In 1946, the future son-in-law of Harry Truman, who eventually decided to recognize Israel, met with the man whose life ambition was to destroy the Jewish State. Until recently, the resulting New York Times profile was seemingly lost to posterity.

But it tells us a great deal about how notorious antisemites were viewed in the wake of the Holocaust.

Clifton Daniel was a veteran journalist who would go on to lead the New York Times editorial section and, in 1956, marry Margaret Truman, the sole child of Harry Truman. Among his many accomplishments, President Truman created the architecture that eventually helped win the Cold War, oversaw the Marshall Plan, and recognized the newly created nation of Israel. To be sure, the Zionists fighting on the ground, many of them Holocaust survivors, secured Israel’s existence. Yet American support was crucial.

But in the summer of 1946, all of this was in the not-too-distant future. Daniel was then a 33-year-old reporter who had made his way to Cairo. He had secured a meeting with Amin al-Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism and an infamous Nazi collaborator. 

In 1921, Husseini was appointed by ruling British authorities to the position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, making him the preeminent Muslim cleric in the land. Husseini had little to recommend him for the post. He was a mere 26 years of age and had little in the way of religious training. Yet he came from one of Jerusalem’s leading Arab families. And he had served the British as a spy and recruiter during the Great War and its aftermath.  

The British had defeated the Ottomans and sought to administer the area as a Mandate. In 1917, the government of David Lloyd George declared its support for the creation of a “national home” for the Jewish people in their ancestral land. The 1920 San Remo Conference and 1924 Anglo-American convention further enshrined Jewish territorial claims into international law. But Husseini was unalterably opposed. 

In 1920, Husseini helped incite an anti-Jewish pogrom in Jerusalem, with the hopes of influencing British authorities to drop their support for the Zionist project. To the cries of “the Jews are our dogs” and “kill the Jews; there is no punishment for killing Jews,” Husseini and other Arab rioters attacked Jerusalem’s Jewish citizens, murdering five Jews and injuring hundreds more.

At the time, Husseini proclaimed that “Faisal is our King,” hoping that the area would become part of Faisal’s short-lived Syrian kingdom. Put simply: his goal wasn’t so much the creation of a Palestinian Arab state as we would understand it today. Rather, he was an Islamic supremacist who opposed living in social and political equality with Jews. In 1920, that meant working to ensure that the area would be ruled by Faisal of the Hashemite family. Later, he would seek power on his own terms — indeed, his henchmen would eventually murder Faisal’s own brother, King Abdullah of Jordan, in 1951. And the British would unwittingly help him along the way.

In 1921, Herbert Samuel, the governor of the Mandate, appointed Husseini to be Grand Mufti over other, more qualified candidates. Historians have long speculated as to why Samuel would offer the position to a man who opposed one of its foundational tenets. Perhaps Samuel was rewarding Husseini for his wartime intrigues. Or perhaps he hoped that he could co-opt a “hardliner” opposed to Jewish self-determination and convert him, via patronage and support, to the great power’s objectives. If so, Samuel was the first, but hardly the last, to indulge in such self-delusions.

Husseini actively worked against ruling Mandate authorities, fomenting other, bloodier, pogroms in 1929. In the 1930s, he solicited, and received, support from the burgeoning fascist movements in Italy and Germany.

Husseini, gifted with fascist arms and money, played a leading role in the 1936 Arab revolt, in which terrorists attacked and murdered British authorities, Jews, and Arab “collaborators.” The revolt was eventually quashed, but not before the British government, worried about the gathering storm clouds of war in Europe, pursued appeasement. 

In 1938, the Woodhead Commission recommended the first outline of what would later become known as the “two state solution” — one Arab state, and another Jewish one, carved out of the original Mandate. Arab leaders, pressured by a now-exiled Husseini, rejected it. The British, desperate to appease the Arabs, responded with more appeasement, issuing the 1939 White Paper, which closed the Mandate’s doors to Jews seeking to flee Hitler’s Europe.

Husseini, unbowed and unmoved, made his way to Nazi Germany, where he toured death camps, broadcast Arab propaganda, recruited a Waffen SS regiment, and in a November 1941 meeting with the Fuhrer, sought support for the elimination of Jewry in the Middle East that he hoped to one day rule.

By 1946, Husseini was a wanted Nazi war criminal, who had made his way from France, where he lived comfortably in a villa with a chef and bodyguards, to Egypt. The Third Reich was dead, but Husseini’s goals for a Judenrein Middle East lived. 

Egypt’s King Farouk, Daniel noted, received Husseini with “cordiality, and offered him every comfort in exile.” And “it soon became apparent that the Mufti was a popular hero, and that there was no way short of actual imprisonment to keep him from continuing the work that has been his passion for a lifetime-keeping Zionism out of Palestine.”

To his supporters, Husseini’s virulent antisemitism was a recommendation. When Husseini left France, rumors swirled that he would return to Mandate Palestine where, Daniel reports “the Arabs of Palestine went delirious. Some of them did not sleep for three nights. They posted pictures of him all over Palestine, festooning them with garlands. They strung lights around the minarets, and with alarming abandon-built gasoline fires on the roofs of mosques and fired off guns which they threaten someday to turn again against the Jews and British.”

“Tributes of such fervency are not paid to a man unless he is something special,” Daniel observed. Husseini, the New York Times correspondent noted, displayed great “charm” and “excessive courtesy.” He was a “renowned spellbinder” who spoke “softly, with a well-modulated voice.” Daniel noted a young Arab supporter meeting the Mufti for the first time. “What a sweet guy!” the man exclaimed. “Oh, he’s beautiful! His eyes are something to hypnotize you. So polite, so nice. He’s lovely!” 

But Husseini wasn’t without his detractors and rivals, many of whom he sought — often successfully — to have murdered during his long career.

Daniel noted that Husseini sparked “internecine” war among Arabs living in the Mandate and that, in 1946, some Arab leaders were lukewarm about the prospect of his potential return. Some of them, he remarked, referred to him as “just another Arab leader.” And “others feel privately that he has besmirched the Arab cause by his association with Germans and Italians.” Yet, “the controlling factor, however, is that this association with the Axis does not seem to have damaged him with the [Arab] masses.”

Husseini hoped to use this support, his ambitions undiminished. 

The Mufti’s critics, Daniel noted, claimed “that he has not had a new idea for a quarter of a century.” But “another interpretation would be that he is single-minded.” And while future academics, journalists, and apologists would attempt to minimize or obfuscate Husseini’s ideology, Daniel didn’t do so. The Mufti’s life “has been dominated by a single idea to recreate the unity of the Arab nation, and particularly to prevent that one corner of the Arab world which is Palestine from being occupied by people whom he regards as intruders.” Those “intruders” were the Jewish people, whose suffering and death he actively sought. And his “devotion to this cause,” Daniel wrote, “is unflagging.”

 The Mufti may have “played the role of the savior of Palestine” as Daniel put it, but his legacy, in all its blood drenched failure, is readily apparent today.

The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis