American Zionist Leaders Say Mufti’s “escape” Will Promote Pogroms in Palestine

The reported “escape” of the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem from France to the Near East was today branded by the American Zionist Emergency Council as an “intrigue” designed to produce riots and pogroms in Palestine.

“Why has the Mufti been helped to ‘escape’ and who engineered his plane journey to Damascus? Has all this been done to make it possible for Britain to claim that ‘the Arab world will go up in flames’ if 100,000 homeless Jews are admitted into Palestine immediately, as requested by President Truman and recommended by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry?” the Council asked.

A mass demonstration will be held in Madison Square Garden tomorrow “to protest the obstructionist tactics on Palestine of Great Britain and the U.S. State Department,” the Council announced. Speakers at the rally, which is being jointly sponsored by the Council and the American Jewish Conference, include Bartley C. Crum, member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, Senator Edwin C. Johnson, Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, Dr. Stephen S. Wise and Henry Monsky.

The United Zionists-Revisionists issued a statement declaring that “the ex-Mufti could not have left France without the knowledge of the French Government, and he could not have arrived in the Middle East without the knowledge of the British. His reappearance on the political scene indicates a major attempt of the anti-Zionist forces in Great Britain to present to the world a grand spectacle of Arab opposition to Jewish aspirations in Palestine.

“The return of the Mufti to the Middle East is part of an elaborate conspiracy aimed not only at provoking serious trouble in Palestine, but at instigating mass massacres of Jews in Arab countries in an effort to block and forestall the implementation of Zionism,” the statement said.