Ben-Dror Yemini: How Europe bankrolls Palestinian antisemitism
From time to time, the Palestinians try to deny the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was known to harbor Nazi sympathies, ever represented the Arabs of Palestine. But to no avail.Ruthie Blum: The Palestinians continue to exploit the Holocaust
In fact, most Arabs in Palestine eagerly awaited Nazi general Erwin Rommel's invasion ahead of the Battle of El Alamein.
Moreover, the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ahmad Shukeiri, said three days before the 1967 Six-Day War that "those who will survive [among the Jews] will remain in Palestine but I don't think any of them will stay alive."
He wasn't the only one who spoke about the mass extermination of Jews. Throughout the three years preceding the war, the Arab League and most Arab leaders declared that their goal was to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth and throw the Jews into the ocean.
The current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is considered a moderate in these terms but despite the ongoing security cooperation with Israel, Abbas channeled his inner al-Husseini earlier this week.
He's not wishing for another Holocaust for Jews. God forbid. He only belongs to the camp that downplays it. Like he did in his infamous doctoral dissertation.
The Holocaust is a sensitive issue for the Palestinians because there is one thing they excel in more than anyone else in the world and that's playing the victim. And their success is astounding.
Every organization in the United States that purports to represent ethnic or gender minorities places the Palestinian issue at the top of its agenda and joins the BDS campaign, whose stated goal is to eliminate Israel. Too often, this antisemitic agenda is laid bare.
SINCE THIS hatred of Israel and desire for its destruction are as rampant among Palestinians as Holocaust exploitation for political purposes, the sudden widespread outcry over Abbas’s Germany performance is peculiar. As the research organization Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) pointed out in the wake of the event, comparing Israel to the Nazis is central to PA ideology.Melanie Phillips: Humbug, hypocrisy and Holocaust
Decades of examples exist, including from this year alone, which PMW has documented. But one purveyor of the vile distortion is particularly worthy of note in the current context: Fatah Central Committee Secretary-General Jibril Rajoub, who happens to head not only the Palestinian Football Association but the Palestine Olympic Committee, as well.
In a May 5 interview on PA TV, Rajoub called Israelis “the new Nazis who are committing acts of terror officially, and whose prisons are a matching copy of the source of Auschwitz and the death camps.”
This was a reiteration of a January 2 Facebook post in which referred to the Israeli government as “the new Nazis” and “the living and recognizable model of the fascist and Nazi thinking of the desire for expansion.”
In his Olympic Committee role, he called on participants in last year’s Tokyo Olympics – where, for the first time ever, a moment of silence was held during the opening ceremony for the victims of the Munich massacre – to refuse to compete with Israeli contenders.
This is the same guy who, in 2012, lauded then-International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge for nixing such a moment of silence at that summer’s games in London. According to PMW, after Rogge denied the request of the families of the victims to mark the terrorist tragedy, Rajoub wrote him a letter saying, “Sports are a bridge for love, communication and the spreading of peace between nations, and should not be used for divisiveness and the spread of racism.”
NO, HE WASN’T kidding. Abbas wasn’t joking, either, when he likened Israeli actions to Nazi atrocities – yet both suit-and-tie-wearing terrorists must be laughing at Israel and the rest of the West for having short memories that keep the contents of their deep pockets flowing into PA coffers.
Indeed, Germany, a key European Union donor to the PA, may have egg on its face at the moment. But the chance of its withholding cash to the “pay for slay” entities in Ramallah and Gaza when Scholz’s “disgust” dies down is slim-to-nil.
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.
Abbas is a former terrorist godfather. He presides over a party, Fatah, which has an active terrorist wing. He supports, rewards and heroises terrorists who have never stopped murdering Israeli Jews.
And his explicitly all-time hero and exemplar is Hitler’s ally, Haj Amin al Husseini, who as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s enthusiastically supported the Final Solution and pledged that if Hitler won the war al Husseini would ensure the extermination of every Jew in the Middle East.
Just as al Husseini — an early Islamist who signed up to the fanatical Islamic thinkers who emerged after the fall of the Ottoman empire — incited pogroms against the Palestinian Jews with the lie that they intended to destroy al Aksa, so Abbas has repeatedly used exactly the same lie to incite hysterical violence against the Israelis.