HITLER'S ARAB HELPERS

Hitler’s Mideast helpers by Max Boot (LA Times)
Arabs were cheerleaders and enablers of the Final Solution

In Ahmadinejad’s view, shared by countless others across the Middle East, whatever the Nazis did is no business of theirs, so why inflict the “Zionist entity” on their region? It is only a small step from this position to claiming that Israel’s destruction is justified.

Pointless though it may be to argue with a madman, it is worth noting that Muslims were not as blameless in the genocide of the Jews as Ahmadinejad and his ilk would have it. Arabs were, on a small scale, cheerleaders and enablers of the Final Solution. The most famous example was Haj Amin Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem (and uncle of Yasser Arafat), who took refuge in Berlin in World War II. A rabid Nazi, he personally lobbied Hitler to kill as many Jews as possible and even helped out by recruiting Bosnian Muslims to serve in the Waffen SS.

Robert Satloff, one of the world’s smartest Arabists, reveals other links between the Arabs and the Holocaust in his groundbreaking new book, “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach Into Arab Lands.” He shows how the Nazis set up the machinery of death in North Africa. Although “only” 4,000 to 5,000 Jews died before the Allies liberated the area in 1943, many more were consigned to forced labor camps in hellish conditions.

“Arabs played a role at every level,” Satloff wrote. “Some went door to door with the Germans, pointing out Jews for arrest. Others led Jewish workers on forced marches or served as overseers at labor camps.”

The picture is not entirely one-sided because, although most Arabs were either apathetic or sympathetic to the Nazis, a small number helped their Jewish neighbors. Satloff uncovered lost tales of “righteous Gentiles,” such as the wartime rulers of Morocco and Tunisia. And on the whole, he found that Arabs behaved no worse under German occupation than did Europeans.

But that isn’t saying much because almost every country on the Continent was heavily complicit in the extermination of their Jewish populations.