Adam Chandler of the Atlantic put it best: “In the surreal course of less than 24 hours, a controversy featuring the leaders of Israel and Germany over the history of the Holocaust has gone full circle.”
He’s referring to Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu’s recent foray into Holocaust revisionism with comments he made this Tuesday at a Zionist Congress meeting, suggesting that Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian religious figure who held the title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the decades before WWII, convinced Adolf Hitler to go forward with the genocide of 6 million Jews.
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “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. He said, ‘Burn them.’
In addition to Palestinian leaders and politicians, Israeli historians condemned Bibi’s remarks, with even the Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog calling them a “a dangerous historical distortion.”
But Germany’s chiming in on the controversy is the most notable. It’s not often that a country needs to reiterate that it was responsible for one of the greatest moral crimes in history just to set the record straight.
The statement came from Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel:
All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust.
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.
Although it’s well known that Husseini was a vicious anti-Semite, the claim that he initiated Hitler’s “Final Solution” resides at the fringes of Holocaust research and is rejected by most legitimate scholars.
In response to Bibi’s revisionism, Twitter is exploding with the hashtag #BibiHistoryLessons:
Hindenburg destroyed by Palestinians in a dastardly terror attack #BibiHistoryLessons pic.twitter.com/QZBFBGJ4VP
— Peter Feld (@peterfeld) October 21, 2015
#BibiHistoryLessons Palestine told Bill Cosby to do it. — Milksteak&Jellybeans (@Tallulahs_Ghost) October 21, 2015
Will we ever know what the Palestinians did with Amelia Earhart? #BibiHistoryLessons pic.twitter.com/zopgbU5zqG
— Buzz_Patriot (@Buzz_Patriot) October 21, 2015
RMS Lusitania torpedoed by Palestinians #BibiHistoryLessons pic.twitter.com/s3MGrwXmAV — Alex Vancina (@AlexVancina) October 21, 2015
All of a sudden, everything falls into place! #MuftiMadeMeDoIt #BibiHistoryLessons pic.twitter.com/lL2c8s8REZ
— Tjerk Muller (@TjerkMuller) October 21, 2015
Featured image via YouTube
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