In a 1984 book published in Arabic and entitled The Other Face, Mahmoud Abbas argued that the Holocaust was in fact a product of collaboration between Zionist leaders and Nazi Germany. He also claimed, as an aside, that the number of Jews killed during World War II was “likely much smaller” than six million, “perhaps less than a million.” Not to leave any stone unturned, the book, which has never been translated, asserts that Jews never suffered persecution in Arab lands. Edy Cohen notes the likely origins of the book’s primary thesis:

Throughout the entire work, Abbas presents a blanket indictment of Zionism and its leaders, from David Ben-Gurion on down. In effect, Abbas charges that they are war criminals who collaborated with the Nazis and those responsible for the Holocaust. He further claims that the Zionists encouraged anti-Semitism in Europe in order to increase aliyah to the land of Israel and accelerate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

The Zionists, [in Abbas’s view], took part in the slaughter. They intentionally thwarted many efforts to rescue Jews. They encouraged hatred of Jews so the Nazis and others would take revenge by expanding the scope of the extermination. And they did all of this in collaboration with the Third Reich. In effect, Abbas claims there was a Zionist conspiracy against the Jewish people. Moreover, he claims that this has never been revealed because all those who tried to expose the conspiracy were assassinated by the Israeli government. . . .

Abbas’s thesis . . . is, from beginning to end, pure fantasy. But it did not spring fully formed from Abbas’s head. Upon investigation, I came to the unequivocal conclusion that Abbas’s book is based on Nazi and neo-Nazi propaganda disseminated in Argentina by Adolf Eichmann and his friend, the pro-Nazi Dutch journalist Wilhelmus Antonius Sassen. . . . Eichmann and Sassen claimed that the Holocaust was a lie, and that there were no gas chambers or crematoria in Hitler’s Europe. In 1957, Sassen interviewed Eichmann on the subject, and their conversations eventually comprised 659 typed pages. . . . [A] significant part of these conversations present claims identical to those of Abbas.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.