Showing posts with label Haj Amin al-Husseini. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haj Amin al-Husseini. Show all posts

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Netanyahu Said What About Muslims and the Holocaust?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked controversy on Wednesday, hours before a visit to Germany, by saying the former Muslim elder in Jerusalem convinced Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked controversy on Wednesday, hours before a visit to Germany, by saying the former Muslim elder in Jerusalem convinced Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews. (Reuters)


Netanyahu Said What About Muslims and the Holocaust?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked controversy on Wednesday, hours before a visit to Germany, by saying the former Muslim elder in Jerusalem convinced Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews. 
In a speech to the Zionist Congress late on Tuesday, Netanyahu referred to a series of attacks by Muslims against Jews in Palestine during the 1920s that he said were instigated by the then Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. 
Husseini famously flew to visit Hitler in Berlin in 1941, and Netanyahu said that meeting was instrumental in the Nazi leader's decision to launch a campaign to annihilate the Jews. 
"Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews," Netanyahu said in the speech. "And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here.' 
"'So what should I do with them?'" Netanyahu said Hitler asked the mufti, who responded: "Burn them." 
Netanyahu, whose father was an eminent historian, was quickly harangued by opposition politicians and experts on the Holocaust who said he was distorting the historical record. 
Palestinian officials said Netanyahu appeared to be absolving Hitler of the murder of six million Jews in order to lay the blame on Muslims. Twitter was awash with criticism. 
"It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbor so much that he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history, Adolf Hitler, of the murder of six million Jews," Saeb Erekat, the Palestine Liberation Organisation's secretary general, said. 
"Mr Netanyahu should stop using this human tragedy to score points for his political end," said Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator with the Israelis. 
Even Netanyahu's defense minister, close ally Moshe Yaalon, said the prime minister had got it wrong. 
"It certainly wasn't (Husseini) who invented the Final Solution," Yaalon told Israel's Army Radio. "That was the evil brainchild of Hitler himself." 
It is not clear what sources Netanyahu was relying on for his comments. A 1947 book "The Mufti of Jerusalem" and a newspaper report at the time said a former Hitler deputy had testified at the Nuremberg war crimes trials that Husseini had plotted with the Nazi leader to rid Europe of its Jews. 
Husseini was sought for war crimes but never appeared at the Nuremberg proceedings and later died in Cairo. 
Historical Record
But the point several historians made was that Netanyahu was distorting timelines and drawing false conclusions. 
The meeting between Husseini and Hitler in Berlin took place on November 28, 1941. More than two years earlier, in January 1939, Hitler had addressed the Reichstag and talked clearly about his determination to exterminate the Jewish race. 
"To say that the mufti was the first to mention to Hitler the idea to kill or burn the Jews is not correct," Dina Porat, a professor at Tel Aviv University and the chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, told Israel Radio. 
"The idea to rid the world of the Jews was a central theme in Hitler's ideology a long, long time before he met the mufti." 
Porat and others pointed out that the murder of the Jews began in June 1941. Even if the mufti wanted the Final Solution to be expanded, he wasn't the one who came up with the idea. 
"For somebody who knows something about history and grew up in the house of historian Professor Benzion Netanyahu, he should know well," Porat said of the prime minister. "But in my humble opinion, to say that the mufti gave Hitler the idea is wrong." 
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Sunday, January 5, 2014

Israel Today: Palestinian Leadership 'Enthusiastically' Supported Nazis

VIDEO: Palestinian Leadership 'Enthusiastically' Supported Nazis

Sunday, January 05, 2014 |  Israel Today Staff Jerusalem 
A senior Palestinian official last month confirmed for Russian television that the Palestinian Arab leadership at the time of World War II “enthusiastically” supported Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, especially its war against the hated “Zionists.”
During an interview with Russia Today TV, former PLO political bureau chief Farouk Kaddoumi was asked if the Palestinian leadership was “sympathetic with Nazi Germany in WWII?”
Without batting an eye, Kaddoumi answered: “I don’t think it would be wrong to say that we were enthusiastic supporters of Germany.”
Wanting to clarify this astonishingly candid response, the interviewer repeated: “You supported Hitler and his people?”
Kaddoumi’s reply was the same: “Germany, yes. This was common among the Palestinians, especially since our enemy was Zionism, and we saw that Zionism was hostile to Germany, and vice versa.”
While the blunt nature of Kaddoumi’s admission might seem unusual, the content of his remarks represent no great surprise for students of history.
At the height of World War II, Palestinian spiritual leader and Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini (pictured) was an outspoken ally of the Nazis. Several photographs of Husseini meeting with Hitler exist, and the sheikh is known to have actively recruited Muslims in the Balkans and elsewhere to the Nazi cause.
It should also be noted that Kaddoumi’s comments cannot in this particular instance be brushed aside as “playing to the crowd” since the Russians were one of Hitler’s greatest foes and suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazi war machine.
Watch the interview below:
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