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the Arab Executive Committee, did not know what was going on!" "I refuse to believe," coolly observed Sheik Taleb Maraka soon afterward, "that the respectable Moslems of Hebron are capable of committing atrocities." Since the Crown seemed unable to get an Arab to prosecute and dared not incense Moslems by calling in a Jew, the trial dragged on in farcical doldrums. Meanwhile the most potent Moslem in Palestine, the young and vigorous Grand Mufti Haj Amin El-Husseini, President of the Supreme Moslem Council, ordered a general strike of Arabs, in protest against the British Government's determination to bring to justice suspected authors of the Palestine Massacres (TIME, Sept. 16). Strikers Spanked. Among the first and most enthusiastic strikers were Arab schoolboys at Nablus, 30 miles north of Jerusalem. Several were nabbed by Assistant Director of Education Parrel and soundly spanked. Screaming they rushed home to their parents. Within an hour the "General Strike," previously ineffective in Nablus, halted every Arab activity. Strikers militating in numerous Palestine towns and cities provoked demonstrations which British troops were able to keep under control last week, but an ugly situation loomed. Einstein v. Mufti. As Jews in foreign lands grew anxious, fearing afresh for their Palestine brethren, the Grand Mufti was attacked from far away Berlin by Israel's aloof delver into relativity riddles, Albert Einstein. Wrote he for the Man chester Guardian, in an effort to arouse Englishmen: "Does public opinion in Great Britain realize that the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, who is the center of all the trouble and speaks so loudly in the name of all the Moslems, is a young political adventurer not much more, I understand, than 30 years old, who, in 1920, was sentenced to several years' imprisonment for his complicity in the riots then, but was pardoned under the terms of amnesty? The mentality of this man may be gauged from a recent statement he gave to an interviewer, accusing me, of all men, of having demanded the rebuilding of the [Jewish] Temple [of Solomon] on the site of the [Moslem] Mosque of Omar."
Mufti's Demands. In frequent statements to Jews and others the Grand Mufti has declared that Palestine can only have peace when ruled by a Government responsible to a local Palestine Parliament in which Jews and Arabs would be proportionately represented. This demand could be met by making Palestine a dominion like Canada. But since Palestine Arabs outnumber Palestine Jews five to one, the British Government fears to make an experiment in democracy which would give Palestine a Parliament almost totally Arabian.