Prime Minister Netanyahu did something important last week — he reminded the world that the Arab war against Israel is a continuation of the Nazis’ war against the Jews.
What an uproar greeted Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks. He made them Wednesday, when he suggested that it was the World War II-era mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who planted in Hitler’s mind the idea of exterminating the Jews.
The prime minister was referring to an infamous meeting between the Mufti and Adolf Hitler in November 1941, two months before the Nazi ghouls gathered at a lakeside villa at Wannsee to plan the Final Solution.
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time,” Mr. Netanyahu told a Zionist conference last week. “He wanted to expel the Jew.” He said the mufti warned Hitler that if he merely expelled the Jews, they’d all go to Palestine.
“What should I do with them?” Hitler asked, according to Mr. Netanyahu’s account.
“Burn them,” the mufti supposedly responded.
The liberal pettifoggers are going crazy over this, claiming, with a straight face, that Mr. Netanyahu was giving a pass to the Führer. A “defense of Hitler,” is how it was described in a headline in the Forward. The White House suggested that Netanyahu was being “inflammatory.”
Even the distinguished Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt called Mr. Netanyahu a “revisionist.” This strikes me as unworthy of her and, in any event, inaccurate, even if the Israeli leader misquoted the precise language used by Hitler and the mufti.
None of the aide-memoires quote the mufti as suggesting Hitler “burn” the Jews. But the records show Hitler vowing to destroy them and the mufti gushing appreciation. I can’t imagine Mr. Netanyahu meant to put the gloss on Hitler any more than Ms. Lipstadt means to pretty up the mufti.
The mufti, according to the notes of Hitler’s translator, opened the meeting by thanking Hitler for his sympathy to the “Arab and especially the Palestinian cause.” They were natural friends, he said, because they had the same enemies.
The Palestinian Arabs, therefore, were “prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war.” The Arabs, the mufti predicted, “could be more useful as allies than might be apparent at first glance.”
“The objectives of my fight are clear,” the mufti’s diary quotes Hitler as saying. “Primarily, I am fighting the Jews without respite, and this fight includes the fight against the so-called Jewish National Home in Palestine.”
Hitler’s translator recorded in his notes that the Führer enjoined the mufti to “lock” in the “upper depths of his heart” that the Führer would battle to “the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.”
The Nazi tyrant would then, the notes say, go on to signal to the Arab world “that its hour of liberation had arrived.” Germany’s sole objective would then be the “destruction of the Jewish element resigning in the Arab sphere.”
Mr. Netanyahu may be wrong that it was the mufti’s idea to exterminate the Jews (killings had already begun); but he’s not incorrect in noting that it’s an idea the Mufti endorsed.
The key point is that the Nazis and the Palestinian Arab leader were on the same side. Peoples had to make a choice in World War II. The Jews went with the Free World. The Palestinian Arabs went with Hitler.
Surely that is the prime minister’s intended point. No doubt he seeks awareness of the fact that Israel is still being attacked by the heirs to a devil’s pact between the mufti and the Führer.
Why has this so upset the left? What does it care whether the mufti gets a portion of blame for Hitler’s crimes?
An answer can be found in a New York Times editorial on Friday. It called Mr. Netanyahu’s comments outrageous, “because…[it] gives the impression” that the Palestinian Arabs’ “resistance is based solely on a longstanding hatred of the Jews, and not on their occupation by Israel or any other grievance.”
As if that weren’t true. The mufti and other Arab leaders hated the Jews before Israel. If Israel went away tomorrow, Muslim fundamentalists would still hate Jews.
The left must shout down and discredit Netanyahu, because he’s highlighting the uncomfortable truth that, with respect to the Jews, the Arab ideology is the same as the Nazi one. And how can anyone defend that?
This column first appeared in the New York Post.
People get upset when their Arab darlings get exposed as Nazis?
You mean they’re not interested in co-existence with the Jews? The stabbings make that point clear.
They want the Jews dead and gone. But for uncomfortable Jews the last thing they can stomach is giving up their worship of the idol called the peace process.
Negotiations with a murderer after all, end up with you or with him dead. There is no common ground.
Just like there was no common ground with the Mufti.
Life’s such a bitch when your carefully crafted fantasies are hit by a large rock…
And what did the world do to stop the Nazi annihilation of Jews?
What has the world done to stop the Iranian project to annihilate Jews?
The world approves of murdering Jews. Or hadn’t you noticed?