OpinionIsrael-Palestinian Conflict

Yad Vashem covers up the Islamic role in the Holocaust

Would the appointee of a coalition government that includes Islamists really be expected to do anything else?

Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini (left) meets with Adolf Hitler in 1941. Credit: German Federal Archives.
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini (left) meets with Adolf Hitler in 1941. Credit: German Federal Archives.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli-born journalist who writes for conservative publications.

First, some background:

Israel’s current government is a leftist-Islamist coalition that includes some former conservatives “out front” as stalking horses. One of those is serving as the current prime minister. Another was Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope party. Dani Dayan, a former consul general and Yesha council leader, ran on the New Hope party list. The only purpose of New Hope was to tear away enough conservative votes to create this leftist hybrid government. Now it’s expected to be wiped out in any future elections.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to appoint Efraim “Effi” Eitam, a truly great man, to head Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum. His successor, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, rewarded Dani Dayan by appointing him instead. And Dayan is doing what he’s told.

It was noted that Yad Vashem was no longer displaying a photo of Hitler and the mufti of Jerusalem.

The mufti of Jerusalem had met with Hitler and repeatedly urged the extermination of the Jews. The mufti had organized his own campaign to massacre Jews in Israel.

After repeated protests, Dayan made it clear that the omission was not an accident, but intentional.

In a statement, Dayan claimed that “Attempting to pressure Yad Vashem to expand the exhibit on the Mufti in the Holocaust History Museum is tantamount to forcing Yad Vashem to partake in a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is alien to its mission. For Yad Vashem to expand an exhibit for reasons not related to the Holocaust might even legitimize Holocaust distortion by others with nefarious intentions. Yad Vashem will continue to defend the historical truth of this dark chapter of our not-too-distant past, without falling prey to any political agenda.”

It’s Dayan who is politicizing the Holocaust. Telling the truth means displaying historical context, even when it’s politically incorrect.

Declaring that Yad Vashem won’t participate “in a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is alien to its mission” (a strange claim considering that the goal of the conflict is another Holocaust) is itself an admission that the photo was removed for political reasons.

The bottom line is that the coalition government doesn’t want the picture there, and foreign governments visiting Yad Vashem don’t want to have pictures taken around it. This is a craven cover-up of the Islamic role in the Holocaust, not a defense of history.

Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) head Morton Klein blasted the decision.

“As a child of Holocaust survivors born in the displaced persons camp in Germany who lost most of my family to Hitler, I find it really appalling for Dani Dayan to actually be censoring out a part of Holocaust history at the major Holocaust museum in an attempt to appease the Palestinian Arabs,” said Klein, according to Breitbart.

He also accused the museum of seeking to placate “a Palestinian Authority that pays Arabs to murder Jews, names school streets and sports teams after Jew killers, promotes hatred and violence in every aspect of their culture, and has refused offers of statehood, clearly showing the issue is not land, but Israel’s destruction.”

“Appeasement always fails, and it’s obviously failed with the Palestinian Authority who won’t even sit and negotiate [with Israel], let alone act in a civilized manner,” he said, according to the report. “This is just an atrocious mistake.”

But a mistake that Israeli lefties and their hired help who pretended to be on the right insist on repeating.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

This article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.

The opinions and facts presented in this article are those of the author, and neither JNS nor its partners assume any responsibility for them.
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