The "Mufti did it" lie:

In his memoirs, Haj Amin al-Husseini wrote about his relations with Germany and Italy between the two world wars. He stated that it was the Germans who initiated contact with him, via Fritz Grobba, the German ambassador in the Near East and Baghdad. Grobba wanted to cajole the Arabs and Muslims to join the Axis powers in the Second World War.

Hajj Amin al-Husseini at the time was not just the foremost Palestinian leader, but also one of the leading figures in the Arab and perhaps Muslim worlds.

For this reason, the demands he communicated to the Axis powers were not limited to Arab rights, but also Muslim rights, including in Italian-occupied Libya and Bosnia, where Muslims were being massacred by the Serbian general Draga Mikhailovich, backed by both the Allies and the Axis nations.

The mufti documented his 1941 meeting with Hitler in his memoirs. He said he had sought hard to obtain a promise from Hitler to guarantee Arab rights, sovereignty, independence, and unity, but did not succeed, as Hitler seemed to have been obsessed with "The Jewish Question" in their conversations.

"Hitler told me: The plans of my struggle are clear: I am fighting Jews relentlessly, and this fight includes the so-called Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Jews want to establish a central state to further their destructive goals... I am determined to find a solution to the Jewish Question," he wrote.

Meanwhile, the mufti sought throughout his four-year stay in Berlin to create a Bosnian Muslim army to protect Bosnians against Serbian massacres.

The Bosnian battalion, dubbed Handschar, did not take part in any battles against either the Allies or Jews, and strictly defended themselves in their own country.

The mufti also worked to create an Arab legion to fight the British and Zionists in Palestine, but the Germans broke the agreement, according to a Palestinian officer, Zulkifli Abdul Latif.

Instead, the Arab volunteers were forced to go to Stalingrad, despite the mufti's objections. The Arab soldiers never made it to the Russian front, and instead deserted and returned to the Arab countries, shocked by the way the Germans had treated them and their cause, according to Abdul Latif.

The mufti's alliance with the Germans was motivated by the alliance between the Zionists and the Allied nations, and the British insistence on establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine without accommodating Arab rights and interests.

Haj Amin Husseini had no illusions, however, about the real goals of the Axis powers, and his alliance with them was one of realism and pragmatism, due to the Arabs' lack of alternatives. Nevertheless, the mufti restricted his plans to Palestine, before the Germans betrayed him. The mufti ultimately ordered his supporters among the Arab officers to withdraw from the battle and return home.

The above does not mean that the mufti did not commit mistakes or miscalculations. Like any politician, he can be criticised for many things, but his alleged - and fabricated - role in the Holocaust is not one of them.

In one important encounter documented in his memoirs, Husseini wrote that Heinrich Himmler, leader of the Nazi SS, told him that by 1943, the number of Jews killed in Europe was three and a half million.

Himmler then asked Husseini: "What about you, how will you solve the Jewish Question in your country?" The mufti answered: "We would not kill Jews who lived among us for many centuries. All we want is for your Jews to return whence they came, and forget the idea of a national homeland on our land."

According to Husseini's memoirs, Himmler retorted angrily: "We will never allow them to return to Germany."

Zionist-Nazi collaboration ---

Binyamin Netanyahu forgot to mention German Zionist Rabbi Stephen Wise, who praised Hitler in the 1930s, for helping rein in moderate Jewish nationalists that saw themselves as full German citizens.

Netanyahu should have criticized that rabbi for working with Hitler and the Nazis against anti-Zionist Jews, instead of fabricating charges against Haj Amin al-Husseini.

While Hitler massacred Jews in the concentration camps, Rabbi Wise, a founder of the Zionist lobby in the US, was visiting Germany frequently, with the knowledge of Hitler and his lieutenants.