Palestinian Prime Minister Sallam Fayyad said that Newt Gingrich’s holds a position on Palestine more appropriate to “a Nazi ideology” than to an American politician, while another Palestinian official attacked Gingrich for “racism.”
Gingrich angered Palestinians when he said “we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community,” during a recent interview, adding that Palestinians “had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it’s tragic.”
According to Ma’an News Agency, Fayyad suggested that Gingrich’s position “would be better suited for a politician adhering to ‘a Nazi ideology, a source of suffering for humanity, and the Jews topped the list of victims’ of that ideology.” Ma’an News Agency considers itself “the main source of independent news from Palestine.”
Hanan Ashrawi, a representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, said that “remarks reflect racism, and ignorance, and it is a cheap attempt to appeal to Jewish voters at the expense of the Palestinian people’s rights, and at the expense of peace in the region.”
