By Alan M. Dershowitz, FrontPageMagazine.com | 9/28/2007
In his speeches, most especially the one at Columbia University, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeats two myths about the Holocaust. The first every reasonable person knows is a total lie: namely that the Holocaust did not occur. The second myth, however, is one that escapes critical attention for the most part, because many people are not aware of its falsity. The myth is that the Palestinian people and their leadership had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust. The conclusion that is supposed to follow from this fact is that the establishment of Israel in the wake of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was unfair to the Palestinians.
This is the way Ahmadinejad put it in his Columbia talk. ..
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[G]iven this historical event [the Holocaust], if it is a reality, we need to question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it. .The Palestinian people didn.t commit any crime. They had no role to play in World War II..
These statements about the role of the Palestinians are demonstrably false. The truth is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler.s Holocaust. The Palestinian leader at the time was Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufit of Jerusalem. As Professor Edward Said has acknowledged: .Hajj Amin al-Husseini represented the Palestinian Arab national consensus, had the backing of the Palestinian political parties that functioned in Palestine, and was recognized in some form by Arab governments as the voice of the Palestinian people.. Husseini was .Palestine.s national leader. and it was in that capacity that he made his notorious alliance with Hitler and played an active role in promoting the Holocaust. Here is the true story that Ahmadinejad tried to mythologize. [..]
This myth also obscures the fact that Israel doe not exist because of the Holocaust. The legal foundations of the state are the League of Nations Mandate (1922) and the San Remo Conference (1920)
The Peel Commission (1936) and the Balfour Declaration (1917) also had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
The people whom we call Palestinians (a mix of people from the lands right across the ME) supported the Nazis, rejected the remaining Jewish victims of the Nazis, began a war with the Jews of Israel and the Jews who escaped the ovens and camps of the Nazis, and now support a new Holocaust for the Jews and the annihilation of the State of Israel.
The mad jihad from Iran could not be more wrong (may Allah defecate on his addled soul). If there was sanity and justice in this world then the Palestinians would be very happy that they came out unscathed from WWII after backing the wrong side, for the wrong reasons to accomplish what they and only they are still trying to accomplish post WWII: the eradication/eviction of the Jews from their own homes and their historical/biblical lands.
The idea of giving Palestinians and all their descendants, friends and co-religionists the right to return en masse to Israel is just about as stupid as saying that the Germans must be given a right in 2007 to Poland, Austria, France, parts of Britain, Italy, etc, because they once coveted those countries and spent a good deal of effort trying to conquer Europe.