An evil religion blog post.
When I first proposed the "Evil Religions" series of blogs, I figured I would make it ironic. You may all remember the "first" Evil Religion post back on April 1st. This is the real one.
Before you get your panties in a twist, I warned readers of this blog quite some time ago that there would be a series of “Evil Religion” blog posts, and that it wouldn't be what you think it is. Guess what, it's still not going to be what you think it is. Read the rest of
this preface here.
Now, let's start with our first “Evil Religion.”
The following can be footnoted in the works of Bernard Lewis
, David Dalin
, Ralph McInerny
, or Roy Schoeman’s “Salvation is from the Jews
”The Middle East has a problem, and it's not Islam. It's their culture... which is also not Islam.
Yes, sorry, hate to break it to all of you, the culture of the Middle East was not substantially altered by The Prophet. Mainly because there were no real fundamental building blocks for the culture to be altered …
The trouble with the Middle East, in part, can be traced to the Nazis.
No, I am not being allegorical, but literal.
If you're a newcomer to this blog, you may not have heard of the term “
Hitler’s Pope
”: that Eugenio Pacelli, aka Pope Pius XII, worked with, for, or around Hitler in support of the final solution of the Holocaust.
What I'm almost certain you never hear about is what has been labeled Hitler’s Mufti.
To be more precise, he is properly called the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Now, a bit of background: in the 1920s, as a prize of World War I, Palestine was a mandate of Britain—they ran it and everything in it. Al-Husseini was installed by the English; he had, in fact, been put into power by a Jewish Minister of the Palestinian Mandate, Robert Samuel. Samuel even rigged the votes a little, in part on behalf of an anti-Semitic “advisor” Ernest Richmond (who may or may not have been al-Husseini's boyfriend; there were rumors, and Richmond was British, after all....).
Through the 1920s, al-Husseini incited two “intifadas” that killed mostly Jews (which I can only assume means that intifada now translates as “pogrom”), and Robert Samuel caved in each time, eventually cutting off any and all Jewish immigration into Palestine.
And you thought British appeasement started with Neville Chamberlain, didn't you?
Hajj al-Husseini was, in essence, local aristocracy. His brother had been the previous Grand Mufti, and his family had been in government positions for the previous seventy years. Unfortunately, his mind had been a little warped by a propaganda piece out of Tsarist Russia called the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
For those of you who don't know about the Protocols, it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that makes anything Dan Brown has written look like a well-researched historical treatise. According to the Protocols, the entire world is run by three hundred Jews out of Europe. Al-Husseini got it into his head that the British forces in Palestine were, in fact, there on the behest of their Jewish overlords, therefore, the British were mere puppets of the vast Zionist conspiracy ...
At this point, it feels like the moment I should grab the Thorazine and cue
The Illuminati Polka
.
Even after al-Husseini became grand Mufti, he called for an anti-Jewish jihad in Palestine during the 1930s, saying “Murder the Jews! Murder them all!” This was how he started riots in 1929 and 1936-1939. He would later move his rhetorical style to Berlin radio, stating in one “Kill the Jews—Kill them with your hands, kill them with your teeth! This is well pleasing to Allah!” Al-Husseini’s connection with Hitler begins in 1933, when he sent emissaries to Berlin, first lending support, then suggesting collaboration. When the German anti-Jewish laws went into effect in 1934, the Islamic world sent them congratulations. Husseini would become friends with Adolf Eichmann (the banal evil that logistically engineered the Holocaust), and pushed for the extermination of Jews as soon as possible.
In 1937, al-Husseini met with Hitler, and they apparently got along quite well. Afterwards, Al-Husseini tried for a Nazi tour of the middle east; he briefly led an overthrow of the government in Iraq, only to be run out by the British. He hid in the Japanese embassy in Iran for a little bit, until the British and the Soviets invaded. He ran through Turkey and made it to Mussolini's Italy. He finally ended up in Germany.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler took Husseini on tours of the death camps, and the mufti pushed for greater diligence in running the gas chambers. Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny mentioned that the mufti “played a role in the decision to exterminate the European Jews.” At the Nuremburg trials, he stated that “the mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler… one of Eichmann’s best friends” And don't think Dieter got anything out of saying all of this—he was executed after the trial.
Al-Husseini also had a Muslim clerical school in Dresden, where Muslims could be trained in Nazism, and introduce it to the Middle East. In exchange for this service, Husseini went into Bosnia to recruit Muslims for the SS, Hanjar (or Handschar) units, who wore specially marked fezzes with the swastika on them. You can also see photos of Husseini in Bosnia inspecting the SS troops (see:
Shoeman, 258. If you want to see more research on Muslim/Arab Nazis, hit the Yad vashem archives , or the Simon Wiesenthal Center). The Muslim SS Hanjar (“sword”) unit massacred about 90% of Bosnia’s Jews.
Husseini made it to France after the war, after the Swiss kicked him out. The pro-Nazi French government (which was still in charge for a while) refused to extradite him, and by the time the Allies could lay their hands on him, it was inconvenient to prosecute him (Tito didn't want the “Handschar units” as an issue in his ethnically-divided Yugoslavia; the new English government didn't want to antagonize the Arabs in their Middle East mandates, and the Soviets had their eye on the middle east as future clients). He managed to stay free and clear until 1974, when death caught him.
So why does Mufti al-Husseini matter today? Well, let’s start with the fact that the grand mufti imported Nazi experts to train young Palestinians in guerrilla tactics—the start of a group we know as the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
During the
Six Day War 
in 1967, Israelis found Egyptian prisoners carrying issues of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Ironically, it had been translated into Arabic by a man known as el-Hadj…aka former Nazi propagandist Lius Heiden. Mein Kampf would be republished by Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in 2001 and was an instant bestseller throughout the Middle East—in 1999, it was sixth on the bestseller list in Palestine (and this is before the reprint). By the way, did I mention that “Schindler’s List” is banned?
The legacy of al-Husseini lives on into the 21st century. To start with, it was in the form of his nephew—Abd al-Rahman abd al-Bauf Arafat al-Qud al-Husseini. If you blink you miss the key word—Arafat. Yes, that Arafat. Second Lieutenant Wilhelm Boerner, a guard at Mauthausen concentration camp, and Erich Altern (Gestapo, head of their “Jewish Affairs” section), trained members of the Palestine Liberation Front. Former Nazi Johann Schuller, supplied arms to Fatah. Jean Tireault, neo-Nazi, also paid by Fatah. In the 1970s, neo-Nazi Otto Albrecht was hired by the PLO to act as a middle man for weapons.
Then there’s the Grand Mufti’s grandson, Skeikh Ekrima Sabri, the current Mufti of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He said recently “The figure of 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust is exaggerated…It was a lot less. It’s not my fault if Hitler hated the Jews. Anyway, they hate them just about everywhere.” Nice guy.
And let’s not forget that the Socialist nationalist party of Syria had a “Furher” and their banner donned the swastika as well. It's also known as the “Ba'athist party.” The one that's currently running Syria, and used to be Saddam Hussein's party.
Remember that pro-Nazi coup that got Husseini tossed out of Iraq? One rally member was a man named Khayrallah Tulfah. After the war, he lived with his nephew, and in the main room of his house he had an idolized portrait of Hitler on the wall. He raised the nephew personally, and had al-Husseini over to his home repeatedly until Husseini died. This nephew would grow up to be one mean fellow—one of his mistresses noted that he would look himself in the mirror and state “I am Saddam Hussein. Heil Hilter!”
The Grand Mufti, this (literal) Islamofascist, helped form the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And let us not forget Egyptian leader Gamal Nasser, who helped the Nazis in Egypt during the war, and who later led the Six Day War against Israel. He even adopted the slogan “One folk, One party, One leader.” His successor, Anwar Sadat, also had ties to the Reich—he spied for Germany during the war. Johannes von Leers, Goebbel’s executive officer, was put in charge of Egypt’s Ministry of Information in 1955. Gestapo man Hans Becher went on to become a police instructor in Egypt.
Let's look at the bad stuff that have come out of the middle east in the last hundred years, shall we? The psycho dictators have decided to enforce laws written down when Islam was still an emerging power, using the literal xenophobic rules of the day to enforce their own will. In fact, most of the stuff they're using isn't really the Koran, but bastardized versions of it, at best. They tend to work with scholars who have very.....old views about how Islam works, or should work.
Many of these were laws that were not in place during the Ottoman empire. It falls, and within a few decades, tada, archaic rules that no one noticed suddenly become applicable, and some which were completely made up two hundred years ago, or two decades ago – basically, whatever they “found” that could be useful. There is no Islamic Vatican. They devolved into a bunch of different opposing viewpoints that tended to disassociate Islam from itself more than anything.
Such transparent bull …
And let's target Israel, because, yes, a nation the size of Vermont is a threat to an Islamic geographical area equal to or greater than the entire United States of America … Israel just reminds Arabs that they're no longer on top of the world, and that there's no changing it.
One of the problems these psychos have taken advantage of is : you can't translate the Koran in the Middle East. Seriously, it's illegal. Which becomes a problem because most people can't read the Koran. I'm serious. Imagine how hard it is to read Shakespeare. It takes entire college courses, because it's poetry, and requires historical context. Now take the Bible, which also requires whole college classes (my bible course took a whole semester, and we only got through the Old Testament), because it's partly written in poetry, and also requires historical context. You get the worst of both possible worlds in the King James Bible.
Now, imagine that the King James Bible was written in Olde English—and I mean
Beowulf 
English, not
Chaucer
.
And now you have the Koran, a document that's heavy on poetry, that is illegal to translate, study, dissect, or give any historical context to, written in a language no one has used in fifteen centuries.
And it has been translated. I've read it … it's still bloody unreadable.
Congratulations, your local leaders can now make it say whatever they like. Say what you like about the Bible, but it has been poked, prodded, dissected, vivisected, and footnoted to within an inch of its life, and it gets a new translation every few years.
And in Europe, you have a whole bunch of immigrant youth, being brought up in Mosques so insane that they're run by rejects from the Middle East, because they were so nuts even the Wahhabi's wouldn't take them. They're all in an environment that is either so antithetical that they're hostile (Chirac's France) or so accommodating that they're letting the nutjobs take over (Holland).
Oh, and you didn't have suicide bombers in the 1920s. Or the 1940s—and the technology was there, the Japanese Imperial Army had suicide bombers near the end of the war in the pacific. Suicide bombers were not invented in the Middle East ... they were invented by the Ayatollah Khomeini, in the 1980s, when he was fighting a war against Iraq, and losing, badly. Suicide bombers were his way of balancing the scales. And as one book notes, Khomeini was inspired by … post-modern, French deconstructionists.
At the end of the day, does being Muslim make you evil? Hell no. Otherwise we would already have the Caliphates of Dearborn Michigan, Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, and possibly Detroit. The problem with the modern Middle East actually start in the “Post-Christian” Europe, with Fascism, and Tsarist Russia creating the
Protocols … if you never thought anything good ever came out of Tsarist Russia, well, you were right. However, all of this grew up in a soil rich for planting – the middle east has a culture that hasn't changed in over two thousand years.
And it has nothing to do with the religion. It has everything to do with a warped cultural and political sense that occasionally intersects with bad religion and bad people. And the culture that is so very very static …
Still don't believe me?
There is An example that recently came to my attention: an old text that discusses the locals making their women cover their faces.
Was this written in the Wahabist 19th century? No.
In the High Imperial, Ottoman time period, in, say, the 1500s? No.
Was it even back in Mohammed’s time? No.
It was the Bible.
One of Joseph's brothers sleeps with a “Canaanite woman” who had her face covered, in the custom of “her people.” It was a scam, but it made me think. Canaan was a long, long time ago… does anything ever change there?
Because in the beginning, there was the Persian Empire. You know them, you saw
300
—and the Persian Empire was actually worse than the film portrayed. No, they weren't
Lord of the Ring
-like mutant orcs, that was dramatic license when the story is told in bardic format. But the Persian Empire had no concept of freedom or liberty. No concept. No frame of reference. Not even the basic idea. How do I know? Simple.
There was no word for “freedom.”
Eight hundred years later, after Darius III, Alexander the Great, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Byzantines … all of whom weren't big on freedom, unless you were a citizen of said empire (and that only came in with the Romans). And up comes the rise of Islam, The Prophet, blah blah blah … When exactly was the word “freedom” supposed to come into play?
Add Western fascist ideology. Stir well.
I believe I will leave the last word to my friend, Jason Bieber (this is paraphrased, so bear with me). "Islam changed the culture at the top. It didn't change the culture at the bottom."
And, when you consider that large parts of the culture hasn't changed much since Xerxes, that says something.
********************
Comments are welcome. Disagreements are encouraged, but only if you are coherant, and can at least offer evidence for your arguments (references wouldn't hurt). Also, this is a PG blog. Any R-rated language will result in your comments being deleted, no matter how good your points are. I dislike pointing that out, but prior events have made it a necessity.
is a name you might be familiar with. He wrote the comic books that would spawn the movies 
, and he had a very popular run on 
-- and has a small lynch mob after him for that, I'm sure.
was, as I understand it, universally panned by reviewers, except for those who seem to want Frank Miller's baby. They weren't pretty, either way.