Germany Reminds Netanyahu That Hitler Was Responsible For The Holocaust
Germany Reminds Netanyahu That Hitler Was Responsible For The Holocaust
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/10/21/3714586/netanyahu-holocaust/
by Beenish Ahmed Oct 21, 2015 12:58pm
CREDIT: AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a press conference with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the Prime Ministers office in Jerusalem, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2015.
Holocaust experts are accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of rewriting history by claiming that Palestinians gave Hitler the idea for his genocidal campaign against European Jews.
Referring to attacks on European Jews before the official outbreak of World War II in 1939, Netanyahu said that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, “instigated” the killings.
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. 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?’ [Hitler] asked. [al-Husseini] said, ‘Burn them.'”
Holocaust historians and political officials in Israel and around the world have been quick to decry the inaccuracies Netanyahu recounted to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem. They have called his remarks “dangerous historical distortion” and “a great shame.”
The initial plan to carry out a mass killing of European Jews came up in 1939 — long before Hitler met with al-Husseini in 1941, Meir Litvak, a professor at Tel Aviv University, told the Israeli news site Ynet. It reported:
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.”
Zevaha Galon, a left-wing Israeli legislator, noted that Hitler was responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Jews before he met with al-Husseini.
Perhaps we should exhume the corpses of the 33,771 Jews murdered in Babi Yar [in Ukraine] in September 1941, two months before the Mufti and Hitler met, and bring them up to speed on the fact that the Nazis had no intention of destroying them.“Perhaps we should exhume the corpses of the 33,771 Jews murdered in Babi Yar [in Ukraine] in September 1941, two months before the Mufti and Hitler met, and bring them up to speed on the fact that the Nazis had no intention of destroying them,” she wrote on her Facebook page.
German historian Stefan Ihrig added that al-Husseini was connected with Hitler, but that connection “cannot be used to shift blame away from the Nazis.”
German officials were much more willing to point to Hitler as the prime culprit for the Holocaust than the head of the Jewish state.
“All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust,” said Steffen Seibert, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “This is taught in German schools for good reason, it must never be forgotten. And I see no reason to change our view of history in any way.”
“We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own,” he added.
The comments come during a time of deep strife between Israelis and Palestinians. In the last month, eight Israelis have been killed in attacks perpetrated by Palestinians. At least 40 Palestinians have been killed in the same period — about half of whom were killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis.
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Netanyahu of absolving Hitler of war crimes out of animosity for Palestinians.
“It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbor so much so that he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history, Adolf Hitler, of the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust,” he said.
For his part, Netanyahu said that he did not intend to give Hitler a free pass.
“I did not intend to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry,” Netanyahu said after critique of his speech swept Israel. “Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution extermination of six million Jews, he made the decision.”
Netanyahu has leveled blame for the Holocaust against the Palestinian religious leader before. In a 2012 speech, he called al-Husseini “one of the leading architects of the Final Solution.”
“This isn’t the first time Netanyahu [has distorted] historical facts,” Israeli legislator Itzik Shumuli said , “But a lie of this magnitude is the first.”
The Israeli Prime Minister has also been found to have distorted facts about Iran’s nuclear capabilities and about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq .
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“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. 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?’ [Hitler] asked. [al-Husseini] said, ‘Burn them.'”
After Hitler had expelled all the Jews, if that was his choice, why would he care if they went to Palestine ?
The quote implies seeing the Jews in Palestine would have upset Hitler so much that he decided to kill them all instead.
I don't see this line of reasoning making much sense.
Netanyahu is very irresponsible.
He does seem to be rewriting history or at least trying to. Hitler hated the Jews and blamed them (and used them politically) for all of Germany's problems after WWI. Besides that he was an unabashed and hateful anti-Semite. Try to exterminate the Jews is at Hitler's and the Nazi's doorstep and no one else.
Trying to blame the Palestinians as accomplices is disgusting in the extreme on Netanyahu's part. Though not terribly surprising given his history of raw hate himself.
Netanyahu is being criticized by his own fellow Israelis, something we never seem to hear much about in the msm.
The Jerusalem Post:
Leading Israeli historians and survivors’ advocates on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of distorting the Holocaust, following a speech in which he claimed that Adolf Hitler had been convinced to murder Europe’s Jews by the leader of the Palestinian nationalist movement.
Addressing the 37th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Netanyahu said that Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini “had a central role in fomenting the Final Solution.
“He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here’” (Mandatory Palestine), Netanyahu said, adding that when asked what to do with the Jews, Husseini said, “Burn them.”
Yad Vashem’s chief historian responded harshly to the speech, telling The Jerusalem Post it was incumbent on Netanyahu to backtrack on his remarks.
While the mufti “definitely” played a role in the Holocaust, he was in no way one of the primary movers behind the adoption of the Final Solution and such comments are likely to “cause some damage unless they are urgently clarified,” Prof. Dina Porat said.
The destruction of European Jewry had been on Hitler’s mind since the First World War and it was “his obsession,” Porat said. “The mufti had nothing to do with fomenting or developing the Final Solution.”
In 1939, years before Hitler and the mufti met in Berlin, the Nazi leader had already publicly stated that should the Jews “succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” Porat said.
She said further that the process of putting Jews into ghettos and the beginning of the mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union occurred before the pair’s November 1941 meeting in Berlin.
Addressing Netanyahu’s claim that Hitler had changed his mind about expulsion as a viable solution to what he saw as the “Jewish problem” following the meeting, Porat said that while Hitler had supported forcible relocation, that was “only at the first stage.”
Jewish emigration from areas under German control was halted in 1940, she said.
“I would like [Netanyahu] to clarify what he meant by the mufti fomenting the Final Solution. I would like him to clarify what he meant by emigration being the only wish of Hitler,” Porat said.
According to historians such as Porat and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Dr. Efraim Zuroff, allegations such as those made by Netanyahu serve to obscure the actual role that the mufti played in the Holocaust and give ammunition to those who would whitewash his legacy.
On Wednesday, Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian Authority official, said that “Palestinian efforts against the Nazi regime are a deep-rooted part of our history,” adding that “Palestine will never forget – though it seems Netanyahu’s extremist government has.”
Zuroff said, though, that the involvement of the leader of the Palestinian national movement in the Holocaust is a matter of historical record. He cited the mufti’s propaganda work on behalf of the Third Reich and his role in recruiting Muslim troops to take part in the Holocaust.
“There is no doubt that the mufti was a zealous supporter of the Third Reich and that he hoped that the Nazis would implement the Final Solution in the Land of Israel, but Hitler did not need any convincing from the mufti or anyone else to launch the annihilation of European Jewry,” Zuroff said.
“At a time when Palestinian lies are fueling an outbreak of terror and the Palestinians have submitted a proposal to UNESCO which totally denies a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, a mistake of this sort is particularly unfortunate,” Zuroff said.
“If you inflate and totally exaggerate the role of the mufti it undermines the accurate aspects of the mufti’s zealous support for the Third Reich and [his] hopes that the Final Solution will be implemented in the Land of Israel.”
While Netanyahu was incorrect in his assertions, it is likely that his confusion was based on the mufti’s very real role in lobbying against proposals to bring Jews out of Romania and Bulgaria during the war, Zuroff said.
“The mufti tried very hard to stop it,” Zuroff said. “He intervened to make sure it wouldn’t happen and that intervention apparently halted or stopped those operations.”
One such incident involved the mufti “persuading the Germans to cancel a 1943 prisoner exchange that would have sent 4,000 Jewish refugee children to Palestine,” said Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington.
“As a result of the mufti’s intervention, the children were sent to Auschwitz. There is ample evidence that he knew they would be murdered,” Medoff said.
Representatives of the Holocaust survivor community in Israel likewise spoke out harshly against the prime minister’s comments.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is engaging in Holocaust revisionism” in a way that “both hurts and incites simultaneously,” Colette Avital, head of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, said.
Avital also thought Netanyahu had hurt survivors’ feelings.
“It hurts because it minimizes the role of the Nazis and incites because he is now directing all the hatred against the Arab public and its leaders, when he implies that they always wanted and continue to want to destroy the Jewish people,” Avital said.
Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, said the mufti’s legacy continues to be a powerful force in Palestinian society, with “striking parallels between the Nazi incitement during the Holocaust and the Palestinian Authority incitement today.”
“Both the Nazis and the PA taught that because of this innate evil nature of the Jews, killing Jews, ridding the world of Jews, is said to be a service to humanity,” Marcus said.
In May, the current grand mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hussein, laid a wreath at Husseini’s grave in Lebanon, while in June a Palestinian preacher, Sheikh Khaled al-Mughrabi, said during a sermon at al-Aksa mosque that the Holocaust had been the German reaction to the Jews’ use of Christian blood in their matza.
In previous years, official Palestinian media outlets have engaged in praise of Hitler.
In 2013, an opinion column in an official PA newspaper asserted that “had Hitler won, Nazism would be an honor that people would be competing to belong to.”
A 2011 essay in the PLO-funded youth magazine Zayzafuna featured Hitler telling a young girl in a dream that he killed the Jews “so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world.”
Before flying to Germany on Wednesday night, the prime minister explained his comments, telling reporters his “aim was not to absolve Hitler from the responsibility he bears, but to show that the father of the Palestinian nation at the time, without a state and before the ‘occupation,’ without the territories and with the settlements, even then aspired with systemic incitement for the destruction of the Jews.”
Netanyahu cited the testimony of Adolf Eichmann’s deputy at the Nuremberg trials that “the mufti was one of the instigators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and was a partner and adviser to Eichmann and Hitler for carrying out this plan.”
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said that “history has made clear that the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a virulent anti-Semite.
“But we must always be careful in talking about the Holocaust. Even if unintended, the prime minister, by his words, plays into those who would trivialize or understate Adolf Hitler’s role in orchestrating the Final Solution. We appreciate his clarification on the point. At a time when there is hateful incitement against Jews spreading across the Internet, it’s important to stay focused on the issues at hand today,” Greenblatt said.
As Usual Bibi let's his hatred and bigotry over take the truth.
Good article to present here randy.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is engaging in Holocaust revisionism” in a way that “both hurts and incites simultaneously,” Colette Avital, head of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, said.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is engaging in Holocaust revisionism” in a way that “both hurts and incites simultaneously,” Colette Avital, head of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, said.
Avital also thought Netanyahu had hurt survivors’ feelings.
“It hurts because it minimizes the role of the Nazis and incites because he is now directing all the hatred against the Arab public and its leaders, when he implies that they always wanted and continue to want to destroy the Jewish people,” Avital said.
By minimizing the role of the Nazis he comes dangerously close to excusing them. At the very least he provides more of an excuse for the Nazis for the Holocaust as them having had to be talked into the Final Solution.
"Netanyahu is being criticized by his own fellow Israelis, something we never seem to hear much about in the msm."
Not only was Netanyahu wrong to make that statement, but he was guilty of misleading the public and intentional incitement. He should be shamed into apologizing and forced to correct his statement.
(This opinion has been provided by Buzz of the Orient, who is constantly being accused of never being critical of Netanyahu, the Israeli government, its Judiciary, the IDF, the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox Haradim.)
I can't imagine Netanyahu doing this! It makes no sense!