Simon Wiesenthal Center condemns Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’ remarks

The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) has condemned Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas's remarks which attempted to justify the Holocaust.

The remarks were made during an address to the Fatah Revolutionary Council in which he said that Adolf Hitler killed European Jews not because of antisemitism, but because of their “social functions” in society, such as money lending.

“These people were fought because of their social function related to money, and usury,” Abbas said in the speech. “From Hitler’s point of view, they were sabotaging, and therefore he hated them.”

"The truth that we should spread to the world is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism," he said.

"As for the Eastern Jews, they are Semites," he added, referring to Mizrachi Jews from the wider Middle East.

“The next generation of Palestinian leaders - including those who want Abbas as president-for-life - are watching to see if this antisemitic outburst carries any ramifications. It does for Jewish people inside and outside Israel,” said SWC Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action, Rabbi Abraham Cooper.

Persistent Holocaust denier

Mahmoud Abbas has been a long-time believer in holocaust denial. He received his doctorate from the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of Oriental Studies for his 1982 thesis titled The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945.

In this thesis, which was later published as a book in 1984, he questions not only the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust but questioned whether the gas chambers even existed. 

He accuses the Zionist leadership of sacrificing the European Jews in the Holocaust in order to "claim" a national home. He further accuses the Zionist movement of actively preventing the escape of Jews from Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Baltic countries as well as claiming that Jews didn't suffer any kind of harassment or persecution in Arab countries.

He also claimed that the origin of the conflict was the privileges that Jews received from the French and British colonialists.

This flies squarely in the face of standard historical understandings of the Holocaust and the origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict. It also ignores numerous examples of discrimination and persecution at the hands of Arab local and national governments, such as the Farhud, the numerous riots in Mandatory Palestine, and even historical events like the Damascus affair. 

The Khazar theory

Abbas also accused Ashkenazi Jews of not being of Middle Eastern origin, putting forward a long-abandoned historical theory that European Ashkenazi Jews were not descended from the ancient Israelites but from 8th Century converts to Judaism among the Khazars, a nomadic Turkic people.

This is in itself a controversial view as some historians have begun questioning whether the Khazars even converted to Judaism. Professor (emeritus) Shaul Stampfer at the Hebrew University is one of those academics.

He questions the main source of the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, the Kuzari. He finds that most of the evidence is not strong and follows it up by pointing out the lack of hard historical evidence, such as coins or burials.

Stampfer also points out that Maimonides, as well as Byzantine and Georgian sources never mention a Jewish kingdom nearby, neither does the Babylonian Jewish community.

If we believe Stampfer's criticism, then this makes Abbas's assertions that Ashkenazi Jews are really descended from Turkic nomads, even more clearly an attempt to disassociate Jews from their historic homeland.