Netanyahu's Revision of the Holocaust for Political Gain Is Inexcusable (by Deborah Lipstadt)
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.681950
It's possible to argue that since neither Huckabee nor Carson are well versed in the history of the annihilation of European Jewry, they should not be too roundly condemned for these cheap analogies. Similarly, one could say that anti-Israel protestors are so infused with hatred and anger that they too have lost sight of any historical reality. But what can one say when the leader of the Jewish state relies on this tactic?
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the World Zionist Congress that the idea for murdering the Jews was the brainchild of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. According to Netanyahu, when Hitler and the mufti met in November 1941, Hitler had not yet thought of exterminating the Jews but simply wished to expel them. When Husseini complained that expelled Jews would all come to Palestine, according to Netanyahu, a perplexed Hitler asked, “So what should I do with them?” The mufti supposedly responded, “Burn them.” And so the Holocaust ensued.
This claim doesn’t make sense. The murder of the Jews began in the summer of 1941, five months before this meeting. By the time Hitler and the mufti had their tete-a-tete, hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children had been shot. At Babi Yar alone, the Germans murdered 34,000 Jews in September 1941, over two months prior to the meeting, without any encouragement from the mufti. Gas wagons were already in use prior to this meeting. Someone who wishes to only expel a people does not rely on mass shootings and gas wagons.
This is not the first time Netanyahu has made this assertion. In 2012 the prime minister claimed in the Knesset that the mufti “more than anyone else convinced [Hitler] to execute the Final Solution.” Some of the prime minister’s critics used this opportunity to brand him a Holocaust denier. He’s not – but he is a revisionist. And he is doing so to score political points.
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Netanyahu, however, did not paint him [the mufti] as a supporter of this genocide. He credited him with coming up with the idea. There is a vast difference between the two. Historians continue to debate who originated the idea of the Final Solution. No serious historian, however, has ever laid the decision at the feet of the mufti.
Deborah Lipstadt is the Holocaust scholar who won the trial vs David Irving establishing him as a per se legal fraud.
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