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"50 Holocausts" Remark Proves Palestinian Authority Head Must Go
(Newsweek) Bassem Eid - Sometimes a world leader's toxicity is clear for all to see. Such a moment arrived for the PA's Mahmoud Abbas when he stood alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin and claimed that Israel had committed "50 Holocausts" against the Palestinians. Scholz later tweeted: "I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. For us Germans in particular, any relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable." Abbas was supposed to be the pragmatist, the moderate, compared to his predecessor, Yasser Arafat. In hindsight, perhaps Abbas' remarks should not have been so shocking. In 1982, Abbas wrote a doctoral thesis at Patrice Lumumba University in Soviet Moscow, titled "The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement," in which he asserted that under a million Jews had died in the Holocaust; a later 1984 introduction challenged the existence of the Nazi gas chambers. For those who don't know - for instance, those raised in the PA - the Nazi Third Reich carried out an industrialized genocide of most of Europe's Jews, slaughtering 6 million. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population has increased by nine times since the Partition of the British Mandate in 1947. Yet, today, the mathematically, historically, and ethically challenged Abbas is allowed to masquerade as a moderate statesman. Palestinian culture has been brainwashed by decades of official Holocaust denial and antisemitic incitement. For peace to materialize, a whole new generation of Palestinian leadership must step forward. The writer is a Jerusalem-based Palestinian political analyst and human rights pioneer.