On Tuesday, Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of perpetrating 50 "holocausts" on the Palestinians:
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas caused shock in Germany Tuesday when, standing beside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, he accused Israel of committing “holocausts” against Palestinians over the years.Abbas was responding to a reporter’s question about the upcoming anniversary of the Munich massacre half a century ago. Asked whether as Palestinian leader he planned to apologize to Israel and Germany for the attack ahead of the 50th anniversary, Abbas responded instead by citing allegations of atrocities committed by Israel since 1947.“If we want to go over the past, go ahead,” Abbas, who was speaking Arabic, told the reporters.“I have 50 slaughters that Israel committed….50 massacres, 50 slaughters, 50 holocausts,” he said, taking care to pronounce the final word in English.
This antisemitism and Holocaust trivialization is hardly anomalous for Abbas. He has a long history of making unmistakably antisemitic statements - yet he is still considered a respected statesman who travels to Western capitals.
The fact that he spouted this hate while answering a question about apologizing for the Munich Olympic massacre of 1972 is telling, because it was Mahmoud Abbas himself who financed that operation.
Abbas' antisemitism goes back decades. His doctoral thesis, which he turned into a book ("The Other Side: the Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement") says that it was a "myth" and "fantastic lie" that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. And Jews were responsible in large part for the Jews that were killed: "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 also compared Jews to Nazis, saying, “We find that Zionists believe in the purity of the Jewish race, as Hitler believed in the purity of the Aryan race."
And to top it all off, he quoted a Holocaust denier saying that the gas chambers were a myth.
In 2015, Abbas spread antisemitism and incitement to violence. He said, "The Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher are ours. They are all ours, and [Jews] have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We shall not allow them to do so, and we shall do whatever we can to protect Jerusalem."
Two weeks after calling on protecting Jerusalem by any means, the "knife intifada" broke out, ostensibly to defend Jerusalem from Jews. And on the first anniversary of the speech, another terror wave gripped Israel.
In 2018, Abbas suggested that Jews who were facing extermination in Europe preferred to stay there than to emigrate to Israel. “The Jews did not want to emigrate even with murder and slaughter. Even during the Holocaust, they did not emigrate." In reality, hundreds of thousands were unable to emigrate because Abbas' fellow Arabs pressured Great Britain to block nearly all Jewish immigration. This is a particularly degusting example of victim-blaming - but not even close to the worst.
Abbas came up with new justifications for the Holocaust in a speech of pure hate in 2018. He told an audience of PLO members that the Jews of Europe brought the Holocaust upon themselves because of usury, banking and their “social function.” He also said that Jews are descended from Khazars, and Israel is a purely European colonial project with nothing to do with Jewish history,
Beyond that, he blamed Jews for their own persecution throughout the centuries: “From the 11th century until the Holocaust that took place in Germany, the Jews – who moved to Western and Eastern Europe – were subjected to a massacre every 10 to 15 years. But why did this happen?...The Jewish issue that was widespread in all European countries... was not because of their religion, but rather their social role related to usury and banks.”
In 2016, speaking to the European Parliament, Abbas said, “Only a week ago, a number of rabbis in Israel announced, and made a clear announcement, demanding that their government poison the water to kill the Palestinians." After a firestorm, he retracted that statement - and today, no one seems to remember his blood libel.
Earlier this year, he said, "The Christian is the brother of the Muslim. They celebrate together, suffer together, live together, work together, and fight together against their enemy." Meaning, the Jew is the enemy.
This is a consistent pattern of antisemitism. These words are not errors or mistakes - this is what Mahmoud Abbas believes.
Inevitably, since Germany is up in arms over this latest outrageous statement, Abbas will issue a thoroughly fake apology, claiming that he has nothing against Jews, and the media and world leaders will let it slide - as they did every single previous time.
