56
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
will work with you 100% and do whatever possible to assist
you."
After Pearl Harbor the League was dissolved, but in 1945
Katibah suddenly reappeared on the letterhead of the streamlined Institute of Arab American Affairs, listing on its advisory board such prominent Americans as Kermit Roosevelt,
Virginia C. Gildersleeve, dean emeritus, Barnard College; and
William E. Hocking, professor emeritus, Harvard University.
After a while Katibah's name disappeared from the letterhead,
and was replaced by that of Khalil Totah as executive director.
Katibah, however, remained very much on the scene.
As tension mounted in Palestine, Katibah, the extraordinary
Benjamin H. Freedman4 (whose name was originally listed
on the Institute letterhead, but was later mysteriously X'd
out), and R. M. Schoendorf—in reality Mrs. Freedman—
sponsored a series of advertisements under the imprint of "The
League for Peace With Justice in Palestine." An apostate Jew,
Frcedman's political views and extreme aversion for Zionism
and his own people took such violent expression that he was
esteemed by America's leading Jew-baiters, ranging from the
psychopathic to a more dangerous variety. Merwin K. Hart
joined Frcedman's camp by devoting several issues of his biweekly bulletin to Freedman's fulminations that "a small
minority of Jews has maneuvered itself into a position where
it can use almost the whole of Western Christendom as its
tool"; and that "Soviet Communism will succeed in its attempt to conquer the world in direct proportion to the support which America gives to Zionism."
While Hussein was lecturing in the United States, he was
represented in court proceedings by a Brooklyn attorney
named Hallam Maxon Richardson. Richardson, attorney for
numerous "nationalist" clients, had once