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Netanyahu denies absolving Hitler for Holocaust, says mufti 'wanted Jews dead'

OCTOBER 21, 2015 14:22

Hitler is responsible for killing six million Jews in the Holocaust, and the Palestinian Arab leader at the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini, encouraged him and also wanted to see the Jews dead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as he boarded a plane for Berlin on Wednesday.

Netanyahu's clarification came as an uproar ensued as a result of comments he made a day earlier that some interpreted as taking the blame for the Holocaust off of Hitler's shoulders, and placing it on Husseini.

Netanyahu, speaking to the World Zionist Congress on Tuesday, sought to draw a line linking Husseini incitement against the Jews in the 1920s for supposedly endangering the Temple Mount, to Palestinian charges today that Israel was threatening the al-Aksa Mosque.

“And his attack and other attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution,” Netanyahu said. “He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. 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’."

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