Netanyahu’s Offensive Fake History
Prime Minister Netanyahu garbled up some inflammatory history to
suggest that a Palestinian mufti was responsible for the Holocaust, but
the underlying message was even more troubling, a suggestion that
Palestinians as a group share the guilt, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R.
Pillar explains.
By Paul R. Pillar
Benjamin
Netanyahu’s bit of revisionist history about the origins of the
Holocaust certainly deserves the outraged response it got this past
week. One wonders why he chose to push this line given the
well-established and easily cited historical fact — which many of his
critics did cite — that the Nazi regime’s mass killing that would become
known as the Holocaust was well under way before the meeting to which
Netanyahu referred, between Adolf Hitler and the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj
Amin al-Husseini.
One further wonders why, given that if
Netanyahu wanted to make a sharply negative comment about the mufti —
who, as also has been well established, was a strongly anti-Jewish
collaborator of the Nazis — he could have done so without adding his
historically inaccurate twist about the significance of the meeting, and
it would have been in order and unremarkable for him or any other prime
minister of Israel to have done so.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
