During a speech to the Fatah Revolutionary Council, Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Adolf Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry was not an act of antisemitism but rather that it was prompted by “social functions … related to money, and usury.” From “Hitler’s point of view,” Abbas went on, it was the Jews who “were sabotaging, and therefore he hated them.”
Now, I’m not sure what kind of interest rates those Jewish kids who ended up in gas chambers were charging Germans, but Abbas — who, granted, usually has a better grasp of “Hitler’s point of view” than most — is spreading gross historical inaccuracies and engaged in nefarious victim blaming.
Abbas’s Holocaust denialism came as a great shock to many of our top Middle East experts. They are simply flummoxed.
“I have been despairing about how to respond to Abu Mazen’s profoundly anti-Semitic diatribe,” tweeted Martin Indyk, “Distinguished Fellow in International Diplomacy” and former executive vice president of Brookings Institute, calling Abbas by his preferred Arabic name. “How could someone who has treated me as a personal friend for three decades at the same time harbor such hateful views of my people?”
How, indeed. If Indyk didn’t know that Abbas, a man who pays the families of terrorists who murder Jewish civilians stipends, was an antisemite, what does that say about his expertise? The media’s go-to expert on the Israel-Palestinian situation did not despair in 2018, when his close personal friend said virtually the exact thing at the
