Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is currently under fire for blaming the Jews for the Holocaust. Abbas issued a milquetoast apology, but it’s worth noting that his recent Holocaust comments are the latest in a long line of anti-Semitic statements by the PA president.
Here are Abbas’ five most anti-Semitic quotes outside of his recent Holocaust remark.
1. “Certain rabbis in Israel have said very clearly to their government that our water should be poisoned in order to have Palestinians killed.” Abbas stated this anti-Semitic blood libel at a June 2016 speech to the European Union (EU). After facing criticism for this statement, Abbas walked it back, saying that such blood libels were “baseless” and that “he didn’t intend to do harm to Judaism.”
2. “The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours, and they have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem.” This quote is part of a speech Abbas made on Palestinian TV in September 2015 during a wave of violence at Temple Mount. His speech only further incited the matter, as he’s essentially stating that Jews and Israelis can’t defile the mosque “with their filthy feet.”
3. “Call yourselves what you want but I will not accept it…the ‘Jewish State’…I will not accept it.” Abbas said this in 2009 and stated it again in 2010, making it clear that no matter how much he claims to prefer a two-state solution, he does not believe the Jews have the right to determine their own homeland.
4. “If they [Jews] say that they made sacrifices in World War II, and we respect what they say, they should not treat us the way they were treated. We must not be a victim of the victim.” According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW)’s Itamar Marcus, Abbas told Polish journalists this in August 2015.
“It is striking that in his statement Abbas presents the Holocaust not as historical fact to be acknowledged but as something ‘Jews say’ which he is willing to ‘respect,’” Marcus wrote.
5. “We find that Zionists believe in the purity of the Jewish race, as Hitler believed in the purity of the Aryan race. Zionism calls to find a fundamental final solution to the Jewish question in Europe by immigration to Palestine. Hitler also called for this and implemented it… Anti-Semitism is persecution and oppression, and this is definitely something desirable to the Zionist movement.” This comes from Abbas’ 1984 book, which pushes the Holocaust-denial conspiracy theory that the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust is a fabricated figure.
