comment on Hitler's speech
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A recent statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has raised a furore in the media. Speaking recently to the Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Netanyahu stated:
“[A]ttacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Hajj Amin al-Husayni 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’.”
A full report can be found in the
Jerusalem Post , and the entire speech is available via YouTube. Netanyahu’s comments have been characterised as a ‘historical distortion’ by a number of academics, who have pointed out that it is inaccurate to characterise the former Mufti as having given Hitler the idea of killing the Jews. Most recently, Netanyahu’s speech has led to a statement from the White House Press Secretary , as well as by a
representative of the German government, who noted the ‘murderous race mania of the Nazis’ and stated “We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own.”
Some people may ask: why does Netanyahu’s speech matter? First, it is significant because Netanyahu made his comment on al-Husayn and Hitler in a speech where he was specifically talking about “an assault on the truth” in contemporary politics and media. This certainly opened the topic to wider debate, given that the statement appeared to exculpate Hitler. As was reported in The Guardian, Netanyahu himself later clarified that it was not his intention to exonerate Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust “but to show that the father of the Palestinian nation at the time [al-Husayni], without a state and before the ‘occupation,’ without the territories and with the settlements, even then aspired with systemic incitement for the destruction of the Jews…”. This leads us to the second point of significance: that the statement appeared to be ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ in a time of contemporary crisis (at least, this point was argued by the White House Press Secretary). Thirdly, it seems to be essentially unhistorical when it comes to the role and agency of Hitler, and denies continuity in favour of singularity. That is, rather than considering the much larger historical context of Hitler’s views, it offers a single historical moment as definitive.
As a historian who specializes in the rise of m the Mufti, nor was he reticent in urging the eradicat
“[A]ttacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Hajj Amin al-Husayni 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’.”
A full report can be found in the
Jerusalem Post , and the entire speech is available via YouTube. Netanyahu’s comments have been characterised as a ‘historical distortion’ by a number of academics, who have pointed out that it is inaccurate to characterise the former Mufti as having given Hitler the idea of killing the Jews. Most recently, Netanyahu’s speech has led to a statement from the White House Press Secretary , as well as by a
representative of the German government, who noted the ‘murderous race mania of the Nazis’ and stated “We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own.”
Some people may ask: why does Netanyahu’s speech matter? First, it is significant because Netanyahu made his comment on al-Husayn and Hitler in a speech where he was specifically talking about “an assault on the truth” in contemporary politics and media. This certainly opened the topic to wider debate, given that the statement appeared to exculpate Hitler. As was reported in The Guardian, Netanyahu himself later clarified that it was not his intention to exonerate Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust “but to show that the father of the Palestinian nation at the time [al-Husayni], without a state and before the ‘occupation,’ without the territories and with the settlements, even then aspired with systemic incitement for the destruction of the Jews…”. This leads us to the second point of significance: that the statement appeared to be ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ in a time of contemporary crisis (at least, this point was argued by the White House Press Secretary). Thirdly, it seems to be essentially unhistorical when it comes to the role and agency of Hitler, and denies continuity in favour of singularity. That is, rather than considering the much larger historical context of Hitler’s views, it offers a single historical moment as definitive.
As a historian who specializes in the rise of m the Mufti, nor was he reticent in urging the eradicat
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