By ARON HELLER
(AP) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a press conference with United...
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked uproar in Israel on Wednesday for suggesting that a World War II-era Palestinian leader convinced the Nazis to adopt their Final Solution to exterminate European Jews.
Holocaust experts slammed Netanyahu's comments as historically inaccurate and serving the interests of Holocaust deniers by lessening the responsibility of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Critics also said the statement amounts to incitement against modern-day Palestinians in the midst of a wave of violent unrest and Israeli-Palestinian tensions.
Speaking to a group of Jewish leaders Tuesday, Netanyahu tried to use a historical anecdote to illustrate his point that Palestinian incitement surrounding Jerusalem's most sensitive holy site goes back decades.
He said the World War II-era Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Nazi sympathizer Haj Amin al-Husseini, instigated Palestinian attacks on Jews over lies that they planned to destroy the Temple Mount, known to Muslims at the Noble Sanctuary.
(AP) People attend a demonstration demanding solidarity with Israel at the Brandenburg...
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The hilltop compound in Jerusalem's Old City, housing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the gold-topped Dome of the Rock, lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and completing claims over it are the source of the current round of violence. It is the third-holiest site in Islam and the holiest site in Judaism, where the two Jewish biblical Temples once stood.
Netanyahu said al-Husseini played a "central role in fomenting the final solution" by trying to convince Hitler to destroy the Jews during a 1941 meeting in Berlin.
"Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews," Netanyahu told the group. "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.'"
Historians quickly noted that the Nazi Final Solution was already well underway at this point, with several concentration camps up and running. Hitler had previously repeatedly declared his lethal intentions for the Jews.
Moshe Zimmermann, a prominent Holocaust and anti-Semitism researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said Netanyahu made a "far-reaching argument" for political purposes that didn't hold water. He said the comments essentially made Netanyahu a Holocaust denier.
(AP) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, speaks during a press conference...
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"Any attempt to deflect the burden from Hitler to others is a form of Holocaust denial," he told The Associated Press.
Al-Husseini was an enthusiastic Nazi supporter. But Zimmermann called him a "lightweight" who was pleading with Hitler for assistance in getting rid of the British Mandate and the Jewish immigrants coming to the Holy Land. He said there was no evidence al-Husseini had any real influence on Hitler.
Netanyahu has long been criticized for invoking the Holocaust when talking about current affairs, alluding to it especially when discussing Iran and its nuclear program.
The prime minister's comments come at a sensitive time, as he is scheduled to travel to Berlin on Wednesday to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Netanyahu is also supposed to meet U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry there in new efforts to bring an end to a month-long wave of attacks that have raised fears that the region is on the cusp of a new round of bloodshed.
Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of inciting the violence. But it didn't take long for angry reactions to start pouring in Wednesday that Netanyahu went overboard by trying to connect the Palestinians to the Nazis.
Opposition leader Isaac Herzog called it a "dangerous historical distortion" that plays into the hands of Holocaust deniers. He called on Netanyahu to immediately correct his comments.
"It downplays the Holocaust, Nazism and the role of Adolf Hitler in the great tragedy of our people," he said. "There was only one Hitler."
Senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said that "Netanyahu hates Palestinians so much that he is willing to absolve Hitler of the murder of 6 million Jews."
Even Netanyahu's loyal defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, distanced himself from the comments in an interview with Israel's Army Radio.
"I don't know exactly what the prime minister said. History is actually very, very clear," Yaalon said. "Hitler initiated it, Haj Amin al-Husseini joined him and unfortunately the jihadist movements promote anti-Semitism to this day, including incitement in the Palestinian Authority that is based on the legacy of the Nazis."
Netanyahu is correct. Hitler's policy was just kicking Jews out, and as far as I know, mein kamph and his speeches till 1941 only talked about kicking Jews out. There's also plenty of evidence that the grand moufti helped create a muslim SS division, so that would be evidence of affecting shitler, and there's also plenty of evidence that he encouraged the holocaust to go faster to his buddy Eichmann, so there's that too.
Netanyahu is right to come out and say this, it's been well documented by many other historians. Good on him for it, now lets see if he continues to support them or starts to treat them like the nazis they are.
History is on Netayahu's side here, not the journalist who wrote that:
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/nazis_palestinians.htmHajj Amin al Husseini is the father of the Palestinian Movement. He created PLO/Fatah (now better known as the ‘Palestinian Authority’), the organization that will govern any future Palestinian state. And he was mentor to Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, the leaders of that organization. Husseini was also, during World War II, a top Nazi leader who co-directed with Adolf Eichmann the death camp system that murdered between 5 and 6 million European Jews, also known as the Final Solution. These facts are not widely known or understood. Neither has their implication for our understanding of Israeli ruling elite behavior been properly appreciated. We present a short documentary and a discussion.
___________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
█ Introduction
█ The Video
█ Discussion
█ Readings relevant to this video
___________________________________________________________
Introduction
For many years now, almost every day, all over the world, the Arab-Israeli conflict is headline news. And yet most people still don’t know that PLO/Fatah (now better known as the ‘Palestinian Authority’), the organization that will govern any future Palestinian state, was created by a top leader of the German Nazi Final Solution. In other words, the ‘Palestinian state’—to be carved out of strategic territory of the Jewish state—will be governed by the spawn of the man responsible for the Nazi murder of between 5 and 6 million European Jews.
The short documentary below explains PLO/Fatah’s history.
This documentary is now on Vimeo, but it was first uploaded to You Tube. In the first two days, almost with no publicity, the You Tube webpage quickly logged more than 1,500 visits. Then, on the third day, Israelis began reporting that You Tube was not allowing them to access the video. You Tube’s explanation is that when a video is blocked in this manner it can be due to only one of two reasons:
1) the You Tube account-owner placed country restrictions on the video; or else
2) You Tube is complying with local laws
We did not place country restrictions on the video. That leaves us with the second possibility.
But what local laws can You Tube be complying with? To my knowledge, no laws have yet been passed by the Israeli Knesset against the dissemination of historical facts.
Some have speculated that “we are complying with local laws” is a cover for “the Israeli government told us to block it.” Others ask: “But why would the Israeli government even want to block this video?”
Let us consider the following:
1) PLO/Fatah—created by a leader of the Final Solution—was brought inside the Jewish state—created (supposedly) to protect the Jewish people from Final Solutions—because the Israeli government signed the 1993-94 Oslo Accord.
2) But why? In 1982 Menachem Begin had already (essentially) destroyed PLO/Fatah and chased the remnant out of Lebanon to its new base in Tunis. So in 1993-94 the Israeli government was breathing new life into a defeated, moribund PLO/Fatah.
3) In doing so the Israeli government gifted PLO/Fatah with its most important victory: legitimacy on the world stage, and lordship over the Arab Muslims in the strategic ‘disputed territories’ of Judea and Samaria.
4) The Israeli government did all this this without informing ordinary Israelis about the roots of PLO/Fatah in the German Nazi Final Solution. Instead, it legitimized PLO/Fatah’s claim to have abandoned terrorism for ‘peace.’
5) With PLO/Fatah’s entry, terrorism against Israelis immediately quintupled, and the security situation worsened for the long term because PLO/Fatah has been indoctrinating the Arab Muslims in the disputed territories into its ecstatic genocidal ideology (not precisely a secret).
6) The Israeli government is still trying to sell the Israeli people—and Jews worldwide—on the idea that a sensible solution to Israel’s security woes is to give the strategic high ground of Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. the ‘West Bank’) to PLO/Fatah.
7) There is a real possibility that the Israeli government will make this strategic territory judenrein (this is a German Nazi term meaning ‘cleansed of Jews’) for PLO/Fatah. They already did it in Gaza.
During the long years since the so-called Oslo ‘Peace’ Process began, the Israeli government still hasn’t informed the Israelis about PLO/Fatah’s origins in the German Nazi Final Solution.
But perhaps the most important points are the following:
9) This Oslo ‘Peace’ Process could have been quickly killed in its tracks if, when the US government first began bullying for it, the prime minister of Israel had simply called an international press conference to explain the origins of PLO/Fatah in the German Nazi Final Solution.
10) At any point since 1993-94, by holding such a press conference, the Israeli government could have scored a major propaganda victory in favor of Israeli Jews, and in favor of ejecting PLO/Fatah from Israel. But no such press conference has yet been called.
On the basis of the above 10 points one may conclude that, if the information in this video becomes widely known, those running the Israeli government will have some egg on their faces. In fact, this information raises the sharpest questions about them, and about their intentions. Here then is a plausible motive for the Israeli government to block the video: to stop Israelis from asking such questions.
But in fact questions must be asked not merely about the Israeli government (in the narrow bureaucratic sense) but also about the Israeli ruling elite more broadly. For none of the major politicians who declare themselves opponents of the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process and its ‘Two State Solution’ have educated Israelis about the German Nazi Roots of PLO/Fatah. Why?
The video follows below. And below the video is a discussion about the evidence it presents, and how this evidence has been either ignored or lied about for many years.
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The Video
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THE NAZIS AND THE PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT from FACESHIRHOME on Vimeo.
Discussion
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Immediately after the war, Husseini’s Nazi activities were well understood, as the article from The Nation (1947) which I have posted to the right of this column attests. But then a tremendous silence about Husseini and his Nazi years developed. Certainly the media, which displays always the latest news on the Arab-Israeli conflict in its front pages, has had nothing to say about the Nazi origins of PLO/Fatah ever since PLO/Fatah was created in the 1960s. The silence in academia has been equally deafening.
Historian Rafael Medoff, in an article from 1996, wrote the following:
“Early scholarship on the Mufti, such as the work of Maurice Pearlman and Joseph Schechtman, while hampered by the inaccessibility of some key documents, at least succeeded in conveying the basic facts of the Mufti’s career as a Nazi collaborator. One would have expected the next generation of historians, with greater access to relevant archival materials (not to mention the broader perspective that the passage of time may afford) to improve upon the work of their predecessors. Instead, however, a number of recent histories of the Arab-Israeli conflict have played fast and loose with the evidence, producing accounts that minimize or even justify the Mufti’s Nazi activity.”[1]
What Medoff refers to above as “early scholarship on the Mufti” is early indeed. The work of Pearlman and Schechtman that he cites is from 1947 and 1965:
Pearlman, M. (1947). Mufti of Jerusalem: The story of Haj Amin el Husseini. London: V Gollancz.
Joseph B. Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuehrer, New York, 1965.
After this ensued a tremendous academic silence on the Mufti Husseini. In fact, Medoff can refer us to no academic work on Husseini before 1990. His article, recall, is from 1996. The few academic mentions of Husseini that he could find from 1990 to 1996 were either completely silent on the Mufti’s Nazi years—as if they had never happened—or else they relegated a ‘summary’ of those years to a single paragraph (or even just a sentence) that left almost everything out. Some authors even claimed (entirely in passing) that Husseini’s Nazi activities had been supposedly imagined by “Zionist propagandists.”
But recent scholars who have studied Hajj Amin al Husseini in depth, such as Rafael Medoff, have confirmed what his early biographers had already established:
1) that Husseini traveled to Berlin in late 1941, met with Hitler, and discussed with him the extermination of the Middle Eastern Jews (whom Husseini had already been killing for some 20 years);
2) that Husseini spent the entire war in Nazi-controlled Europe as a Nazi collaborator;
3) that Husseini helped spread Nazi propaganda to Muslims worldwide (one of his famous exhortations goes like this: “Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.”[2]);
4) that Husseini recruited thousands of Bosnian and Kosovo Muslims to Heinrich Himmler’s SS, who went on to kill hundreds of thousands of Serbs, and tens of thousands of Jews and Roma (‘Gypsies’).
It is beyond dispute that Husseini did all that. And in fact photographic evidence of Husseini’s Nazi collaboration abounds on the internet.
But there has been quite an effort to whitewash Husseini’s responsibility in the German Nazi death camp system specifically—in other words, his responsibility in the Holocaust, or as the Jews more properly say, in the Shoah (‘Catastrophe’). One example of this whitewashing effort is Wikipedia’s page on Husseini.
Because of its emblematic nature, I shall now quote from the Wikipedia article on Hajj Amin al Husseini as I found it on 14 July, 2013 and then comment.
[Quote from Wikipedia begins here]
Al-Husseini settled in Berlin in late 1941 and resided there for most of the war.[153] Various sources have repeated allegations, mostly ungrounded in documentary evidence, that he visited the death camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka and Mauthausen.[153] At the Nuremberg trials, one of Adolf Eichmann's deputies, Dieter Wisliceny, stated that al-Husseini had actively encouraged the extermination of European Jews, and that he had had an elaborate meeting with Eichmann at his office, during which Eichmann gave him an intensive look at the current state of the “Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe” by the Third Reich. Most of these allegations are completely unfounded.[153]
[Quote from Wikipedia ends here]
Consider first the phrase “completely unfounded” as it attaches to any part of Wisliceny’s Nuremberg testimony.
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As part of the legal proceedings at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, two independent witnesses (Andrej or Endre Steiner and Rudolf Kasztner)—both of whom had had personal contact with Dieter Wisliceny during the war—reported to the Tribunal that in wartime conversations with Wisliceny he had said certain things about Husseini’s role in the Final Solution (the genocidal enterprise in which Wisliceny was not just anybody but a highly-placed administrator). The Steiner and Kasztner testimonies are quite similar to each other. Before his execution for crimes against humanity, Nuremberg Tribunal investigators called on Wisliceny to either confirm or deny what these two independent witnesses had said. Wisliceny did correct them on minor points but he confirmed what they had both stated concerning Husseini’s central and originating role in the extermination program (consult footnote [3] to read the Steiner and Kasztner testimonies).
So are these “completely unfounded” allegations? If so, that would mean:
1) that in light of other, better established evidence, what Wisliceny stated is impossible; and/or
2) that Wisliceny is less credible as a witness than witnesses who contradicted his statements.
So I ask: On the basis of what evidence do the Wikipedia editors argue that “most of these allegations are completely unfounded”?
At first it seems as though Wikipedia editors have provided three sources but on closer inspection it is the same footnote, repeated three times (in the space of four sentences). The footnote contains this:
Gerhard Höpp (2004). “In the Shadow of the Moon.” In Wolfgang G. Schwanitz. Germany and the Middle East 1871–1945. Markus Wiener, Princeton. pp. 217–221.
The title is incomplete. Gerhard Höpp’s article is: “In the Shadow of the Moon: Arab Inmates in Nazi Concentration Camps.” The full title makes it obvious that this article is not about Husseini, something that readers who see only the truncated title in the Wikipedia reference will not realize.
But, anyway, what does Höpp say—entirely in passing—about Wisliceny’s testimony concerning Husseini? He says this (and only this):
“Al-Husaini… is said not only to have had knowledge of the concentration camps but also to have visited them. Various authors speak of the camps at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Mauthausen. While the assumption that he visited the Auschwitz camp in the company of Adolf Eichmann is supported by an affidavit of Rudolf Kasztner, referring to a note by the Eichmann collaborator Dieter Wisliceny, the other allegations are entirely unfounded.” (p.221)
Recall that Höpp is Wikipedia’s thrice-cited source to ‘support’ that “most” of the following three allegations are “completely unfounded”:
1) that Husseini visited death camps
2) that Husseini encouraged the extermination of the Jews;
3) that Husseini met with Eichmann to discuss said extermination.
But notice that Höpp says absolutely nothing about allegations 2 and 3.
And notice that, concerning allegation 1, Höpp uses the phrase “entirely unfounded” in a manner exactly opposite to the Wikipedia editors who invoke him. For the Wikipedia editors, “most” of what Wisliceny says is “completely unfounded,” whereas for Höpp it is those allegations not backed by Wisliceny’s testimony that he considers “entirely unfounded.”
Moreover, Höpp states:
“Speculation on this and other misdeeds by the Mufti appear unnecessary in view of his undisputed collaboration with the Nazis…” (p.221)
In other words, since we already know that Husseini was a rabid anti-Semite who himself organized mass killings of Jews before he met the Nazis, and then also with the Nazis, and discussed with Hitler the extermination of the Middle Eastern Jews, and shouted on the Nazi radio “Kill the Jews wherever you find them,” is it not a waste of time to argue back and forth whether Husseini did or did not visit this or that death camp with Eichmann?
But, I might add, why doubt it? And why doubt that such a man encouraged the Nazis to exterminate the European Jews and also met with Eichmann to discuss this program? (Unless, of course, such expressions of doubt are intended as an apology for the Mufti…)
Let us now continue with the Wikipedia article:
[Quote from Wikipedia continues here]
A single affidavit by Rudolf Kastner reported that Wisliceny told him that he had overheard Husseini say he had visited Auschwitz incognito in Eichmann's company.[154] Eichmann denied this at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. ...Eichmann stated that he had only been introduced to al-Husseini during an official reception, along with all other department heads. In the final judgement [sic], the Jerusalem court stated: “In the light of this partial admission by the Accused, we accept as correct Wisliceny's statement about this conversation between the Mufti and the Accused. In our view it is not important whether this conversation took place in the Accused's office or elsewhere. On the other hand, we cannot determine decisive findings with regard to the Accused on the basis of the notes appearing in the Mufti's diary which were submitted to us.”[157] Hannah Arendt, who attended the complete Eichmann trial, concluded in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil that, “The trial revealed only that all rumours about Eichmann's connection with Haj Amin el Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, were unfounded.”[158]
[Quote from Wikipedia ends here]
I am confounded by Wikipedia’s choice of reliable experts. The Jerusalem court that tried Eichmann for Crimes Against Humanity concluded that “we accept as correct Wisliceny’s statement about this conversation between the Mufti [Husseini] and the Accused [Eichmann]” (the topic of which was to discuss how to exterminate the European Jews); but Wikipedia editors prefer the contrary opinion of philosopher Hannah Arendt, according to whom any claim of a relationship between Husseini and Eichmann is “unfounded.” And why do they prefer Arendt? Because she “attended the complete Eichmann trial.”
Didn’t the judges also attend?
Anyway, let’s look at Arendt more closely. To her, two independent testimonies at Nuremberg concerning Husseini’s relationship with Eichmann, later corroborated by Wisliceny, a highly-placed eyewitness, are “rumours.” This is strange. And, against this, Arendt simply accepts Eichmann’s denial. Doubly strange. Why has Eichmann earned so much respect from Hannah Arendt?
But more to the point: Do we have reasons to consider Eichmann a more credible witness than Wisliceny?
Arendt shouldn’t think so. She wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil so that she could extend herself in deep ruminations about the human soul based on (odd choice) Eichmann’s strange behavior at trial, which led her to call him a “clown.” Wisliceny, by contrast, was universally considered by prosecutors as a very careful witness, who was painstaking in correcting the smallest details in the testimony he was asked to comment on.[4]
(And Eichmann most certainly had motive to lie. Husseini was still at large and busy organizing the ‘Palestinian’ movement, so better not to say anything that could support a manhunt plus extradition procedures, for that might derail Husseini’s ongoing effort to exterminate the Jews in Israel, a project certainly dear to Eichmann’s putrefacient heart, a project that, as he sat in the witness box, no doubt swam before his mind’s eye as a pleasant future outcome to engulf those sitting in judgment of him, or their children.)
Let us continue:
[Quote from Wikipedia continues here]
Rafael Medoff concludes that “actually there is no evidence that the Mufti's presence was a factor at all; the Wisliceny hearsay is not merely uncorroborated, but conflicts with everything else that is known about the origins of the Final Solution.”[159]
[Quote from Wikipedia ends here]
Rafael Medoff is expressing an opinion. Is it reasonable? Here is the full passage in Medoff’s article:
“With regard to the crucial question of what the Mufti knew and when he knew it, the evidence requires especially careful sifting, and earlier scholars did not always take sufficient care. Pearlman, for example, accepted as fact the unfounded postwar claim by Wisliceny that the Mufti was “one of the initiators” of the genocide. Of course, Pearlman was writing in 1946-1947, when the genesis of the annihilation process was not yet fully understood. Other accounts at that time, such as a 1947 book written by Bartley Crum, a member of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine, likewise accepted Wisliceny’s claim. Schechtman, writing in 1964-1965, should have known better. He made much of the fact that the Mufti first arrived in Berlin shortly before the Wannsee conference, as if the decision to slaughter the Jews was made at Wannsee, when in fact the mass murder began in Western Russia the previous summer (at a time when the Mufti was still deeply embroiled in the pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad). Schechtman eventually conceded that ‘it would be both wrong and misleading to assume that the presence of Haj Amin el-Husseini was the sole, or even the major factor in the shaping and intensification of the Nazi ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which supplanted forced emigration by wholesale extermination.’ Actually, there is no evidence that the Mufti's presence was a factor at all; the Wisliceny hearsay is not merely uncorroborated, but conflicts with everything else that is known about the origins of the Final Solution.”[5]
Medoff’s argument turns on a semantic point. If we agree with him that the mass killings of Jews on the Nazi Eastern front, which began before Husseini arrived in Berlin, are part of the ‘Final Solution,’ then Husseini is not “one of the originators” of the ‘Final Solution.’ But the question here is not one’s definition of what the term ‘Final Solution’ should cover. The question is whether the Nazis had yet decided, before Husseini alighted in Berlin, to create a death camp system to kill all of the European Jews. They had not. And that decision was formalized at Wannsee, indeed shortly after Husseini arrived in Berlin.
Now consider what historians say about the established chronology of changes in Nazi policy on the so-called ‘Jewish Question.’
Gunnar Paulsson explains that “expulsion”—not extermination—“had initially been the general policy of the Nazis towards the Jews.”[6] Tobias Jersak writes: “Since the 1995 publication of Michael Wildt’s documentation on the SS’s Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst SD) and the ‘Jewish Question,’ it has been undisputed that from 1933 Nazi policy concerning the ‘Jewish Question’ aimed at the emigration of all Jews, preferably to Palestine.”[7] Even after the conquest of Poland, writes Paulsson, “Jewish emigration continued to be permitted and even encouraged, while other expulsion plans were considered.”[8] Christopher Simpson points out that, though many Jews were being murdered, and people such as Reinhard Heydrich of the SS pushed for wholesale extermination, “other ministries” disagreed, and these favored “deportation and resettlement,” though they disagreed about where to put the Jews and how much terror to apply to them.[9] And so, “until the autumn of 1941,” conclude Marrus & Paxton, “no one defined the final solution with precision, but all signs pointed toward some vast and as yet unspecified project of mass emigration.”[10]
Hajj Amin al Husseini arrived in Berlin in “the autumn of 1941”—to be precise, on 9 November 1941. So yes, there had already been mass killings of Jews on the Eastern front, but for the hypothesis that Husseini had something to do with the Nazi decision to set up the death camp system in order to kill every last living European Jew (instead of sending most to ‘Palestine’), Husseini arrived right on time.
The last part of Medoff’s passage—the one that Wikipedia quotes—is especially problematic. He writes:
“Actually, there is no evidence that the Mufti’s presence was a factor at all; the Wisliceny hearsay is not merely uncorroborated, but conflicts with everything else that is known about the origins of the Final Solution.”
Medoff disparages the evidence we have as “hearsay.” Is it?
Wikipedia explains the legal definition of ‘hearsay’:
“information gathered by one person from another person concerning some event, condition, or thing of which the first person had no direct experience.”[11]
In US law there is a famous “hearsay rule,” which says that if an eyewitness cannot present his or her testimony in court, then another’s report of the supposed testimony is inadmissible.[11a] Medoff is turning this legal tradition into a historiographical principle in order to do away with the evidence from Wisliceny. Is this a proper maneuver?
A historian is not subject to the caution of a court of law, which must err on the side of presumption of innocence in order to safeguard a person’s rights. But even if a historian were so constrained Medoff’s reasoning does not apply. We have two independent testimonies before the Nuremberg Tribunal, by Andrej (Endre) Steiner and Rudolf Kasztner, about their wartime conversations with Wisliceny, the topic of which was Husseini’s key role in 1) the decision to exterminate all of the European Jews and, 2) the administration of the death-camp system with Adolf Eichmann. These two testimonies, by themselves, count as ‘hearsay.’ But are they inadmissible? Actually the hearsay rule has exceptions that a judge may invoke, and having two consistent and independent testimonies could favor such an exception. But this is not even necessary. Both testimonies were corroborated by Wisliceny, whose “direct experience” of the relationship between Husseini and Eichmann is well established, since Wisliceny was Eichmann’s right-hand man. Wisliceny is an eyewitness. This is not hearsay. Medoff is wrong.
So:
1) we do have evidence that the Mufti’s presence was a factor;
2) this evidence is not hearsay because it comes from Wisliceny; and
3) given what we know about Husseini’s character, deeds, and timely arrival in Berlin, Wisliceny’s claims certainly do not conflict “with everything else that is known about the origins of the Final Solution.”
So every word in the Medoff passage that Wikipedia quotes is false.
We continue:
[Quote from Wikipedia continues here]
Bernard Lewis also called Wisliceny’s testimony into doubt: “There is no independent documentary confirmation of Wisliceny’s statements, and it seems unlikely that the Nazis needed any such additional encouragement from the outside.”[160]
[Quote from Wikipedia ends here]
The full passage from Bernard Lewis’s work is the following:
“According to Wisliceny, the Mufti was a friend of Eichmann and had, in his company, gone incognito to visit the gas chamber at Auschwitz. Wisliceny even names the Mufti as being the ‘initiator’ of the policy of extermination. This was denied, both by Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, and by the Mufti in a press conference at about the same time. There is no independent documentary confirmation of Wisliceny’s statements, and it seems unlikely that the Nazis needed any such additional encouragement from outside.” [12]
So Eichmann and Husseini deny it and this is enough for Lewis… If we apply his standards to any ordinary criminal investigation we will be forced to let the main suspect go the minute he himself and/or his alleged accomplice deny the charges. Presto! This will save a lot of unnecessary police work.
The same can be said for his curious insistence that without “independent documentary confirmation” the testimony of witnesses can be dispensed with. But, naturally, a great many things that happen in the world are not recorded in a document. Eyewitness testimony must be considered carefully, but saying that “there is no independent documentary confirmation” of a particular piece of testimony is not the same thing as producing good reasons to doubt it. And to say, in the absence of conflicting evidence, that our null hypothesis will be to consider as true the opposite of what was testified to, why that is simply absurd.
The above is obvious but Lewis’s last argument—“it seems unlikely that the Nazis needed any such additional encouragement from outside”—will appeal to many as reasonable, so it deserves a more extended comment.
What Lewis is saying is that the Nazis decided on total extermination for reasons that were ‘endogenous’ to their ideological program. But though killing lots of Jews as part of a campaign of terror and to make lebensraum for deserving Aryan specimens on the Eastern front was certainly part of general Nazi policy, the ‘Final Solution,’ as pointed out above, was initially and for a long time a program of mass expulsion, and did not contemplate (yet) exterminating the entire European Jewish population. Getting to that point required some ‘exogenous’ prodding (“from outside”); it was not an ideological requirement.
Historian Thomas Marrus writes: “After the riots of Kristallnacht in November 1938, SS police boss Heydrich was ordered to accelerate emigration, and Jews were literally driven out of the country. The problem was, of course, that there was practically no place for them to go.”[13] The reason there was no place for them to go is that no country would receive them. As historian James Carroll points out: “The same leaders, notably Neville Chamberlain and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had denounced the anti-Jewish violence of the Nazis declined to receive Jews as refugees. …Crucial to its building to a point of no return was Hitler’s discovery (late) of the political indifference of the democracies to the fate of the Jews…”[14] Though one may argue that this was not really “indifference” on the part of Roosevelt et al. but a very special interest (in their doom).[15] The main point here is that, as historian Gunnar Paulsson points out: “Expulsion had initially been the general policy of the Nazis towards the Jews, and had been abandoned largely for practical, not ideological, reasons” (my emphasis).[16]
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The Nazis were right bastards. No disagreement. But they did need some encouragement to go that far. They needed to be told, first, that they would not get rid of any Jews by pushing them out to the ‘Free World.’ And then they needed to be told, by British creation Hajj Amin al Husseini, that neither could they push them out to ‘Palestine.’ Bernard Lewis is wrong.
Perhaps Wikipedia would like to try again with a new set of ‘supporting’ sources? We will be waiting to examine them.
Topic: Netanyahu causes uproar by linking Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini to Holocaust (Read 1362 times)