Abbas Denied Holocaust

Rabbi Gelman regularly writes a thoroughly engaging column for online Newsweek and this week's entry is quite illuminating. While discussing his reasons for not wanting to defend the truth of the holocaust, Gelman makes the stunning comment that “Many do not know that the new prime minister of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, wrote a Holocaust-denying doctoral thesis.” This caught my attention, especially since the news of late has been focused around anything but the Israeli-Palestinian “Road to Peace” and its ongoing ups and downs.

Here’s the background to Gelman’s reference:

… Mahmud Abbas completed a doctoral thesis in 1982 titled “The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement”. In his thesis, Abbas wrote that the estimated number of Jews killed during World War II was “less than one million.” Abbas stated that the Zionist leadership collaborated with the Nazi regime to “facilitate the wide-spread destruction” of Jews. Abbas’ ‘research’ was later printed by a publisher located in Amman, Jordan.

In an introduction to his work published in 1984, Abbas raised doubts regarding the existence of the gas chambers. He asserted again that the number of Jews killed during the war was about one million.

Abbas claimed in his work that the Zionist leadership was interested in convincing the world that a large number of Jews were killed during the war in order to “attain larger gains” after the war and to “divide the booty.”
[George Mason University History News Network]

There’s more, but how much of this crap do you need to know? A little less ignorance, and a little more education, never hurt anyone. And forgiveness, on both sides, is a big part of the lesson. There is no other choice.