NEAR EAST: Holy Skirmish

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The Arabs resented Britain's splitting them up into small States. The Arabs in Palestine resented Zionism and were sniping at British troops there last week. The Arabs in Iraq's neighbor, Syria, resented being kept a French mandate. Moslems everywhere, even in India, had longstanding grudges. If the Germans could warm over these resentments and arouse the entire Moslem and Arab worlds against Britain, the geographic guts would be knocked out of the Empire. Berlin, with its talk of jihad, did its best to kindle the Arab sheiks to flame. Newspapers and radio announced loudly that Syrian Arabs were individually telegraphing support and encouragement to Iraq, that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was urging Palestine Arabs to open battle, that Ibn Saud, tough, single-minded leader of Saudi Arabia, was mobilizing his desert legions.

There is probably nothing Adolf Hitler would like so much as to be called in to be the savior of Islam. Last week he got his first bid. According to Rome reports, Seyid Rashid Ali El-Gailani asked him, through the mediation of Italian Minister Luigi Gabbrielli, to come and save Iraq. In a desperate effort to stave off the Near East crisis, Turkey offered to mediate the undeclared war, but Turkey was fast being pulled out of its pro-British orientation, and the British, mistrusting Moslem mediation of a Moslem vexation, turned the offer down. If the Iraq Incident was not the beginning of the Holy War, at least it was a Holy Skirmish.