Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in fourteenth year of his four-year term, has long been touted by liberals and the media as a moderate. During the Obama administration, Abbas was touted as a genuine peacemaker, while Obama officials lashed out at Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu as the main obstacle to peace.
Yet lately, it’s becoming harder for liberals to hold up Abbas as a beacon of hope in the region, given that he’s made even less effort to hide his virulent anti-Semitism.
The Times of Israel reports, “Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday said that the Holocaust was not caused by anti-Semitism, but by the ‘social behavior’ of the Jews, including money-lending.” This is the latest in a string of bombastic remarks from the Palestinian leader. Abbas, in recent months, has called the Jewish U.S. Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman a “son of a dog“; and claimed Jews were “really excellent in faking and counterfeiting history and religion.”
Reading these stories, liberals have been putting on their shocked faces, as if this is some surprising new turn for Abbas. But that Abbas holds these beliefs should not be a surprise to anybody. Back in 1982, he wrote a dissertation arguing the Holocaust was exaggerated and claiming there was a secret relationship between Zionists and Nazis. This even though the leader of Arabs in the region during World War II was quite literally allied with a Adolf Hitler, and there’s actually photographic evidence.
Abbas, who is 82, will fade from the scene at some point. But it won’t stop liberals and their allies in the media from propping up some other Jew-hating, terrorist-celebrating, Palestinian leader as a “moderate” who is dedicated to peace.
