Netanyahu: Former Palestinian Leader, Not Hitler, Triggered Holocaust

It was a Palestinian leader, not Hitler, who was responsible for exterminating 6 million Jews during World War II, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday, at the 37th World Zionist Congress. He said that the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler wanted to just expel the Jewish, but it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amni al-Husseini, who convinced Hitler at a meeting in 1941 that extermination was needed.

"Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews," Netanyahu told the group, reported The Independent. "And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here.'"

After that, when Hitler asked: "So what should I do with them?" al-Husseini replied, "Burn them."

All these statements are totally false, said respected historians. It was not al-Husseini that inspired the Holocaust.

Professor Dan Michman, a global expert and head of the Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University and Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, said that the leaders had met only after Nazis had already begun to kill the Jews, in an extermination effort called the Final Solution, reported The Guardian.

In earlier speeches, including one at Knesset in 2012, in which al-Husseini was called "one of the leading architects" of the Final Solution, Netanyahu was slammed by Moshe Zimmermann, an important Holocaust and anti-Semitic researcher at Hebrew University in Jersusalem.

He felt that Netanyahu's "far-reaching argument" did not seem true.

"Any attempt to deflect the burden from Hitler to others is a form of Holocaust denial," he told AP. "It cheapens the Holocaust."