Ninety years ago, late August, 1929, the U.S. Beatrice Daily Sun (Beatrice, Nebraska), proclaimed, “MOSLEMS SATE BLOOD LUST. Even Little Children Die By Knife in Jehad” (Aug. 29, 1929; p.8). This brief report conveyed with grisly accuracy the Arab Muslim jihad [jehad] depredations against the Jews of Hebron which began with the insolated stabbings (one fatal) of two yeshiva students on Friday, August 23rd, followed by a raging massacre the next morning, during which 66 Jews were butchered within two-hours:
In practically every instance death was caused by swords or knives. Even young children of two and three years, many of them girls, did not escape the savagery of the attack.
While the greatest carnage of Jews was in Hebron, the Arab Muslim jihad rampages, which continued through August 29th, extended to Jerusalem 31 killed, 119 wounded; Safed 20 killed, 39 wounded; Jaffa 8 killed, 33 wounded; Haifa 6 killed, 67 wounded; Ramla 1 killed, 1 wounded; Beisan 25 wounded; Acre 3 wounded; and Nazareth 1 wounded. Even a strained “balanced” account of the 1929 Arab Muslim jihad—which ignores 1300 years of chronic jihad-imposed dhimmitude and Islamic antisemitism, with sporadic paroxysms of mass-murderous jihad violence against Jews, within their ancestral homeland—concedes, regarding the total of 133 Jews killed, and 241 injured:
A large majority of the Jews slain were unarmed and were murdered in their homes by Arabs. Most of the Arab dead were killed as they attacked Jewish settlements or neighborhoods. Most of the Arabs were felled by bullets fired by the British armed forces…
Jerusalem historian and journalist Pinchas Grayevsky (d. 1941) provided this graphic 1929 description of the brutal murder of Hebron pharmacist Ben-Zion Gershon:
For forty years, this Jew dressed the wounds and treated the illnesses of the most wretched Arabs, generally without asking for any compensation, as he received a salary from the community or from Hadassah. Over his lifetime, this man saved hundreds and thousands of Arabs from dying of diseases of all kinds, from going blind or becoming handicapped…On the day of the riots Arabs broke into the home of this poor Jew, and instead of having mercy on him for being one-legged, they cut off both of his hands. The very same Arabs whose eyes had been cured by him of trachoma [a potentially blinding infection caused by C. trachomatis, if untreated] and blindness stood over him and gouged out his eyes. The same Arabs whose wives and daughters he had saved from miscarrying and from gynecological illnesses now seized his eldest daughter, raped her, and killed her. They also stabbed his wife four times with a knife and brought a nail-studded club down on her head.
Historian Jerold Auerbach’s somber 2009 analysis Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel summarizes the Muslim atmospherics, and offers harrowing details—rape, torture, beheadings, throat slitting, and mutilation—from eyewitness reports of other merciless assaults on Hebron’s Jews:
In August 1929, Palestinian Arabs were incited to impassioned fury by the harangues of Haj Amin-al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. His allegations that Jews intended to “usurp” the Western Wall and endanger Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount aroused his followers throughout Palestine… [Saturday, Aug.24th] cars filled with Arabs from nearby villages, screaming Allah akbar (Note: “Allah is greater”) and Itbach al Yahud (“Kill the Jews”), sped through the streets of Hebron. Rabbi Bemzweig recounted, “Right after eight o’clock in the morning we heard screams. Arabs, armed [with iron bars, sledgehammers, knives, and axes], had begun breaking into Jewish homes…
…[F]amily members and yeshiva students, had crowded into Eliezer Dan Slonim’s spacious house, where they believed that his esteem in the Hebron community would protect them…Virtually the entire Slonim family, including his wife Hannah and their son, his father-in-law, the chief rabbi of Zichron Yaakov, and his wife, was slaughtered. The sole survivor, one-year-old Shlomo, was discovered, blood drenched and wounded, beneath the corpses of his relatives. His look of abject terror, captured in a photograph, reflected the horror he had witnessed but could not begin to describe. A visiting tourist, Y. L. Grodzinsky, heard “the shrieks of the women and the babies’ wailing” reverberate through the Slonim house. When he emerged from hiding, he saw “a sea of blood” from victims with “knife and hatchet wounds in their heads. . . . A few bodies had been slashed and their entrails had come out.” Twenty-two Jews were murdered there.
…Elsewhere in Hebron, Rabbi Hanoch Hasson, along with his entire family, was murdered… Four-year-old Shalom Goldshmidt and his sister survived by hiding under a bed; their mother and another sister were killed, and their father was tortured to death by Arabs who held his head over a burning kerosene stove. Two-year-old Menachem Segal, one of three children under the age of five who was murdered, had his head torn off.
… In the main room of the Anglo-Palestine bank, where twenty-three corpses were discovered, blood covered the tile floor “like thick jelly.” Arabs “knocked down thirteen-year-old girls, mothers, and grandmothers in the blood and raped them in unison.” Six yeshiva students were successively seated on the lap of Mrs. Sokolov; then, “one by one, [Arabs] slit their throats.” Among the murdered students were eight Americans, including two sixteen-year-olds. One of the survivors, a student from Chicago, recounted that he “had seen greater horrors than Dante in hell.” The grisly toll mounted. The entire Lazarovsky family, except for one son, was slaughtered. Rabbis Meir Kastel and Tzvi Drabkin, with five of their students, were tortured, castrated, and murdered. Rabbi Yakov Orlanski HaCohen had his brain removed from his skull. Moshe Arbiter, a yeshiva student from the United States, had two fingers chopped off; Elchanan Zeligroch, another student, had one hand severed at the wrist; and Liba Segal lost four fingers. There were reports of amputated penises and breasts.
Artist Nachum Gutman’s poignant 1929 black and white drawings (see two, below)—quickly banned by the British Mandatory authorities—captured the Muslim incitement, and barbarity.
Auerbach’s study mentions Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s indirect role as key instigator of the Arab Muslim “fury” unleashed on Hebron. Lt. Col. F.H. Kisch, Chairman of the Palestine Zionist Executive from 1923 to 1931 assigned culpability to el-Husseini, directly, in his 1938 memoir, Palestine Diary:
I mentioned…in regard to those whose active campaign of provocation ample evidence was in the hands of authorities…[local Hebron] Sheikh Taleb Morke, against whom there was abundant evidence of his having called upon the inhabitants of Hebron to kill the Jews, saying that an order to this effect had come from Hajj Amin.
As early as 1918, el-Husseini, whose “bigotry and fanaticism” were already “fully flowered,” had stated plainly to a Jewish coworker, at the Jerusalem Governorate, I. A. Abbady (reported in The Edmonton Journal, Dec. 29, 1947,p.4),
This was and will remain an Arab land…the Zionists will be massacred to the last man… Nothing but the sword will decide the future of this country.
Historian J.C. Hurewitz’s 1950 “The Struggle For Palestine”, revealed how el-Husseini consolidated his status as the pre-eminent Muslim religio-political figure amongst the Palestinian Arabs by establishing control of the Supreme Muslim Council’s funds.
Through them [the funds] he was able to reach the illiterate fellahin (villagers and farmers) and arouse their [Islamic] religious fanaticism against Zionism…In the multiplying schools supervised by the [Supreme Muslim] Council he encouraged the instruction of extreme religious conservatism, as an Islamic bulwark against Westernization…[T]his established the Mufti’s reputation as the protector of Islam in Palestine.
My own research (see video summary) has demonstrated that throughout his public career, Hajj Amin el-Husseini relied upon canonical anti-Jewish motifs from the Koran, primarily, the hadith (tradition of Islam’s prophet Muhammad) and sira (earliest pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad) to arouse the Arab Muslim street. As I detailed in a 2103 monograph, which provided, and riveted upon, the first full English translation of el-Husseini’s 1937 “religious edict” (“fatwa’) about the Jews, the former Mufti of Jerusalem exclusively cited traditionalist Islamic themes, familiar to the Muslim masses, to foment their murderous Islamic Jew-hatred. Just before his concluding admonition for a jihad to annihilate the Jewish community of historical Palestine—invoking Muhammad’s apocalyptic hadith (Sahih Muslim Bk41 #6985) to slaughter the Jews en masse–Hajj Amin el-Husseini recapitulated the dominant thematic narrative, woven together from a myriad of specific, canonical Islamic motifs, throughout the 1937 proclamation:
[T]he Arabs have learned best how they really are, that is, as they [the Jews] are described in the Koran [esp. Koran 5:82] and in the sacred scriptures… The verses from the Koran and hadith prove to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it.
El-Husseini’s declaration was reprinted, verbatim, by the Nazi regime he collaborated with during World War II, as Islam und Judentum (Islam and Jewry), and distributed to Muslim SS units in Bosnia, Croatia, and the Soviet Union. The mufti remained unrelenting in his espousal of a virulent, canonical Islamic Jew-hatred as the focal tenet of his ideology, before, during, and in the aftermath of World War II, and the creation of the State of Israel. Consistent with this ugly “legacy”, Hamas incorporated the same Jew-annihilating hadith into its founding 1988 covenant (article 7), along with a continued call for the annihilation of Israel as a political entity by jihad (in article 15). Not surprisingly, given a century, ongoing, of such canonical Islamic religious incitement of Jew-hatred, 2011 face-to-face Arabic interview polling data of 1,010 Arab Muslims from Judea-Samaria, and Gaza, by American Democratic party pollster Stanley Greenberg indicated 73% abided the dictates of the Jew-annihilating hadith, while 80% agreed with the goal of destroying Israel as a state, via jihad.
In stark contrast to the evocative drawings of Palestinian Jewish artist Nachum Gutman, less than a week after the 1929 jihad carnage ended on August 29th, “Morning Freiheit”, the New York City-based, official Communist party Jewish [Yiddish] language newspaper, published the first of two vicious Der Stürmer-like cartoons (Sept. 4, 1929; the second appearing Sept. 19th) condemning the self-defensive actions of Mandatory Palestine’s Jews. Rabbi Benjamin Schultz’s July 13,1949 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Communist Antisemitism, highlighted the “object” of these grotesquely bigoted caricatures—“discredit Jewish aspiration for a homeland in Palestine and justify Stalin’s power bid to the Arabs against the British”. Schultz also displayed the images and provided these apt descriptions of them:
Ex-Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers, in his searing 1952 autobiography “Witness” commented acidly about the same perverse 1929 American Communist Party phenomenon having served then as a writer/editor for the English language Communist organ Daily Worker:
Arab outrages were occurring in Palestine. The Communist International chose that moment to call for the formation of a ‘Soviet Arabistan,’ and to attack the Zionists. Day after day bludgeoning stories and editorial along this mad line appeared in the Daily Worker. Editing them seemed less like a peculiarly trying exercise in party discipline than horseplay in a mental home.
Historian Walter Laqueur’s 1956 study, “Communism And Nationalism In The Middle East,” chronicled the same reaction—orchestrated by the Soviet Comintern—within the Communist movement of Palestine itself: full-throated support for Arab violence—pogroms—to destroy Jewish settlements.
“In a country like Palestine a revolutionary movement without pogroms is impossible.” This, in a nutshell, was the new line. Could a real revolutionist argue that such a movement should be disapproved of and discouraged merely because there was a danger of pogroms? Of course not If the Arab proletariat had not been so weak, pogroms would not have occurred at all…The Zionist ideology was the real culprit, but the Arab revolt, the pogroms, and the national struggle in general had given Zionism a death blow from which, in all probability, it would never recover. The main assignment for the Communist Party was to encourage the Arab revolt, to broaden it, and to lead it.
The concordance between totalitarian Marxist and jihadist Jew-hatred, and shared aspirations for global hegemony, dates back to the origins of Marxism/Communism. Marxism’s founding Dr. Crankley, Karl Marx, was an annihilationist Jew-hater. Marx wished to extinguish Judaism, and its Jewish adepts—mere embodiments of “usury and money”— actions which would achieve his dystopian vision of “the emancipation of society from Jewry”:
Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand…The God of the Jews has become secularized and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange…What is the foundation of the Jew in our world? Practical necessity, private advantage…The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the true nationality of the merchant, of the man of money. The law of the Jew, lacking all solid foundation, is only a religious caricature of morality and of law in general…What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly God? Money…Very well then: emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time…As soon as society can abolish the empirical nature of the Jew, that is, usury and its preconditions, being a Jew will become impossible…The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry” (The Jewish Question, Braunschweig, 1843)
Additional statements of Karl Marx’s reflexive, day-to-day Jew-hatred, include the following:
It is the circumvention of law that makes the religious Jew a religious Jew. (Die Deutsche Ideologie, MEGA V, 162); The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races. (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 29, 1849); He called Ferdinand Lassalle, “Judel Itzig—Jewish Nigger.” (Der Judische Nigger, MEKOR III, 82, July 30, 1862); Ramsgate [British coastal resort] is full of Jews and fleas. (MEKOR IV, 490, August 25, 1879)
Marx was also the original proponent of a “Red-Green Alliance”, circa 1878 (in a February 4, 1878 letter), championing the (final gasps of) Ottoman jihad to defeat Czarist Russia, and foment “revolution” there, and throughout Europe:
…the defeat of the Russians would greatly accelerate the social upheaval in Russia—the elements for which are plentiful—and thereby the reversal in all of Europe
A brilliant historical and doctrinal analysis elaborating the intimate connections between the Muslim creed, and modern Communism was published by French sociologist and ex-Communist, Jules Monnerot. Indeed the title of Monnerot’s first chapter dubbed Communism as “The 20th-Century Islam.” Monnerot elucidated these two primary shared characteristics of Islam and Communism: “conversion”—followed by subversion—from within, and the fusion of “religion” and state. He argued, “Communism takes the field both as a secular religion and as a universal State; it is therefore . . . comparable to Islam…,” while each also “…work[s] outside the[ir] imperial frontiers to undermine the social structure of neighboring States.”
Five years before the October, 1917 Bolshevik Revolution would begin to impose Communist totalitarianism on Russia, Henry C. Vedder, observed in his 1912 study of Socialism, that the Marxist Social Labor Federation of Britain had adopted Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” [Capital] as their infallible authority, “an article of faith from which they will permit no dissent, on pain of excommunication.” Vedder, a Professor of Church History at the Upland, Pennsylvania Crozer Theological Seminary, added that this British Marxist organization rejected the orthodoxy of its own votaries unless they too professed as their credo, “There is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.”— mirroring the Islamic declaration of faith (p.730), or “shahada”—“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” Subsequently, in April, 1918, the Burlington Vermont Daily News, again captured, the quintessential, shared ideological roots of this Red [Communism]- Green [Islam] Alliance, foreshadowing the ugly consequences of this nexus in Germany:
[M]any of the Protestant churches in Germany are no more than empty shells. This lack of horizon, spiritually speaking, has led to the growth of socialism to a marked degree in Germany. Karl Marx was its founder and its slogan is ‘There is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.’
Texas Congressman Martin Dies (d. 1972) was an intrepid investigator of both Fascist and Communist subversion in the U.S during the 1930s and 1940s, having established the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938. Dies’ 1963 memoir elaborated upon early Communist Infiltration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s [FDR’s] New Deal, punctuated, initially, by recognition of the Soviet Union, in 1933 (despite the Communist totalitarian state’s ongoing terror famine in the Ukraine), and the character assassination of anti-Communist educator and truthteller, William Wirt, during 1934. A September memorandum Dies references by Cardinal Spellman detailed the Archbishop’s September, 1943 conference (reported in the Chicago Tribune, Feb. 1962) with FDR who promoted the idea of a “convergence” between Soviet Communism and U.S. capitalism—“in accord,” Dies adds, ‘with the opinions Roosevelt expressed to me over the years.” Unduly sympathetic to Soviet Communism under Stalin, FDR made a particularly maleficent, if bizarre, statement revealing his visceral antisemitism during the seminal February, 1945 Yalta Conference between the American President, the Soviet dictator, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. President Roosevelt was scheduled to meet with Arabia’s despot King Ibn Saud immediately after the Conference. Alluding to this upcoming meeting with the Arabian despot, Stalin asked Roosevelt what concessions the President might make to Ibn Saud regarding Middle Eastern issues. As per two independent sources of archival documentary evidence i.e., the minutes preserved in the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, and the papers of then Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius (the latter reproduced in the recent M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein analysis, “Stalin’s Secret Agents—The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government,” p. 34),
The President [Roosevelt] replied that there was only one concession he thought he might offer and that was to give him [Ibn Saud] the six million Jews in the United States. [February 10, 1945]
Tragically, such Marxist/Communist sympathies (or worse still allegiances), accompanied by Antisemitism, and its contemporary equivalents, Anti-Zionism and hatred of Israel, have become staples of both American and Western European Leftist political parties.
Christopher Steele—now infamous for his false, concocted Anti-Trump “dossier”—was a Cambridge University Marxist/Socialist, who headed its Union “debating society,” in the mid-1980s. The Jewish Post of Indianapolis, reported March 12, 1986 on Steele’s invitation to the Palestine Liberation Organization—then a U.S. and Israel designated [Marxist-jihadist] terrorist organization—to a Cambridge University “debate” on Israel’s existence as Jewish state (amidst 20+ Arab Muslim states). Geula Cohen, the Israeli Knesset member invited, replied,
To the Union President Christopher Steele: The sole dialogue to which I would be a partner with an official representative of the PLO, an organization I consider neo-Nazi in character in that it slaughters Jews merely for being Jews, would be one in which he stood in the dock of an Israeli courtroom.
Current U.S. Muslim Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are Steele’s ideological heirs on the Left (here; here), whose words and actions are much more blatantly pro-jihadist (here; here) and Antisemitic (here; here). The BDS movement both women aggressively support is a toxic amalgam of annihilationist Jew-haters, which includes operatives from the Marxist terror organization PFLP, and two major, overt jihad terror organizations, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Collectively, these terrorist organizations have a bloody 50-year legacy (ongoing) of murderous attacks on Jews. Upon the cancellation of their slated visit to “Palestine,” the Congresswomen re-tweeted a cartoon by the Marxist-Jihadist (here; here) sympathizer (at minimum) Carlos Latuff, whose oeuvre includes a second place “award winning” 2006 cartoon from Iran’s odious “International Holocaust Cartoon Contest”.
Nine decades after the 1929 Hebron jihad carnage of Jews—celebrated then by the Soviet Communist movement and its regional tentacles—the annihilationist Jew-hatred of the Jihadist/Green-Marxist/Red alliance lives on, embodied now, by the somehow more “acceptable” Tlaib and Omar. Their true mental and moral ugliness, however, was captured by the unabashed May, 13, 2011 interview of a 92-year-old Palestinian Arab woman who witnessed the murderous 1929 anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing pogrom in Hebron. She openly celebrated the slaughter of the Jews of Hebron as an appropriate paradigm for the present:
[Interviewer]: Please tell us who you are.
[Sara Jaber]: I am from Hebron. The Jaber family.
[Interviewer]: What is your name?
[Sara Jaber]: Sara Muhammad ‘Awwadh Jaber.
[Interviewer]: How old are you?
[Sara Jaber]: I am 92.
[Interviewer]: So you remember May 15, 1948, the day of the Nakba.
[Sara Jaber]: Why wouldn’t I remember? May Allah support us. I hope we forget those days. Allah willing, you will bury [Israel], and massacre the Jews with your own hands. Allah willing, you will massacre them like we massacred them in Hebron.
[Interviewer]: What does this day mean to you? You have lived 63 years since the Nakba. You have experienced the entire Nakba…
[Sara Jaber]: 92 years. That’s 92. I lived through the British era, and I lived through the massacre of the Jews in Hebron. We, the people of Hebron, massacred the Jews. My father massacred them, and brought back some stuff…
[Interviewer]: Thank you very much.
