Last month, the Palestinian Authority president gave a speech simultaneously absolving the Nazis of anti-Semitism and arguing that the Holocaust was justified. The speech attracted widespread media coverage, condemnation from the European Union, and even an open letter of denunciation from a group of Palestinian academics. (The past statements of such signatories as Rashid Khalidi does, however, raise questions about the writers’ sincerity.) Perhaps the most puzzling reaction came from the veteran American Middle East hand Martin Indyk, who said he was “despairing about how to respond” to this “profoundly anti-Semitic diatribe” from someone he considered “a personal friend for three decades.”
All these responses are far more newsworthy than the speech itself, in which Abbas simply repeated a sampling of the canards about Jews he has spent his entire career spouting—as the Middle East Media Research Institute details:
These statements are in fact part of a comprehensive anti-Semitic ideology Abbas has espoused and elaborated on over the years. This ideology includes blaming the persecution of Europe’s Jews, from the Middle Ages to the Holocaust, on their behavior or “social role” in Europe, while repeating classic anti-Semitic tropes such as the Jews’ avariciousness—yet at the same time questioning the scope of the Holocaust and the authenticity of the gas chambers. Another central theme in this ideology is accusing the Zionist movement of collaborating with the Nazis and of resembling the Nazis in its ideas and methods. Abbas’s accusations against the Zionist movement and Israel likewise incorporate anti-Semitic themes such as allegations about poisoning wells.
Some of Abbas’s ideas were set out in his 1982 doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Oriental College in Moscow and titled The Secret Connection between Nazism and Zionism—1933-1945.
Read more on MEMRI: https://www.memri.org/reports/he-said-it-all-already-2018-and-more-jews-poison-wells-%E2%80%93-mahmoud-abbass-antisemitism-and