People looking to understand why Hamas thugs and their backers in Tehran organized the systematic slaughter of over 1,200 Jews, as well as a few dozen Bedouin Arabs and immigrants, Oct. 7 will greatly benefit from a look at the group’s origins and history. It revolves around their determination to solve the “Jewish Question” by exterminating the Jews.
Massacres of Jews in the Middle East by Islamist forces began decades before Modern Israel came into existence. The record of these atrocities by Hamas’ forerunners are hidden today by middle-class leftists who present Hamas as a national resistance movement.
Beginning in the early 1920s, al-Husseini — from a wealthy landowning family — orchestrated a series of massacres of Jews in Palestine. The rulers in the U.K. had taken control over Palestine as part of the notorious Sykes-Picot backroom deal that redrew the borders of countries in the region and divided the riches of the Middle East between London and Paris.
Al-Husseini first led a pogrom in Jerusalem in 1920 during a Muslim religious procession, inciting attacks on the Jewish quarter. The British withdrew their troops from Jerusalem, giving their blessing to the pogrom. Six Jews were murdered and two women raped. The British authorities then pardoned al-Husseini, and appointed him the city’s Grand Mufti.
In 1929 he urged his followers to attack Jews in Jerusalem, killing 130. Sixty-seven more Jews were massacred in Hebron a few days later. Women were raped and men castrated. British authorities responded not by fighting the reactionary pogroms, but by placing limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Al-Husseini urged the same during bloody riots against Jewish settlements in 1936.
The Nazis took on distributing al-Husseini’s writings. Up to 1939, the German Embassy in Cairo produced Muslim Brotherhood propaganda. By the start of World War II the Nazis established radio broadcasts in Arabic, Farsi and Turkish, helping spread al-Husseini’s Jew-hating tirades to a much wider audience. None of the anti-Hitler Arabic language broadcasts by British and other Allied powers made any effort to politically answer the Nazis’ “kill the Jews” vitriol.
Al-Husseini met with Hitler in Berlin in 1941, concretizing plans for collaboration against Jews in the Middle East.