(JNi.media) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday night tried to drive his point across using the Holocaust. During his speech he told the Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu stated that the Nazi-sympathizer Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was the one who persuaded Adolf Hitler to exterminate Europe’s Jews. “Al-Husseini played a key role in planning the final solution,” Natanyahu said. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, but only to expel them. The Mufti told him, If you expel them, they’ll come here (to Palestine). Hitler asked him: What should I do with them? And he replied: Burn them. The Jews want to destroy the Temple Mount.”
The conversation as Netanyahu described it never took place. The point Netanyahu was trying to make was not well presented, resulting in the PM blowing out of proportion the role of the Jerusalem Mufti in Hitler’s life. It would have sufficed for Netanyahu to assert that Palestine Arabs took part in the Nazi effort (although there was no specific Palestine unit fighting in the German Army, as there were, for instance, Bosnians).
Opposition leader MK Yitzhak Herzog (Labor) rebuked Netanyahu for his remarks, saying the son of a historian (the late Prof. Benzion Netanyahu) should be accurate about history. Writing on his Facebook page, Herzog said Netanyahu’s statement is a dangerous historical distortion, and demanded a retraction, lest it be perceived that Netanyahu trivializes the Holocaust, Nazism and Adolf Hitler’s share the tragedy of our nation in the Holocaust. Herzog suggested that the PM’s assertions are falling like ripe fruit into the hands of Holocaust deniers.
Historian Prof. Moshe Zimmerman told an Israel Radio news show that Netanyahu removes the responsibility from Nazi Germany and Hitler and transfers it to the Arab world. According to him, this is a destructive stunt designed to tarnish today’s Arabs because of the actions of the Arabs in the past.
For the record, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, the Mufti of Jerusalem sent Hitler 15 drafts of declarations he wanted Germany and Italy to make concerning the Middle East, one of which called on both countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine, giving “to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of the Arabs and, by the same method, that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries.”
In November 1941, the Mufti met with Hitler, who told him the Jews were his foremost enemy. The Nazi dictator rebuffed the Mufti’s requests for a declaration in support of the Arabs, however, telling him the time was not right. In notes were taken by Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt on 28 November 1941, Hitler made the following declaration, requesting the Mufti to lock it deep in his heart:
1. He (the Fuehrer) would carry on the fight until the last traces of the Jewish-Communist European hegemony had been obliterated.
2. In the course of this fight, the German army would – at a time that could not yet be specified, but in any case in the clearly foreseeable future – gain the southern exit of Caucasus.
3. As soon as this breakthrough was made, the Fuehrer would offer the Arab world his personal assurance that the hour of liberation had struck. Thereafter, Germany’s only remaining objective in the region would be limited to the annihilation of the Jews living under British protection in Arab lands.
MK Ahmed Tibi (Joint Arab List) attacked Netanyahu’s remarks about Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini and said it is nonsense and an embarrassing historical fraud which condones Hitler’s racist teachings that led to the extermination of Jews. According to Tibi Netanyahu’s hatred and his strong desire to poison the minds of Israelis against Arabs has driven him crazy.
