Friday 31 December 2010

Yesterday Once More

In the dead of last night, I watched three fascinating installments of Yesterday's series on Nazi collaborators. The first was on the schemes of Seán Russell and the like to secure a German landing in the Irish Free State in order to bring about the 32-County Republic. The third was about ethnic Jews who fought in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe and the Waffen SS.

And the one in the middle was about Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, veteran of the Allied side in the First World War, and created Grand Mufti of Palestine (he, like anyone else, had previously only been Mufti of Jerusalem) by the ardently Zionist Sir Herbert Samuel, but later radicalised along with his people by the repression only made possible by the freeing up of British forces when Czechoslovakia was handed over to Hitler. He was thus driven into Hitler's embrace, from which he organised the Bosniaks into the SS Division that was to be recalled in the uniforms and other features of their sons and grandsons in the 1990s.

Henry Kissinger once said that there was no worse fate than to be an American ally. But there just might be one. To have been a British ally. Ask the Arabs. Or the Serbs.

3 comments:

  1. And there we were, thinking that the Telegraph blogs had only dropped you because Nile Gardiner, Janet Daley, Toby Young and Damian Thompson had found out you were mixed-race. Obviously a reason, but obviously not the only one.

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  2. The programme repeatedly said that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the "spiritual leader of the Palestinian Arabs", which would have been news to the Latin, Greek and Armenian Patriarchs whose successors are your close allies. You have paid the price for that alliance in the British media, but you are unbowed. You are a legend, Mr Lindsay, a legend.

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  3. @23:18, don't forget Gilligan. David probably gives him a free pass because of Hutton and out of loyalty to Rod Liddle. But those days are long gone. Gilligan is a racist rabblerouser and the principal agent of the Awami League's interference in British politics. His racism and treason require the full David Lindsay treatment.

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