Avi Benlolo: Mahmoud Abbas openly flaunts his antisemitism for all to see

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In Canada, we proudly espouse values of pluralism, co-existence and anti-discrimination. Why, then, does our government continue to funnel money to a serial racist’s dictatorship to the tune of $30 million a year? I am, of course, referring to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Recently, Abbas openly and unabashedly said that Adolf Hitler “fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money.” For centuries, these words have been spoken by rabid antisemites bent on inciting violence and promoting hate.

These lies were delivered in a speech he gave to Fatah’s Revolutionary Council on Aug. 24, according to a translated video published by the Middle East Media Research Institute and exposed on Twitter by Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

In the speech, Abbas also accused Ashkenazi Jews of not being of Middle Eastern origin, putting forward the false notion that European Jews have no historic ties to the Land of Israel, in a blatant attempt to delegitimize their right to live in their homeland.

Like other antisemites before him, Abbas spreads myths and innuendos among his people and others in the Arab wold, stating, in this case, that Ashkenazi Jews hail from the Khazars, a community said to have converted to Judaism. By attempting to delegitimize a large portion of Israel’s Jewish population, in effect, Abbas is trying to invalidate Israel’s very right to exist.

“The truth that we should clarify to the world is that European Jews are not Semites … they have nothing to do with Semitism,” said Abbas. “They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true. It was clearly explained that (the Europeans) fought (the Jews) because of their social role, and not their religion.”

In our forthcoming report on Palestinian terrorism, my friend Judea Pearl (father of Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by Islamist terrorists) put this falsehood into context: the Palestinians have an “incendiary mentality that Israel is a temporary colonial enclave that has no right to exist, that Israel is the malignant equal of Nazi Germany, that Israel perpetrates a perpetual Holocaust upon Palestinian Arabs, that the Palestinians’ only recourse to liberation is the elimination of Israel and, hence, that their greatest heroes and role models are murderers of Jews.”

For years, Abbas was known for his Holocaust denial. His 1982 dissertation for his doctorate from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow claimed that Jews helped perpetuate the Holocaust. “The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule, in order to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination,” wrote Abbas.

His true colours emerged more concisely and boldly during his speech to Fatah’s leadership, but his long history of antisemitism and Holocaust distortion has been clear for decades. Last year, he had no problem openly telling German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that Israel had committed “50 Holocausts.”

“If you wonder why the Oslo peace process hit a dead end and stayed there, consider that Mr. Abbas and Fatah have been described for decades as ‘moderates,’ ” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board recently. “His predecessor, Yasser Arafat, once stunned President Clinton’s negotiators by denying even that Jerusalem had been the site of the Jewish Temple.”

The problem is that no one is stunned any longer by the antisemitism, Holocaust distortion and denial of Jewish indigeneity to the Land of Israel that is so often espoused by Palestinian leaders. The money from the West, including from Canada, keeps flowing and indirectly arriving into the coffers of these liars.

Canadian taxpayers are largely oblivious to our government’s support of a leadership that inspires terrorism and goes against the grain of our foundational values and national identity. Sadly, these words will fall on deaf ears. But one day, maybe decades from now, a historian will find them and ask the same question we now ask about the Holocaust: why did so many people look away?

National Post

Avi Benlolo is the founder and chairman of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.