Hezbollah's aim: Exterminate Jews

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Sometimes an apology can be quite revealing. Consider the one recently issued by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He apologized to the families of two Israeli children who were killed by a Hezbollah rocket that hit the Christian holy city of Nazareth. He called them shahids, martyrs, even though they did not choose to die at the hands of Hezbollah terrorists.

The apology was issued not because they were children or innocent bystanders but because they were Israeli Arabs and not Jews. Hezbollah's rockets are aimed at Jews and earn cheers whenever they kill a Jewish baby or grandmother. No apologies there.

The so-called Arab-Israeli conflict represents the first instance since the Holocaust that Jews, as Jews, are being specifically targeted by an international organization that seeks recognition as a legitimate power. Hezbollah has threatened to attack Jewish targets outside of Israel as well. And they have proved their willingness to do so, as evidenced by their attack on a Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, in 1994, in which they collaborated with Argentine neo-Nazis to murder many Jews, including children.

The collaboration between neo-Nazis and Islamic terrorists to murder Jews should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of the collaboration between the Palestinian leadership and Hitler during World War II.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was recognized as the official leader of the Palestinians during this period, was a virulent anti-Semite whose hatred of Jews was both religious and racial. He became a close ally and adviser to Adolf Hitler, and an active supporter of the "final solution," the mass murder of European Jewry. In 1940, he asked the Axis powers to settle the Jewish problem in Palestine in accordance with the "racial interests of the Arabs and along lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany." He urged Hitler to extend the final solution to the Jewish refugees who had reached Palestine, and he advised Hitler, in 1943, when it was well known what was happening in Poland's death camps, to send the Jews to "Poland, in order thereby to protect oneself from their menace."