of foreign territory on the grounds that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not technically "occupied" because they were never part of the sovereign territory of any state. Therefore, according to this interpretation, Israel is not a foreign "occupier" but a legal "administrator" of territory whose status remains to be determined.

The Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles (the Oslo Accords) was signed in Washington in September 1993. The Declaration of Principles established that Israel would withdraw from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, with additional withdrawals from further unspecified areas of the West Bank during a five-year interim period.
The Oslo accords set up a negotiating process without specifying an outcome. The process was supposed to have been completed by May 1999.
During the protracted interim period of the Oslo process, Israel's Labor and Likud governments built new settlements in the occupied territories, expanded existing settlements and constructed a network of bypass roads to enable Israeli settlers to travel from their settlements to Israel proper without passing through Palestinian-inhabited areas. These projects were understood by most Palestinians as marking out territory that Israel sought to annex in the final settlement. The Oslo accords contained no mechanism to block these unilateral actions or Israel's violations of Palestinian human and civil rights in areas under its control.

In July 2000, President Clinton invited Prime Minister Barak and President Arafat to Camp David to conclude negotiations on the long-overdue final status agreement. Barak proclaimed his "red lines": Israel would not return to its pre-1967 borders; East Jerusalem with its 175,000 Jewish settlers would remain under Israeli sovereignty; Israel would annex settlement blocs in the West Bank containing some 80 percent of the 180,000 Jewish settlers; and Israel would accept no legal or moral responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The Palestinians, in accord with UN Security Council resolution 242 and their understanding of the spirit of the Oslo Declaration of Principles, sought Israeli withdrawal from the vast majority of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including East Jerusalem, and recognition of an independent state in those territories.

As for Ford and GM plants becoming German property when the war began, this is only partially correct. As I quoted previously a 1974 report printed by the US Senate Judiciary Committee stated, "The outbreak of war in September 1939 resulted inevitably in the full conversion BY GM and Ford of THEIR Axis plants to the production of military aircraft and trucks. On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored 'mule' 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich's medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as 'the backbone of the German Army transportation system.'" Ford lost control of it's Werke plant in Cologne, which used slave labor from the Buchenwald concentration camp WHILE Ford controlled it, after the US entered the war in 1941, when the Nazi government seized the factory's assets (Not when WWII began in 1939). The same is true of the GM plant in Berlin. It was while these factories were controlled by US businessmen that they manufactured war machines for the German Army. Henry Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, five years after Hitler's passing of Anti-semitism laws and three years after the Nuremberg Race laws.

You speak as if license to build plants alleviates moral responsibility for the management of them. Slave labor, Jewish slave labor, should not have been used by American businessmen to build German weapons. This doesn't mean Americans in general should be ostracized. Al Husseini shouldn't have been in a meeting with Hitler. Likewise, This doesn't mean Palestinians in general should be ostracized. Period. Enough for this evening.

-For liberation.

Here is my reply to the communist in post #47.As I have said this is taking place on another site.Enjoy
At the outbreak of the war foreign and domestic industrial assets were seized and incorporated into the Hermann Goering Reichswerks. Ironically, the Thyssen family, one of the few German industrial families to proactively support the Nazis in their early days, were the first to have their family company seized by Goering's cronies in the economics ministry.Obviously this help was not continued after the outbreak of the war.

Remember, the Nazis were on a crusade against what they called the twin evils of Zionism: Bolshevism and Capitalism. They were no fans of private industry, although election politics limited their seizures until the late 1930s

I think that it would be logical that they had severed contact once the assets were stolen, do you think the Germans in control of that plant or the German government was still making their payments to Ford or GM after declaring war on us? Can anybody believe that executives in north america were in contact with thier German counter-parts by phone, even, on a daily basis while the war raged?
For further reading on the Nazi's seizure of industrial assets, Ian Kershaw's two volume biography of Hitler covers the topic nicely. Alan Bullock's "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" also does an excellent job.
Let us put the larger picture in perspective, some thumbnail history is in order. Large numbers of Jews have been living in these territories since biblical times -- without interruption. Most of the Arabs living there are in fact relative newcomers. As the term "Palestine" is understood, it encompasses the entire area now covered by Israel including Judea/Samaria (the so-called "West Bank") and what is now the Kingdom of Jordan. It originally also included the Golan Heights. In 1922, totally contrary to the Mandate of the League of Nations, the British severed the entire area east of the Jordan River and gave it to the Hashemites as reward for their assistance in W War I. Thus, fully 75% of Palestine, all of which under the Mandate and under the terms of the Balfour declaration was meant to be a home for the Jewish people, was lost for that purpose. Only the area west of the Jordan River was left for the Jewish homeland

1947, after decades of strife between Arabs and Jews in the territories west of the Jordan River, the British had enough and relinquished the Mandate. The United Nations proposed a partition plan under which the country (west of the river) was to be divided into respective Arab and Jewish areas. Jerusalem was to be internationalized. The Jews accepted the plan; the Arabs refused it out of hand. In 1948, on the twice-truncated territory allotted to them by the United Nations, the Jews declared their independence and the state of Israel was born. On the same day, six Arab armies invaded the new-born state. In what can only be described as an almost biblical miracle, the ragged and poorly armed Jews defeated the six Arab armies, though at staggering cost in lives. When an armistice was finally secured, however, Transjordan remained in possession of Judea/Samaria (the "West Bank") and the eastern part of Jerusalem; Egypt remained in possession of the Gaza Strip. Transjordan promptly renamed itself Jordan.

Over 200,000 Jews now live there. And why shouldn't they? Why should the Arab countries and the "West Bank" be the only places in the world where Jews cannot live? How can 200,000 Jews living among one million Arabs be "an obstacle to peace"? And why does absolutely nobody care about how many Arabs "settle" in the "West Bank"? The over one million Arabs who live in Israel are citizens, enjoy every civil right, and have nothing to fear from the Jews. Nobody considers them an "obstacle to peace".
Jews have been living in Judea/Samaria since Biblical times. The area was made judenrein (free of Jews), following the Nazi model, by Jordan, when it was in possession of the territory. After 1967, Jews moved back into the territory and a great hullabaloo was raised and is still being raised about the not more than 200,000 "settlers," who do not occupy more than 2 percent of the area. But there is no concern about the hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who, lured by the prosperity of Israel, have flooded into the area, nor of the more than one million Arabs who live in Israel proper and who enjoy full rights of citizenship.
Israel acquired the territories (the "West Bank" and Gaza) in defense of an aggressive war waged against it. No country in history has ever been asked to return such territories. Do the Poles return the huge chunk of Germany that they acquired in the wake of World War II? Do the Czechs return the Sudetenland, do the French return Alsace-Lorraine? Of course not! Only Israel is being asked to return such territories. The last sovereign of the "West Bank" and of Gaza were the Ottomans. The "West Bank" and Gaza are unallocated territories.
The last sovereign in Judea/Samaria and in Gaza was the British mandatory power - and before it was the Ottoman Empire. All of Palestine, including what are now the Kingdom of Jordan and Gaza, was, by the Balfour Declaration, destined to be the Jewish National Home. How then could the Israelis possibly be "occupiers" in their own territory? Who would be the sovereign and who the rightful inhabitants?
Israel is an open and pluralistic society. Different religions, cultures, and social traditions co-exist. Protection of such diversity is embedded in Israel's traditions and confirmed by the government. About 20% of the population (over one million people) are non-Jews, most of them Arabs, and some Druze. Like all other Israeli citizens, they have full rights to vote and to hold elective office. Both Arabs and Druze hold seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Every Knesset, since the founding of the State in 1948, has had Arab and Druze members. All transactions in the Knesset are simultaneously translated into Arabic, and Arab members may address the Knesset in Arabic.
It is official policy of the Israeli government to foster the language, culture, and traditions of the Arab minority, in the educational system and in daily life. Arabic is an official language in Israel, together with Hebrew. Israel's Arabic press is the most vibrant and independent of any country in the region. There are more than 20 Arabic periodicals. They publish what they please, subject only to the same military censorship as Jewish publications. There are daily TV and radio programs in Arabic, Arabic is taught in Jewish secondary schools. Israeli universities are renowned centers of learning in the history and literature of the Arab Middle East.

All religious communities in Israel enjoy the full protection of the State. Israeli Arabs -- Moslems, as well as many Christian denominations -- are free to exercise their faiths, to observe their own weekly day of rest and holidays and to administer their own internal affairs. Each community has its own religious councils and courts, and has full jurisdiction over religious affairs, including matters of personal status, such as marriage and divorce. The holy sites of all religions are administered by their own authorities and protected by the government

In contrast to the non-Israeli Arab world, Arab women in Israel enjoy the same status as men. Israeli law grants women equal rights, including the right to vote and to be elected to public office, prohibits polygamy, child marriage, and the barbarity of female sexual mutilation. It has thus vastly changed the status of women, to far above that of any country in the region. Israeli health standards are by far the highest in the Middle East. Israeli health institutions are freely open to all Arabs, on the same basis as they are to Jews.
There is, however, one difference between the "rights" of Arabs and Jews in Israel. Israeli and Druze men are required to do three years of military service and then serve one month every year until they are 50. Arabs are exempted from military duty and are not required to perform any compensating civilian service. Since the surrounding Arab states are the avowed enemies of Israel and dedicated to its destruction (there is "peace" with Egypt and Jordan), this exemption is granted by the Israeli government to its Arab citizens, so as to spare them conflicts of loyalty and conscience.
Contrary to propaganda and to what many believe, the Arabs in Israel are full-fledged citizens, enjoy every right, have the same status in law as Jewish Israelis, and can freely move all over the country without fear of being harassed, attacked, or killed. That's quite in contrast to the mortal dangers to which Jews are subjected when they venture into predominately Arab areas even within Israel proper. In summary, they enjoy the highest standards of living and liberty of any Arabs in the Middle East. In a poll, 70% of Israel's Arabs declared that they identified with and felt loyalty to the Palestinians, and not to the state of Israel. Significantly, however, the same percentage (70%) declared that they would much prefer to live in Israel than in any other country in the area. And who can blame them? Life is so much better for them, so much more prosperous than it would be any place else. It is instructive and sobering to compare the condition of the approximately one million Arabs in Israel with that of the pitiful remnants of Jewry in Arab countries. Jews have been living in Arab countries for almost 2,000 years. Under Arab dominance, they were always third-class citizens and subject to harassment and persecution. There were about 900,000 Jews in Arab countries in 1946 -- now there are fewer than 25,000. But there are now over one million Arabs in Israel, many more than after the exodus in 1948 -- a manifold increase. That alone would seem to prove that things can not be all that bad for Arabs in Israel.

You said "Al Husseini shouldn't have been in a meeting with Hitler."
I agree he should not have in any way supported him.The goals however IMHO were and are the same.
Adolf Hitler wrote in his book Mein Kampf that the first obstacle facing the creation of a New National Socialist State was "above all elimination of the existing Jewish one." That would require not only the elimination of the current "Jewish" State but elimination of all the Jews in that State.

Yet, the preamble of Hamas´ Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, written in 1988, like Mein Kampf, plainly outlines a planned genocide. It states:

"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."
Article seven reads:

"The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.' "

Recent killings in Israel clearly show Hamas is trying to implement that "Covenant." Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian authority are supporting Hamas. Thousands of Palestinians gathered in the streets in Gaza to cheer the killing of five American students and others at Hebrew University.
What does that all have to do with the story? The Mufti admired what Hitler did to the Jews, unlike Ford. The story is about what the Mufti thought and how Arafat looks at him.

Consider Arafat's and the PLO's long history of terrorism and violence. Over a span of 35 years, Arafat and the PLO have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Israeli, American, Lebanese, and Palestinian civilians. Through the PLO, Arafat has orchestrated the kidnapping and murder of Israeli school children, the hijacking of airliners, numberless car bombings and death-squad killings. Often Arafat's violence has been targeted at his Arab "brothers," as is evidenced by the PLO's role in Jordanian (1960s-70s) and Lebanese (1970s-80s) civil insurrections. And he hasn't changed his ways. Recently Arafat attempted to smuggle into Gaza a shipload of Iranian arms to be used against Israelis, and Arafat's Al Aqsa Brigade deliberately target and kill Israeli women and children through suicide bombers

Consider also the track record of Arafat's Palestinian Authority—the temporary governing body of the Gaza Strip and West Bank territories. Arafat is the dictator of the Palestinian Authority in everything but title. The Los Angeles Times has described his domination as stretching "from the largest to the most minor matter." Palestinians live in constant fear of having their property arbitrarily confiscated by Arafat's corrupt "police" force. Laws prohibiting free speech are common and are enforced brutally. To silence those who oppose him, Arafat shuts down radio and TV stations and imprisons and tortures journalists who criticize the Palestinian Authority. Dissenters are arbitrarily detained, tortured, or "encouraged" at gunpoint to leave the territories. In November 1999 a group of prominent intellectuals who signed a petition accusing Arafat's regime of corruption was summarily jailed. They were lucky; some recalcitrants are assassinated. Remember the mayor of a Palestinian village, Zuhir Hamdan, who publicly stated that his villagers preferred to live, not under Arafat, but Israel? He was gunned down, but luckily survived.
Arafat's current regime is barbaric and oppressive. One can logically predict that conditions in an independent Palestinian state would be worse than they are presently.
Viewed in this context of dictatorial rule, the alleged right of Palestinians to "self-determination" is groundless. No group has a right to its own state if what it seeks is a dictatorship. Arafat's "Palestinian self-determination" really means more of Arafat's despotism—it means granting legitimacy to a state that is utterly hostile to its own citizens

Those attacking Israel, by contrast, are terrorist organizations, theocracies, dictatorships and would-be dictators. They do not recognize the individual rights of their own subjects, much less those of the citizens of Israel. They initiate force indiscriminately in order to retain and expand their power.
For Liberty.