Israel Matzav

No difference between Hamas and Fatah on the Holocaust

Lefty blogger Matthew Yglesias notes that Hamas is embracing Holocaust denial. According to Yglesias, 'Israeli officials' are using Hamas' Holocaust denial as a pretext for why western governments shouldn’t reconsider their attitudes to dealings with Hamas.

But if Israel were really using Holocaust denial as a 'pretext' for not talking to Hamas, it wouldn't be talking to Fatah either. 'Moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen is a Holocaust denier. He even earned his doctorate at the Institute for Oriental Studies in Moscow in 1982 by writing a thesis that denied the Holocaust.

The institute was headed by Yevgeny Primakov, a Jew, an Arabist, an avowed friend of Saddam Hussein and other Arab rulers, and eventually the prime minister of Russia. Of all these qualities, Abu Mazen emphasized mainly Primakov's Jewish origin.

The heading of his doctoral thesis was: "Zionist leadership and the Nazis." The introduction dealt, among other topics, with a loaded issue: How many Jews perished in the Holocaust. In the Soviet period, especially in the anti-Israel institute that Abu Mazen attended, they often dealt with such questions. The Soviet Union, more than any other country, was addicted to Holocaust denial. The victims were not recognized by their origin, but rather by their nationality. And this is what the diligent researcher Mahmoud Abbas wrote:

World War Two caused the death of 40 million people from different parts of the world. Ten million Germans, 20 million Soviets, and more…Rumors at the end of the war said that 6 million of the world's Jews were among the victims in the war of extermination that was waged against the Jewish people and later on against other peoples. The fact is that no one can confirm this number or deny it. The number could be 6 million, but it could be much smaller, perhaps even smaller than one million. The controversy over the number must not divert us from the severity of the crime committed against the Jewish people. The murder of a human being is a crime that the cultured world must not accept.

"Many researchers who discussed the number reached the unconventional conclusion that it is no more than several hundred thousand," he wrote. Later on, Abu Mazen quotes a Holocaust denier who claimed that "at first the Zionists spoke about 12 million Jews who were killed in the death camps. They later narrowed the number down to 6 and to 4 million. It is not possible that the Germans murdered more Jews than existed in the world at the time." He quotes another Holocaust denier who counted 896,000 Jewish victims in all.

And Abu Mazen is hardly the only Holocaust denier among Fatah's leadership.

Let's go to the videotape (from official Palestinian Authority Television, owned and operated by Fatah).



I don't know why Israel talks to Fatah and not to Hamas. They are both terror organizations and we should not be talking to either of them. But you cannot claim that we don't talk to Hamas because of their Holocaust denial. By that standard, we would not be talking to Fatah either.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:15 AM