THE LEAGUE: Faithjul Mohammedan

Faithful Mohammedan

Looking not unlike genial Mr. Toad in The Wind In The Willows, His Highness the Aga Khan presided over the Assembly of the League of Nations last week. He had been elected president for this session without a single dissenting vote, such is British potency at Geneva, and was ready to perform more of the useful functions for which London has loaded him these many years with honors. Last week it was curiously appropriate that a Mohammedan should preside as the Assembly discussed whether or not Palestine should be partitioned according to the recent British plan (TIME, July 19 et seq.).

Up in the League Assembly before the Aga Khan stood His Excellency Wassif Buotrous Ghali Pasha, Foreign Minister of Egypt, which by the good offices of Britain has just "achieved nationhood" by being admitted to the League of Nations. In a vigorous speech the Minister said that about the only things wrong with Britain's plan to partition Palestine are that: 1) It violates the British promises by which Arabs were induced to join the Allied cause during the War; 2) It violates "the natural and sacred rights of the Arabs" to their holy places; 3) It "fails to solve the international Jewish problem"; and 4) It aims to create in Palestine "two small hostile states lacking in substance and with no possibility of permanent existence."

Egypt's Minister proposed a treaty solution by which Jews who care to remain in Palestine ultimately would receive Arab citizenship—an ingenious and plainly impossible solution to which as good an answer as any was the Aga Khan's toadlike complacency in shifting the debate to an innocuous subject prior to adjournment. As a Mohammedan he thus rebuffed Mohammedans and got away with it more easily than a Christian could have done.