Parashat Shemot 5784
by HaRav Nachman Kahana
Shlomo King of Yisrael wrote in Kohelet 3,8:
עת לאהב ועת לשנא עת מלחמה ועת שלום
“… a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.”
Jewish Messages
Jewish messages, even very serious or tragic ones, are often encased in humor, to ensure that the message will be remembered.
Years ago, I wrote a column for a popular religious publication. In one of my contributions, I added a humorous story because of its important message. It bothered one of the readers who began a campaign to have me released from contributing to this publication by writing to its financial sources explaining the implications of my remaining a contributing author. I understood the financial reasons of the directors for releasing me and we remain very close friends to this day.
The following is the humorous but very serious piece that this leftist found disturbing. How do I know that he is a leftist? Because he left Jewish saychel (intelligence) and witty Jewish humor.
An Arab entered a bank just as the automatic mechanism closed the safe, until the following morning. In reply to his boisterous demands to receive cash, the teller told him that the safe could not be opened until eight AM.
The Arab became very nasty, even threatening the life of the teller. At this point, the manager approached and physically threw the Arab into the street.
While the Arab was nursing his wounds, the teller approached him saying: “Didn’t I tell you that the safe is closed until tomorrow morning?” The Arab turned to the teller and replied, “Yes. You told me, but he explained it”.
The moral of the story: It is not sufficient to tell most Arabs; it must be explained to them.
Another serious Jewish message which has a humorous core
The local Mafia leader passed away. His brother requested a priest to officiate at the funeral and eulogize the deceased while emphasizing that he was a righteous man. The priest explained the irrationality of the request and that it was beyond what a priest does. The brother took out $10,000 and placed it on the altar as a donation for the church. The following morning at the chapel, the priest concluded his eulogy by saying: “The deceased was of questionable character; he violated all the rules of law, order and decency. However, when compared to his brothers he was a righteous man”.
I will return to this.
The Ustasha
In the 2010 book titled “The Farhud: Roots of The Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust”, author Edwin Black discusses the most heinous killers of the holocaust: THE MUSLIM-CATHOLIC USTASHA.
The Farhud referenced in this book was the heinous pogrom carried out against the Jewish population of Bagdad, Irag on June 1st and 2nd in 1941. (Learn more at the Holocaust Encyclopedia site.)
Ustaša and plural Ustaše (anglicized as Ustasha) means insurgence. It was a Croatian fascist and ultranationalist movement from 1929 – 1945 (ref: Britannica).
In the hierarchy of Hell that created the Holocaust, one group of killers stands out as more vicious, murderous, and bloodcurdling than all others. Who were they? Where did they plow their killing fields? How and why did they come together to bear a chronicle of atrocities a magnitude worse than Auschwitz?
The answer: None were more savage than the Ustasha of Yugoslavia, a Muslim-Catholic alliance of Nazi killers so gruesome and beastly that even Berlin shrank in horror at the slaughter. This berserk army of ghastly murderers, the Ustasha, and three related crack divisions of Arab-Nazi Waffen SS comprised of tens of thousands of Muslim volunteers, terrorized people of all faiths in Yugoslavia. In large measure, these murder machines emerged through the efforts of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The Grand Mufti was on a mission to accelerate the extermination of all Jews everywhere. His partner was Adolf Hitler personally.
The epic story of this alliance of horror and hate is one that begins (with the Mufti) in Jerusalem, moves to Baghdad, culminates in the killing fields of the Balkans, and ultimately spreads across all Europe.
In many ways, the scene was set centuries ago by the Medina Extermination of 627. Medina was a largely Jewish city. When its 500-600 Jews refused to convert to the new Muslim religion, madman Muhammad mass-murdered them in a protracted ceremony, beheading the Jewish faithful one by one. This massacre became a glorious iconic event in Islamic history.
[From 1921 to 1937] The leader of the Palestinians [Arabs living in Palestine] was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. The Nazi-Arab alliance had been aggressively sought by the Arabs of Palestine since the Third Reich’s first moments in 1933.
[From his 1937 exile] From Iran the Mufti and his cohorts escaped to Berlin to meet Hitler personally…
In Berlin, a pact was sealed to provide Arab oil and battlefield military assistance sufficient to help the Nazis push into Russia in exchange for recognizing an Arab national state and exterminating the Jews. Arab military units formed from Paris to Palestine. Arabs and Muslims worldwide, on the radio and in newspapers, incessantly and openly called for the extermination of the Jews. The rallying cry was: “In Heaven, Allah is your master. On Earth is Adolf Hitler.”
When Heinrich Himmler needed to fight the partisans of Yugoslavia to protect German supply lines, the Mufti visited the region and helped organize tens of thousands of Muslims and Arabs into three Waffen SS divisions… Concomitantly, a Nazi murder militia, known as Ustasha, was created from a legion of Catholic and Muslim killers.
The Diet legislature passed a sequence of genocidal decrees… outlawing Serbian and Jewish existence in Croatia, the looting of Serbian and Jewish property, and the systematic regimentation of Serbian and Jewish citizens into death camps and merciless killing fields. Catholic priests commonly operated the concentration camps, enforcing the most degrading of slaughter rituals.
President Ante Pavelić declared early on, “This is now the Ustasha and Independent State of Croatia. It must be cleansed of all Serbs and Jews. There is no room for any of them here. Not a stone upon a stone will remain of what once belonged to them.” He later assured, “The Jews will be liquidated within a very short time”. To this end, more than 20 Ustasha concentration camps were established for the killing process, manned by combined Catholic and Muslim forces. The most notorious of these camps was the hellish complex known as Jasenovac, considered by many to be more sadistic than Auschwitz by an immeasurable magnitude. Gas chambers were not needed. All death was personally inflicted.
The Ustasha’s barbaric methods for exterminating Jews and Serbs included sadistic group killing by cracking heads open with hammers until the cranial cavity was exposed. That was for adults. Children were commonly marched into the forest, where their heads were crushed with long mallets. Sometimes children were thrown live into flaming furnaces. Decapitation or dismemberment with giant lumber saws was frequent. These Ustasha atrocities were not committed in fits of mad rage, but for sport, with the gleeful perpetrators smiling for the camera over the helpless victims waiting to be brutalized. Mass throat-slittings at great velocity were achieved with a small hand blade wrapped tight to the wrist and dubbed the “Serbcutter”. They were specially designed and manufactured for the purpose. One night, guards at Jasenovac wagered amongst themselves to see who could cut the most throats with their Serb cutters. Guard Petar Brzica, a Franciscan priest, was determined to prove his skill, which he did by slicing the throats of an estimated 1,360 defenseless inmates.
German General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, the commanding officer of the region headquartered in Zagreb, reported back to Berlin, “According to reliable reports from countless German military and civil observers during the last few weeks, the Ustasha have gone raging mad.” He added, “The Ustasha camps … are the ‘epitome of horror!” In revulsion, Glaise von Horstenau wrote, “The most wicked [concentration camp] of all must be Jasenovac, where no ordinary mortal is allowed to peer in.”
Hermann Neubacher, Hitler’s personal assistant for the Balkans, called the Ustasha exterminations “a crusade that belongs among the most brutal mass-murder undertakings in the entire history of the world.”
Eventually, the Nazis fell. Their allies in the Ustasha, and the three Waffen SS divisions faced post-war justice in some cases. But too many melted into the turbulent history of the Cold War. The Mufti escaped to become a revered icon of the Palestinian people. But the Third Reich fell. And those in the Arab-Nazi movement went on to form the post-war geopolitical Middle East that prevails in the current century.
The author writes “The most notorious of these camps was the hellish complex known as Jasenovac, considered by many to be more sadistic than Auschwitz by an immeasurable magnitude”.
After reviewing reports of the 1929 pogroms in Chevron and other cities here in Israel, and the history of Islam, I can truthfully state that the Nazi murder militia known as Ustasha, created from a legion of Catholic and Muslim killers descended to the pits of human barbarism: but compared to Hamas and their tens or even hundreds of millions of supporters in our time, the Ustasha were righteous men.
For the future of mankind these devils in Gaza, Tehran, Yemen, and all around the Middle East have to be destroyed. If they remain alive their acts will be repeated in the Christian cities of Europe, the US and elsewhere. The choices are clear: either back Israel in our war to exterminate Hamas today or prepare to experience similar atrocities on your sons and daughters tomorrow.
My only concern is that although we Jews have the capacity to love, we might not have the necessary capacity “to hate” (as stated by King Shlomo) that is needed to cleanse our land of all its evil individuals.
Shabbat Shalom,
Nachman Kahana
Copyright © 5784/2024 Nachman Kahana
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