While many heard Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas’s March 19th response to US Ambassador David Friedman’s comments regarding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the significance of these comments appears to have been missed.
In calling Ambassador Friedman “a son of a dog settler”, it was not the revelation of Abbas’s disdain toward the Ambassador that was shocking, but rather, his choice of words. While Abbas has in the past stood up against anti-Semitism in the Palestinian Authority, famously recalling his ambassador to Chile for quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, his own history of anti-semitic diatribes is notable.
Past outbursts have included calling the State of Israel the result of a Western conspiracy to settle Jews in Arab lands and denying any Jewish historical connection to the land whatsoever. If we examine Abbas’s history a bit further, we can see even more severe instances of blatant anti-Semitism, leading among them his 1984 book, based on his own doctoral thesis, positing that the murder of six million Jews was a “fantastic lie”.
To continue reading this article, click here.
Contributed by Cambridge University CAMERA Fellow Shlomo Roiter.
