by Jim Chimirie on X
Britain’s Green Party has revived one of the Cold War’s most discredited slogans. To its supporters, “Zionism is racism” sounds like the language of modern progressive activism. Its history is considerably darker.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the leading Palestinian Arab political figure of his generation, met Hitler in Berlin in 1941. He broadcast Axis propaganda and sought Nazi backing against a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His collaboration went well beyond Berlin, though. In 1943 he personally toured Bosnia to recruit for the 13th Waffen-SS “Handschar” Division, whose Bosnian Muslim volunteers went on to kill an estimated 90 per cent of Bosnia’s Jews and burn Serbian Orthodox churches and villages across the region. Yugoslavia sought to try him for exactly this. Arab political pressure made sure he never faced it. He did not design the Holocaust, and nobody serious claims he did. His own documented record needs no exaggeration.
After 1945 the language shifted but the hostility didn’t. Moscow had backed Israel’s founding. Once Israel turned West and the Arab states turned to the Soviet Union, Soviet propaganda recast Zionism as racist, colonialist, imperialist. The 1967 war sharpened the campaign. Old hostility to Jewish nationalism now spoke in the vocabulary of anti-colonialism.
By 1975 that vocabulary reached the United Nations. Resolution 3379, sponsored chiefly by Arab and Muslim states alongside Cuba and the Soviet bloc, declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It passed 72 votes to 35. Presiding over a different UN session two decades earlier, at the 1955 Bandung Conference where al-Husseini himself appeared as a delegate, was a young Austrian diplomat named Kurt Waldheim, later UN Secretary-General, who would not be exposed for another three decades as a former Wehrmacht intelligence officer in the same Balkan theatre al-Husseini had recruited through. The two men’s paths crossed on a conference stage years before the world learned what either had actually done in that war.
Read also: A chilling anniversary by Melanie Phillips. The West’s depraved reaction to the October 7 atrocities and the resulting war spells disaster not for Israel but for itself