Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated in an address that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem during the 1940s inspired Adolf Hitler in his attempt to annihilate the Jews.
Husseini visited Berlin in 1941 and Prime Minister Netanyahu said that this meeting was instrumental in the Hitler’s decision to launch a campaign to exterminate the Jews.
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” Mr Netanyahu said in the speech the day before he left for a visit to Germany.
“And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [Palestine]. So what should I do with them?’,” Mr Netanyahu said Hitler asked the mufti, who responded: “Burn them.”
Of course, the ABC has been quick to find a contrary opinion, reporting:
“To say that the mufti was the first to mention to Hitler the idea to kill or burn the Jews is not correct,” Dina Porat, a professor at Tel Aviv University and the chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, told Israel Radio.
“The idea to rid the world of the Jews was a central theme in Hitler’s ideology a long, long time before he met the mufti.”
Whether al-Husseini was the first person to mention the idea of killing off the Jews to Hitler doesn’t change the fact that the Nazism of Adolf Hitler and the Islamism of al-Husseini were kindred spirits.
Al-Husseini led attacks against Jews in the Holy Land earlier in the 20th Century, and was later sought for war crimes in Nuremberg Trials for his involvement in Hitler’s ‘final solution.’
As world leaders grapple with Islamic terrorism and expansionism, this is perhaps the more important issue to be acknowledged.