The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  Al-Husseini also actively intervened on numerous occasions to ensure that Jews were not deported from Europe—thereby ensuring that extermination was the only option left for the fanatical Nazi Jew-haters. As late as July 25, 1944, al-Husseini wrote to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German minister for foreign affairs:

  I have previously called the attention of your Excellency to the constant attempts of the Jews to emigrate from Europe in order to reach Palestine and asked your Excellency to undertake the necessary steps so as to prevent the Jews from emigrating. I had also sent you a letter, under date of June 5, 1944, in regard to the plan for an exchange of Egyptians living in Germany with Palestinian Germans, in which I asked you to exclude the Jews from this plan of exchange. I have, however, learned that the Jews did depart on July 2, 1944, and I am afraid that further groups of Jews will leave for Palestine from Germany and France to be exchanged for Palestinian Germans.

  This exchange on the part of the Germans would encourage the Balkan countries likewise to send their Jews to Palestine. This stop would be incomprehensible to the Arabs and Moslems after your Excellency’s declaration of November 2, 1943 that “the destruction of the so-called Jewish national home in Palestine is an immutable part of the policy of the greater German Reich” and it would create in them a feeling of keen disappointment.

  It is for this reason that I ask your Excellency to do all that is necessary to prohibit the emigration of Jews to Palestine, and in this way your Excellency would give a new practical example of the policy of the naturally allied and friendly Germany towards the Arab Nation.72

  According to the Arab Higher Committee, “In virtually identical letters, the Mufti, in the summer of 1944, approached Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary to speed up the extermination of the Jews by sending them to Poland where the Nazi death chambers were located.”73

  Whatever the mufti’s actual role in the establishment of the Nazi death camps, he certainly approved of their work, saying confidently: “The Arab nation awaits the solution of the world Jewish problem by its friends, the Axis powers.”74

  Al-Husseini was a committed collaborator with the Nazis, traveling from Berlin to Bosnia in 1943 to raise up a Muslim SS company, which was responsible for killing ninety percent of the Jews in Bosnia, as well as for the burning of numerous Serbian churches.75 He noted the convergence of the goals of Islamic jihad and those of the Nazis. “It is the duty of Muhammadans in general and Arabs in particular to…drive all Jews from Arab and Muhammadan countries.… Germany is also struggling against the common foe who oppressed Arabs and Muhammadans in their different countries. It has very clearly recognized the Jews for what they are and resolved to find a definitive solution [endgültige Lösung] for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that Jews represent in the world.”76

  The mufti also made radio broadcasts in Arabic from Berlin that were beamed into the Arabic-speaking world, using Islam to bring Arabs over to Hitler’s side. On May 9, 1941, he broadcast a fatwa calling upon Muslims in Iraq to wage jihad against the British. In response, Muslims in Iraq began murdering Jews, ultimately killing 128 while destroying well over a thousand Jewish businesses and homes.77

  That was just what the mufti wanted, and he wanted much more. On November 2, 1943, he decried “the overwhelming egoism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God’s chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other people are animals.”78 All that, he said, made Jews “incapable of being trusted. They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals.” In a 1944 broadcast, he was more succinct: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion.”79 His call was an echo of the Qur’an’s call to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89) and to “kill the idolaters wherever you find them.” (9:5)

  Al-Husseini was arrested by French troops in May 1945, but the French refused requests from the British to turn him over to their custody. The British may have wanted to put him on trial, as he was a British citizen (of their Palestinian mandate) and a collaborator with the Nazis. Instead, the French put him on a plane to Cairo, where he resumed his jihad against the Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood successfully prevailed upon the Egyptian government to grant him asylum.80

  Strangling Israel in its Cradle

  In October 1947, al-Banna told the Brotherhood to begin preparing for jihad.81 The Brothers were ready for this call, as the Brotherhood was dedicated to an Islamic revival, and since the Qur’an and Sunnah teach warfare, jihad war was part of that revival. The Brotherhood had weapons and a military wing, preaching revival openly while secretly amassing weapons and preparing for jihad.

  U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died in 1945, had declined to give any significant support to the Zionist project. When Rabbis Stephen S. Wise and Abba Hillel Silver tried to convince him that Jewish refugees from Europe should be moved to the Holy Land, he responded: “Do you want to be responsible by your actions for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives? Do you want to start a holy jihad?”82 (In saying this, he demonstrated far greater awareness of history and Islam than many of his successors, but about their same level of resolve to confront it.) After a conversation with his friend, the Saudi king, Roosevelt recounted happily to Congress: “I learned more about the whole problem by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in an exchange of two or three dozen letters.”83 That the king’s perspective was formed by jihadi assumptions about who rightfully owned the land did not appear to trouble Roosevelt in the least.

  After the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed, however, the Zionist movement was able to gain a great deal of international support, most notably from Roosevelt’s successor as president, Harry S. Truman. The state of Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948.

  The Muslim Brotherhood was in the front line of the jihad effort to smother the Jewish state in its cradle. Al-Banna predicted: “All Arabs shall arise and annihilate the Jews. We shall fill the sea with their corpses.”84 Abdul Rahman Azzam, the secretary-general of the Arab League, said: “I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars.”85

  Hajj Amin al-Husseini emphasized that this was not just a war but a jihad, saying: “I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!”86 The idea that the Arab war against the new Jewish state was not just a conflict over territory but an Islamic jihad was based on the Qur’anic command to “drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191), the same command that the Muslim Brotherhood invoked to call for Islamic reconquest of Spain and the Balkans. The Islamic principle that no land that had ever been ruled by the laws of Islam could ever legitimately revert to rule by the infidels, and that all land once won by Islam belonged to Islam forever, meant that a state of Israel ruled by Jews would never be acceptable in any form. Israel was even more of an insult because of the Qur’an’s many anti-Semitic passages, portraying Jews as dishonest schemers, enemies of Allah, and enemies of the Muslims: “You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers to be the Jews” (5:82). Arab leaders consequently rejected the United Nations’ partition of the area and creation of an Arab state alongside the Jewish state and called instead for war.

  Many Muslims heeded this call, massacring forty-one Jews at the Haifa oil depot in December 1947; burning Jews alive at the Ein Zeitun settlement in January 1948; ambushing and murdering thirty-five Jews on a Jerusalem road that same month and sexually mutilating the corpses; killing one and injuring twenty with a bomb in the Jerusalem Post offices in February 1948; murdering forty-six and injuring 130 with a bomb at the Ben Yehuda market later that month; murdering fourteen and injuring forty with sti
ll another bomb at the Jewish Agency building in March 1948; ambushing and murdering 105 Jews on another road in April 1948; destroying thirty-five synagogues and other Jewish institutions in May 1948; disemboweling several women at Nitzanim in June 1948; and on and on. The mufti’s Arab Liberation Army killed three hundred Jews at Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem, in jihad attacks in the opening months of 1948; the Muslims blew up one house with twenty Jewish girls inside it.87

  On April 4, 1948, Easter Sunday, Arabic-language notices were posted in Jerusalem saying, “The Government is with us, Allenby is with us, kill the Jews; there is no punishment for killing Jews.”88 Allenby was the English field marshal viscount Edmund Allenby, who had won the admiration of Muslims in Jerusalem when he took the city from the Ottomans in 1917 while emphasizing that he was only fighting the sultanate, not crusading against Islam. Allenby brushed aside celebrations of him as being the Christian commander who had liberated Jerusalem from 730 years of Turkish rule; he was not religious, and his war was no Crusade.89 Allenby died in 1936, so the authors of these posters were invoking his spirit and claiming his blessing on their pogrom. A Muslim mob chanting, “Palestine is our land, kill the Jews” and, “We will drink the blood of the Jews” began rampaging through the city; at the end of the day, five Jews were dead and 216 injured.90 There would be much, much more of this to come in the years and decades ahead: Muslim Arabs never stopped waging jihad against Israel.

  Arthur Derounian met Hasan al-Banna while in Cairo to cover the jihad that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Muslims were preparing against Israel. He found a great deal of excitement and enthusiasm for the jihad against the Jews. He also met with Saleh Harb Pasha, Egypt’s former minister of defense and a close friend of al-Banna’s; Harb Pasha expressed regret at the outcome of World War II: “If Rommel had won we would be independent now. If the Nazis and Fascists had won, they would have been friends to the whole Arab world. And there would have been no Zionist problem because there would have been no Zionist Jews…or any Jews at all left.”91

  An imam told Derounian: “I pray to Allah to destroy the Jews. I pray to Allah to punish President Truman because he has been on the Zionist side. I used to pray against President Roosevelt, a very bad man.… May Balfour and Roosevelt take the first place in hell. Allah, Allah, may this be done.”92 One jihadi assured the American journalist: “Our God is the strongest. We are not afraid to die. The Jews are cowards because they want to live. The Arabs would rather lose ten men than one gun. The Jews are the opposite. They want to save their lives and lose their guns. That is one difference between us.”93

  The jihadi was wrong. The nascent state of Israel defeated forces from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen that had been determined to destroy it utterly. The jihad against it continued, but it held firm, defeating Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon again in the Six-Day War in 1967, and Egypt and Syria yet again in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In winning these victories against enormous odds, Israel won the admiration of the free world, leading to the largest-scale and most audacious application in Islamic history of Muhammad’s dictum “War is deceit.”94

  In order to destroy the impression of the tiny Jewish state’s facing enormous Muslim Arab foes and prevailing, the Soviet KGB (the Soviet Committee for State Security) developed the fiction of an even smaller people, the “Palestinians,” menaced by a well-oiled and ruthless Israeli war machine. In A.D. 134, the Romans had expelled the Jews from Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt and renamed the region Palestine, a name they plucked from the Bible, the name of the Israelites’ ancient enemies, the Philistines. But never had the name Palestinian referred to anything but a region, not to a people or an ethnicity. In the 1960s, however, the KGB and Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s nephew Yasir Arafat created both these allegedly oppressed people and the instrument of their freedom, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

  Ion Mihai Pacepa, who had served as acting chief of Cold War–era Communist Romania’s spy service, later revealed that “the PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for ‘liberation’ organizations. There was the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara…the KGB also created the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out numerous bombing attacks.… In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter—a document that had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.”95

  For Arafat to head up the PLO, he had to be a Palestinian. Pacepa explained that “he was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.”96

  Arafat may have been a Marxist, at least at first, but he and his Soviet handlers made copious use of Islamic anti-Semitism. KGB chief Yuri Andropov noted that “the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep.… We had only to keep repeating our themes—that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.”97

  PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein explained the strategy more fully in a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw:

  The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.

  For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.98

  Once the people had been created, their desire for peace could be easily fabricated as well. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu tutored Arafat in how to play the West like a fiddle. Pacepa recounted: “In March 1978, I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. ‘You simply have to keep on pretending that you’ll break with terrorism and that you’ll recognize Israel—over, and over, and over,’ Ceausescu told him [Arafat].… Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.… Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his—all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73 percent.”99

  This strategy continued to work beautifully, through U.S.-brokered “peace process” after “peace process,” from the 1978 Camp David Accords into the presidency of Barack Obama and beyond, with no end in sight. Western authorities never
seem to ponder why so many attempts to achieve a negotiated peace between Israel and the “Palestinians,” whose historical existence everyone by now takes for granted, have all failed. The answer, of course, lies in the Islamic doctrine of jihad. “Drive them out from where they drove you out” is a command that contains no mitigation and accepts none.

  While all of the Palestinian factions made the fact clear (at least to those who were paying attention) that they would never accept the existence of Israel in any form, and that their war against it was a jihad, none have made this clearer than Hamas (Harakat Muqawama Islamiyya—the Islamic Resistance Movement), founded in 1988. The Hamas charter calls for Islamic rule in Palestine, describing the PLO’s idea of a secular state as a Western colonial imposition upon the Muslim world: “Secular thought is diametrically opposed to religious thought. Thought is the basis for positions, for modes of conduct and for resolutions. Therefore, in spite of our appreciation for the PLO and its possible transformation in the future, and despite the fact that we do not denigrate its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we cannot substitute it for the Islamic nature of Palestine by adopting secular thought. For the Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religion, and anyone who neglects his religion is bound to lose.”100 The charter follows this with a quotation from the Qur’an: “And who forsakes the religion of Abraham, save him who befools himself?” (2:130)