LOS ANGELES, September 8, 2023 – StandWithUs strongly condemns the August 24, 2023 hate speech by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas before the Fatah Central Committee that recently came to light. In his speech Abbas rationalized the Nazi genocide against six million Jews by claiming Hitler “fought” the Jews not because of antisemitism but due the “Jewish role in society, which had to do with usury, money.” He also repeated a debunked theory, favored by white supremacists and Arab nationalists alike, that Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of a medieval Turkic tribe called the Khazars and therefore have no legitimate claims to the land of Israel.
Roz Rothstein, CEO and Co-Founder of StandWithUs, issued the following statement:
This latest rant by President Abbas against Israel and the Jewish people is not his first. He has a long record of making overtly anti-Jewish statements going back to his 1982 doctoral thesis for a Soviet university titled, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” later published as a book. In it, Abbas claims the Holocaust was exaggerated and that "the Zionists” created “the myth” of six million murdered Jews, which he argued was a “fantastic lie.”
His oft-repeated antisemitic conspiracy theories seek to disprove the Jewish historical, cultural and religious connection to the Land of Israel.
Holocaust denial and minimization is antisemitism. Racializing Jews is antisemitism. Erasing and distorting Jewish history, culture and memory is antisemitism. President Abbas did all these things in his latest diatribe.
We applaud the condemnations of Abbas’s speech by the United States, Germany, the EU and other governments. We applaud the decision by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to revoke the esteemed Medal of the City of Paris awarded to Abbas in 2015 declaring his comments “contrary to our values.”
Unsurprisingly we have not heard a single word of condemnation from any UN bodies. The UN’s silence is complicity in anti-Jewish hate and is contemptible.
Antisemitism is nothing new in Palestinian political discourse. Its roots are traced back to when Palestinian nationalist leaders formed an alliance with Nazi Germany during world War Two.
Other antisemitic outbursts by Abbas include:
September 2015, during a wave of terror incidents stoked by Abbas and his Palestinian Authority’s media, he said, “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every shaheed (martyr) will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.” He also said, referring to the Al-Aksa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, “They (Jews) have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet.”
In June 2016, speaking before the European Parliament, he echoed the medieval blood libel that charged Jews with poisoning the wells of non-Jews when he accused Israeli rabbis of “demanding that their government poison the water to kill the Palestinians.”
On December 13, 2017 in Istanbul Abbas accused Jews of “faking” history saying, “They are really masters in this and it is mentioned in the holy Quran they fabricate truth and they try to do that and they believe in that.”
