Chutzpah: After Holocaust remark, White House warns Netanyahu against incitement

The sheer madness and chutzpah of the White House ... read the following  then read below:

Comments made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the week, which implicated the former grand mufti of Jerusalem in the decision to proceed with the Holocaust, amount to inflammatory rhetoric stoking tensions on the ground between Israel and the Palestinians, the White House said on Thursday.

In a speech on Tuesday, Netanyahu said that Palestinian Haj Amin al-Husseini was directly responsible for encouraging Adolf Hitler not just to expel Jews from Europe, but to exterminate them. Netanyahu has since clarified that he had no intention of absolving Hitler for responsibility for the Holocaust.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters the Obama administration has no doubt who was responsible for the genocide, which involved the systematic murder of six million Jews.

"The inflammatory rhetoric needs to stop," Earnest said. 

On Wednesday, the State Department declined to characterize Netanyahu's specific remarks as incitement, but added: "Scholarly evidence does not support that position," referring to the prime minister's historical account.

Earnest's comments come just hours after Netanyahu met with Secretary of State John Kerry in Berlin to discuss the violence across Israel and the West Bank in recent weeks.

The Holocaust:
The Mufti and the Führer

(November 1941)

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Holocaust: Table of Contents | Concentration Camps | Jewish Persecution

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In 1941, Haj Amin al-Husseini fled to Germany and met with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentropand other Nazi leaders. He wanted to persuade them to extend the Nazis’ anti-Jewish program to the Arab world.

The Mufti sent Hitler 15 drafts of declarations he wantedGermany and Italy to make concerning the Middle East. One called on the two countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine. Furthermore, “they accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of the Arabs and, by the same method, that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries.”¹

In November 1941, the Mufti met with Hitler, who told him the Jews were his foremost enemy. The Nazi dictator rebuffed the Mufti's requests for a declaration in support of the Arabs, however, telling him the time was not right. The Mufti offered Hitler his “thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches....The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely....the Jews....” Hitler replied:

Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine....Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle....Germany's objective [is]...solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere....In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. The Mufti thanked Hitler profusely.²

In 1945, Yugoslavia sought to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for his role in recruiting 20,000 Muslim volunteers for theSS, who participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary. He escaped from French detention in 1946, however, and continued his fight against the Jews from Cairo and later Beirut. He died in 1974.

Read more about the conversation between Hitler and the Mufti, CLICK HERE.

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Sources:
¹ “Grand Mufti Plotted To Do Away With All Jews In Mideast,” Response, (Fall 1991), pp. 2-3.
² Record of the Conversation Between the Fuhrer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941, in the Presence of Reich Foreign Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin, Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Series D, Vol. XIII, London, 1964, p. 881ff in Walter Lacquer and Barry Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, (NY: Facts on File, 1984), pp. 79-84.