BENJAMIN NETANYAHU’S wild allegation that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini was responsible, rather than Hitler and the nazis, for the Holocaust is breathtaking.

To attempt to pin this monstrous crime on a Palestinian exemplifies the Israeli Prime Minister’s tenuous grasp on history and his visceral hatred of zionism’s victims.

Husseini hitched his wagon to Hitler just as debased groups in various European states did during the second world war.

He and they believed that a victorious Germany would alter the international landscape in their favour.

While Hitler and the nazis were content to enlist a Waffen SS ragbag of volunteers for its armed forces or to take part joyfully in the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and other “untermenschen,” to suggest that any of them had decision-making roles would be preposterous.

This applies to Haj Amin al-Husseini, who sucked up to the nazis in the hope of persuading Hitler to cancel the Balfour declaration imposed on Palestine by Britain.

His meeting with Hitler was in November 1941 by which time the fascist dictator had already ordered extermination of “all Jews and card-carrying Communists” in the Soviet Union and other countries occupied by his forces.

Whitewashing Hitler is the usual chosen occupation of psychologically disturbed neonazis intent on translating their own inadequacies into hatred for an entire people.

It takes a peculiar quality in a politician who claims to speak for all Jews to jump on the “Hitler didn’t order the Holocaust” bandwagon.

The grotesque enormity of this allegation confirms Netanyahu’s propensity for disregarding reality, justice and human decency in pursuit of a one-state solution built on historic Palestine.

His resort to racist “The Arabs are coming” rhetoric in Israel’s general election in response to agreement between Arab organisations and the Communist Party to present a united list was indicative of his anything goes approach.

Netanyahu’s declaration that he would never allow a Palestinian state to take shape on his watch was cut from the same cloth.

It contradicted everything that Israeli leaders purport to believe and, more seriously, what their supporters in Western governments use as a fig leaf to obscure the reality of zionism.

Whenever Netanyahu is challenged on his policies, he migrates to the 1930s, pretending that there are direct parallels.

US refusal to bomb Iran into submission equates to kow-towing to dictators, while Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and sundry others are all modern Hitlers.

Now that we know, courtesy of the Israeli Prime Minister’s alternative approach to historical facts, that Hitler wasn’t guilty of the genocide charge conferred on him by history, will Netanyahu change his tune?

Will he declare in future that this or that dictator is today’s Haj Amin al-Husseini?

Netanyahu has been able to get away with absurd characterisations of his enemies, especially the dispossessed Palestinians, because Israel’s allies in Europe and the US have played along with the zionist game of pretending to be in favour of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

They utter half-hearted condemnations of the inexorable illegal colonisation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank while refusing to apply pressure through effective sanctions.

Netanyahu and his apologists at home and abroad tar advocates of the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) campaign to oblige Israel to respect international law as anti-semitic and expressing a similar world view to that of Hitler and the nazis.

It is time that the rest of the world rejected this blackmail based on falsified history and stood up effectively for Palestinian national rights.