A new anti-Semitic diatribe from the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, which initially went unnoticed, emerged on September 6 and aroused disapproval. Before the revolutionary council of Fatah, the Parliament of his party meeting in Ramallah, the oldest leader of the Arab world (87 years old) had drawn up on August 24 a history of the Jewish people, their origins and their persecutions in Europe, which led to the denial that the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust during World War II.
“They say Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews, and Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. It’s wrong. (…) THE [Européens] fought these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, with money. (…) According to [Hitler]they were sabotaging and that’s why he hated them,” said Mr. Abbas.
The Palestinian president held “to clarify for the world” a ” truth ” : the Jews of Europe could not, according to him, have been victims of anti-Semitism, not being Semites. He thus took up a controversial theory according to which Ashkenazi Jews did not originate from the Middle East, but descended from a nomadic tribe from Central Asia, the Khazars, who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. This argument has fueled conspiratorial discourse in recent years.
” An insult “
The pseudo-history lesson of the Rais of Ramallah was drowned out in one of his lengthy speeches that official Palestinian television broadcast live, to the indifference of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, for whom Abbas has never been so weak and discredited.
This speech was made public on September 6 by the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), a pro-Israeli website that monitors Arab and Iranian media. The president of the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, Dani Dayan, judged that these statements “are not only an example of Holocaust denial and distortion: they make use of deeply ingrained anti-Semitic stereotypes.”
The German ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, denounced “an insult to the memory of millions of murdered men, women and children”adding that “Palestinians deserve to hear from their leaders the historical truth. » Washington and Paris also condemned the remarks. The European Union added that these statements “play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution, for which President Abbas has repeatedly advocated”.
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