Did Abbas retract his Holocaust denial?

In an interview with Dutch media, PA president Mahmoud Abbas was asked about his views of the Holocaust:

Is it true that you deny the extent of the Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed?

"No, I do not deny the Holocaust. I know that the Holocaust took place during WWII. I have studied and written a book about. I believe that many Jews were murdered and that other peoples of other nationalities were murdered . So I agree, I admit there were pogroms, that genocide was committed during the war against the Jews by the Nazi regime. "

How many Jews were killed according to you?

"I've heard from the Israelis that there were six million. I can accept that."

So are you yourself convinced of that number?

"I accept what they say. If they say six million, six million I say. It is up to them to decide, because they know better than e."

In Abbas' doctoral thesis, he wrote, "the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed." In the book he wrote based on the thesis, he wrote, "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand...Following the war, word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that a war of extermination was aimed primarily at the Jews . . . The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is possible that the number of Jewish victims reached six million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller, below one million."

He also claimed that the Jews who were killed were victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot.

So how can we reconcile Abbas from 1983 and Abbas today? Simple - he is a liar.

When Israeli media asked him about his thesis and book, Abbas told Maariv, "When I wrote `The Other Side,' we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks."

Which means that he is willing to lie about his beliefs if the lies are politically expedient.

So which is more likely - that he lied about his beliefs in a doctoral thesis and subsequent book that took hundreds of hours to write, or that he is lying now because he does not want to appear to be a Holocaust denier to the Europeans and Americans?

(h/t jzaik)