No doubt. There is a long tradition of academicians making evil stuff up for political purposes, President Abbas, with his Soviet doctorate in Holocaust denial, being a subject matter expert on the subject. Still, rarely did anyone but the Joooos object before — it’s understandable that the Palestinians would be shocked at objections now..
[IsraelTimes] Nabil Abu Rudeineh condemns ’frenzied campaign’ against PA president, says his actual position is ’full condemnation of the Nazi Holocaust and a rejection of antisemitism’A front man for Paleostinian Authority President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
...aka Abu Mazen, a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial. While no Yasser Arafat, he has his own brand of evil, just a little more lowercase....
said the PA leader’s recent statements using antisemitic tropes were in fact "academic and historical quotations."
Abbas’s contentious comments were made during the Fatah party’s Revolutionary Council on August 26 but were only recently published in an English translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute, drawing a barrage of condemnations from Israel, the US and Europe.
In a statement published Thursday by the official Paleostinian news agency Wafa, Abbas’s front man Nabil Abu Rudeineh said that "Mahmoud Abbas’s position on this matter is clear and unwavering, which is a full condemnation of the Nazi Holocaust and a rejection of antisemitism."
"We express our strong condemnation and outrage at this frenzied campaign [against President Mahmoud Abbas] for just quoting academic and historical quotations," Abu Rudeineh said, giving no further details.
Wafa said that Rudeineh was referring to work by unnamed Jewish and American academics.
In his speech, Abbas repeated a number of antisemitic canards he has made over the years, including unfounded claims that Ashkenazi Jews descend from the Khazars, a Turkic people who according to a discredited theory converted to Judaism en masse, and that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler
...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days as a politician somebody doesn't like...
had Jews slaughtered because of their "social role" as moneylenders, not because of enmity toward Judaism.
"The truth that we should clarify to the world is that European Jews are not Semites," Abbas said, adding that Jews from Arab countries, on the other hand, are considered Semites.
"They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews and that Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true. It was clearly explained that [the Europeans] fought [the Jews] because of their social role, and not their religion," Abbas continued, echoing allegations he has made in the past. "Several authors wrote about this. Even Karl Marx said this was not true. He said that the enmity was not directed at Judaism as a religion but to Judaism for its social role."
Abbas’s assertions have drawn widespread condemnation. Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: "This is the true face of Paleostinian ’leadership.’ Just as Abbas blames the Jews for the Holocaust, he also blames the Jews for all the Middle East’s issues. While he spreads this pure antisemitism he also pays Paleostinian gunnies for murdering Israelis and publicly commends Paleostinian terrorism."
| Update at 8:20 a.m. EDT with a snicker: |
[IsraelTimes] p of Palestinian academics and intellectuals signed an open letter on Sunday to condemn the “morally and politically reprehensible comments” recently made by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas about the Holocaust and the origins of Ashkenazi Jews.
The letter was signed by over a hundred “Palestinian academics, writers, artists, activists, and people of all walks of life,” mostly living in the US and Europe, and was publicized on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, by Dana El-Kurd, an assistant professor of political science at the university of Richmond in Virginia.
The letter condemned Abbas’s distortion of the Holocaust in strong terms: “Rooted in a racial theory widespread in European culture and science at the time, the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was born of antisemitism, fascism, and racism. We adamantly reject any attempt to diminish, misrepresent, or justify antisemitism, Nazi crimes against humanity, or historical revisionism vis-a-vis the Holocaust.”
The second part of the open letter addressed the publicity fallout of Abbas’s statements on the Palestinian cause. “The Palestinian people are sufficiently burdened by Israeli settler colonialism, dispossession, occupation, and oppression without having to bear the negative effect of such ignorant and profoundly antisemitic narratives perpetuated by those who claim to speak in our name,” the authors wrote.
| Ah. The real objection is to the problems saying such things aloud causes the Palestinian diaspora. |
“Having held onto power nearly a decade and a half after his presidential mandate expired in 2009, supported by Western and pro-Israel forces seeking to perpetuate Israeli apartheid, Abbas and his political entourage have forfeited any claim to represent the Palestinian people and our struggle for justice, freedom, and equality, a struggle that stands against all forms of systemic racism and oppression,” the letter ended.
Abbas’s popularity has been in steady decline for years, in the face of growing discontent among Palestinians at his autocratic style of ruling; his refusal to hold elections after his defeat to Hamas in 2006; the PA’s corruption and security cooperation with Israel, which many Palestinians consider a form of collaboration, his perceived inaction in the face of settlement expansion; and his weak governance in parts of the West Bank, particularly in the northern Jenin-Nablus area, which have paved the way for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to encroach in the area.
...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...