Israel's "peace partner" Mahmoud Abbas gives an hour-long rant that denies any connection between Israel and Judaism, that says that Jews chose to stay in Europe during the Holocaust rather than emigrate to Israel, that Ben Gurion was a bigot who hated Jews from Arab lands but ended up making secret agreements to have them persecuted in Arab countries so they would flee to Israel, hints that TWA chose to fly Jews from Yemen to Israel against their will because it is owned by Jews, and other hateful and antisemitic garbage.
J-Street briefly says that Abbas said some unacceptable things without elaborating - and then tells us why he was driven to such despair:
Sunday’s speech by President Abbas no doubt reflected his own and the Palestinian people’s deep despair at the ever-deepening occupation and the lack of diplomatic progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That frustration, however, is no excuse for calling into question either the Jewish connection to, or Palestinian recognition of, the state of Israel – or for language and proposals that are justifiably earning widespread condemnation.Abbas revealed himself as a blatant antisemite. And not for the first time. His PhD thesis denied the Holocaust, saying that not so many Jews died and that Zionists colluded with Hitler to persecute them. He told the EU Parliament that rabbis encourage Israel to poison Palestinian wells. He said that Jews raise wild boars and dogs just to attack Palestinian farmers.
This speech – and the undercutting of America’s role as a mediator in this conflict – would not have come about if it were not for President Trump’s inept and disastrous missteps regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By appointing a settlement movement ally as Ambassador to Israel, refusing to endorse the two-state solution and upending longstanding US policy on Jerusalem, the president and his team have taken one step after another to destroy the chances of peaceful resolution of the conflict.
But to J-Street, Abbas is a moderate peace partner. To them, Abbas' long history of hate and bigotry doesn't exist, and when it is undeniable, they blame...Trump, The Source Of All That Is Evil In This World.
Because they know their audience. And to the J-Street crowd, Trump saying that Jerusalem is Jewish is the ultimate evil, and Abbas saying that Jews preferred to die in gas chambers rather than move to their ancestral homeland is a minor annoyance....that must be blamed on Trump.
