Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an uproar Tuesday after claiming that the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, planted the idea of exterminating Jews from Europe in Adolf Hitler’s mind. In an address to the World Zionist Congress, Netanyahu said the Nazi ruler had no intention of killing the Jews, but only to expel them—a claim that has been rejected by most accepted Holocaust scholars. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jew. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine],’” Netanyahu said, adding that the mufti told Hitler to “burn them.”
