The Truth about Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti, Hitler and the Holocaust

Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini meeting
with Adolf Hitler in Dec. 1941.

JEWISH JOURNAL: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went too far in recent comments that Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem before and during World War II, played a “central role in fomenting the Final Solution” by trying to convince Hitler to destroy the Jews during a 1941 meeting in Berlin. But Netanyahu was right on when he emphasized the Mufti’s Holocaust complicity and activities before, during, and after the war when the Mufti lied about alleged Jewish intentions to expel Muslim and Islam from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—the same lie that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas repeats today in support of the current “knife Intifada.”

Netanyahu said: “Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. "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?' he asked. He said, 'Burn them’.”

Netanyahu’s quotation of the Grand Mufti is word-for-word accurate, but it is not true that the Fuhrer needed the advice of Islam’s leading anti-Jewish fanatic to implement the Final Solution. That was his dream as far back as 1919 as a letter that he authored and signed now on display at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance documents.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has been accused of “a dangerous historical distortion” and even “Holocaust Denial” from the predictable political quarters who even dismiss the Grand Mufti as “a lightweight” inconsequential in the history of the Holocaust. This claim wrongly mitigates the Mufti’s mindset and crimes as one of the Hitler era’s leading anti-Jewish haters. » | Abraham Cooper * and Harold Brackman ** | Wednesday, October 21, 2015

* Rabbi Abraham Cooper is Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

** Dr. Harold Brackman, a historian[,] is a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.