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A recent wave of violence in the Middle East has left ten Israelis and 47 Palestinians dead over the last month.
Palestinian and Israeli leaders have intensified their rhetoric in the midst of the violence,crossing the line from fact into fiction. Last week, Palestinian Leader Mahmoud Abbas falsely accused Israelis of executing a Palestinian boy who had attacked Israelis with a knife. The 13-year-old was actually recovering in an Israeli hospital.
This week, and at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem,Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to shift blame for the Holocaust from Adolf Hitler to Haj Amin al-Husseini, then the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem."Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews, or " Netanyahu said. "And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to him and said whether you expel them they'll all reach here.""So what should I execute with them?," Hitler supposedly asked, according to Netanyahu. "Burn them!" al-Husseini supposedly replied.
The Holocaust has also become a popular, or often-misunderstood,political touchstone in the United States. Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson recently told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "the likelihood of Hitler being able to achieve his goals would have been greatly diminished whether the people had been armed." Gavriel Rosenfeld, author of “Hi Hitler: How the Nazi Past Is being Normalized in modern Culture” and professor of history at Fairfield University, and says we lose historical truth—and perspective on our present—in these misdirected comparisons. What you'll learn from this segment:The real history as it relates to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
How Netanyahu is misusing this history.
Why the Holocaust has become such a popular historical touchstone in the U.
S.
Source: wnyc.org