Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, where he told him that Israel “committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian villages, 50 holocausts.” In a joint press conference, Abbas described the way Palestinians are treated by the Israeli government as “apartheid,” a claim Scholz immediately rejected.
“Of course, regarding Israeli politics we have a different assessment. I want to say clearly that I won’t use the word ‘apartheid’ and I don’t believe it is right to use the term to describe the situation,” Scholz said.
Scholz appeared visibly upset by Abbas’ use of the term “Holocaust” to describe the killings of civilians, restrictions on the rights of PA Arabs, and Israeli settlement in Judea and Samaria, but he didn’t denounce that lie as he did the “apartheid” claim.
Meanwhile, Abbas did not express regret for the deadly attack by PLO terrorists on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Abbas, then a Fatah official, was in charge of the finances of that terror attack.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Germany refuses to apologize for 1972 Munich massacre and accused Israel of committing “Holocausts”
Appalling
— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) August 16, 2022
Deutsche Welle’s correspondent Nina Haase said that “when President Abbas used the word ‘Holocaust’ for the actions of the Israeli government it looked as though Scholz wanted to respond, but he didn’t, and then the presser was over.”
“Normally a German leader would challenge such undiplomatic language,” Haase said. “He didn’t look good here. But it’s also unclear whether Abbas did his cause any favors by knowingly provoking the German chancellor this way. It might have an effect on Scholz’s willingness to give full-throated support to Mahmoud Abbas in the future.”
Scholz later told the newspaper Bild: “For us Germans, in particular, any relativization of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable.”
Prime Minister Yair Lapid tweeted in response: “Mahmoud Abbas accusing Israel of having committed ‘50 Holocausts’ while standing on German soil is not only a moral disgrace but a monstrous lie. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including one and a half million Jewish children. History will never forgive him.”
It should be noted that Abbas’s 1982 doctoral thesis written at Patrice Lumumba University, in the Soviet Union, was submitted under the title “The connections between Nazism and Zionism between the years 1933 – 1945.” The work was the basis for a book he later wrote in Arabic called “The Other Face: The Secret Connections between the Nazis and the Zionist Movement Leadership.” Abbas’s book claimed that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of the Jewish people, in exchange for the signing of an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Jewish Agency for the transfer of the property of tens of thousands of Jews from Germany to Eretz Israel. In the introduction to the book, Abbas accused the Zionist movement of exaggerating the number of murdered Jews and the severity of the Holocaust.
Germany’s ambassador to Israel Steffen Seibert, who served as Angela Merkel’s spokesperson, tweeted: “What President Abbas said in Berlin about ‘50 holocausts’ is wrong and unacceptable. Germany will never stand for any attempt to deny the singular dimension of the crimes of the Holocaust.”
Conservative German lawmaker Armin Laschet also tweeted his outrage at Abbas’s comments, saying he “would have gained sympathy if he had apologized for the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics 1972. Accusing Israel of ‘50 Holocausts’ instead is the most disgusting speech ever heard in the German Chancellery.”
Since 1945, that is.
