There is a line that runs from the bunker in Berlin to the killing fields of the Negev. It bends through decades of propaganda, through refugee camps and mosques and school curricula, through satellite broadcasts and social media. But it is unbroken. And if we are serious about understanding October 7, we must follow it to its source.

That source has a name: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And it has an address: Berlin, November 1941, where the Mufti sat across from Adolf Hitler and found in him not a wartime necessity but a kindred spirit in the oldest hatred in human history.

Adolf Hitler’s vision was not merely political. It was biological and theological — the belief that Jews were a corrupting, subhuman force that had to be eradicated from the earth for civilization to survive. This was not metaphor. It was operational doctrine, expressed in Mein Kampf, enacted in the Nuremberg Laws, and industrialized in the death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, where six million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered. Six million. A number so vast the world has spent eighty years struggling to comprehend it — while some parts spent those same eighty years celebrating it.

When the Mufti arrived in Berlin, he did not come as a diplomat. He arrived as a believer. He had spent years building a movement rooted in religious antisemitism — the belief that Jewish sovereignty was theologically intolerable and that violence against Jews was not just justified but sanctified. He did not need convincing. He needed weapons and a microphone. Hitler gave him both.

Together they forged a synthesis — racial and religious antisemitism fused into a single worldview — that would outlive both of them by decades and find its most murderous modern expression on October 7, 2023.

The Mufti broadcast that worldview every night from Radio Berlin — that Jews were the enemy of God and humanity, that killing them was a religious obligation. He recruited Muslims for SS divisions. And when Jewish children had the chance to flee the death camps for Eretz Yisrael — the ancestral homeland to which Jews have maintained an unbroken connection for three thousand years — he wrote personally to the Nazi foreign ministry to ensure they were sent back to be murdered. Those letters are in the archive. They are not disputed. They are simply not discussed.

Germany surrendered in May 1945. The vision did not.

In Europe, military defeat was followed by ideological reckoning. De-Nazification happened. Nuremberg happened. Decades of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)