30
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
4
hours. There can be no doubt of us being a 'slave race' today."
I dined twice with Canning at his apartment in Cadogan
Square, London. These were highly instructive meetings. For
this man who bought Hitler's bust, and who—on the basis of
his writings—might be dismissed as a crackpot, permitted his
apartment to be used as a meeting-place by Arabs working in
London. Canning told me he was a close friend of Abdul
Rahman Azzam Pasha, the Jew-baiting secretary-general of the
Arab League. He then showed me photographs taken with
Abd el Krim, the Moroccan rebel leader ("back in the twenties I tried to make peace between the French and the
Arabs"), and with other high Arab personalities. A prize in
his collection was one taken with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Canning had written a pamphlet, "Arab or Jew," in
which he reprinted the introduction the Mufti had given him
at a dinner sponsored in Canning's honor by the Moslem Supreme Council in Jerusalem on November 5, 1929. This was
the time of the bloody Palestine riots, when the Mufti gangs
staged pogroms against Palestine's Jews. Said the Mufti then:
"We are here this afternoon to greet Captain Canning
heartily. He is our distinguished guest, and a sincere friend to
our people. We immensely thank him for his efforts he has
been unceasingly exerting in support of our cause. . . . The
Arabs in this country request all their British friends, and our
distinguished guest, Captain Canning, is of the best of them,
to be so good enough as to let the noble British people know
the real facts in this country."
"I am one of the few Englishmen the Arabs trust completely," Canning said proudly, caressing the album containing
the photograph of himself with the Mufti and others.
One night, when I knew Canning had invited a group of
Arab leaders to his home, I dropped in casually at suppertime.
4
This was in reference to a series of anti-Semitic outbreaks in London,
Liverpool, Manchester, and other cities, growing out of Jewish reprisals
against the British in Palestine.