True to the pro-Nazi line that has characterized the Palestine Arab National movement from its inception, the PA chairman continues to distort history with blatant anti-Semitism
Mahmoud Abbas was and still is a Holocaust denier. That is not new. It is well known that in his doctoral dissertation from 1982 at the Communist University of Moscow, entitled “The Secret Connection between Nazism and the Zionist Leadership,” he falsifies numbers and cites Holocaust deniers. An important by product of his work was a book he published on the subject, based on Adolf Eichmann’s propaganda. These are the facts.
To this consistent stance of his, he has now added a number of innovations in his speech at the Palestinian National Council conference in Ramallah on Monday. There are a number of aspects of this speech that deserve attention, the last of which will be discussed below.
The first aspect is the political motivation of the speech. Politically, Abu Mazen is counting on only one scenario – that the Donald Trump regime will come to a premature demise. Therefore, he is absolutely opposed to American involvement and is doing everything to prevent negotiations with Israel.
Towards this aim, he intentionally makes it hard for Israel by displaying an extreme position that rejects any legitimacy of a Jewish state. As he claimed in his speech, Zionism is a European adventure that has nothing to do with the Jewish People.
The second aspect of Abbas’s speech is another example of a familiar fact: anti-Zionism and Holocaust denial tend to mix in different doses and with various emphases – if the Jews did not suffer, they do not deserve a state because there is in fact no problem that requires a solution for.
Third, Abu Mazen is no longer a communist student or even a KGB agent, but the president of the Palestinian Authority, who together with the ayatollahs in Iran, have become the two regimes that adopted Holocaust denial as a matter of policy. This fact makes it even more difficult for Israel to have any contact with the Palestinian Authority, and this is in line with Abu Mazen’s goal of waiting for the desired Trump transition.
In addition to all these, the bitter fact and the most difficult to digest, is that the Palestinians have not yet rejected the pro-Nazi line that characterized their path from the beginning. To argue this is contrary to political correctness, but the historical truth is that the Arab Palestine national movement was born as an arm of Nazism in the Land of Israel.
The multi-dimensional Nazi activity of Mufti Amin al-Husseini, who was considered the founder of the Palestinian struggle, is well known and proven. He was admired by his three heirs to date – Ahmed Shukeiri, Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.
Can’t Forgive the Jews for the Holocaust
One of the most important surveys published in recent years presents a worrisome picture of a global rise in Judophobia sentiment in the world, with over a quarter of the world’s population having anti-Jewish prejudice.
The geographic rankings see the nation of Laos stand out at the bottom of the list (0,2% of the population is defined as Judeophobic), when the champion of hate is, as expected, the PA. Ninety three percent of the population there harbors feelings of hate. For example, in a survey conducted by the ADL, 87% of Palestinians responded favorably to the statement: “People hate Jews because of the way they behave,” and 91% agreed that “Jews have too much power in the business world.”
Indeed, the main aspect rising from Abbas’ recent statements is indeed the stubborn Judeophobia of the Palestinians, fueled by the propaganda of their leaders. One of the most prominent manifestations of this is, of course, Holocaust denial.
When discussing Holocaust denial, it usually includes parallel phenomena that do not belong to actual denial. In fact, the correct definition is “Holocaust distortions,” a parallel term in English coined in 1989 by researcher Lucy Davidovitch in a debate with the Marxist historian Arno J. Mayer of Princeton University.
Of the dozen historical distortions known in regards to the Holocaust, denial is the most familiar and therefore it includes under its blanket all the parallel phenomena. But there are several other examples:
Reduction – The claim that the numbers of Jewish victims in the Holocaust were inflated, or in the words of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French: “The Holocaust was only a tiny detail in the war.”
The expunction of the victim – which blurs the Jewish identity of the victims, such as the propaganda version of the former Soviet Union. Under the communist regime, a long film was screened at Auschwitz, where the word “Jews” was never mentioned. The film did not really deny the murder, but listed the victims as Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and others.
A recent example is the words of the former European Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton, who on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day four years ago, eulogized the “citizens” who were exterminated. No mention of Jews at all.
Other examples of distortions include the cheapening of the Holocaust, shifting responsibility for its implementation, dilution of guilt, and so forth. Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld wrote an instructive book describing the variety of shades that exist in the field.
Abu Mazen Reassigns Guilt
One of the gravest distortions of the Holocaust is the blaming of the victim, the position taken by Abu Mazen a few days ago in a speech that has already become infamous.
The PA chairman presented the Holocaust as being the consequence of “the anti-social behavior of the Jews,” such as their involvement in money lending.
According to Abbas, the Holocaust did happen, but in total, the extermination was a punishment for these Jews because they were anti-social. These words echo almost exactly the German anti-Semitic historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who stated at the end of the 19th century that the anti-Jewish riots “are the natural reaction of the people.”
In other words, Abbas actually ignores the thousand of years of European Judeophobia, not to mention contemporary Judeophobia. According to him, all that there is are Jews who are working against humanity, and humanity is reacting angrily to their crimes. So the Holocaust was actually an event in which millions of Jews, a third of the Jewish people, brought upon themselves the terrible suffering.
In our day, Abu Mazen will say, there is no Palestinian terrorism but a “natural reaction of rage.”
For Abu Mazen and the Judeophobes in general, there is no possibility that the Jew or the Israeli will be attacked – they are the perpetual aggressor by their very existence, and they have no choice but to disappear.
It is therefore no wonder that if these are their leaders, the Palestinians have become the champions of global hatred.
A point worth mentioning is that Abu Mazen is considered one of the moderates among them.
*(Translated from Mida.org.il Hebrew)
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Dr. Gustavo Perednik is a scholar of Jewish Philosophy and Anti-Semitism and the author of several books on these subjects. His latest book discusses the nature of Judeophobia.
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abbas has stated clearly that “not a single Jew will live in an Arab “Palestine””. His anti-Semitic beliefs are wel documented, yet some of his biggest supporters are Jews! Left wing Israeli Jews, liberal, secular American Jews and “elitist” Jews worldwide all prop him up. Jewish guilt for not going quietly into the night runs deep and gives Haaretz a big reader base.