Does no one at The New York Times use Google?
On Sunday, the paper gave us “Mahmoud Abbas Shifts on Holocaust” — when a little work with a search engine would’ve shown that any shift came years ago.
Yes, the Palestinian Authority president last week acknowledged the Holocaust as “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era” in a statement made at the urging of New York celebrity Rabbi Marc Schneier, to much rejoicing in the international media. But he’s said it all before.
True, as Yair Rosenberg notes in Tablet, Abbas “has a PhD in Holocaust denial — literally.” Not that he’s ever denied the reality of the Nazi drive to exterminate European Jewry, but his 1982 doctoral thesis (expanded into a book) claims that the figure of 6 million dead Jews was “a fantastic lie” and that the Nazis and the Zionist movement were “partners in crime.”
But he’s long since backtracked a bit, saying that at the time the book was written, “we were at war with Israel. Today, I would not have made such remarks.”
In fact, he’s gone even further. More than a decade ago, in a 2003 interview with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz after he was appointed the PA’s prime minister, Abbas called the Holocaust “a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind.”
Eight years later, he told Dutch Public Broadcasting that “there were pogroms [and] genocide was committed during the war against the Jewish people by the Nazi regime.” He also said he accepted that 6 million Jews had been killed.
Now, Mahmoud Abbas may well be lying through his teeth. But the fact remains that this latest statement is nothing new at all, save for the fact that, as the Times noted, Abbas for the first time made an “offering of condolences.”
All of which doubtless is one reason why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was less than impressed with Abbas’ sympathy for slaughtered Jews, 70 years after the fact. Another is that Abbas’ statement also drew a parallel between the Nazis’ Jewish victims and the Palestinians, who “suffer from oppression and injustice.”
Then, too, the media and educational systems under Abbas’ direct control either ignore the Holocaust entirely or dismiss it as an outright lie, complete with paeans to Hitler.
But the most important reason why Netanyahu was so dismissive — and rightly so — was its timing: Abbas’ statement, released on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, served as a handy distraction from his just-announced reconciliation with Hamas — a step President Obama, in classic understatement, labeled “unhelpful.”
As Bibi noted, “Hamas denies the Holocaust while trying to create another Holocaust by destroying Israel.” And even as he was offering condolences to the Jews for the Holocaust, Abbas reiterated that “I’ll never recognize Israel as a Jewish state.”
All in all, Abbas’ statement is little more than a cynical repackaging of past statements that was spoon-fed to credulous reporters and would-be peacemakers. Yet it’s Netanyahu who’s being seen as petty and stubborn for refusing to accept Abbas’ supposedly outstretched hand.
Credit the prime minister for recognizing an empty gesture when he sees one — and for understanding that actions always speak louder than words, especially in the Middle East.