The Truth against Rashida Tlaib's Lies
Now, Tlaib's latest provocation was a rant, a rather short one, in which she turned modern Middle Eastern history upside down. She claimed that the Palestinian Arabs had helped Jews obtain a safe haven:
“ … when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors—Palestinians—who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people’s passports … just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways, but they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them.” [here]
One of the things that we can derive from Tlaib's remarks is that the Palestinian Arabs were victims of the Holocaust or Shoah as we call it in Hebrew. Rather than being victims of it, however, Palestinian Arabs were perpetrators. The top leadership of the Palestinian Arabs, Haj Amin al-Husayni [el-Husseini] were pro-Nazi and in fact Husayni spent most of the war years in the Nazi-fascist domain in Europe. Husayni regularly broadcast pro-Nazi genocidal propaganda towards Jews in Arabic over Radio Berlin in Arabic. In one of his broadcasts he called on the Arabs to: Kill Jews wherever you find them. . . . He and his entourage operated out of a headquarters in Berlin that the Germans put at his disposal and worked from there to persuade Muslims in Europe, especially Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, to collaborate with the Nazis. He was successful in helping the Germans recruit an SS division [the Handschar] among the Bosnian Muslims, which is one of the reasons for the bitterness of the Bosnian Serbs against the Bosnian Muslims in the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s. This SS division helped the Nazis slaughter Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. For that reason, the post-war Yugoslav government put Husayni's name on a UN list of war criminals that they wanted tried by the UN or the Allies. Husayni also worked his influence on the Germans to get them to prevent Jews --including Jewish children-- from leaving the Nazi-fascist domain. Among other things, he and other Arab leaders urged the Germans to extend their persecution of Jews to Jews living in Arab-ruled countries. And so on.
So the Palestinian Arabs were hardly opposed, as a group, to the German Nazi extermination project against the Jews. The problem was not only Husayni. His entourage in Germany was made up of scions of leading Palestinian Arab families. Now before we get into more tedious detail, which you can find at the linked articles and blog posts, we may ask did they feel regret after the war. Tlaib asserts "it was my ancestors—Palestinians—who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out . . . . all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy . . . . I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that . . . . in many ways"
The truth be told, after the war the Palestinian Arabs as a group did not feel regret or remorse for the mass murder of the Jews. After all, their top leader Husayni had been applauding it and urging Arabs to murder Jews "wherever you find them." So the Arabs did not provide a safe haven for Jews or work to that end. They tried to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in the ancient Jewish homeland. With the encouragement of the British government, under the Labour Party at that time, and the encouragement of most of the US State Department and CIA, and parts of the French government of the time. And most notably for the issue of Tlaib's claims, they applauded perpetrators of the mass murder of Jews.
Take the case of one Tscherim Soobzokov, a Circassian Muslim and Soviet citizen before WW2. When the Germans came to the northern Caucasus, Soobzokov joined the Einsatzgruppen, mobile mass murder squads that slaughtered Jews in towns and cities of the occupied USSR, mainly in Belarus and Ukraine of today. He had been recruited into the SS under the rule of Heinrich Himmler. It is curious that during WW One and the Armenian genocide, Circassian mass murder units had worked under the Ottoman Empire to slaughter Armenians.
After WW2 Soobzokov desperately wanted to escape Soviet punishment for treason/Nazi collaboration/. He made his way to Egypt with Egyptian government aid and was sent by the Egyptians to Jordan, then Transjordan.
Now, how was this mass murderer received by Palestinian Arabs in Jordan?
"Soobzokov's arrival in Jordan coincided with the first Arab-Israeli war and . . . . Soobzokov made another practical alliance; the Palestine refugee organizations could be a promising connection for an ingenious man. Mahamet Perchich in his statement . . . wrote: 'During my stay in Jordan, it was 1949, I was witness of a conversation between Tscherim Soobzokov and the head of the Palestinian Arabs refugee camp, when Mr Soobzokov told the Arabs about his activities during World War II. As part of his story Mr Tscherim Soobzokov told the Arabs that if all those Jews he liquidated during World War II were now in Palestine, all the Arabs in the camp would not be enough to drink the blood of all those Jews. The same day the head of the camp gave an evening of festivities in honor of Mr Tscherim Soobzokov.'
"And Danil Gussov . . . . wrote: 'While in Jordan Mr Soobzokov used to show Palestine refugee Arab leaders [sic] his documents with photos certifying his membership in Nazi execution commandos and that he was a killer of Jews in World War II, for which Mr Soobzokov received material help from Arab leaders . . .'" [These testimonies come from the book by Howard Blum, Wanted: The Search for Nazis in America (New York: Quadrangle 1977), see pp 60-61, 67. Quadrangle publishers was owned at the time by the New York Times].
It is clear that Palestinian Arabs knew at the time about the Shoah massacres which were reported in the European press at the time. Or, in the unlikely possbility that they did not know about the Shoah, when they were informed about it, as Soobzokov recounted his role in it, they did learn about it. And in this case they approved of it and even celebrated it. The story of Soobzokov in Howard Blum's book makes this clear. So Tlaib is either grossly ignorant of how Palestinian Arabs felt at the time --just a few years after the ovens of Treblinka were shut down-- or she is a gross liar. She may be both. One does not rule out the other.
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For additional info on Haj Amin al-Husayni [usually spelled el-Husseini], see posts on the Emet m'Tsiyon blog for lists of other books and articles.
Rashida Tlaib is trying to rob Jews of their history [here] - Yisrael Medad
Fake History: Rashida Tlaib's Grotesque Distortion. . . [here] - Lahav Harkov
The Myth that Palestinian Arabs Helped Jews in WW2 [here]
CNN Anchor Corrects Tlaib: Palestinian Arab Leaders of the WW2 Period Sided with Hitler [here]
Labels: Arab Nazi collaboration, Haj Amin el-Husseini (the MuftI), Palestinian Arabs