Open Letter to the Los Angeles Times

(Because they probably will not print the letter I sent them.)

Today, Sunday, June 12, on its OP-Ed page, under the heading "What is the U.N.'s role?," the Los Angeles Times published a column by Mousa Abu Marzook, deputy political bureau chief of Hamas. The Hamas Charter, entitled "The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement," issued August 18, 1988, the organizational document of Hamas, calls for the murder of Jews, not just "Israelis," not just "Zionists," but Jews.

Would the Times also have published a column by Adolf Hitler, explaining his program for rebuilding Germany? (Like Mr. Marzook, Herr Hitler might well have cloaked his lies, distortions and Jew hatred for easy digestion by a naive American audience.) Perhaps there are two sides to every political issue, including even the wisdom of a UN General Assembly resolution creating a Palestinian state, but the Times needs to ask itself whether it could not have found an advocate of that position whose organization does not also advocate genocide? Or does the Times consider a Hamas leader a legitimate spokesperson for Jew hatred?

Although Hamas spokespersons and their apologists often attempt to downplay the significance of the Hamas Covenant, the organization has never repudiated it. Nor could it honestly do so. The relationship of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in general to Jew hatred is not casual. The spiritual forebearer of Hamas, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, was the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in pre-World War II Palestine. [Reader, please note that "Palestine" was never an independent country, and certainly not an Arab one, but rather the area assigned by the League of Nations to Britain after World War I, under a mandate to create a Jewish homeland.] During World War II, he became a valued ally of Nazi Germany and an honored friend of Adolf Hitler. He even helped recruit two Bosnian Moslem divisions of the SS. He is shown in the photo below, published in a Vienna newspaper in 1944, reviewing Bosnian Moslem SS troops:


The French arrested the Grand Mufti at the end of World War II, and both Great Britain and Yugoslavia requested his extradition to stand trial for collaboration with the Nazis and war crimes. Eager to enhance its status in the Arab world, the French refused the extradition requests and allowed his departure to Cairo. In Egypt, where he enthsiastically participated in the Arab military campaigns to destroy the newly declared State of Israel, he placed a young man, apparently his grand nephew, Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, in charge of arms procurement to fight the Jewish State. That young man later becomes known to the world as Yasser Arafat. The Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine later becomes known to the world as Hamas.

Would the Los Angeles Times have printed a column on "the Palestine question" by the Grand Mufti?