58
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
tion to a book by Joseph E. McWilliams, speaker at Bund
meetings and fuehrer of the pro-Nazi Christian Mobilizers.5
Hussein addressed a meeting for which invitations were sent
by a Yorkville hate-monger who had been sentenced to the
workhouse for participating in a meeting "tending towards a
breach of the peace." Another speaker was Ernest F. Elmhurst,
a veteran hand at the Nazi hate game, once indicted for subversive activities.6 Thus, before leaving our hospitable shores,
Hussein made his bow to some of our more distinguished citizens.
Shortly before he departed Hussein staged a banquet at the
Hotel Commodore in New York. Katibah was toastmaster.
Freedman was a speaker.7 Richardson sat across the table from
a friend of mine who later filed a detailed report of the proceedings. Hart was absent, but in the assortment of bigots
and others was a surprising guest—Faris Bey el Khouri, leader
of the Syrian delegation to the United Nations. The gathering
was also honored by the presence of none other than the
Mufti's political cohort, Azzam Pasha, to whom Captain
Gordon-Canning referred me as his friend. Azzam Pasha
praised Hussein as "a great leader, one who speaks from the
heart." He added that he was delighted to have met "real
Americans, the Americans in this room tonight." A weird note
was struck by the presence of a tipsy American Army colonel.
5
In 1943 McWilliams, with 29 others, was charged with conspiracy
"to establish and aid in the establishment of national socialist or fascist forms
of government in place of the forms of government then existing in the
United States," and of carrying on "the objectives of said Nazi Party in the
United States" by means of "a systematic campaign of propaganda designed
and intended to undermine the loyalty and morale of the military and naval
forces. . . ."
6
Elmhurst was a defendant in the same trial with McWilliams. After a
mistrial occasioned by the death of the judge, the indictment was dismissed.
7
Freedman, represented by Richardson, testified at a court hearing in
which a criminal libel complaint was sought against the Rev. Henry A.
Atkinson, chairman of the Advisory Board of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi
League, that he had paid half the bill for the banquet. He also testified that
he had spent more than $100,000 "of my own money" for pro-Arab advertisements and other propaganda.