Yesterday, an impressive roster of world leaders visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Some—including Prince Charles, Emanuel Macron, and Vladimir Putin—will also be stopping in Ramallah to meet with the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, an unrepentant Holocaust denier. For Lyn Julius, this is evidence enough that many of the attendees will return to their homes having learned the wrong lessons:
There is a danger that [these] leaders will come away with confirmation of the idea that anti-Semitism was a purely European phenomenon. Israel is “Europe’s penance” for killing six-million European Jews. The world’s leaders will visit Ramallah with little inkling of the depth of pro-Nazi feeling among Arabs during World War II.
The Palestinian leadership will take care not to mention that one of the foremost Arab leaders, the wartime mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was complicit with the Nazis. After the Palestinian mufti incited the 1941 farhud massacre of Iraq’s Jews, he spent the rest of the war in Berlin as Hitler’s guest. While pumping out vicious anti-Jewish radio propaganda to the Arab world, he sought Hitler’s permission to manage the extermination of the Jews across the Middle East and North Africa—not just in Palestine—should the Nazis win the war.
When the war ended, the Allies did not put Husseini on trial at Nuremberg. As a result, the Arab world was never “de-Nazified.” Its legacy of anti-Semitic, Nazi-inspired Islamofascism and Islamist terrorism—represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and Hamas—also fuels jihadist anti-Semitism in the West today.
Will anyone at Yad Vashem make the point that 850,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab lands because Arab League states implemented anti-Jewish laws eerily reminiscent of Nuremberg laws against their Jewish citizens, stripping them of their rights and dispossessing them of their property?
More about: Amin Haj al-Husseini, Arab anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Mahmoud Abbas, Yad Vashem