Tifatul Watch I: Adolf Hitler

Apr 12th, 2010, in News, by

Information minister Tifatul Sembiring and his Adolf Hitler quoting tweet.


Part the First of a series on the travails of the Minister for Truth Information, Tifatul Sembiring of the Islamist Justice Party/Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS).


On April 8th Tifatul posted a ‘wise saying’ tweet on his very active Twitter account, from Adolf Hitler: twitter

Pertemuan antara dua anak manusia, kemudian keduanya saling melengkapi, ini adalah sebuah keajaiban ~ adolf hitler

which local media are translating as:

the union between two children, when both of them complete each other, this is magic – Adolf Hitler

A prize for anyone who can find out what Hitler actually said here, i.e. where it is sourced from.

twitter tifatul

Puzzled ‘followers’ of Tifatul’s Twitter account soon questioned the minister over the tweet, causing Tifatul to hastily add:

Penulis sejarah tentang hitler, mengutip pidatonya, bukan berarti ybs pendukung nazi. [writing about the history of Hitler, quoting his speeches, doesn’t mean a person is a Nazi]


38 Comments on “Tifatul Watch I: Adolf Hitler”

  1. Odinius says:

    ET said:

    Have there been indications that the Nazis sought to expel part of the Jews to Palestine

    Yes, the idea was seriously considered, as was the idea of transferring European Jews to Madagascar. In fact, there was an agreement promulgated in 1933, called the Haavara Agreement, which was supposed to be the first step towards the total transfer of Jews to Palestine, but was really a way to placate Britain and maneuver in the uncertain political environment of the 1930s.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
    http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=395105

    Priorities changed once Nazi Germany started waging, and winning, battles all over Europe.

    It’s also clear from biographies of the Mufti that he was unaware of this. He was, to put it simply, pro-German because he was anti-British and wanted a patron for his exclusivist vision of Palestine.

  2. David says:

    Well I take back the bit about him maybe regretting it, he seems to think it’s a joke, this screenshot was taken by Unspun:

    Then today he’s still at it with the Hitler humour

    Hitler marah karena christiano ronaldo dijual ke real madrid ~ sindo hr ini @fadjroel

    ————————

    Priorities changed once Nazi Germany started waging, and winning, battles all over Europe.

    I had thought that the Nazis’ priorities changed once they started losing battles, when at some level or another they realised time was running out for them.

  3. ET says:

    @ Arie Brand

    This did not prevent the editors of the four-volume ‘Encyclopedia of the Holocaust” from giving him a starring role. The article on the Mufti is more than twice as long as the articles on Goebbels and Goering, longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined, longer than the article on Eichmann – of all the biographical articles, it is exceeded in length, but only slightly, by the entry for Hitler.”

    The Mufti was not at the Wannsee conference and probably had no clue to what was decided there. I don’t know when these alleged pleas for stopping Jewish migration to Palestine were supposed to have taken place but I suspect that already very early in the war these pleas had become irrelevant because the ‘inner circle’ of which he definitely was not a member had other plans anyway. I would argue that these very pleas signified that he had no clue as to the actual nature of the proposed ‘final solution’.

    So the Mufti’s role in The Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust must have been overrated. Once more proof that encyclopedias should be taken with a grain of salt, especially when they deal with facts too close in the timeline which would later be edited out by more comprehensive and unbiased interpretations.

  4. Arie Brand says:

    I thought that you would pick this up. In my view there is a difference. It is quite probable that the editors of this encyclopedia quite knowingly aggrandized the role of the mufti. I still see no reason why the innocent reporters on Balinese marriage customs would knowingly distort the facts.

  5. Odinius says:

    Patung said,

    I had thought that the Nazis’ priorities changed once they started losing battles, when at some level or another they realised time was running out for them

    That they did. But they had also changed a few years earlier, once they were winning. You can identify 3 phases in the persecution of Jews (and Gypsies, communists, homosexuals and others).

    1. Hostility, prejudice, racist laws, intermittent violence, allowing Jews to flee (1933-1938)

    2. Rounding them up and pushing them into ghettos, marked by poor living conditions and no jobs, not allowing Jews to flee (1938-1942)

    3. The Final Solution (1942-1945)

    The Haavara Agreement was in phase 1.

  6. capekdeh says:

    A lot of Indonesians simply aren’t aware of the history of Hitler. I saw some girl with a picture of Hitler as her laptop screensaver.. it took me about 5 minutes to explain to my girlfriend how outrageous that was. She had an idea that Hitler had killed a lot of people, but seemed to think it was in the context of battle. When I explained otherwise, her first reaction was “-No.. that can’t be!”

    But really, why should any Indonesian be expected to know more about WWII Germany than the average American/European knows about the communist purge under Suharto, or the Chinese civil war?

  7. macannyantai says:

    Agree with capedeh: a lot of Indonesians aren’t aware of who Hitler was or what atrocities he committed in WWII (or the Nazis in general for that matter).

    Check out a convoy of VW enthusiasts; you might spot a swastika-bumper sticker on one of the cars. Motorcyclists wearing the “Stahlhelm” as a funny gimmicky thing. Go to a Paul Van Dyk rave; you might see a moron proudly waving a Nazi-flag just because Van Dyk comes from Germany.

    However, I’d really wish that the Indonesian educational system would emphasize more on International history instead of glorifying Indonesia’s Independence struggle over and over again in a repeating manner through. In an age where your public image can be really f*cked-up through a self-generated faux-pas you made on twitter/facebook/etc., I’d truly wished we could compete on a more international level in a who-is-who face-off of historical knowledge. At least our leaders should.

    And, oh, and I don’t agree that the Holocaust can be compared to Soeharto’s purges. I Hitler did what he did on an international level …and just check out the number of victims.

  8. fabian says:

    Very interesting topic…

    Here in Southamerica some neonzis befriended extremists Shia muslims,due to their common hate of the jews and Israel.

    I personally met a few of them….”strange bedfellows”

    However, the fascists usually are catholic, pro spanish falange

    And yes, there were esoteric variants of nazism who liked buddhism,there was even an expedition to Tibet

    But in Asia the svastica symbol is not a nazi thing, is something positive, hindu or buddhist

    So, a few neonazis were allied with extremist muslims

    But in Europe,some zionist undergrounds is making islamophobic progagana, so as to put the christians against the muslims….the myth of Eurabia…

    And, incensed by that anti muslim propaganda, fueled by zionists, it happens in _Spain that some skinheads attack moroccan boys..

    Strange bedfellows…..

    But the weirdest thing, was the connection between some nazis and early zionists, before the 2nd World War

    A bizarre and explosive cocktail of poliitics, religions and racism..

    Anyway, Hitler arrived to power with popular vote….later he became a dictator, but he was very popular in the begining…

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