T, Belman. Bibi didn’t get it exactly right about the Mufti’s role. But there is no question that the Mufti wanted Italy and Germany to “accord 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.”. [ “Grand Mufti Plotted To Do Away With All Jews In Mideast,” Response, (Fall 1991), pp. 2-3.]
At first Hitler intended to expel all the Jews but since no one would take them in, he concluded that the nations wouldn’t stop him from killing all the Jews. Bibi was right about that. But he was wrong to suggest that the Mufti was responsible for Hitler choosing to do so. The Mufti aided Hitler in other ways such as providing Muslim troops for him from the Balkans.
I am disturbed by the rancor that critics are showing Bibi for his remarks. They are in effect protecting the Arabs from the truth by jumping on Bibi for the error. They should simply correct Bibi and then do a correct indictment of the Arab role in supporting Hitler. I am glad Bibi made his remarks because of the wide exposure the truth is getting.
Netanyahu: Hitler was responsible for Final Solution
“At the same time, it is absurd to ignore the role played by the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a war criminal who encouraged Hitler, [Joachim von] Ribbentrop, [Heinrich] Himmler and others to destroy the Jews of Europe.”
Holocaust scholars refute prime minister’s assertion that Muslim religious leader first suggested the Final Solution; Netanyahu: ‘I had absolutely no intention of absolving Hitler’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday at the 37th Zionist Congress that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler did not initially plan to exterminate the Jews and was convinced by the grand mufti of Jerusalem – but renowned historians said definitively on Wednesday that this was not the case.
Professor Dan Michman, a world-renowned expert who is the head of the Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University and Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem said Hitler did indeed meet the mufti – but this only occurred after the Final Solution began.
“He flew to Berlin,” Netanyahu said of the mufti. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Hajj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them.'”
Netanyahu also said that the mufti was sought during the Nuremberg trials but managed to evade them.
He further noted that the mufti claimed Jews wanted to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque before the war, and “this lie is about a hundred years old.”
Yad Vashem’s chief historian, Professor Dina Porat, told Ynet that Netanyahu’s statements were factually incorrect. “You cannot say that it was the mufti who gave Hitler the idea to kill or burn Jews,” she said. “It’s not true. Their meeting occurred after a series of events that point to this.”
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Wednesday on Netanyahu’s remarks: “Of course Hajj Amin al-Husseini did not invent’ the Final Solution to the Jewish question’. History clearly shows that Hitler initiated it. Hajj Amin al-Husseini joined him.” He added that “the jihadist movements today are encouraging anti-Semitism and lean on known Nazi heritage.”
Opposition leader Isaac Herzog called Netanyahu’s remarks “distortion of history” on his Facebook page.
“No one needs to teach me how much of an Israel-hater the mufti war,” wrote Herzog. “He gave an order to murder my grandfather, Rabbi Herzog, and actively supported Hitler. But there was only one Hitler. Hitler did not need Husseini to order the murder of Jews just because they were Jewish.”
Professor Meir Litvak, who teaches at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Middle Eastern History, said the idea of annihilating the Jews came up in 1939. While the initial plan was to send Europe’s Jews to an area north of the Ural Mountains so that they would die of disease, he said, the plan was nixed when the Soviet Union did not surrender in 1941. At that point, Litvak said, the extermination idea arose.
“Husseini supported the extermination of the Jews, he tried to prevent rescuing of Jews, he recruited Arabs for the SS,” said Litvak. “He was an abominable person, but this must not minimize the scale of Hitler’s guilt.”
The PLO made its own statement on its Twitter page. “Netanyahu hates Palestinians so much that he is willing to absolve Hitler for the murder of 6 million Jews,” the account quoted Saeb Erekat, former chief negotiator in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, as saying. “On behalf of the thousands of Palestinians that fought alongside the Allied Troops in defense of international justice, the State of Palestine denounces these morally indefensible and inflammatory statements.”
“I had absolutely no intention of absolving Hitler of his diabolical responsibility for the extermination of Europe’s Jews,” Netanyahu said as he prepared to depart for Berlin to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution to murder six million, it was his decision.
“At the same time it is absurd to ignore the role played by the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a war criminal, in encouraging and goading Hitler, Ribbentrop, Himmler and others to exterminate European Jewry.
“There are many testimonies to this, including the testimony of Eichmann’s deputy at Nuremberg – not now, but after the Second World War.
“He said: ‘The Mufti played a role in the decision of the German government to exterminate the European Jews, the importance of which must not be disregarded. He has repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he has been in contact, above all before Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this as a comfortable solution for the Palestine problem.’
“Eichmann’s deputy added: ‘The Mufti was one of the initiators of the diabolical extermination of European Jewry and was a partner and advisor to Eichman and Hitler in the carrying-out of this plan.’
“This attempt by certain researchers and certain people to give an apologetic to the central and important role Hajj Amin al-Husseini had is obvious. Many other scholars quote this testimony and other testimonies as to Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s role.
“My goal was not to absolve Hitler from the responsibility that he bears, but rather to show that the father of the Palestinian nation at that time, without a state and without what they call “the occupation”, without Palestinian territories and without settlements, already aspired to destroy the Jews through systematic incitement. Unfortunately, Hajj Amin al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society. He appears in textbooks and is elevated as the father of the nation, and the incitement that began with him, incitement to kill Jews, continues. It’s not the same format, but in another format, and it’s the root of the problem. In order to stop the murder, we must stop the incitement.
The prime minister made similar statements three years ago in the Knesset, claiming that the mufti was “one of the leading architects of the Final Solution”.
Prof. Meir Litvak, a historian at Tel Aviv University, called the speech “a lie” and “a disgrace.” Prof. Moshe Zimmermann, a specialist of German history at Hebrew University, said, “With this, Netanyahu joins a long line of people that we would call Holocaust deniers.”
As for the usual suspects of the PC police who control the dialogue about Islam, Israel, etc., those two historian mentioned in this article fall in the category of what is called in Israel “Post-Zionists”. They are the protagonists who supported the Oslo Accords which brought the PLO (now called the Palestinian Authority [PA]) to the West Bank and Gaza (until Hamas took over the PA there). It can be said that the Post-Zionists are those Jews of German-Austrian ancestry who were known as the “German Jewish intellectuals” and were founding members of the Social Science faculties of Israel’s first university (Hebrew University) [See Yoram Hazony’s book the “The Struggle for Israel’s Soul” 2001]. It is revealing that one of the two “historians mentioned below still has German surname Zimmermann (I should add with the German ending mann). If one investigated his bio one could probably show that his MO fits the profile of a typical Post-Zionist. Another case in point is that the Israeli newspaper of record Haaretz (the New York Times of Israel) also attacked Netanyahu with these canards of falsely accusing the Mufti of instigating the Final Solution. It too is published by the Austrian Jewish family “The Schockens”. It in fact, has sold a significant share of its stock to a Austrian family of Nazi origin. Even the New York Times is run by the Schulzberger family. The Publisher patriarch Arthur Hays Schulzberger was a Reform German Jew opposed to Jewish nationhood in the mold of the Post-Zionists. This helps to understand why the New York Times buried the Holocaust in its back pages during WWII [See “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper” by Laurel Leff ]and its anti-Israel line today.
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Robert_K says
October 22, 2015 at 4:11 pm
I did a cursory check on Moshe Zimmerman’s bio. Here are some excerpts:
Moshe Zimmermann. It is uncanny how his background matches his MO.
The second-to-the-last sentence is a giveaway (Moshe Zimmermann has frequently given his active support to peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians in their own respective states.).
https://www.daad.de/alumni/netzwerke/vip-galerie/nordafrika/12810.en.html
North Africa and the Middle East
Moshe Zimmermann
Honorary Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
One-year scholarship, 1972/1973, University of Hamburg
“It is especially my family’s German-Jewish background that led me to my topic as an historian: the Jews in Germany.”
Moshe Zimmermann comes from a Jewish family from Hamburg that fled Nazi Germany in 1935. He was born in Jerusalem in 1943 and studied history and philosophy there. He returned to Germany as a DAAD scholarship holder. “It is especially my family’s German-Jewish background that led me to my topic as an historian: the Jews in Germany. The archives I needed for my doctoral thesis were in Germany, so I came here to do my research,” he says. After gaining his doctorate on the Emancipation of the Jews in Hamburg in the 19th century, Zimmermann worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on setting up an Institute of German History. The Richard Koebner Institute of German History was founded in 1980; Zimmermann has been its director since 1986.
…
Moshe Zimmermann has frequently given his active support to peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians in their own respective states. He is also a committed and much sought-after discussion partner in Germany.
Date: 2013-01-31
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None of these esteemed historians ever seem to find any distortions in “palestinian” history. Perhaps they’ve just never come across any history.
@ bernard ross:
After extended review I decided that Netanyahu’s penchant for speecherism landed back on him with a fury regarding his remark about Husseini’s role before and during WWII as arch enemy of ours. It was easy to forecast that Netanyahu would eventually cause himself a terrible blow on his own. His garrulous penchant was bound to cause that.
The bestial Islamic “religious” item Al Husseini, (not to be confused with Hussein of course), was instrumental to the Holocaust but not the Holocaust’s main planner. Hitler and Germany led many others including but not limited to Europeans on that.
Meanwhile…
The jury is out about the role of the “labor zionists” in that subject. Hertzog and his handlers stepped into their own deep dark past on that subject.
Further.
Since at least the 80’s Hertzog and the rest of the Oslo mass murderers of Jews intentional importers, were and are directly responsible for tens of thousands of Jewish “victims of peace” still being added to the Rabin, Peres, Barak, Ben Ani, Hertzog, Aloni, Sarid, Ben Yair, original “victims of peace” numbers.
Newly and freely elected courts will attend to all of the Oslo conspirators and “partners” of Arafat’s muslim beasts.
While the evidence suggests that Hitler had decided to exterminate the Jews as early as January 1939, and gave definite orders to begin the process (through his deputy Goering) on July 31, 1941, the mufti did assist in preventing the escape of several thousand Jews whom the Nazi puppet regimes were willing to exchange for their soldiers held by the British (these Jews were mainly children). The mufti asked the Hungarian, Rumanian and Slovakian puppet regimes to hand these Jews over to the Germans for deportation to the Nazi death camps in Poland. They complied with the mufti’s request. He recruited Muslims in the Balkans and the Caucasus to serve in the Waffen SS. The Muslim SS divisions that he helped to recruit murdered many Jews, Serbs and others. Worst of all, he asked Himmler to exterminate all of the Jews in North Africa and the Middle East once German forces occupied these countries. Himmler agreed to this request and dispatched SS survey teams to Algeria and Tunisia to lay the groundwork for this proposed operation. Only the landing of the Americans in North Africa and the British victory at El-Alamein frustrated this Husseini-Himmler plan. The mufti confessed to having made this request of Himmler in his memoirs.
Isn’t it amazing how a little religion can can ease the conscience when it comes to mass killing?
Especially Islam for some inexplicable reason.
Perhaps the “historians” who “slammed this distortion” of history should study it carefully so as to avoid making it up as they go along.
Any names?
the despicable herzog, instead of opening Jews eyes, to the pal history of nazi alliances with hitler to murder Jews, has chosen to throw in a red herring, picking on meaningless detail and obfuscating the pal arab hitler link and historical murderous intentions. Why do these despicable leftist swine cover for the muslim jew killers???? Because the left has so much invested in the notion that the holocaust denying abbas and the chronic congenital anti semitic arab pals are “peace partners”….. and Jews made aware of the arab nazi link might make the sensible deduction that the pals are the same nazis to day as they were then …..and then with this knowledge decide to throw out the left along with the notion of peace with the pals which would be as sane as advocating peace with hitler.
Herzog and the despicable left have sunk to a new low by tryng to fool the Jews, seeking to hide the arab nazi link that BB brought to life with their usual fake red herrings which are irrelevant to the main point:
the pals were nazis then and the pals are nazis now.
Duh Herzog, that is the important issue
I defend Netanyahu on this one.
He was not seeking to exonerate Hitler, and any cynic who claims otherwise has ulterior motives.
There are many legitimate reasons to bash Netanyahu, but this is utter poop.
Buji Herzog and the Israeli Left want to deny the existence of Arab anti-Semitism.
This is what is behind the on-going Arab pogrom in Israel today.
The Mufti was the moving spirit behind the Nazi Farhud pogrom in Iraq.
He wrote letters to various eastern European countries demanding the Jews be exterminated. His complicity as a war criminal in the Holocaust is well-established.
He helped to create the Muslim Nazi SS Division in the Balkans.
He hatched a plot to poison the water supply of Tel Aviv.
Whether or not Hajj Amin Al-Husseini pushed Hitler in an eliminationist direction, his desire to kill Jews was clear.
The Mufti was behind the anti-Semitic pogroms in Israel in the 1920s.
And he was an ardent anti-Semite and a fanatical Nazi.
He had no love for the Jews.
It has gotten to the point that even at speeching the item is gone. He must go now!