You shall become a horror, a proverb, and a taunt among all the people where the LORD drives you. (Deu 28:37)
Mahmoud Abbas added his exceptional insight to the world’s understanding of the Holocaust on April 30th during a meeting of the Palestinian National Council in Ramallah. The Palestinian Authority President told other Palestinian leaders that the Holocaust was not driven by anti-Semitism among Germans but by frustration with respect to the financial practices of European Jews. “Jews who moved to east and west Europe were facing a massacre every 10 or 15 years from a different country,” Abbas said. “The hatred towards the Jews is not because of their religion but because of their social roles related to taxes and banks.”
Abbas is currently serving the 12th year of his 4-year term as President of the Palestinian Authority and is a documented expert on Jew-hatred. His 1984 epic, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism was derived from degree work Abbas completed in 1982 at Patrice Lumumba University, a paper entitled, The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement.
In his book, Abbas submits that the Holocaust had been exaggerated, that Zionists created “the myth” of six million murdered Jews, calling the claim a “fantastic lie,” and he further asserts that the Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust were victims of a “Zionist-Nazi plot.” These claims, like the concept of Palestine itself, are, of course, unsupported and unoriginal, but the UN’s reaction to Abbas’s recent rant is fresh new antisemitism. After being roundly criticized Abbas issued a public apology, offering regrets “if people were offended by [his] statement,” but he retracted none of his claims.
Abbas’s hollow penance proved sufficient at the United Nations, an organization long committed to assaulting Jews and Israel more artfully, as the United States failed to win Security Council backing to brand Abbas’s remarks as “unacceptable.” Kuwait, a non-permanent council member that represents the Arab Group of countries, carried the ball for Abbas by objecting to the U.S. draft statement, arguing that Abbas had already apologized and that the draft statement was “one-sided,” which we can assume means that it lacked sufficient criticism of Jews and Israel.
Abbas is not alone. A recent Anti-Defamation League report, Quantifying Hate: A Year of Anti-Semitism on Twitter, estimates that “a minimum of approximately 4.2 million English language anti-Semitic tweets were disseminated between January 29, 2017 and January 28, 2018. The analysis showed that within predefined seven-day periods, the number of tweets expressing anti-Semitic sentiment ranged from a low of 36,800 in week 26 (July 23-29) to a high of 181,700 in week 45 (December 03-09).” That’s an average of over 81,000 tweets each week expressing anti-Semitic sentiment.
“Of course, 4.2 million tweets is a very small number out of the trillions of tweets sent on the platform each year,” the report said. “But that does not negate the lived experience of Jews who have found Twitter to be a toxic environment.”
There is perhaps no better example of the current toxic global revival of all things antisemitic than the abundance of hateful and blatantly dishonest pseudo-news videos on social media which assault Israel’s ongoing struggle to defend itself against existential threats of terrorism.
The lie, though doomed to failure, remains alive and well for now.
So it shall be when all of these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind in all nations where the Lord your God has banished you and you return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul according to all that I command you today, you and your sons, then the Lord your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion on you, and will gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you.
If your outcasts are at the ends of the earth, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you back…into the land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will prosper you and multiply you more than your fathers. (Deu 30:1-5)
Thanks for the informative, insightful article.