Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the Holocaust the “single greatest tragedy in modern-day history” during a meeting with a visiting American rabbi in Ramallah on Sunday.Schneier, being a well-meaning peaceful type of guy, cannot fathom that he is being played by an expert in lies and doubletalk.
According to Rabbi Marc Schneier of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, a Jewish-Muslim interfaith group, Abbas agreed to make a public declaration on behalf of Holocaust-remembrance efforts around the world, as well as to speak out against attempts to ban circumcision and ritual slaughter in several European countries.
Abbas told Schneier that “remembrance should be an issue of increased concern to both Jews and Muslims,” the rabbi said after the meeting.
Abbas has been a subject of criticism in some Israeli circles over accusations of Holocaust denial because of his graduate thesis, written while studying in the former Soviet Union, which asserted that “a partnership was established between Hitler’s Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement” and that the Zionist movement “gave permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine.”
Last year Abbas defended his thesis, saying that he “challenges anyone who can deny that the Zionist movement had ties with the Nazis before World War II,” according to a report in the Palestinian news service Ma’an.
Abbas wrote a thesis that Zionists cooperated with Nazis in murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews (Abbas doesn't admit six million.) That is obviously a major loss of life. So when Abbas says that the Holocaust is a tragedy, he means it is a crime done by Zionist Jews against European Jewry not that it was a Nazi genocide!
Abbas isn't taking out any lessons from the Holocaust except that Zionists are mass murderers, and they continue to be so.
And Schneier smiles and thinks that he moderated a Holocaust denying terror supporter.
Of course, getting Abbas to act as a catalyst to help turn back European laws against Jewish and Muslim rituals like circumcision and ritual slaughter is a good thing, if Abbas follows through. But Abbas remains what he has always been.
If Schneier knew who he was talking to, he could have asked Abbas a simple question: will he remove his Holocaust denying essay from his own official website?
Because, today, his Holocaust denial is available in Arabic on Abbas' official "president.ps" website - and it was most recently reprinted in 2011!
Now, is it even remotely believable that Abbas has changed his mind about the Holocaust when he is hawking his own book, reprinted recently, on his own site?
Abbas knows quite well that he can manipulate Western "peaceniks" - in another of those books on his site - and they are a critical part of his strategy to delegitimize Israel. Schneier is being played for a fool.