The Man Who Would Be le Président (Nicholas Sarkozy alert)

Paris
"PLUS SIMPLE! Plus vite!" says minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy to the waiter bringing croissants to a receiving room outside his office at the ministry. The fellow made the mistake of heating them. That has cost time, and Sarkozy has a lot to do. Just now, he is trying to fit in both an early-morning breakfast and an interview with a foreign journalist that he hopes will take "as little time as possible." More generally, Sarkozy is running the ministry that is the nerve center of post-riot France. He is also running against prime minister Dominique de Villepin and a dozen other hopefuls to replace Jacques Chirac in the presidential elections scheduled for next year.

It is not certain that "Sarko," as he is called in the press, will win, but it is certain he will set the tone. To adapt a metaphor of the political scientist Samuel Lubell, he is the "sun" of the French political scene, generating all the light and ideas. The other candidates are like "moons," merely reflecting the light he gives off--agreeing with Sarko on this, disagreeing with him on that, and sort of agreeing with him on the other thing. According to the Socialist Manuel Valls, the successful mayor of the Paris suburb of vry, who is sometiimes presented as a left-of-center counterweight to Sarkozy, "The things he's talking about are the things the left ought to be talking about. France is losing sight of the essentials. I give him credit for raising these subjects and recognizing that politics has got to change."

Sarkozy has been a politician for most of his 51 years. He resembles Bill Clinton in that he leaves the impression that politics is the only thing he cares about really deeply; he resembles Ronald Reagan in that he seems to view politics as a battle between, on the one hand, hard-working people with on-the-ground knowledge of problems, and, on the other, vainglorious dispensers of official baloney, from academicians to columnists to "community leaders." Very few ministers of any description have visited the isolated and anomic banlieues that exploded in riots last fall. Sarkozy has been there dozens of times. As the minister of the interior, Sarkozy is responsible both for keeping order in the banlieues and for organizing France's religions, particularly the 5 million or so Muslims whom he has with difficulty shepherded into the French religion-and-state system, by means of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, which he launched two years ago.

When an 11-year-old boy was shot to death last spring while washing his father's car as a Father's Day present in the Cité des Quatre Mille housing project outside of Paris, Sarkozy promised to clean up the neighborhood "à Kärcher"--citing the trade name of a company that makes high-pressure hoses. While he was visiting Aulnay-sous-Bois at the height of the riots, a mother pleaded with him from a window to do something about the "low-lifes" (racaille) who were burning down the neighborhood. Sarkozy shouted back that he would, and used the word himself. To say that his impetuosity gets him in trouble, as the newspapers often do, is to miss the point. True, Sarkozy is a polarizer. The senior-circuit tennis player Yannick Noah, who--quite bizarrely--is one of the most quoted celebrities in France, allegedly told Paris Match last summer (the remark was never printed), "S'il passe, je me casse!" (If he gets in, I'm out of here!). But at this point Sarkozy is as popular as any politician in the country, even in parts of the banlieues themselves. While some kids echo the condemnations of the press ("Vraiment, 'Kärcher', 'racaille', ça ne passe pas," one Marseille teenager told Le Monde), others admire him. Everyone knows him.

One thing Sarkozy does not resemble in the slightest is a traditional French politician. "I am a man of the right," he says over breakfast, "even if I'm not a conservative in the traditional sense." This is an extraordinary admission. No presidential hopeful in decades, even in the UMP created by Jacques Chirac in the wake of De Gaulle's RPR, has ever accepted the label. Never in his political life has Jacques Chirac made a similar statement. From his time as prime minister in the mid-seventies, when he described his goal as the creation of "a labor movement à la française," to his recent New Year's address, in which he again attacked American-style capitalism, Chirac has taken many positions, but none of them on the "right." Since Sarkozy's profession leaves him liable to accusations in the French press that he is the favored candidate of Americans or free-marketeers, he is anxious to spell out exactly what he means by a "temperament of the right." It is something he has obviously thought about a lot. "First, the primacy of work; second, the need to compensate personal merit and effort; third, respect for the rules, and for authority; fourth, the belief that democracy does not mean weakness; fifth, values; sixth, . . . I'm persuaded that, before sharing, you have to create wealth. I don't like egalitarianism."

Out of this value system come plans for everything. Between stints at the interior ministry, Sarkozy also spent time as minister of finance. He intends to shrink the state, reform the profligate, bureaucratic, and job-killing "French social model," cut taxes, promote ethnic harmony (through the controversial expedient of affirmative action), normalize Islam in French society, and shore up France's alliance with the United States. These plans amount to what supporters and detractors call la rupture. As Sarkozy told a roomful of journalists at UMP headquarters in January: "You can't run France on the ideas of 30 years ago." This may sound old hat. Since 1974, all French presidential elections have been run on the theme of "change."

But when Sarkozy's advisers and supporters and political allies speak of la rupture, they are thinking of something different and bigger--a recognition of past failures that is the precondition of renewed grandeur, along the lines of De Gaulle's break with the government that surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940. "The rupture is with the philosophy of French exceptionalism," says Sarkozy's adviser, the National Assembly member Patrick Dévédjian. By this he means the common French idea that France can escape the constraints of other countries because its people and its institutions are so much more sophisticated. Naturally, this is a position that is easy to attack. It involves a swallowing of pride, and Sarkozy's rival Villepin has lost no opportunity to remind his listeners that ruptures are often bloody.

Much of Sarkozy's work involves the way France has changed (and must change further still) in the face of mass immigration, something he has a closer perspective on than most. His father was a Hungarian nobleman who fled west toward the end of World War II and settled in Paris. His mother's father immigrated from Salonika. They were cultivated people--the father was a high-living anti-Communist, the mother put herself through law school after their divorce. Sarkozy did not wind up in government the way cultivated Frenchmen often do--through the elite grandes écoles. He became a lawyer, got involved in politics in the rich suburb of Neuilly, and managed to outflank the crafty RPR politician Charles Pasqua to get himself elected mayor at the age of 28.

This was a coup that brought him to the attention of two great rivals in the party: Jacques Chirac and douard Balladur. The latter, as prime minister, made Sarkozy minister of the budget in the early 1990s, and Sarkozy backed him against Chirac for president in 1995. Sarkozy bet wrong. Since then, he has had to fight against Chirac's machinations to retain his position in the party. In 2002, Chirac moved him from the ministry of the interior to the ministry of finance, a portfolio that--given France's ballooning deficit--is something of a ticking bomb for the person who holds it. When Sarkozy survived and managed to take control of the UMP, Chirac issued a declaration that no one could be both party leader and minister simultaneously. To the surprise of many, Sarkozy opted for the party and turned it into a vehicle for promoting his political fortunes.

His time in the wilderness lasted only a few months. It ended when France, the intellectual engine of European integration for half a century, became the first country to reject the proposed European constitution in a referendum last May. Chirac had invested his political credibility in a "Yes" vote. Worse, the sound drubbing his side received was attributed in part to Chirac's own incompetence in appealing to the nation in a pair of televised appearances. Compelled to reshuffle his cabinet, Chirac made Villepin prime minister and invited Sarkozy back to become minister of state for the interior, a position that gave him responsibility for public order on the eve of the Paris riots.

France now is going through a crisis of national self-confidence, somewhat akin to what Americans went through in the late 1970s. Every day seems to bring a disorienting new factoid or outrage. In December, in tampes, for instance, a teacher was stabbed in class. Nine thousand cars were burned in 2005 before the riots of last fall. But the two weeks of burned cars, smashed buildings, and menacing hip-hop gestures in October and November were particularly disorienting. Unlike the riots of 1968, the uprising in the suburbs produced no leaders, no social movement, no body of thinking that outside observers could either accept or deplore, and no demands that could be productively answered. Three months after the events, there was still no consensus in French public opinion over what the riots were even about. Some said that Islam played a central role in the events, others that it played none at all. One former minister even credibly asserted that the involvement of North African Arabs in the events was minimal, and that the lion's share of the destruction was carried out by newer immigrants from elsewhere.

The lack of a ready-made agenda in addressing the riots--or even of a clear diagnosis--was less of a challenge for Sarkozy than it would have been for other politicians. "I speak for the people who live real life, not for those who live virtual life," he says over breakfast. "What interests me is not to describe injustices, but to combat them." That is one reason his popularity rose in the course of the riots, even though keeping public order is, in theory, his job, and despite an onslaught of criticism in the press. Another reason was the extraordinary physical courage Sarkozy has shown over the years, which matters a great deal wherever television, violence, and democratic politics meet. In 1993, when a hostage-taker with a bomb took over a nursery school in Neuilly, Sarkozy walked into the building and negotiated the release of several schoolchildren face-to-face with the criminal.

Although not as hard during the riots as the "Kärcher"-and "racaille"-filled press reports would imply, Sarkozy was tough, and he has been tough ever since. He has not been cowed or apologetic before suggestions that his tough stance might win him votes from the far-right National Front. "I always try to get as many votes as possible," he says at the ministry of the interior, "whether it's from the FN or anywhere else." (A poll in Valeurs Actuelles even showed him doing better among Le Pen supporters than Le Pen.) He defended the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who was attacked as a "deviant" and a "reactionary" in politically correct circles after saying of the rioters in an interview that "there are people in France who hate France as a republic." And since the turn of the year Sarkozy has courted the wrath of immigrant lobbies. It has long been his view (he mentioned it in his New Year's address to the press) that family reunification rules were being abused to maximize immigration. Last month, Sarkozy suggested a reform of the immigration laws--not to diminish immigration but to orient it around the skills that France needs. This illustrates Dévédjian's claim that Sarkozy seeks to break with the tradition of French exceptionalism. "In the great democracies," Sarkozy said in January, "immigration is usually considered a source of dynamism and opportunity."

Here Sarkozy's ideology has been highly syncretic. He has won the standing to talk like a hard man of the right because a lot of his program comes from the soft-hearted left. When Sarkozy says, "I want to put in place a policy that affects these neighborhoods directly," he is talking about two things. The first is affirmative action, or "positive discrimination," as it is called in France. It can be argued that France needs such measures desperately, that the inscrutability of the riots (and of the hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents earlier this decade) arose from the lack of ghetto interlocutors who had one foot firmly in the wider French society.

But affirmative action is a radical departure for France, where unequal treatment of citizens is viewed as an attack on core values of the republic. Both Villepin and Chirac have opposed it, as have many on the left. Sarkozy shows a bit of the naiveté of, say, Hubert Humphrey in 1964 when he implies the program would be only temporary. "Positive discrimination implies a limitation in time," he says. "Once the injustice is taken care of, there's no need to envision any specific discrimination." How long would the program last, then? Twenty years? "No, twenty years is too long."

The second leg of his soft approach is to bring Islam into the mainstream of French life. Most people in France pay lip service to this idea, but Sarkozy acts on it. A great deal of the work Sarkozy has done with the two-year-old French Council of the Muslim Faith involves getting non-pork dishes into school cafeterias and arranging for Muslim burials to be allowed in municipal cemeteries.

French people, to put it mildly, are worried about Islam. They notice yawning gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim sentiment. For instance, according to a poll released by the Center for Political Research (Cevipof) in December, Muslim French are almost twice as likely as others (39 percent to 21 percent) to disapprove of homosexuality. The French fret, too, that many of the institutions of French Islam are supported by foreign governments and note that Sarkozy's CFCM has for periods been under the domination of the hard-line Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF). Sarkozy's approach is to blow past these worries, to face up to the fact that Islam is in France to stay, and to focus on making coexistence tolerable to all parties. His supporters say that without the CFCM, the UOIF could have drifted out of the mainstream altogether. "I judge by my own district," says Patrick Dévédjian of Sarkozy. "The young, marginalized kids--yes, they think of him as just a cop. But for the 90 percent who want to integrate into French life, he's a real source of hope."

Unemployment has been in double digits in France for most of the past two decades. But it is at 20 percent for youth, and 40 percent for youth in the suburbs. This is another of those areas where Sarkozy intends to break with French exceptionalism. His favorite public-policy thinkers--the ones whose books he recommends to visitors--are Alain Minc and Nicolas Baverez. Both have focused on the country's giant problems: first, a deficit that has swollen to unmanageable levels; and, second, France's still-incomplete reconciliation to the global economy. "The problem with France," Sarkozy said in a January speech, "is not that we work too much but that we don't work enough." He clearly believes the 35-hour work week, won by a Socialist government in the late 1990s, is damaging France's competitiveness, although this is still too treasured an "entitlement" to be attacked frontally, or by name--especially after the alarming successes scored by anti-free market rhetoric in last spring's referendum on Europe.

The free market, in fact, is the most likely means by which Sarkozy could get "demagogued" out of the presidency for which he appears destined. In the heat of an election campaign it is easy for a political establishment to pick apart the "heartlessness" of one who would reform the welfare state. In Germany, Angela Merkel--who held a double-digit lead before last fall's campaign started and today has the highest poll numbers ever recorded for a German postwar leader--came within a hair's breadth of losing to Gerhard Schröder last September when her socialist opponents began dissecting her flat-tax plans. (This is a reading that Sarkozy disputes. "No," he says. "The reason for that is that M. Schröder also had an important reform package himself.")

The other potential pitfall is foreign policy. Sarkozy has often deviated sharply from the positions of Chirac. Some of these deviations will help him. He opposed Turkish entry into the European Union. He takes terrorism more seriously than Chirac does: He thinks the recent spate of books in France that deal with barbarism is due to people's worries about terrorism, "because terrorism is nothing but barbarism." He supports Israel more forthrightly than do most French politicians, although he shares their insistence that peace rests on the establishment of a Palestinian state. "I support Israel because it's the right thing to do," he says. "Israel is a democracy, Israel is a francophone country, and Israel came into being after the Holocaust. That's three good reasons." Although today, Sarkozy speaks of "reservations" he had about the U.S. intervention in Iraq, he was known to be unhappy at the time with the style in which Chirac and Villepin opposed it.

Certainly, Villepin will have the advantage in foreign policy when the election comes, whether that is next year or earlier. After suffering what the press euphemistically calls a "cerebral accident" last September, Chirac has been slow to regain his form. In a January speech in Tulle, in his old electoral district of Corrèze, he made a dozen bumbles where he substituted similar words for words that were written in his speech ("No one is extended" for "No one is astounded," that sort of thing).

The presidential election, whenever it happens, is difficult to game out, and full of paradoxes. It's a two-round election, like elections in Louisiana, where the top two finishers in a first round compete head-to-head in a runoff. Everyone expected Villepin--distant from the people, never elected to office, without his finger on the pulse, etc.--to stumble when he started to campaign. But everyone has thus far been wrong. Villepin has shown himself a gifted politician, lifting some of Sarkozy's more attractive programs and running a well-controlled campaign. That does not solve Villepin's big problem--he is Chirac's designated heir at a time when an heir to Chirac is the last thing the French people want.

Unfortunately for Sarkozy, the second-to-last thing the French people want is a real reformer. Villepin has attacked French "déclinologues," a term cleverly intended to present any attempt to diagnose and fix France's problems as somehow anti-French. If Villepin and Sarkozy should both make it to the second round--a real possibility, if the left is as fragmented as it was in 2002 and if Sarkozy peels votes away from the far right--Villepin will win, since his role in obstructing the war on Iraq will gain him the votes of the left. If there is a unified left, and a strong socialist candidate--such as the social-conservative member of parliament Ségolène Royal--then the odds are even for Sarkozy. Anything can happen.

Or almost anything. One thing that appears highly unlikely is the eclipse of Sarkozy as the dominant and defining French politician of his generation.

Gavrilo Princip in prison cell in Theresienstadt

Gavrilo Princip (Serbian Cyrillic: Гаврило Принцип) (July 25, 1894 April 28, 1918) was a Bosnian Serb nationalist who killed Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Countess Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The event, known as the assassination in Sarajevo, prompted the Austrian action against Serbia that led to World War I.

Early Life Born in Obljaj, Bosansko Grahovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Gavrilo Princip's parents, Petar and Marija Nana Mičić, had nine children, five sons and four daughters, six of whom died in infancy. His health was poor. From an early age, he suffered from tuberculosis, which was his eventual cause of death in 1918, and was also one of the reasons he let himself kill Archduke Ferdinand in the first place.

Princip attended primary school in Grahovo where he excelled in his studies, especially in romantic and historic literature. A teacher at the school gave him a collection of Serbian heroic folk poetry. At thirteen, Princip planned on a military career and went to Sarajevo to study at the Military School. After arriving, he instead chose to pursue a business career so he enrolled in the Merchant's School where he studied for three years.

Contrary to common belief, Princip was not a member of the Black Hand, but was a member of the group Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna), which he joined in 1911. The Young Bosnia Movement was a group made up of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, committed to achieving independence for Bosnia.

http://www.answers.com/topic/gavrilo-princip

http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/006.shtml

The Holocaust in Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1941-1945

by Carl K. Savich
Bosnia-Hercegovina has for over a millennium been a battleground where the world's major religions, civilizations, cultures, and empires have clashed and collided: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the medieval Serbian, Croatian,and Bosnian Empires, the East and the West. Bosnia-Hercegovina was the dividing line between East and West, between Catholicism and the West and Orthodoxy, Islam, and Judaism and the East. The churches, the cathedrals,the mosques, and the synagogues are the remaining symbols of this battle and conflict between cultures and empires.

World War I began in Bosnia, one of the bloodiest and most horrific wars in the history of mankind, ushering in the twentieth century. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 sprang from the 1875 insurrection in Bosnia-Hercegovina. During World War II, Bosnia-Hercegovina was one of the bloodiest battlefields of the war and of the Holocaust.

The Bosnian Serbs are representatives of the Orthodox Christian Church and of the Byzantine culture and are part of the larger Serbian nation. The Bosnian Croats are representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the Austro-Hungarian culture and are part of the Croatian nation. The Bosnian Muslims are representatives of Sunni Islam and were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and culture. The Bosnian Jews are representatives of Judaism and are mostly descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain following the Inquisition and expulsion of the Jews.

From 1941-1945, Bosnia-Hercegovina was part of the NDH, Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia and was one of the bloodiest arenas of the Holocaust and battlefields of the war. With the assistance of Haj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler, the Bosnian Muslim leadership undertook the systematic extermination of the Jewish and non-Muslim, non-Croat population of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Two Waffen SS Divisions and other Nazi and fascist formations were formed to advance the goals of the Third Reich and of Islam. The goal of the Muslims was to achieve autonomy and independence for Bosnia-Hercegovina under Muslim rule. The period 1941-1945 is crucial in understanding and comprehending the Bosnian civil war of 1992-1995.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

Haj Amin el Husseini fled to Europe in 1941 following the unsuccessful pro-Nazi coup which he organized in Iraq. He met Joachim von Ribbentrop and was officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941 in Berlin. Nazi Germany established for der Grossmufti von Jerusalem a Bureau from which he organized the following: 1) radio propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany; 2) espionage and fifth column activities in Muslim regions of Europe and the Middle East; 3) the formation of Muslim Waffen SS and Wehrmacht units in Bosnia, the Balkans, North Africa, and Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union; and, 4) the formation of schools and training centers for Muslim imams and mullahs who would accompany the Muslim SS and Wehrmacht units. As soon as he arrived in Europe,the Mufti established close contacts with Bosnian Muslim and Albanian Muslim leaders. He would spend the remainder of the war organizing and rallying Muslims in support of Nazi Germany.

Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el Husseini was born in 1893 in Jerusalem, then the capital of Palestine, which was a part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. In 1917, during World War I, the British occupied Palestine and established the Mandate. On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced that Britain was committed to establishing a Jewish homeland in formerly Ottoman Palestine, which was known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

Husseini devoted his entire life and career to the destruction of a proposed Jewish homeland and the prevention of Jewish immigration into Palestine. His goal was to create an Arab state of Palestine with the concomitant extermination or marginalization of the Jewish population..."

Running through the carnage of two world wars is islam, islam, islam...

I totally agree, but Mark Steyn's humour he doesn't have, nor does he need it. Making it all the more difficult now for me to add my own pathetic contribution. But here goes, the last in the series...how islam winds it's way through the sewers of our history (and no one ever told us.)

Beginning with Princip as a potential 'useful idiot' for islam, the leaders of the quite possibly muslim-controlled and motivated 'revolutionary' group he belonged to, must have understood the various alliances of the period, and how it would result in a huge conflict...if the Archduke was assassinated.
Better to allow or persuade a misfit, a consumptive Christian to carry out the deed - persuade him he was striking a blow for Independence from the Austrian Empire, than have a muslim do it...islam has not, will NEVER forget it was driven back from the gates of Vienna!
Under the cover of the Great War, the Turks annihilated the Christian Armenians; that's nothing less than the usual islamic 'cleansing' of territory...which they did whilst Germany was their ally and witness.

While Hitler was in the trenches, fighting beside the Turks, imbibing muslim hatred of Jews and Christianity, learning about islam, reading from the koran...that terror manual, a collection of instructions on how to annihilate human beings. (Tie them up and burn them alive etc. That's what the Turks did to hundreds of thousands of Armenians.)

Hitler returns to Germany after the war. There is to be a brief communist government. He identifies communism with Jews. He has the enemy he needs, he has the indoctrination...he has studied the methods used by the Turks. Two world wars. For and about islam. The ideology of hatred is infectious! Hitler promises the Mufti of Jerusalem 'no Jew will leave Europe alive'

http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/medigest/may00/arabnazi.html

History needs a re-write. We have only touched the surface. We treat the symptoms and have no idea of the cause IMO.

That book should be part of every syllabus in every school throughout this country's public school system.

People need to realize that they are being lied to.

Islam=Death and/or subjugation if you're "shirk."

The massacre of "dhimmis," i.e. non-Muslims, by Abdul Hamid and by the Pashas were only different in scale, not intent.

The second Armenian genocide set the stage for the Holocaust because before there were Nazis there were Muslims, whose virulent antipathy towards Judaism matched-if not eclipsed-anything seen under the Third Reich.

In fact, in Muslim nations today Adolf Hitler is rebuked, not for the unimaginable atrocities he committed against humanity, but for not exterminating more Jews in a more efficient, expeditious manner.

That is the sick, perverse, depraved mentality we are dealing with, and the sooner we recognize it the better off we'll all be.

Take a look at the date on this letter:
The Author? Immanuel Velikovsky.

The Daily Compass
THURSDAY, JUNE 23, 1949

Dean Acheson's Promise

By OBSERVER
Recent reports from Damascus inform us of a secret agreement between the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem and the Syrian dictator Zayim.

On Aug. 28, 1946, Dean Acheson, then Undersecretary and Acting Secretary of State, announced that the State Dept. was preparing a White Paper on the activities of the ex-Mufti, comprised of documents seized in Germany by the Allied armies. The White Paper was not published. Mr. Acheson stepped out of the State Dept.; others there remained silent as to the promise of the ex-Secretary and obviously disavowed it. During the war in Palestine, State Dept. officials would not publishe the documents concerning the ex-Mufti; this failure to act was not explained.

It is now several months since Mr. Acheson has been back in the State Dept., this time as Secretary of State. Now, to fulfill the promise he made when Undersecretary, he does not need the consent of a superior in the department—he is the chief. He is therefore respectfully requested to release, as promised by him almost three years ago, a full account of the documents concerning the ex-Mufti seized in Germany.

If these documents prove that the ex-Mufti is a war criminal and a criminal against humanity, then holding them back casts a shadow on the silken curtain.

If a person must be tried at the place where he committed the crime the ex-Mufti ought to be brought to trial in Palestine where he and his henchmen in 1936-39 killed and wounded more than one thousand Jews from ambush and as many Arabs of rival families and a number of Britons, and from where, after hiding in a mosque, he fled in the garb of a woman to Syria. He ought to be tried in Syria where he was a spy on Mussolini’s payroll and from where he fled to Iraq.

He ought to be tried in Iraq, the state which he, by intrigue and bribe, brought into the war against the Allies at the critical time when Nazi troops were entering Greece, Crete and Egypt, and from where, the rebellion having been quashed, he fled to Iran, but not before he had 400 Jews assassinated in a pogrom in Bagdad. On July 2, 1941, the Investigating Committee appointed by a new Iraqi Government declared: “The causes of the outbursts are Nazi propaganda emanating from (1) the German Legation, (2) the Mufti of Jerusalem and his henchmen who followed him to Iraq.” Gen. Wavell’s price on his head ($100,000) is still valid. After hiding in the Japanese Legation in Iran, he fled to Rome. He ought to be brought to trial there: in his radio speeches from Italy he incited the Arabs to murder and cursed the American people.

Then to Germany, where he was the chief instigator of the annihilation of the Jews, a counselor of Himmler and Eichman, and a visitor of gas chambers. And to Yugoslavia where he, a British-Palestinian subject, formed the Bosnian Legion to fight the Allies. And to Hungary, from where, following his letter to the Hungarian Government, Jewish children were sent to Poland to be killed there; and to Romania, where he did the same thing; and to North Africa, where he helped organize troops against the American forces; and finally to the French zone in Germany where he was caught with the bags of gold he received from Hitler before the Führer reached the end of his rope.

* * *
Can it be that the documents seized at that time by the American Army in Germany exonerate the ex-Mufti? And to a degree that none of these trials should take place? Then they should certainly be made public to protect the good name of an innocent person, especially in view of the fact that he has embarked on new activity in Syria.

http://www.varchive.org/obs/index.htm

New York Post
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1948

The Arab Refugees

The Invaders Get International Help that
May be Converted into Military Aid
By OBSERVER
(EDITOR’S NOTE: On Saturday the United States Delegation at Paris pledged a minimum of $13,000,000 from the U.S. to the fund for Arab refugees in Palestine. While approving assistance for refugees, Arab, Jew, or gentile, anywhere, T.O. Thackrey, coeditor of the New York Post Home News, suggests that the $13,000,000 available be applied as the first installment on the United States' promised loan to Israel. . . and that the $13,000,000 for Arab relief be raised as follows: $ 8,000,000 from Great Britain in place of the $ 8,000,000 she paid Abdullah to invade Palestine this year, thereby causing the Arab refugee problem; say $ 2,000,000 from King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, also a Palestine invader, from his subsidy from the American-Arabian oil company: the remainder from Great Britain by eliminating the cost of maintaining Foreign Minister Bevin’s 1948 Dachau at Cyprus!)

If you have visited one of the Arab countries, you certainly have seen Arab beggars—men, women and children—blind or decrepit—crying for alms. If you have watched them, you must have been impressed by the fact that almost no Arab gives anything, not even the smallest coin, to the poor; and you may have wondered. Why do they then ask for alms? An occasional foreigner, a European or an American, who passes along the street, may drop a coin; but an Arab who begs in the precincts of a mosque visited by Arabs only will not collect enough for a loaf of bread no matter how much he may display his infirmities.

* * *

There are hundreds of thousands of Arabs who, following the commencement of hostilities in Palestine, left their domiciles at the call of Arab leaders from outside. The case of Haifa is especially well authenticated. When the British prepared to leave the city, they practically suggested that the two sides contest for it. After a day or two of battle, the Arab leaders appeared before the British General with a request that he negotiate the surrender.

The conditions offered by the Jewish forces included full freedom and all civil rights for the Arab residents of Haifa; the Arabs who came from foreign countries to fight were to leave Palestine; and the surrender of only the German (Nazi) officers of the Arab “irregulars” was demanded. The Arab emissaries accepted the conditions transmitted to them by the British General.

A few hours later, however, they returned and, wiping the sweat from their brows, informed the General that they had received orders from abroad not to go through with the agreement and to alert the Arab population that they should hurriedly leave the city. An exodus followed.

* * *

Transjordan has, according to Arab sources, one hundred thousand refugees, and in all there are over three hundred thousand. You never can trust figures coming from an Arab source. According to the Egyptian and Syrian war communiqués, they have killed more Jews than there are in Israel. Neither can your rely on figures on refugees, especially if help from abroad is asked. But if there are one hundred thousand refugees in Transjordan, they must constitute a great burden on this country unless they are fit to work.

Abdullah approached Ibn Saud, the owner of the Arabian oil fields and the recipient of fabulous royalties from Aramco. In answer to Abdullah’s appeal, Ibn Saud declared that he would donate $50,000, a few hours’ income from his royalties. Actually, Abdullah probably did not receive anything from Ibn Saud, for the promise did not specify whether the help would be given to the refugees in Transjordan or elsewhere.

Seven Arab countries that boast that hundreds of millions of Moslems throughout the world stand solidly behind them appeal to international organizations, private groups, and various governments, asking for help to care for the refugees from Palestine.

From Europe and America hands eager to help stretch toward the Arab refugees. But unless the distribution is placed in the hands of some organization, the food, clothing, and tents will not reach them. They will most certainly reach Arab armies; and just as certainly they will enrich some private pockets.

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To lend a neutral character to the appeal, 7,000 Jewish refugees are included with the 300,000 Arab refugees. On this point I have my doubts. Are these Jewish refugees from pogroms in Cairo and Bagdad? There are no Jewish refugees in Israel who would accept help from international organizations. Will the help be delivered to the imprisoned Jews in Arab countries?

There are hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, since 1933, and since 1937 (Anschluss of Austria), since 1939, and since V-E Day in 1945. Jewish organizations have taken care of them as well as they could. They were not among their own people as the Arabs are, but among hostile, anti-Semitic populations.

Israel, a state that was born into war, manages to keep its entire able-bodied population mobilized and on the front; at the same time it brings within its borders every month ten thousand destitute refugees, mostly women and children. How can this be done? Only at the cost of great sacrifices, and only in the spirit of great cooperation. And only because Israel is really a nation: a people who do not leave their land in war; who share among themselves whatever they have.

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The International Red Cross and other organizations that consider it their duty to alleviate suffering and right the wrong are invited to join the Committee for the Forgotten Million, Inc., to care for the imprisoned Jews in Arab countries—Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria in the first place—and to give help to the victims of pogroms.

The United Nations is invited to send investigation commissions into these countries, or at least to demand a report on existing conditions from the respective Governments.

Serge Trifkovic:

The massacres perpetrated by the Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger in sheer numbers than the Holocaust, or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese. They are insufficiently known in the outside world, however:

From Francois Gautier,

The British, in pursuing their policy of divide-and-rule, colluded to whitewash the atrocious record of the Muslims so that they could set up the Muslims as a strategic counterbalance to the Hindus. During the freedom struggle, Gandhi and Nehru went around encrusting even thicker coats of whitewash so that they could pretend a facade of Hindu-Muslim unity against British colonial rule. After independence, Marxist Indian writers, blinkered by their distorting ideology, repeated the big lie about the Muslim record.

Militant Islam sees India as "unfinished business," and it remains high on the agenda of oil-rich Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are spending millions every year trying to convert Hindus to Islam.

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