Netanyahu says Hitler needed the Mufti to devise the Holocaust. Truth screams: No!
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu damaged Israel’s reputation by committing the very same crime he rightly accuses the Palestinian leadership of.
He lied about history. Either that, or he missed the fact that George Washington was the first president of the United States.
Palestinians say that the Jews have no history in Palestine, that there were no Temples in Jerusalem, that the Land of Israel was never the Jewish homeland.
Netanyahu said that Hitler didn’t decide on the Final Solution until the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, convinced him.
Netanyahu’s claim is as simple — as in simply wrong — as the claim that George Washington was not the first president of the US.
There is no need to consult “the historians” on this matter. There is no need to investigate whether Babe Ruth hit 60 homeruns in 1927, whether the Beatles came to American in 1964, or whether Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.
There is no need to investigate whether Hitler’s “Final Solution” was well underway before he met with the Mufti of Jerusalem.
By the time the Mufti met Hitler in November, 1941, Hitler’s hordes had already killed, at a minimum, tens of thousands of Jews via the Einsatzgruppen.
You know those horrible pictures of Nazis lining up Jews before empty pits — mass graves — and shooting them in the head, filling up the pits?
That was before Hitler met the Mufti.
You know Babi Yar, the terrible slaughter of some 33,771 Jews in just a couple of days in September, 1941?
That was before Hitler met the Mufti.
You know the incidents of direct Nazi mass murder of Jews in Vilna, Kovno, Riga, Grodno, Brest-Litovsk and elsewhere in Eastern Europe?
All that was before Hitler met the Mufti.
Hitler began his mass extermination of Jews after his invasion of the USSR in June, 1941. He met the Mufti in November, 1941. When Hitler’s men and his East European collaborators couldn’t stomach shooting masses of Jews in person, the Nazis devised a more impersonal method: mobile killing vans. These were trucks with hermetically sealed cabins mounted on their rear, with the exhaust routed into the cabins.
They began before Hitler met the Mufti.
Like the mass murder squads, these mobile killing vans were used behind the lines of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
All in all, the Einsatzgruppen killed more than one million Jews (plus others, such as Roma). What the precise number of Jewish dead was between the beginning of this rampage of mass murder in June, 1941 and the time of Hitler’s meeting with the Mufti in November, 1941, we don’t know. But with more than 33,000 dead in two days alone at Babi Yar, you know it was the Holocaust.
Hitler didn’t need the Mufti’s help or ideas to do this.
Yet, here’s what Netanyahu said last week in Germany: “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?’ he asked. He said, “Burn them.’”
As if, at the time of this meeting, Hitler’s mass extermination of the Jews had not begun already, via the Einsatzgruppen.
As if, at the time of this meeting, the Nazi idea of the mass gassing of Jews had not begun already, via the mobile vans.
As if, at the time of this meeting, the construction of the first “killing center” (Belzec) had not begun.
As if Kristallnacht, which was three years earlier in November, 1938, were a mere “expulsion.”
The Mufti, no doubt, was an evil man, taken up with his own persecutions of Jews [see adjoining editorial]. But Hitler did not need the Mufti’s help tactically, ideologically, emotionally or politically.
Israel’s right to the Land of Israel is based on irrefutable history. For Netanyahu to stoop to the same kind of egregious historical denial that is widespread in many Arab circles is destructive, disappointing and indeed astonishing.
Is expert historical knowledge needed to know whether George Washington was president of the US? That level of knowledge is what Benjamin Netanyahu denied last week. This only makes it infinitely more difficult for Netanyahu to be believed in his refutations of Arab lies about Jewish history in Israel.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
