HIR articles on antisemitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict

Why is Ariel Sharon Accused of War Crimes in Lebanon?
A Skeptical Look at the Evidence

On November 28, 2001, The Guardian published an article with the following headline:

As a result of such accusations, many now believe that Sharon is guilty of atrocities in Lebanon. However, as this article will show, the very evidence that the accusers brought forth shows that not only did Sharon have nothing to do with that massacre, he was actually trying to prevent human rights abuses.

The Guardian article I quote above tries very hard to convict Sharon. It is funny, therefore, that they begin by conceding that Sharon's forces did not carry out the massacre:

“In February 1983, the [Israeli] Kahan commission found that no Israeli was ‘directly responsible’ for the massacre, but determined that Sharon bore ‘personal responsibility.’ It ruled that he was negligent in ignoring the possibility of bloodshed in the [refugee] camps following the assassination of the Lebanese Forces’ leader, president-elect Bashir Gemayel, on September 14.”

Holding a soldier responsible for a possibility is absurd. Possibilities always exists, and no soldier can make them disappear.

But if a soldier will be held responsible for a possibility, one might at least hope that the possibility in question will be one that the soldier has some connection with. In other words, one hopes this will not be the possibility of an earthquake, or of the criminal behavior of a foreign army. But this is exactly what the Kahan commission did: it accused Sharon of ignoring the possibility of bloodshed in camps that he was not in charge of, by an army that he did not command, following “the assassination of the Lebanese Forces’ leader, president-elect Bashir Gemayel, on September 14,” an event entirely out of his control.

Isn't this more than a little bit crazy, for starters? One may conclude from this that Israelis are so concerned about protecting innocent civilians that they take it to the point of absurdity.

“The commander is also responsible if he has actual knowledge, or should have knowledge, through reports received by him or through other means, that troops or other persons subject to his control are about to commit or have committed a war crime and he fails to take the necessary and reasonable steps to insure compliance with the law of war or to punish violators thereof...”[2]

Notice the words “by troops or other persons subject to his control,” and also “are about to commit,” both of which make a point very different from such actions being merely “possible,” which they always are. A sensible and intelligible accusation against Sharon (whether just or not is a different matter) would talk about neglecting the obvious likelihood of bloodshed against civilians by soldiers under his command responsibility.

The Guardian vouches for the ‘evidence’ against Sharon. But can we trust the Guardian?
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Apparently aware that what is needed is an accusation in harmony with the requirements of something like the US Army Field Manual, the Guardian reports that the Belgian lawyers are trying to establish both that Sharon had command responsibility over the Lebanese forces, and also that he actually knew attacks against civilians were likely.

“…a stack of documents delivered to lawyers seeking to bring Sharon, now Israel's prime minister, to trial in Belgium for war crimes committed in Lebanon 19 years ago when he had overall responsibility for the IDF.

The documents, exclusively obtained by the Guardian, cover the period between June and November 1982 - from a meeting in which ‘the cabinet has decided to have the Lebanese army and the Phalangists participate in the entering of Beirut’ to the testimony to Israel’s Kahan commission of inquiry of a senior military intelligence officer, Colonel Elkana Harnof. Some are in Hebrew; others in English. Michael Verhaeghe, one of three lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the case against Sharon, has little doubt about the documents’ authenticity. They arrived anonymously in June, within 10 days of the suit being lodged under legislation that allows Belgium to prosecute foreigners for war crimes, wherever they were committed.”

The Guardian says that the lawyer who intends to use these anonymously delivered documents in order to bring charges against Sharon “has little doubt about the documents’ authenticity.”

Is anybody supposed to expect that the lawyer who intends to bring charges against Sharon by using these documents would express skepticism about their authenticity in public? And if not, of what value is it to learn that he is supposedly very sure that they are genuine? Or is the Guardian trying subliminally to whisper that they are authentic?

Not quite. the Guardian actually means to yell that the documents are supposedly authentic. This is what the Guardian says next:

“‘The documents give a very detailed account of a number of events which would be very difficult to fabricate - especially in that very short period of time,’ says Verhaeghe. Investigations by the Guardian in Israel and Lebanon have confirmed the identity of the intelligence officers named in the documents as well as the dates, times and locations of some of the meetings, those who attended them and some of their content. The typescript of the Hebrew documents matches that used at the time of Kahan. And the voices of many of the protagonists are unmistakable - among them the courtly Pierre Gemayel, patriarch of the Gemayel family, and Sharon, referred to throughout as DM.”

So we have, first of all, that “The documents, exclusively obtained by the Guardian,” have had their authenticity confirmed ... how? Through “Investigations by the Guardian.”

Can we believe the Guardian? Well, this is, after all, the same Guardian which, in the same article, confidently proclaims that Deir Yassin was

What is really spectacular are the two errors contained in the above statement, and which lay bare The Guardian’s true bias.

First, the phrase “the conquest of Palestine” telegraphs that the Zionist Jews supposedly fought an aggressive war of conquest in 1948, but even the Arabs do not agree with that! And this is no secret. Addressing the UN Security Council in April 1948, Jamal Husseini, Spokesperson for the Mufti [Hajj Amin’s] Arab Higher Committee (the organization that officially spoke for the Palestinian movement), said:

And they also told the whole world what the fighting would be about. Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, promised before that war:

It is not surprising that the Arabs meant to exterminate the Jews given that the Mufti Hajj Amin, founder of the Palestinian movement, and mentor and hero to Yasser Arafat, spent his time during WWII as one of the top leaders of Hitler’s Final Solution. He is directly responsible for the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of Jews.[5]

But not only does the Guardian present the war of 1948, in which Israeli Jews fought to save their lives from a genocidal attack, as “the [Jewish] conquest of Palestine.” Not only that. In addition, with zero comment, they present the allegation that Jews supposedly massacred 254 Palestinian Arab civilians at Deir Yassin as fact. And yet these allegations against the Jewish forces have always been hotly disputed, and by now the evidence is clear that they were fabricated. Among other pieces of evidence, those who originally fabricated the allegations have now confessed their lies to the press.[6]

And this - mind you - happened well before the Guardian wrote the article we are looking at here (see fn. 6).

Given The Guardian’s clear anti-Israel bias, then, one is entitled to be skeptical when anonymous documents which The Guardian says blame Israel's prime minister, and which were sent exclusively to The Guardian, have been deemed authentic by an internal investigation conducted by...The Guardian.

But even if we were to believe in the Guardian’s work with regard to these anonymously delivered documents as competent and honest, this newspaper is only claiming to have confirmed “some of the content.” That’s very interesting because the documents in fact make contradictory claims, so it is incumbent on The Guardian to tell us which content has been verified. But we are not told...

The evidence ‘against’ Sharon speaks in his defense!
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Finally, let us take a look at what these documents supposedly say. Is it really damning? Remember, the key questions here are three:

(1) Did Sharon have command responsibility for the Lebanese forces that are accused of carrying out the massacre?;

“In his testimony to [the Israeli] Kahan [Comission], Sharon claimed that no one imagined the Lebanese Forces would carry out a massacre in the camps. This claim is contradicted by numerous testimonies in the documents in Belgium - among them Sharon’s own complaint to Bashir Gemayel, minuted 10 weeks before the massacre, that ‘it is incumbent that we prevent several ugly things which have occurred - murders, rapes and stealing by some of your men.’ In the same month, in a meeting with American diplomats at the home of Johnny Abdo, Lebanon's military intelligence chief, Sharon proposed that the PLO fighters in Beirut be given ‘refuge’ in Israel. ‘Although we are at a friend’s house,’ he said, according to the report of the meeting, ‘rest assured that they would be more secure in our hands!’”

What is The Guardian trying to establish? That Sharon lied when he said that “no one imagined the Lebanese forces would carry out a massacre in the camps.” According to the Guardian, the supporting evidence is supposedly this: that Sharon said to Bashir Gemayel “it is incumbent that we prevent several ugly things which have occurred - murders, rapes and stealing by some of your men.”

This evidence therefore supports the idea that Sharon did not have good reasons to expect a widespread massacre against civilians.

The documents which the Guardian has also support the idea that Sharon did not command Gemayel. What Sharon said is, “It is incumbent that we prevent.” That is how one speaks to an ally, not to one’s subordinate. Sharon may not have minced words when he criticized Gemayel for the individual crimes of some of Gemayel's men, but Sharon did not issue a command. This should not be surprise anybody: we are talking, as the Guardian says, about Lebanon’s “president-elect Bashir Gemayel,” and it is indeed a stretch to imagine the president-elect of a country making himself the subordinate of a foreign soldier.

The point about giving refuge to the PLO fighters in Israel is far from being clear as to its meaning. But it appears to suggest - if authentic - that Sharon might have even been concerned that the PLO terrorists would be mercilessly killed, whereas he preferred that they be arrested.

It is also worth pointing out that Gemayel, the man whom Sharon admonished to be careful about protecting civilians, died assassinated on September 14th, 1982. The Lebanese militiamen went into Sabra and Shatila, and allegedly perpetrated a massacre there, just two days later, on September 16th. The relevant points here are three:

(1) It is not Sharon’s fault that Gemayel was assassinated, and it is Gemayel - not somebody else - who was admonished by Sharon to protect civilians;

(2) Although Sharon had impressed upon Gemayel the importance of protecting civilians, he had not issued a command, because Gemayel was not under Sharon’s orders;

(3) the Lebanese forces entered Sabra and Shatila only two days after Gemayel was assassinated which suggests that, even if Sharon had known that those who took over after Gemayel died were likely to conduct a massacre, there was precious little time in which to prevent the Lebanese attack, and it was probably complicated by the confusion resulting from Gemayel’s assassination.

Given all this, the conclusion of the Kahan commission, which accuses Sharon of being “negligent in ignoring the possibility of bloodshed in the camps following the assassination of the Lebanese Forces’ leader, president-elect Bashir Gemayel, on September 14,” seems harsh indeed. The Israelis apparently require that their soldiers be clairvoyant and all-powerful.

Why was Sharon accused?
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Since Sharon did not have command responsibility over the Lebanese forces accused of massacres in Sabra and Shatila, we should ask the question: Why did anybody accuse Sharon?

For an answer to this question, we can turn to James Harff, director of the public relations firm Rudder Finn, who explained the following in an interview with Jacques Merlino:

In other words, this expert in public relations explains that facts are entirely irrelevant. If somebody wanted the rest of the world to think that Sharon was guilty of 'war crimes', all they would have to do, according to Harff, is make the accusation. Where? Say, a Belgian court.

Even if the documentation actually contradicts the charge? Sure. Just give the documentation exclusively to the Guardian - assuming the Guardian is cooperative - and have this newspaper explain that this documentation, which they have investigated themselves, supposedly supports the accusation. People don't read that closely, and mostly they only read the headline. Nobody will notice. And what people will remember is that there is supposedly a lot of documentation accusing Sharon of war crimes.

The accusation is what counts, and "all denials are entirely ineffective" - James Harff said it.

And since he did, allow me to point out that Harff really does know what he is talking about. His firm took the antisemitic Islamist terrorist and Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic - a former ally of the German Nazis and proud of it - as client.[8] Harff then helped convince the world that the Bosnian Serbs were the ones supposedly running death camps.[1b] This was all done with zero evidence. The Emperor’s Clothes film “Judgment!” demonstrates that the effort to convince the world that British television station ITN had obtained photographs of the so-called death camps was a fraud.[1c] Harff has candidly explained to journalist Jacques Merlino that he was never interested in the authenticity of the photographs. His job was just to make the accusation.

What was done to the Bosnian Serbs, naturally, can be done to the Israeli Jews. As in the case of the Serbs, the Jews are fighting Islamist terrorists. Yasser Arafat, the terrorist mastermind, was always portrayed by the media and many governments as the 'moderate' - or at any rate moderate enough that his terrorist organization, the PLO, should be given a Palestinian state. An even more extreme clean-up job has been done for his successor, Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a Abu Mazen), but he is hardly different.[7]

How can world public opinion support the creation of a state led by a genocidal terrorist? Well, but suppose you tell them all of the following:

If you say all of that, and people believe it (which, given widespread antisemitism, is not tremendously hard so long as you keep repeating it), then you can get people around the world to agree to create a new state next to Israel and put a terrorist organization - the PLO - in charge.

This is also how things worked out in Yugoslavia. People all over the world were told that the Serbs were killing their ethnic neighbors, and that these neighbors were innocent doves (or at any rate not as bad as the Serbs!). This made people willing to support attacks on the Serbs, just as now they are willing to support attacks on tiny Israel.

The attack on Sharon is part of a symbolic political battle by those who wish, once again, to give the extermination of the Jews another try. Such extermination is Yasser Arafat's goal, inherited from his mentor and hero Hajj Amin al Husseini, the founder of the Palestinian movement, and one of the top leaders of Hitler's WWII Final Solution. Hajj Amin, as non-coincidence would have it, was especially active in Bosnia, where he personally recruited and trained thousands of Bosnian Muslim volunteers into SS units that slaughtered civilian Serbs, Jews, and Roma (Gypsies), merely for being Serbs, Jews, and Roma.

If Ariel Sharon is guilty of anything, it is of not defending himself more vigorously, and of yielding to demands that he abandon Gaza to the PLO terrorists. According to the evidence presented by his own accusers, he certainly had nothing to do with the alleged massacres at Sabra and Shatila.

Footnotes and Further Reading
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[1] The Guardian (London), November 28, 2001, Guardian Features Pages, Pg. 6, 1697 words, Inside Story: The Sharon files: A Belgian court will today decide whether to try Ariel Sharon for war crimes. Julie Flint uncovers secret documents that detail Israel's involvement in the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila, Julie Flint

[1a] “Les Verites Yougoslaves Ne Sont Pas Toutes Bonnes En Dire” (Albin Michel, Paris, 1994); pp. 126-127

[1b] "Who started the war in Bosnia? And who committed genocide?: Was it the Bosnian Serbs, as NATO and the mass media alleged, or the Bosnian Muslim followers of Alija Izetbegovic?"; Emperor's Clothes; 15 December 2004; by Francisco Gil-White.
http://www.tenc.net/gilwhite/alija3.htm

[1c] http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/freezer1.htm#film

[3] Security Council Official Records, S/Agenda/58, (April 16, 1948), p. 19

[4] Howard M Sachar, A History of Israel (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 333

[5] “Anti-Semitism, Misinformation, And The Whitewashing Of The Palestinian Leadership,” by Francisco Gil-White
http://emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/Israel.htm#part2

“Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin's Role as Leading Instigator of the Shoah (Holocaust)”
http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/bakera.htm

[6] “Was There a Massacre at Deir Yassin? The pro-PLO camp says yes; the historical documentation says otherwise,” by Francisco Gil-White
http://emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/deiryassin.htm

[7] [NOTE: The sources in this footnote are marked alphabetically, (a), (b), (c)..., and listed at the end.]

An Associated Press wire dated 27 November 2004 reports that:

…in the Balata refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus, about 1,000 Palestinians - including scores of armed, masked militants affiliated with Fatah - demonstrated for the continuation of the uprising.

The demonstrators also declared their support for Mahmoud Abbas [Abu Mazen], the new head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Fatah’s candidate in Jan. 9 presidential elections.(a)

The Fatah terrorists who came out to the streets to demonstrate their support for continuing with the killing of innocent Israelis, in the same breath, supported the new Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas. He was their candidate. And the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade branch of Fatah was particularly passionate about Abbas, taking his side vociferously when it seemed like Marwan Barghouti, another Fatah leader, might seek the post:

Abbas already has been nominated as Fatah's presidential candidate, so Barghouti must run as an independent. But as a leading Fatah member, he would likely undermine Abbas' prospects… Zakaria Zubeidi, the 29-year-old West Bank leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a violent group linked to Fatah, said he would back Abbas. "Barghouti ... should resign from Fatah," he told The Associated Press.(b)

The Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades, as Newsday once explained, is “the deadliest Palestinian militia,”(c) so what we see above is that the most extreme Palestinian Arab terrorists are also the most enthusiastic supporters of Mahmoud Abbas.

This same Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade - a terrorist organization that is part of Fatah, I remind you - quickly claimed responsibility for the February 25 suicide bombing that broke the cease-fire between Israel and Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority,(d) something that was subsequently confirmed when

As I have argued elsewhere, this shows that Mahmoud Abbas himself gave the order for the terrorist attack on 25 February, 2005.(f) Why? Because Mahmoud Abbas is the leader of Fatah, the PLO, and the Palestinian Authority, and the structure of Fatah, the PLO, and the Palestinian Authority is utterly authoritarian, so it is inconceivable that Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade carried out a suicide bombing on 25 February without Mahmoud Abbas giving the order. If it had, and if Mahmoud Abbas disagreed with such actions, then he would naturally have castigated the Brigades publicly. Instead, Abbas’s Palestinian Authority pretended that the Lebanese Hezbollah - a terrorist group that was denying responsibility - was responsible:

A Palestinian official speaking on condition of anonymity said preliminary inquiries pointed to the involvement of Hezbollah in the attack, although the radical Lebanese Shiite group denied any involvement.(g)

So what we have is that Mahmoud Abbas has already broken the cease-fire.

This should not be surprising, because Mahmoud Abbas is a committed antisemitic terrorist, which explains why he was Arafat’s second-in-command, and why his PhD thesis is an exercise in Holocaust denial.(h)

And Mahmoud Abbas is who invented the strategy of talking 'peace' in order to prepare the ground for genocide. The following article from MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) translates an article from an Arabic daily where this was explained to its Arab-speaking audiences :

In an article in the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, reprinted in the Palestinian daily Al-Quds on July 4, 1999, the journalist Saleh Qallab discusses the importance of the polarization of Israeli society - which was evident in the last general elections. The author’s analysis focuses on the political thought of PLO Executive Committee Secretary General, Mahmoud Abbas, aka “Abu Mazen,” who was the first to claim that the fragmentation of Israeli society is relevant to the Arab strategy in the peace process.(i)

In other words, the point of the peace process, for Mahmoud Abbas, is that it will fragment Israeli society. ‘Peace’ is a means, not the end. The end is the destruction of Israel, as called-for in the PLO Charter, of which Mahmoud Abbas has always been a high official (see above). Thus, the ‘peace’ strategy, for Mahmoud Abbas, is a good one to the extent that it helps fragment Israeli society, making it more vulnerable. The MEMRI translation continues:

“The Arab interest in the Israeli elections focused on political aspects,” writes Qallab, “but neglected one important issue: the unprecedented racial and religious polarization that showed Israel as a mosaic of different races and groups... Israel was seen [in the last elections] as it was never seen before - divided, flooded with internal feuds, and composed of people who have nothing to do with one another.”

“Most Arabs failed to notice this phenomenon, with the exception of the PLO Abu Mazen, who [recently] wrote a 73 page study of the racial and religious polarization in Israel... Abu Mazen was the first to focus on the mosaic-nature of the Israeli society and one of his studies of this topic earned him a Ph.D. from a Soviet university.”

So Abu Mazen, according to this Arabic article in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, is a specialist on how to use the talk of ‘peace’ to create divisions in Israeli society, the better to exploit those divisions with a view towards the eventual destruction of the Jewish state.

Qallab states that Abu Mazen is a pioneer of the realistic school, which, in his opinion, included former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, “who…told some PLO leaders, including Yasser Arafat, Abu Iyad, and Khaled Al-Hassan, that it was necessary to bring the Israelis down from their tanks to the ground and cause them a sense of security and peace, to allow their social maladies to appear and to prevent their unification in the face of an [external] danger.”

There is no question that this strategy has worked. Qallab writes:

“It is clear that the racial and religious polarization, which was in the forefront of the last elections in Israel, did not develop in a vacuum but rather was the accumulated result of a [process] that started with the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations, continued with the Oslo Accords and later the peace treaty with Jordan...”

(…)

“In the introduction to his book Racial and Religious Polarization in Israel, Abu Mazen poses a question: ‘What may better increase and escalate the conflicts and racial and religious contrasts in the Israeli society: a state of war or a state of peace?’…”

There can be no clearer statement of Abu Mazen’s purpose: to “increase and escalate the conflicts and racial and religious contrasts in the Israeli society.” And Saleh Qallab, the author of the translated article, makes clear below that all-out war has been abandoned only as a strategic necessity in the short-term:

“…There is no doubt that the war [with Israel] was essential and that it might be essential [again] in the future. However, since the current stage is the stage of peace, this process must be exhausted and there should be an advantage gained from all these current conflicts, including the deep dispersal in the composition of Israeli society.”

“…All that is required from us is to bring the Israelis to the absolute conviction that we Arabs really want peace, because such conviction will deepen the dispute in Israeli society and bring the Israelis down from their tanks and out of their fortresses.”

Soften and divide the Israelis with talk of peace, then kill them—this is the strategy. What is the remaining obstacle?

“…This mission is not easy, because the Israeli right knows the truth… The Arabs, however, must give this phase a chance. They must convince the majority of Israelis that they… want a just peace based on what can be referred to as a historic settlement, on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.”

This is more than clever. UN Resolution 242 is in fact a radical attack against Israel, designed to strip it of territory that the Pentagon, in 1967, determined was essential to the defense of Israel, and without which it could not survive.(j) So even the overt posture of ‘peace’ is in fact an attack in its specific proposals. ‘Peace’ only makes its appearance, in the Arab strategy, when the word ‘peace’ is pronounced in public for the purposes of duping well-meaning Jews. Of course, the danger in this strategy lies in the possibility that those well-meaning Jews will be made aware of what is really going on. Therefore, Saleh Qallab recommends:

“…This issue should not even be discussed at this stage while the peace process is still underway…”

Can things be any clearer? Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is the author of a strategy designed to fool well-meaning Jews into believing that the Palestinian Arab leadership really wants peace, and which strategy produced the Oslo Process, thanks to which the Israelis were made to suffer the violence of the Second Intifada.

Sources:

(a) Associated Press Online, November 27, 2004 Saturday, INTERNATIONAL NEWS, 991 words, Palestinian Security Unit to Be Disbanded, IBRAHIM BARZAK; Associated Press Writer, GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip.

(b) Barghouti Seeking Palestinian Presidency, Associated Press Online, December 1, 2004 Wednesday, INTERNATIONAL NEWS, 836 words, MOHAMMED DARAGHMEH; Associated Press Writer, RAMALLAH, West Bank

(c) Newsday (New York, NY), September 8, 2002 Sunday, NASSAU AND SUFFOLK EDITION, Pg. A05, 1333 words, WEST BANK; Inside the Crucible; An occasional series on te Israel-Palestine conflict; Militia Goes More Quietly; Al-Aqsa changes tactics after losses, By Matthew McAllester. MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT

(d) “The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades…claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to AFP.” Source: Palestinians denounce Tel Aviv suicide attack, Agence France Presse -- English, February 25, 2005 Friday, 11:03 PM GMT, 123 words, GAZA Feb 25

(e) Tel Aviv suicide bomber identified, Xinhua General News Service, February 26, 2005 Saturday, 5:00 AM EST, WORLD NEWS; Political, 196 words, RAMALLAH.

(f) “Can Israel Survive if it Does Not Defend Itself?”; By Francisco Gil-White; The Soapbox; 27 February, 2005.
http://dolphin.upenn.edu/~soapbox/Articles/CanIsraelSurvive.htm

(g) Palestinian bomber told mother: 'I won't be home for dinner', Agence France Presse -- English, February 26, 2005 Saturday, 2:25 PM GMT, 487 words, DEIR AL-GHUSSUN, West Bank Feb 26

(h) The following are excerpts from the following article: “A Holocaust-Denier as Prime Minister of “Palestine?”; by Dr. Rafael Medoff; March 2003
http://www.wymaninstitute.org/articles/2003-03-denier.php

[Excerpt begins here]

While European Union officials praised Yasir Arafat’s decision to appoint his first-ever prime minister, historians of the Holocaust winced at the news that a leading candidate for the job is the author of a book denying that the

Nazis murdered six million Jews.

The candidate is Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), Arafat’s second in command, and his book, published (in Arabic) in 1983, is titled ‘The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement.’ It was originally his doctoral dissertation, completed at Moscow Oriental College, in the Soviet Union.

According to a translation of the text provided by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Abbas’s book repeatedly attempts to cast doubt on the fact that the Nazis slaughtered six million Jews. He writes: “Following the war, word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that a war 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 reached six million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller--below one million.” Abbas denies that the gas chambers were used to murder Jews, quoting a “scientific study” to that effect by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson.

Abbas then asserts: “The historian and author, Raoul Hilberg, thinks that the figure does not exceed 890,000.” This is, of course, utterly false. Professor Hilberg, a distinguished historian and author of the classic study ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, has never said or written any such thing.

Abbas believes the number six million is the product of a Zionist conspiracy: “It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater,” he writes. “This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions--fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.” Another falsehood. In fact, no serious scholar proposes such a figure.

After reducing the magnitude of the Nazi slaughter so that it no longer seems to have been a full-scale Holocaust, Abbas seeks to absolve the Nazis by blaming the Zionist leadership for whatever killings did take place. According to Abbas, “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, to treat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine.” In addition to encouraging the persecution of Jews so they would emigrate to the Holy Land, the Zionist leaders actually wanted Jews to be murdered, because --in Abbas’s words--”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 of accounting.”

(…)

Yet some in the media have treated Abbas with kid gloves, to say the least. The official BCC News Profile of Abbas reports: “A highly intellectual man, Abbas studied law in Egypt before doing a Ph.D. in Moscow. He is the author of several books.” The New York Times recently characterized Abbas as “a lawyer and historian ... He holds a doctorate in history from the Moscow Oriental College; his topic was Zionism.” Neither the BBC nor the Times have offered any further explanation as to the contents of Abbas’s writings.

Bestowing the title “historian” upon Mahmoud Abbas awards his writings a stature they do not deserve, and deals a grievous insult to every genuine historian.

(…)

[Excerpt ends here]

(i) “Arab Peace Strategy and the Fragmentation of Israeli Society”; MEMRI; July 21, 1999; No.40.
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP4099

(j) To read about UN Resolution 242:
http://emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/ally.htm#1967b

[8] "Who was Izetbegovic? Moderate Democrat or Radical Islamist?"; Emperor's Clothes; 10 March 2003; by Francisco Gil-White
http://emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/alija1.htm