- MELANIE PHILLIPS - AUG 18, 2022 -
Under a storm of criticism, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas has tried to walk back comments he made in Germany this week.
Standing beside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on an official visit to Berlin, Abbas accused Israel of carrying out “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians.
This produced a furious reaction in Israel, Germany and America. Israeli acting prime minster Yair Lapid called his remarks “a monstrous lie”. Dani Dayan, chairman of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum, called Abbas’s words “despicable” and “appalling”.
In the US, Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s antisemitism monitor, warned:
Holocaust distortion can have dangerous consequences and fuels antisemitism.
The Anti-Defamation League tweeted:
This kind of hateful rhetoric from Abbas is simply unacceptable. There's no justification for invoking the Holocaust when speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — in Germany of all places. He must immediately retract his statement.
Scholz, who was himself roundly criticised for saying nothing when Abbas made his remark, belatedly tweeted:
For us Germans in particular, any relativisation of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable. I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust.
The Times of Israel reported:
Following the uproar, Abbas issued a statement released by the Palestinian Authority’s official WAFA news agency, affirming that “the Holocaust is the most heinous crime in modern human history.”
The presidency said Abbas was “stressing that his answer was not intended to deny the singularity of the Holocaust that occurred in the last century,” and was “condemning it in the strongest terms”.
Talk about a missed target!
Abbas’s “retraction” was as spectacularly hypocritical as the outrage — which, while containing valid criticisms, totally missed the most important point. The real outrage should not be over the disgusting nature of Abbas’s remark. It should be over the disgusting nature of Abbas himself.
First off, Abbas’s gross distortion of the Holocaust is absolutely nothing new. This is a man who actually got a doctorate in Holocaust denial — if you can actually call an award in 1982 by the “Patrice Lumumba university” in Moscow a doctorate — by claiming that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis in order to spur more Jewish immigration to Palestine.
“The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule, in order to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination,” he wrote, asserting that Zionists were the Third Reich’s “basic partner in crime”.
As MEMRI has reported:
In the introduction to his 1984 book The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, which is based on his doctoral dissertation, he wrote that “the number of Jewish [Holocaust] victims could be six million but could [also] be far smaller, even less than a million”. Citing Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, he also questioned whether gas chambers were used to kill Jews…
In a 2018 speech to the Palestinian National Council in Ramallah, Abbas said that the massacres to which European Jews had been subjected from the 11th century until the Holocaust were not because they were Jews, but “because of their function in society, which had to do with usury, banks, and so on”.
As Palestinian Media Watch has observed, comparing Israelis to Nazis and Israeli policies to the Holocaust is fundamental to the ideology of the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah party which Abbas leads.
For example, PA controlled media have said of Israel that “in its crimes it surpasses German Nazism”; Israeli prisons for terrorists are a “matching copy of the source of Auschwitz and the death camps”; Israel is “re-enacting the German Nazi Holocaust in a new way”; Israel is “committing worse things against the Palestinians” than the Holocaust; “Israel has repeated Kristallnacht”; “Israeli detention camps have become most similar to the Nazi crematoriums”; and on and on in similar vein.
Second, the real issue is the question Abbas dodged. A reporter asked if he would offer an apology on the upcoming 50-year anniversary of the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics.
“If we want to dig further into the past, yes, please, I have 50 massacres that were committed by Israel,” Abbas replied in Arabic. “Fifty Holocausts,” he said, using the English word for the genocide.
Cue uproar — over the use of the word “Holocausts”. But the real point is that Abbas was actually an instigator of the Munich atrocity. As Stephen Flatow writes on JNS.org:
The autobiography of the late Mohammed Oudeh, better known as Abu Daoud, named Abbas as one of the three senior officials of Fatah who assisted Daoud in planning the Munich massacre.
Officially, the Munich attack was carried out by the “Black September” group that pretended to be independent of Fatah. But the myth of an “independent” Black September was shattered many years ago with the declassifying of a telegram sent by the US State Department to American embassies around the world on March 13, 1973.
The text of the telegram is widely available on the Internet. It reveals the harsh truth about the Munich murderers. You can see it here...
“The Black September Organisation is a cover term for Fatah’s terrorist operations executed by Fatah’s intelligence organisation. … For all intents and purposes, no significant distinction now can be made between the BSO and Fatah”.
So “Black September” was a fiction — so says our own State Department. Fatah, under the leadership of Arafat and Abbas, was the “parent body” of Black September. Meaning that Fatah was responsible for the Munich massacre.
And both Fatah and the PA remain proud of it. Palestinian Media Watch has reported many instances over the years where PA and Fatah have glorified the Munich murderers.
In June, Fatah’s Facebook page praised them as “heroes” and “righteous sons who create the glory of the revolution”. In previous years, Fatah lauded the massacre as a “heroic operation; the PA gushed over one of the Munich attack planners as “one of the stars who sparkled… at the [Olympics] sports stadium in Munich”; various PA-run educational institutions bear the name of the Black September leader Salah Khalaf or “Abu Iyad”; and so on and murderously on.
LEIA MAIS >