Thursday, October 22, 2015
Elder of Ziyon24 hours after Netanyahu withdrew his remarks about the Mufti of Jerusalem and clarified them with specific citations of the Mufti's importance to the Nazi's efforts to destroy all of European Jewry, major media are ignoring his later statements - and doing so while whitewashing a Jew-hating war criminal.
At the Washington Post, an article by Ishaan Tharoor says that the Mufti had little to do with the Holocaust, and his alliance with Nazi Germany had nothing to do with antisemitism but with his antipathy towards Great Britain:
While a convenient ideological scarecrow, it totally obscures the real forces that drew someone like Husseini into the Nazi orbit around World War II.So simple! Just a convenience. Nothing about the Mufti's virulent antisemitism, nothing about his role in pogroms against Jews in 1920, 1921 and 1929, nothing about his explicitly antisemitic broadcasts or his role in the deaths of hundreds of Jewish children who would have been able to escape Europe if it wasn't for the Mufti.
At the time, Palestine was under British mandate, a colonial context that Palestinians feared would lead to their dispossession. The British were themselves well aware of Arab grievances in the face of Jewish migration.
...The mufti's meeting with Hitler was really about Husseini's own desire to secure national status for his people and be recognized as a future Arab leader.
(Tharoor's bias shines through when he describes the Peel Commission plan, which would have given the Jewish state a tiny, indefensible sliver of land on the coast and in the north, as it "would give the new Jewish state most of the coastline and the country's most fertile agricultural lands. ")
This is a disgraceful whitewash. But not the only one.
The New York Times wrote a major editorial for Friday's paper slamming Bibi for his original, flawed speech - and without mentioning his later words on that topic two days previous, for which they have no retort.
The claim by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that a Palestinian persuaded Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews of Europe is outrageous.Yet there is a clear line between Haj Amin Husseini's incitement to kill Jews in the 1920s based on his lies that Jews were planning to take over the Al Aqsa Mosque and Mahmoud Abbas' words last month that the blood of Palestinians to "defend" the Al Aqsa Mosque from the hated Jews with their "filthy feet" was "holy."
It is outrageous because the Holocaust is far too terrible a crime to be exploited for political ends, especially in the state linked so closely to the tragedy of the Jewish people. It is outrageous because the only apparent purpose is to demonize the Palestinians and the current leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and to give the impression that their resistance is based solely on a longstanding hatred of the Jews, and not on their occupation by Israel or any other grievance. And it comes at a time of renewed tension in Israel, with a wave of lone-wolf attacks on Jews by knife-wielding Palestinians.
Just as Jews were murdered in the 1920s based on the lies pushed by the Mufti, so are Jews in 2015 being murdered directly because of the lies and incitement by Mahmoud Abbas and others.
But the only incitement that the NYT can find is not Abbas' words but rather Netanyahu's pointing out the nearly perfect analogy between the Mufti and Abbas.
This editorial is knowingly trying to cover up Netanyahu's main point by disparaging his earlier statement - and by extension, whitewashing the Mufti's crimes.
The Huffington Post also seized on the Netanyahu speech and the criticism of it without mentioning his later, perfectly accurate comments. Even though that wasn't the focus of the article - a smarmy putdown of members of Congress who were against Palestinian incitement of the type that the Mufti excelled at - the overall effect is to make the readers think that the Mufti was not nearly as bad as Netanyahu made him out to be.
To criticize Bibi's speech without mentioning his correction, and without doing a fact check of the Mufti's crimes, is irresponsible and shows a deep bias on the part of the media.
The Mufti may not have influenced Hitler to murder millions of Jews, but he was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the effort which was consistent with his actions in British Mandate Palestine. And any attempt to downplay that fact is at least as bad as Bibi's initial accusations were.
(h/t Jordan, GLR, Alyssa)
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