Many years ago, in 1992-1993, I was studying history at the University of Leicester, England and during my leisure hours I began to collect material on the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and his Nazi collaboration during the World War II era. I worked on that for a while and the product became known as Muftism and Nazism, and was slightly updated during my studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1995.
This short esssay was published at my former website some years later and somehow gained momentum in the world of the internet where it can be found at various locations. I have received many emails concerning this subject, the latest one only a couple of days ago.
I have not had time to update this essay and perhaps I don't have to or should not. Maybe this essay should stand as it is.
I am planning to re-publish this essay here, at this blog, one piece at a time.Hopefully we can learn something from this lesson of the dangers of collaborating with evil or what happens when two evil minds come together.
Muftism: the term and its origins
It has been a long time and I cannot be totally sure, but I think it was I, back in 1993, who coined the term "Muftism". It is now widely accepted and was even used for a documentary on this very same subject. If I am wrong, please correct me.
Muftism, in my view, is basically a local version of Islamism, mixed with a particular ethnic agenda and is supposed to unite an entity against a common enemy that usually happens to be Jewish.
However, when I used this term back in the old my idea was that this ideology of hatred would be put on the same level with the other, Nazism, and they were, indeed, compatible.
If I remember correctly, it was Yasser Arafat's family that actually owned or/and leased a large part of the Gaza Strip of today. And Arafat was brought up at the feet of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Thus it should in fact not be surprising that the Muftists of today, commonly referred to as Hamas, should control that piece of land.
The story of Hajj Amin thus has a message for today. Muftism of the 1930s and 1940s claimed thousands of lives, where civilians were murdered for their ancestry's sake, their blood, their religion.
The same thing might happen in the near future, as the modern Muftists, Hamas, are planning to continue the work of their most logical predecessor: The Mufti of Jerusalem.
