Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON — Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s top envoy combating antisemitism, condemned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for comparing Israel to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief.
“PA President Abbas’s equating Israel with the lies of top Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is an affront to Holocaust victims and survivors,” Lipstadt wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “Especially during a time of rising antisemitic violence throughout the world, such rhetoric about the world’s only Jewish state is entirely unacceptable.”
Abbas spoke Monday at a United Nations event commemorating the 75th anniversary of what Palestinians call the “Nakba,” the word meaning “catastrophe” that denotes the displacement of Palestinians during and after Israel’s establishment. It was the first-ever event at the U.N. General Assembly commemorating the Nakba.
“Israeli and Zionist claims continue by saying that Israel made the desert bloom. As if Palestine was a desert and they made the desert bloom,” Abbas told the event in New York. “These are lies. They continue to lie, like Goebbels, and they continue to lie until people believe their lies.”
Abbas also said at the event that the United Nations should suspend Israel’s membership at the body until it allows the establishment of a Palestinian state and recognizes a Palestinian right of return.
The United States and a number of other nations boycotted the event.
Speaking Wednesday at a briefing for Jewish media, Lipstadt said Abbas’s statement was so shocking that U.S. officials accelerated clearing her tweet for publication, usually an arduous process. Lipstadt is one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust, and assumed her government role last year.
“We found it just outrageous,” she said.
Abbas claiming that Israel and Zionists continue to lie is analogous to the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. How many times has Abbas whipped his supporters into a Jew-hating frenzy lying about Israel, falsely claiming that Israel was preventing Palestinians from praying at the Temple Mount? How many times has Abbas’ media and school system defamed, using Nazi tropes and lies, Jews in order to incite his fellow Palestinians to murder Jewish civilians, regardless of age, sex or non-military status. The ” Nakba” that Abbas is referring to was Israel’s defense of Arab’s self described war of extermination in which six Arab armies invaded the infant Jewish state in order to wipe it and it’s people off the map. The Arab catastrophe was that they lost in their attempt to produce a second holocaust and a couple of other attempts too.
Implying that Israel is equivalent to Nazi Germany is very, very, cute, since Abbas and Hitler’s propaganda stooge shared each others views, especially those that pertained to Jews. Abbas is an antisemite, a man who could have had his own state several times but refused because he couldn’t permit a Jewish state within any borders anywhere in the Middle East. Calling anyone Goebbels is distasteful since he and his fellows were one of a kind but Abbas is the closest to that moniker that now exists on the planet. Kudos to Lipstadt for standing up for the truth.
The Palestinian Authority president also ad-libbed a highly significant reversal of his previously stated positions, a change of stance that shows him now rejecting not only any Israeli presence and claims in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, but also Israel’s legitimacy in its pre-1967 borders, while demanding the termination of Israel as a majority-Jewish state.
The Palestinians never accepted Israeli presence or claims in any of what they see as Muslim-Arab lands in Jerusalem, the West bank nor the land between the River and the Sea. That’s all the land that presently composes Israel. So in reality there was no reversal, just an acknowledgement of what their position has always been, No Jewish presence anywhere in the Middle East. That’s the real reason for the continuing conflict from 48 to the present.