In the 1980s and 90s, it was a common refrain in some circles of the hard left that the U.S. government had created AIDS or deliberately spread it to kill gays, African Americans, or both. Later on, Soviet defectors explained how the KGB had concocted this theory, planted it in an English-language newspaper in New Delhi, and simply allowed it circulate. A similar process explains the widespread belief, detached from reality, that Israel is an “apartheid state.” And the similarities are not coincidental, write Dan Diker and Yechiel Leiter:

Beginning in the late 1960s, PLO officials regularly underwent military and political-warfare training in Moscow and other Soviet satellite countries such as North Vietnam and Cuba. . . . “Active measures,” [as information warfare was known in Soviet parlance], have been used by the PLO, Hamas, and the Iranian regime. Ironically, the signing of the Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel intensified the phenomenon of disinformation and incitement rather than eliminating it.

Disinformation on American university campuses has metastasized in recent years via both student and faculty groups. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), with over 200 branches on American college campuses, has become a main advocate for Hamas. SJP has also invited former convicted Palestinian terrorists . . . as keynote campus speakers. SJP sponsors the annual “Israel Apartheid Week” on hundreds of campuses across the U.S. and Europe, [which] has led to anti-Semitic assaults and harassment against Jewish students.

In the same spirit, scores of Jewish and Israeli academics signed a public letter of condemnation in 2016 excoriating the German Bundestag’s resolution that the BDS movement is anti-Semitic. Anti-Zionist groups, including If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, have actively advocated the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. . . . In this way, Jewish groups have normalized a propaganda narrative against Israel rooted in Soviet ideology and in such terminology as “settler colonialist,” “imperialist,” and “racist.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.