Following his anti-Semitic speech this week to Palestinian Liberation Organization in Ramallah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was re-elected to head the PLO. Now, Abbas hasresponded to a storm of international criticism—“If people were offended by my statement in front of the PNC, especially people of the Jewish faith, I apologize to them. I would like toassure everyone that it was not my intention to do so, and to reiterate my full respect for the Jewish faith, as well as other monotheistic faiths.”
Mr. Abbas’ partial apology comes in the wake of his speech in Ramallah where he said, in part, “The Jews of Europe brought persecution and the Holocaust upon themselves because of usury,banking and their ‘social function’.” Abbas 
went on to say, “Israel grew out of a Europeancolonial project that had nothing to do with Jewish history or aspirations.”
While a graduate student in Moscow decades ago, Abbas wrote in his Holocaust-denying thesis, "Following the war...word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that awar of extermination was aimed primarily at the Jews...The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is possible that the number of Jewish victims reachedsix million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller -- below one million."
"The historian and author Raoul Hilberg thinks that the figure does not exceed 890,000."
"It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement...is to inflate this figure [six million] so that their gains will be greater”
"This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunningconclusions -- fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."
"A partnership was established between Hitler's Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement...[the Zionists gave] permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, totreat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine."
“Having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner-- suffering victims in a battle -- it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment ofaccounting."
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which first translated Abbas’ hateful words into English in 1983 and denounced him after his Ramallah speech as an anti-Semite, asks the PA president “Willthe real Mahmoud Abbas please stand up?”
For more information, please contact the Center's Communications Department, 310-553-9036, join the Center on Facebook, www.facebook.com/simonwiesenthalcenter, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent direct to your Twitter feed.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the UnitedStates. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).
