Adelson-linked Think Tank Article Preceded Netanyahu’s Hitler-Mufti Claim

Ted Belman. Haaretz continues in its efforts to defame Netanyahu suggesting that Netanyahu got his ideas from a right wing, Adelson supported, think tank. In so doing they ignore the great influence of the Mufti on Palestinian nationalism and ignore its murderous intent that is as strong today as it was then.

New Hampshire philosophy professor wrote in March that in his 1941 meeting with the Nazi leader, the Mufti insisted on the Final Solution.

By Chemi Shalev, HAARETZ

An article written earlier this year by a New Hampshire professor of philosophy for a Jerusalem think tank funded in the past by Sheldon Adelson supplies an ostensibly academic underpinning for the prime minister’s contentious claim that the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini persuaded Adolf Hitler to annihilate European Jews.

In an account that is almost identical to the version supplied by Netanyahu in his controversial speech to the World Zionist Congress last week, Professor Joseph Spoerl of St. Anselm University in New Hampshire wrote: “Up until 1941, Hitler had seemed content to drive all the Jews out of Germany and German-occupied lands, often taking hefty ransom payments in the process. But Hajj Amin al-Husseini insisted that Hitler and the Nazis end this method of “solving the Jewish question.” Thus, mass murder became “the final solution.”

The article, “Palestinians, Arabs and the Holocaust” was published in March 2015 by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), a think tank headed by Netanyahu confidante Dore Gold from 15 years until his appointment in June as director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry. According to an article in the Forward and U.S. tax files on public view, one of the main financers of JCPA in recent years has been Adelson: in 2012 he gave a million dollars to the JCPA through the Baltimore-based Center for Jewish Community Studies, which Gold also headed. According to the Forward, Adelson’s contribution constituted two thirds of JCPA’s annual budget.

Thought he does not cite the “Burn them” quote that Netanyahu ascribed to the Mufti, Spoerl portrays his November 28, 1941 Berlin meeting as the pivotal turning point that led to Hitler’s decision to carry out “The Final Solution”. According to Spoerl’s narrative, after meeting the Mufti, Hitler decided to convene the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which the mechanism of the Final Solution was discussed.

Though he cites extensively from other books written by right-leaning historians that purport to prove the Mufti’s close ties to the Nazis, Spoerl does not provide any historical references for this claim, endorsed by Netanyahu, that it was the Mufti who convinced Hitler of the need to annihilate the Jews.
Spoerl heads the Department of Philosophy at the Catholic St. Anselm College, a small but prestigious liberal arts college in Manchester, New Hampshire renowned for its important presidential addresses and forums. Spoerl is a member of the pro-Israel Association for the Study of Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) and writes frequently on issues related to radical Islam. He has also delivered addresses to hawkish, pro-Israeli forums, some of which are on view on YouTube.
At press time, Spoerl could not be reached for comment and the Prime Minister’s Office did not return queries on whether the article was read by Netanyahu or served as a historical source for his speech.

Spoerl traces the Mufti’s call to murder Jews to the 1920’s and 30’s, saying that his genocidal ideology developed separately from that of the Nazis. He describes al-Husseini as having single-handedly compelled Hitler in 1941 to stop the emigration of Jews to Palestine and elsewhere. Moving on the Berlin meeting between the two, he writes “Immediately after his meeting with al-Husseini, Hitler ordered Heydrich to organize a conference within ten days to prepare ‘the final solution of the Jewish question.’ This was to be the infamous Wannsee Conference, which was postponed to January 1942 because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s subsequent declaration of war on the United States.”

He then cites the book “Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, written by the late Barry Rubin, who was a columnist for the Jewish Press and the Jerusalem Post, and Wolfgang Schwanitz, which claims that the influence of the Mufti and others “also reinforced, made more necessary, and accelerated a policy of genocide in Europe that the Axis’s [Arab] partners intended to spread to the Middle East.”

Spoerl, who has written in the past about the Nazi-based ideology of Hamas and other Palestinian leaders, draws a direct line between the 2014 Gaza War and the 1948 War of Independence.
“The widespread adoption of Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s anti-Semitic rhetoric by Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim leaders shows another kind of complicity in the Holocaust. When Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood leaders say that Hitler gave the Jews the punishment they deserved, they are vicariously participating in and endorsing the Holocaust.” These Palestinians, he writes, are Hitler’s “soul-mates”.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.682144

October 25, 2015 | 5 Comments »

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  1. @ Robert_K:
    this explains the anti jewish stance of haaretz, its employment of anti semitic editors and writers. this also explains they this anti semitic rag is the most cited “newspaper” by the foreign anti semitic press.

  2. You’re right, Bernard, the Schocken Family of Haaretz sold a major share of Haaretz to an Austrian (Non-Jewish, or should I say “Aryan”) family with links to the Nazis. This I found from Wiki:
    Until August 2006, the Schocken family owned 100% of the Haaretz Group, but then the German publisher M. DuMont Schauberg acquired 25 percent of the shares.[11] The deal was negotiated with the help of former Israeli ambassador to Germany, Avi Primor.[12] This deal was seen as controversial in Israel as DuMont Schauberg’s father, Kurt Neven DuMont, was member of the German Nazi party, while his publishing house promoted Nazi ideology.[13]
    [11]”M. DuMont Schauberg. Press-release”. Dumont.eu. Archived from the original on 26 February 2012. Retrieved 10 February 2013.
    [12] Koren, Ronny (13 August 2006). “Germany’s DuMont invests 25m euros in Haaretz”. Haaretz. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
    [13] “Haaretz’s ‘Nazi problem'”. Ynetnews. 20 June 1995. Retrieved 10 February 2013.

  3. my understanding is that the austrian family who bought haaretz had links with the nazis. with such a background haaretz should never point fingers to defame others. gil white showed that these leftists are all bullshiiting and that connections with Husseini and hitler took place long before the 1941 meeting. Such diplomatic meetings and announcements are usually held for public consumption AFTER agreements are made not during… therefore everything was probably agreed in prior contacts, to which the mufti actually referred in the meeting. The leftist liars like to obscure the facts because if abbas is a nazi trained by the nazi mufti then conducting peace negotiations with him would have the same credibility as a Jew conducting negotiations with Hitler. After all hitler had a pact with stalin too.

  4. I can not overstate the Haaretz-NYTimes Post-Zionist Nexus, which comes from their German-Austrian Publishers (Haaretz – The Schockens, New York Times – The Sulzbergers). These quote-on-quote German Jewish intellectuals were against the idea of Jewish nationhood and supported a bi-national state where Jews were a minority under Arab rule. As I mentioned before, the New York Times of 1929, in fact, gave prominent editorial space to the first rector of Hebrew University, the Reform Rabbi Yehuda Leib Magnes, who was for negotiating with the Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini. The “Peace Now” of those days which Magnes and his ilk were associated with was known as Brit Shalom. Do you really expect our modern day successors of Brit Shalom to allow Bibi to expose the nefariousness of the Mufti and the Palestinian national movement?

  5. Dr. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz’s book, co-authored with the late Barry Rubin, on Hitler’s relationship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem is being credited as the source of Netanyahu’s belief that it was al-Husseini who convinced Hitler to exterminate the Jews rather than deport them from Europe. It is substantiated that the Arabs have incited to the level of extreme violence and murder against the Jewish people since the 1920s.

    The Real History Behind Netanyahu’s Holocaust Comments
    An interview with Dr. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz

    Bibi has made some very solid points and his theory is not off the wall.