Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s latest anti-Semitic rant should be a wake-up call to anyone who is sufficiently deluded to believe it would be a good idea for Australia to formally recognise a non-existent Palestinian state. His profoundly insulting assertion, at a meeting of his Fatah party’s Revolutionary Council, that Hitler ordered the mass slaughter of Jews not because of any murderous enmity towards them and Judaism but because of their “social role” as “moneylenders and usurers”, was a reprehensible distortion, calculated to cause maximum offence. The claim has been discredited by a century of scholarship. It’s a theory “one expects to find only in online fever swamps”, The Wall Street Journal said.
Mr Abbas did not let reality stand in the way of anti-Semitism. “They say Hitler killed the Jews (just) because they were Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true. It was clearly explained that (the Europeans) fought (the Jews) because of their social role, and not their religion,” he claimed. “Even Hitler said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money … (The Holocaust) was not about Semitism and anti-Semitism.” This from a man who claims to epitomise all that is worthy about Palestinian aspirations for statehood and is lionised by governments and leaders across the world as he seeks – and all too often gets – the formal diplomatic recognition that has been sought from countries like Australia.
Read the editorial in The Australian.