Holocaust Myths
By Alan M. Dershowitz
In his speeches, most especially the
one at Columbia University, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeats two myths about
the Holocaust. The first every reasonable person knows is a total lie: namely
that the Holocaust did not occur. The second myth, however,
is one that escapes critical attention for the most part, because many people
are not aware of its falsity. The myth is that the Palestinian people and their
leadership had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust. The
conclusion that is supposed to follow from this “fact” is that the establishment
of Israel in the wake of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was unfair to
the Palestinians. This is the way Ahmadinejad put it in his Columbia talk.......
"…Given this historical event [the Holocaust], if it is a reality, we need to
question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it"… "The
Palestinian people didn’t commit any crime. They had no role to play in World
War II".
These statements about the role of the Palestinians are demonstrably false. The
truth is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses,
played a significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust. The Palestinian leader at the
time was Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufit of Jerusalem. As Professor
Edward Said has acknowledged:
“Hajj Amin al-Husseini represented the Palestinian Arab national consensus, had
the backing of the Palestinian political parties that functioned in Palestine,
and was recognized in some form by Arab governments as the voice of the
Palestinian people.”
Husseini was “Palestine’s national leader” and it was in that capacity that he
made his notorious alliance with Hitler and played an active role in promoting
the Holocaust. Here is the true story that Ahmadinejad tried to mythologize.
Shortly after Hitler came to power, the Grand Mufti decided to emulate him. He
informed the German consul in Jerusalem that “the Muslims inside and outside
Palestine welcome the new regime of Germany and hope for the extension of the
fascist anti-democratic, governmental system to other countries.” In an effort
to bring it to his own country, Husseini organized the “Nazi Scouts,” based on
the “Hitler Youth.” The swastika became a welcome symbol among many
Palestinians.
The mid to late 1930’s were marked by Arab efforts to curtail immigration and
Jewish efforts to rescue as many Jews as possible from Hitler’s Europe. These
years were also marked by escalating Muslim violence orchestrated by Husseini
and other Muslim leaders. In 1936, Arab terrorism took on a new dimension. In
the beginning the targets were once again defenseless Jewish civilians in
hospitals, movie theatres, homes and stores. This was followed by strikes and
shop closures, and then by the bombing of British offices. The Nazi regime in
Germany and the Italian fascists supported the violence, sending “millions” to
the Mufti. The SS, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, provided both
financial and logistical support for anti-Semitic pogroms in Palestine. Adolf
Eichmann visited Husseini in Palestine and subsequently maintained regular
contact with him. The support was mutual, as one Arab commentator put it:
“Feeling the whip of Jewish pressure and influence, the Arabs sympathized with
the Nazis and Fascists in their agony and trials at the hands of Jewish
intrigues and international financial pressures.”
The Palestinians and their Arab allies were anything but neutral about
the fate of European Jewry. The official leader of the Palestinians, Haj Amin
al-Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin with Hitler, serving as a consultant
on the Jewish question. He was taken on a tour of Auschwitz by Himmler
and expressed support for the mass murder of European Jews. He also sought to
“solve the problems of the Jewish element in Palestine and other Arab countries”
by employing “the same method” being used “in the Axis countries.’ He would not
be satisfied with the Jewish residents of Palestine - - many of whom were
descendants of Sephardic Jews who had lived there for hundreds, even thousands,
of years - - remaining as a minority in a Muslim state. Like Hitler, he wanted
to be rid of “every last Jew.” As Husseini wrote in his memoirs:
“Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to
eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for
an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner
befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific
methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was:
“The Jews are yours.”
The Mufti was apparently planning to return to Palestine in the event of a
German victory and to construct a death camp, modeled after Auschwitz, near
Nablus. Husseini incited his pro-Nazi followers with the words “Arise, o sons of
Arabia. Fight for your sacred rights. Slaughter Jews wherever you find them.
Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history and religion. That will save our
honor.” In 1944, a German-Arab commando unit, under Husseini’s command,
parachuted into Palestine and poisoned Tel Aviv’s wells.
Husseini also helped to inspire a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and helped to organize
thousands of Muslims in the Balkans into military units known as Handselar
divisions which carried out atrocities against Yugoslav Jews, Serbs and Gypsies.
After a meeting with Hitler, he recorded the following in his diary:
The Mufti: “The Arabs were Germany’s natural friends… They were therefore
prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to
participate in a war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage
and the instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an
Arab Legion. In this struggle, the Arabs were striving for the independence and
the unity of Palestine, Syria and Iraq….
Hitler: “Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after
the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time direct a similar
appeal to non-European nations as well. Hitler. Germany’s objective would then
be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere
under the protection of British power. The moment that Germany’s tank divisions
and air squadrons had made their appearance south of the Caucasus, the public
appeal requested by the Grand Mufti could go out to the Arab world.”
It is fair to conclude that the official leader of the
Muslims in Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a full fledged Nazi war criminal
and he was so declared at Nuremberg and sought by Yugoslavia as a war
criminal after the war. He escaped to Egypt where he was given asylum and helped
to organize many former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers against Israel.
It is also fair to say that Husseini’s pro-Nazi sympathies and support were
widespread among his Palestinian followers, who regarded him as a hero even
after the war and the disclosure of his role in Nazi atrocities. According to
his biographer,
“Haj Amin’s popularity
among the Palestinian Arabs and within the Arab states actually increased more
than ever during his period with the Nazis… [because] large parts of the Arab
world shared this sympathy with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.”
Nor was it merely a hatred of Zionism that animated this support for Nazi
ideology. The grand mufti’s “hatred of Jews…was fathomless, and he gave full
vent to it during his period of activity alongside the Nazis (October 1941-May
1945).” His speeches on Berlin Radio were anti-Semitic to the core: “Kill the
Jews wherever you find them—this pleases God, history and religion.” In 1948,
the National Palestinian Council elected Husseini as its president, even though
he was still a wanted war criminal living in exile in Egypt. Indeed, Husseini is
still revered today among many Palestinians as a national hero. Yasser Arafat,
in an interview conducted in 2002 and reprinted in the Palestinian daily Al-Quds
on August 2, 2002, calls Haj Amin al-Husseini “our hero,” referring to the
Palestinian people. Arafat also boasted of being “one of his troops,” even
though he knew he was “considered an ally of Nazis.” (If a German today were to
call Hitler “our hero,” he would appropriately be labeled a neo-Nazi.!)
It is a myth therefore – another myth perpetrated
by Iran’s myth-maker-in-chief – that the Palestinians played “no role” in the
Holocaust.
Considering the active support by the Palestinian leadership and masses for the losing side of a genocidal war, it was more than fair for the United Nations to offer them a state of their own on more than half of the arable land of the British mandate.
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