by Uri Avnery, … with Gush Shalom, Tel Aviv
[ Editor’s note: My my, Uri is fired up at the slight given to his holocaust, by none other than the Exploiteer the Magnificent, Bibi Netanyahu. While denouncing Bibi for being insane, he is coming to the party late, as Bibi and those like him were elected by Zionists, the people who have holocausted the Palestinians to the best of their ability.
I share Uri’s concern that many of the Likuds would set the gas chambers up in two seconds if the AIPAC lobby assured them they could quash a move in Congress to cut Israel’s funding. He won’t call the Likuds Zio-Nazis, but I would. Nothing Uri calls them bothers them a bit.
But he does give us a good lecture on the Jerusalem history of the Mufti in question, a minor aberrant official of his age when they were a dime a dozen. We agree he was a footnote in history. But while Uri is scholarly in debunking historical exaggerations, he will not lay a glove on his most cherished one — that of Jewish victim supremacy during WWII, when 50 million were killed, but only the death of Jews was “the” tragedy.
While he mentions the massive scholarship on the subject, he leaves out the long list of holocaust debunkings that someone at his level should know, and probably do… like the human soap and the lampshades made out of skin, most of these stories created by the adept British psyops people during the War.
David Irving dug up a mistakenly declassified document, where the psyops group had ordered their field people to break all links and destroy all their paperwork, as the “gas chambers thing was getting out of hand”. Irving became a marked man for his unrelenting exposures like this.
But my dear Uri, why will you never own up to knowing anything about the Auschwitz plaques being reduced from 4 million to one million and change? For honest historians, this would have brought the 6 million number down to 3 million… but it didn’t in this case.
Why won’t you fill us in on why international Jewry did not celebrate there being 3 million fewer Jews killed? I have rubbed this little math quiz in a lot of faces over the years and am hated by all the right people for doing so.
After all, the numbers that ended up applying for holocaust compensation were so large that they were way beyond what was statistically justified, if that many had really died.
So why did not all of the scholarly Jews get their calculators out and recheck the numbers? You and I both know the answer to this, but I tell people, and you won’t, because that puts you in Bibi’s camp a bit.
The hyped numbers were used to boost special treatment for the Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) after WWII, for emigration westward and to Palestine, and later compensation that none of the other victims of WWII were ever entitled to — forming what I refer to as the cult of victim supremacy.
The cult of the holocaust in the modern world is far beyond what ISIL dishes out to those who won’t convert to their branch of extremism or agree to marry their rapist.
Across the world now, your beloved Zionist supporters have been working to pass laws that any criticism of Israel be categorized as incitement to hatred of all Jews, a felony with a five year term.
You are in your 90’s now. You still have time to pony up to the table and come clean. We even did a nice piece on Nobel Prize winner in literature, Gunter Grass, this past week where he told all about being a young teen in the Waffen SS at the end of the war.
If we are going to barbecue Bibi for being a ruthless exploiter of Jewish WWII dead, why not make the party a big one and make it an open house event where we go after all the others? We will invite all of you “Auschwitz Deniers” who think that 6 minus three still equals 6… because it is politically profitable for you to do so… Jim W. Dean ]
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– First published … October 31, 2015 –
It is not very pleasant when serious people around the world – historians, psychiatrists, diplomats – ask themselves if my prime minister is completely sane. But this is happening now. And not only abroad. More and more people in Israel are asking themselves the same question.
All this is the result of one event. But people are now looking at many other events – past and present – in a new light.
Until now, many strange actions and utterances by Binyamin Netanyahu have been seen as the manipulations of a clever politician, a talented demagogue who knows the soul of his constituents and supplies them with ample lies.
Not anymore. A troubling suspicion is getting around: that our prime minister has serious mental problems. Is he losing his marbles?
It all started two weeks ago, when Netanyahu made a speech to a world-wide Zionist assembly. What he said was shocking. Adolf Hitler, he pontificated, did not really want to exterminate the Jews. He just wanted to expel them. But then he met the Mufti of Jerusalem, who convinced him to “burn” the Jews. Thus the Holocaust was born.
The conclusion? Hitler was not so bad after all. The Germans are not really to blame. It was the Palestinians who were the instigators of the murder of six million Jews.
If the subject had been different, this speech could be considered as one of the usual lies and falsifications typical of Netanyahu. Hitler was really not so bad, the Palestinians are to blame, the Mufti was the forerunner of Mahmoud Abbas. Just a routine piece of political propaganda.
But this concerns the Holocaust, of the most atrocious events of modern times, and by far the most important event in modern Jewish history. This event has a direct bearing on the lives of half the Jewish population of Israel (including myself) who lost their relatives in the Holocaust, or are themselves survivors.
This speech was not just a minor political manipulation, one of those we have become accustomed to since Netanyahu became prime minister. This was something new, something awful. All around the world there was an outcry.
There are many thousands of experts on the Holocaust. Innumerable books have been written on Nazi Germany (including one by me). Every single detail has been researched over and over again.
Holocaust survivors were shocked, because Netanyahu was really absolving Hitler, and the Germans in general, of the main blame for the horrendous crime. So Hitler was not so bad, after all. He just wanted to expel the Jews, not to kill them. It was the evil Arabs who induced him to commit the atrocity of atrocities.
Angela Merkel did the decent thing and issued an immediate denial, assuming again the total blame of the German people. Thousands of furious articles appeared around the world, many hundreds of them in Israel. This particular utterance of Netanyahu’s was not just stupid, not just ignorant. It borders on the insane.
A mufti is a religious scholar, a high ranking authority in an Islamic society, well above a mere judge. A Grand Mufti is the highest local religious authority. In Islam there is no pope. The Grand Mufti in this story is Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who was chosen by the British authorities in Palestine for the office of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. As it turned out, this was a grave mistake.
The man who made the mistake was a Jew – Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner of the British Mandated territory of Palestine after World War I. Young Hajj Amin was already known as a firebrand, and Samuel followed the well-established colonial practice of appointing enemies to high office, to quiet them down.
The Husseini family is the foremost Hamula (extended family) in Jerusalem. It has some 5000 members and occupies an entire neighborhood. It is one of the three or four most distinguished families in town, and for many generations a Husseini has been either the Mufti, the mayor or another dignitary in Arab Jerusalem.
Hajj Amin (hajj is the appellation of a Muslim who has made the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca) was a trouble-maker right from the beginning. He saw early on the danger of the Zionist immigration for the Arab community in Palestine, and several times incited anti-British and anti-Jewish riots. These came to a head in the Great Rebellion of 1936 – known to the Jews as “the events” – which shook the country for three years, until World War II.
During “the events”, many Jews and many British were killed, but most of the victims were Arabs. The Mufti (as everybody called him) used the opportunity to have all his rivals and competitors killed off. For the Jews in Palestine he became the symbol of evil, the object of intense hatred.
By now, the British, too, had had enough of him. They chased the Mufti out of the country. He went to Lebanon, but when this country was occupied by the British in World War II (to drive out the troops of the French Vichy regime) the Mufti fled to Iraq, which was in the hands of anti-British and pro-Nazi rebels.
When the British re-conquered Iraq, the Mufti fled to Italy, which was leading the Fascist “Axis” effort to win over the Arabs. The Mufti, whose main enemies were the British, acted upon the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. (At the same time, a leader of the Jewish underground in Palestine, Abraham Stern, acting upon the same theory, also sought contact with the Italians and Germans.)
It seems that the Italians were not too keen on having Hajj Amin around, so the Mufti moved to Nazi Germany. At the time, the SS was trying to enlist Muslim volunteers for the war against Russia, and somebody had the bright idea that a picture of the Grand Mufti with Hitler might be useful.
Hitler did not like the idea at all. He was a true believer in the race theory, and the Arabs are Semites – an inferior and detestable race, just like the Jews. But in the end he was weighed upon to receive this Arab refugee for what we now call a “photo opportunity”.
A picture was taken – the only picture of the only meeting between these two persons. (There are also photos of the Mufti with Muslim Bosnian SS volunteers).
The meeting was short, a perfunctory protocol was taken, the Jews appear nowhere in it.[*] The whole episode was insignificant. Until Netanyahu.
It is ridiculous to crown the Mufti as the father of the Palestinian nation. In all my hundreds of meetings with Palestinians, from Arafat down, I have never heard a good word about Hajj Amin, not even from the wonderful Faisal al-Husseini, a remote relative. They unanimously described him as a real Palestinian patriot, but a person with limited education and narrow-minded outlook, who bears part of the blame for the disaster that befell the Palestinian people in 1948.
The bloodbath he carried out among the Palestinians in the 1936-1939 rebellion weakened the Palestinians so much, that when the crucial test came – the 1947 partition of Palestine and the 1948 war – the nation was devoid of any effective leadership. The idea that the mighty Fuehrer needed or heeded the advice of a fugitive Semite in order to decide on the Holocaust is preposterous. Indeed, it is crazy.
Also, the dates don’t jibe. The photo-meeting took place at the end of 1941. The extermination started immediately after the conquest of Poland in 1939, and took on its monstrous dimensions with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in the middle of 1941.
It acquired its final, industrial format when Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, decided that “one cannot demand of a decent German” to shoot all this Jewish scum. The Mufti had absolutely nothing to do with this, and the very idea is insane.
Until 1939, Hitler did indeed further the expulsion of the Jews, because physical extermination in a peaceful Europe was unthinkable. But once the war broke out, he saw at once the chance for mass extermination – and said so quite openly.
So how did this son of a “renowned historian” come to say this crazy thing?This appellation of Ben-Zion Netanyahu is now de rigueur in the Israeli media, though I never met anyone who has read his work on the Spanish inquisition.
Perhaps he heard it from some crackpot hired by Sheldon Adelson – but even so, the fact that he did not reject it outright shows not only that he is a complete ignoramus about the most important chapter in modern Jewish history, but also that he may have some mental problem.
In this light, many others of his decisions now look different, including this week’s decision to take measures to cancel the “inhabitant” status of tens of thousands of Arab Jerusalemites. When East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel in 1967, the inhabitants were not granted Israeli citizenship, only reduced resident’s rights, which deny them the right to vote for the Knesset.
They were graciously allowed to apply for citizenship individually, but, of course, almost nobody did, since this would mean recognition of the annexation. Now I am afraid. If indeed we are governed by a man with mental problems – just where is he leading us?
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Jim W. Dean was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.
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