And these are the ‘moderate’ and ‘good’ Palestinians of the Palestinian Authority.
By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine
In June 1-2, 1941, the Jews of Baghdad were set upon by Arabs, who murdered hundreds of them and wounded thousands, in what has come to be known as the “Farhud,” which is Arabic for “violent dispossession.”
After Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, leaders of Arab countries took revenge on the Jewish communities under their rule.
Thousands of Jews were forced to emigrate as a result of harassment, imprisonment (in Egypt about 600 Jews were put in prison for one to three years), acts of murder (in Libya and Morocco), cancellation of citizenship (Iraq and Egypt), expulsion, and confiscation of property (Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Syria).
Some three weeks after Israel’s establishment, on June 7-8, 1948, pogroms occurred in the Moroccan towns of Oujda and Jerada.
Forty-two Jews were murdered and hundreds wounded. Several days later, 14 Jews were murdered in Tripoli in Libya.
In June and July 1948, in response to the Egyptian army’s failure to destroy the nascent Jewish state, the Jewish areas of Cairo were hit by Muslim Brotherhood bombings, acts of sabotage, and attacks; tens of Jews were killed and wounded.
On January 27, 1969, nine Jews, some of them minors, were hanged in the Baghdad city square on the concocted charge of collaboration with Israel.
That is a very small sample of such Arab-attacks on Jews, that have been going on all over the Arab world (including Islamic Spain) for more than a thousand years, with a very sharp increase in the 20th century.
Yet Mahmoud Abbas says that Jews were “never attacked” in Arab lands. “Jews provoked the Holocaust, Palestinian leaders say (again),” by Rafael Medoff, Jewish Journal, March 7, 2024:
The real reason for the Holocaust, Abbas said, was the Jews’ own “social behavior, [charging] interest and financial matters.” Those Jewish actions are what provoked the Nazis, he claimed.
Just last year, the P.A. chairman repeated that perspective in a speech to Fatah’s Revolutionary Council (on Aug. 24, 2023).
“They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true,” Abbas asserted. “[The Nazis] fought [the Jews] because of their social role, and not their religion… The [Nazis] fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money and so on and so forth.”
Somehow, that train of thought coexists peacefully in Abbas’s mind alongside the view he articulated in his infamous PhD dissertation-turned-book, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” published in 1984.
There he argued that fewer than one million Jews were killed by the Nazis, and they were the victims of a secret partnership between David Ben-Gurion and Adolf Hitler.
Asked about the book by a Lebanese television interviewer in 2013, Abbas insisted that he stands by what he wrote, and even has written “seventy more books that I still haven’t published” on the topic….
The real partnership was not the non-existent one between Ben Gurion and Hitler — a preposterous idea — but that between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs between the 1920s and the end of World War II, and Hitler.
Al-Husseini met Hitler, applauded his Final Solution, raised several Waffen SS battalions from Bosnian Muslims, and became friendly with Himmler and Eichmann; he even visited the Trebbin concentration camp to see the good work the Germans were doing.
Abbas told a Lebanese interviewer that he continues to believe what he wrote in his doctoral thesis that was turned into a book.
And in an example of can-you-top-this absurdity, he said that he had written “seventy more books on the subject” of the secret links between the Zionists and the Nazis.
“Seventy more books”? What a very busy scholar Mahmoud Abbas must be.
Where has he found the time, between ordering the killings of dissidents like Nizar Banat, engaging in his persiflage with foreign leaders, and helping himself to hundreds of millions of dollars from the aid money meant for all the Palestinians?
And these are the “moderate” and “good” Palestinians of the Palestinian Authority, the ones whom the Bidenites hope will take over Gaza once the IDF has put paid to Hamas, despite the failure of anyone in the PA, including Mahmoud Abbas, to condemn the October 7 atrocities.
A slender reed, Messrs. Biden and Blinken. You are pinning your hopes, to change metaphors in midstream, to a very slender reed.