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PortugueseA photo purporting to show Abbas’ health showed something more significant – blatant and ugly anti-Semitism.
By: United with Israel Staff and the Tower
A picture of Palestinian Authority (PA) head Mahmoud Abbas at the hospital, published to subdue concerns about his health, shows the leader reading a newspaper with an anti-Israel cartoon.
While Abbas appears to be reading one side of the paper, there is a cartoon facing the camera depicting a menacing-looking Israeli soldier replacing a baby’s milk bottle with poison.
Assaf Gibor, an Israeli journalist who exposed the incident, tweeted that “everybody published the pictures of Abu Mazen [Abbas] recovering at the hospital, in order to say that the moderate leader is still here. Now zoom in on the cartoon in the newspaper he holds. An Israeli soldier replaces bottle of milk with poison to the Palestinian baby.”
The cartoon was described as depicting the reported death of Leila al-Ghandour, an eight-month-old baby, from inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli troops at a Hamas-led riot.
Subsequent to the initial reporting of the claim, an unidentified Gaza doctor told reporters that the girl had died from a pre-existing condition. Her name was later removed by Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry from the list of the “Shahids,” those killed by the IDF.
Abbas, who was admitted to the hospital last week with a high fever, is being treated for pneumonia.
Abbas’ Pervasive Anti-Semitism
The Palestinian leader is no stranger to anti-Semitism. Late last month, he delivered an-anti-Semitic speech to the Palestinian leadership in which he alleged that the Jews’ own conduct caused anti-Semitism and that Jewish usury caused the Holocaust.
Abbas authored The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, which claims that the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust had been exaggerated and that Zionists created “the myth” of six million murdered Jews, which he called a “fantastic lie.”
He further claimed that those Jews which were killed by the Nazis were actually the victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot aimed to fuel vengeance against Jews and to expand their mass extermination.
The book also discussed topics such as the Haavara Agreement, in which the Third Reich agreed with the Jewish Agency to facilitate Jewish emigration from Germany to British Mandate Palestine.
The book is considered classic Holocaust denial.
Addressing the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the PLO parliament, Abbas dismissed Israel’s existence as “a colonial project intended to plant a foreign agent in [the Middle East],” but then claimed he was “not saying here that Israel should be removed. Israel exists, and all I want is a state so that we can live together in peace.”
Abbas touched on a number of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories during what he called a “history lesson,” attempting to prove that the 3,000-year-old Jewish connection to the Land of Israel doesn’t exist.
He went on to say that the Holocaust was not the result of anti-Semitism, but rather of the Jews’ “social behavior, [charging] interest, and financial matters.”
Abbas further claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler facilitated the immigration of Jews to Israel by reaching a deal with the Anglo-Palestine Bank under which Jews who moved to the British Mandate of Palestine could transfer all their assets there.
This speech brought the New York Times to publish an editorial calling on Abbas to resign.
Under the title “Let Abbas’s Vile Words Be His Last as Palestinian Leader,” the Times’ piece said that by “feeding reprehensible anti-Semitic myths and conspiracy theories,” Abbas has “shed all credibility as a trustworthy partner if the Palestinians and Israelis ever again have the nerve to try negotiations.”
Abbas has been roundly condemned by US officials, the European Union, Israeli officials, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, UN officials, and even left-wing organizations that usually support him.
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