A Palestinian mufti and the U.S. election, then and now

The Jerusalem Grand Mufti Amin el Husseini and Reichs Fuhrer Himmler.

A Palestinian mufti and the U.S. election, then and now. (JTA).By Rafael Medoff .
WASHINGTON - A Palestinian mufti has called for violence against Jews, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is demanding Palestinian leaders disavow him and America's presidential race could be affected.That could be the lead sentence of a news report from last week.
Or from 1946.
Sixty-five years ago, another Palestinian mufti, another Netanyahu and another American presidential race likewise intersected in an unexpected round of high-stakes Middle East politics and diplomacy.
At the center of the current controversy is Sheik Muhammad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem, who is the Palestinian Authority's senior religious official. In a recent speech Hussein, citing a traditional Islamic text, urged Arabs to "fight and kill the Jews." Later he explained he was "only quoting the words of the Prophet Muhammad."In an American presidential election season, words like those can be explosive. The candidates for the Republican nomination have strongly condemned Palestinian incitement against Israel and criticized the Obama administration for not being more outspoken on the issue. The votes of Jews and pro-Israel evangelical Christians could be decisive in some battleground states in November.
"Whoever wants peace should not permit such incitement and should not allow calls to murder Jews," Prime Minister Netanyahu said, urging the Palestinian Authority to disavow the mufti's remarks.
He said that Hussein's "morally heinous" statements were reminiscent of one of his predecessors, the mufti Amin el-Husseini, who fled to Germany in 1941 and collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Husseini's pro-Nazi radio broadcasts were beamed from Berlin to the Arab world -- including a March 1, 1944 tirade in which he exhorted his listeners, in language similar to that of last week's controversy, to "Kill the Jews wherever you find them."What is not well known is the impact of the mufti on the 1948 U.S. presidential race.Read the full story here.


(Dr. Rafael Medoff is the director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and co-author, with Professor Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of "Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel," which will be published in April.)