At times,
startling revelations and uncanny disclosures made in books spark an appetite
to delve deeper into the subject to satisfy curiosity. Months after the
gruesome Hamas terror attack in Israel in October 2023, the world witnessed a
surge of ‘from river to sea’ slogans renting the air. The partisan debates,
one-sided attacks and bold calls for the liquidation of Jews with vehemence
were hardly met with any counter. The book, “Israelophobia: The Newest
Version of the Oldest Hate & What To Do About It” by Jake Wallis Simon,
deciphered the oldest hate and unabashedly exposed the various players of this
punitive discourse.
The book
drops a truth bomb of the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin
al-Husseini’s Lemonade Summit with Führer Hitler. Husseini, who harboured the dreams of becoming
the ruler of the Arab world, leveraged Hitler’s hatred for Jews as the gel to
forge a bond with the Nazi ruler. Placing Islam in high esteem, reportedly,
Hitler had portrayed ‘Islam as a strong and practical faith’ and
described Christianity as a ‘soft, artificial, weak religion of suffering’.
In one of his memoirs, Husseini boastfully claimed that he supported the Nazis,
“because I was persuaded and still am that if Germany had carried the day,
no trace of Zionists would have remained in Palestine (P 140)”. This was a
revelation for me. Since then, I longed to learn more about the collaborative
scheme that vowed to destroy world Jewry. Buried in the annals of history, this
coalition forged in ideology and smelted in the embers of hatred with profound
implications was dismissed as rhetoric and forsaken. This collaboration,
fuelled by shared loathing, hardly garnered international attention, thanks to
the swift portrayal of Arabs as the victims.
Far removed
from the Nazi and Arab scheming, back home, Hitler’s fascism turned out to be
the popular stick to beat ‘Hindutva’. Ironically, the real culprits who
leveraged this ideology have been spared this castigation, while Hindutva icon,
Veer Savarkar, who endorsed the vision of “Jewish Homeland”, continues to be
derided. Peeling the layers of history, Aabhas Maldahiyar, through his
scholarly work, “Hitler: The Proclaimed Messiah of the Palestinian Cause,”
sets the record straight.
More than
eighty years after World War II, the Middle East remains precariously poised,
with Israel still battling radical Islamic factions that shout “death to
Israel”. Rather than facing condemnation for the violence unleashed by
terrorists, the ideological stream spanning continents continues to promote
perpetrators and celebrate hatred. No part of the world is immune to the
magnetic pull of ideology rooted in anti-Semitism.
Decades ago,
intolerant, supremacist ideologies of fascism and Islamism converged to overthrow
British Colonialism, exterminate Jews and oppose communism. Dripped in their
venomous anti-Semitism, Hitler co-opted the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini,
to turn the Middle East into a crucible for ideologies. Amid the throes of war,
Hitler appeased Muslims, stirring hope of liberation as they struggled against
Jews and the British. The Arabs, in turn, created favourable propaganda about
the Third Reich as the liberator among the English colonies. Hitching together
the ideologies, both sides indeed, deployed scholars to build compatibility
between National Socialism and Arab Nationalism.
Demonstrating
extraordinary acumen, tomes of literature were generated to facilitate a close
collaboration. In the Arab world, the rise of Hitler was celebrated. This
admiration attained spiritual and theological overtures, with intellectuals
joining the chorus. Interventions like- “Arabia will wake up on the day God
sends a faithful man who believes in his actions and who summons the people of
Arabia like Hitler has summoned the German people”(p 127). Soon, articles
in press elevated him alongside the Prophet Muhammad. Not to be left behind,
signalling the apotheosis of Hitler, Imams proclaimed, “God has sent the
twelfth imam to the world in the form of Adolf Hitler”. Hitler’s
deification culminated with his images being held alongside depictions of Ali,
implying, “Ali is the first and Hitler the last imam”(p 128).
War is
nothing but a battle of narratives. To lend the propaganda a religious
legitimacy, the machinery selectively extracted passages from the Quran to
stoke anti-Jewish sentiment. Sharpening some of the rough edges of Mein
Kampf, passages critical of Arabs were purged from the translations found
in Egypt, Morocco, Iran and Lebanon. Refraining from overstepping on the
sensibilities of the Arabs, the definition of anti-Semitism was applied only to
Jews and not to Arabs. The immaculate propaganda accumulated enormous goodwill
for Hitler, though he never formally declared support for Arab independence. Husseini
used inflamed enmity against the Jews to stoke the Arab revolution and the
decimation of the Jews in Palestine.
The
motivated demonisation of the Nazi-Arab alliance and the sinister playbook of
the Third Reich, portraying Jews as a malevolent force, has had far-reaching
consequences. Even now, the extermination of Jews is compellingly justified by
the Islamo-leftist-intellectual cabal, deeming them as an ‘occupying force’
while the Arabs adorn the cloak of victimhood. The sharp, stinging,
unrestrained prose of Maldahiyar hits readers' conscience as sharp arrows. Injecting
doses of truth anti-venom, the author rightly establishes the presence of Jews
in the region dating back to the second millennium BCE.
Taking the
readers through a bewildering maze of name jumble, the author traces the
specific markers of ‘Israeli identity’, pegging it to Iron Age I (p 19),
precisely to 1209 BCE. The perpetually chaotic region of the Middle East has
remained intensely contested with the rise and fall of several kingdoms.
Retaining their identity, fleeing to safer regions under intense attacks,
yearning for their roots, Jews always regrouped and returned to rebuild their
fortunes in the region that was referred to as ‘Syria Palaestina’.
Laid out
into thirteen chapters, the book explores the Nazi-Islamic collaboration in
great detail. Offering a dedication verse to Jews, the book begins with a
prologue and ends with a postscript. Splashed with rich repertoires of primary
sources, with over a thousand bibliographic references and six notable
appendices, the book stands as a testament to the author’s intellectual rigour.
Textured in
their outlook, decades of jaundiced academic writings have buried a malefic
nexus that sought a complete annihilation of an entire people. Under the
pretence of political correctness, menacing scheming has been given a free
pass. Holocaust denial is just the tip of the iceberg. Truth alone can offer
redemption for historical wrongs and forewarn the world of impending threats.
The author’s
evocative, undisguised style of writing adds a layer of emotion, making this
treatise an engaging read. Looking forward to the sequel, I strongly recommend
this book for its uncompromising, bold investigation of the complicated and
turbulent past of the Middle East.
Pages: 550
Publisher: BLUONE
INK PVT. LTD.
@ Copyrights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment