Abbas Extremism Continues

In the last few days we've seen Abbas demonstrate more and more extremist tendencies.

First he re-wrote the history of Israel in the New York Times, blaming the entire situation on Israel and absolving the Palestinians of an blame, ignoring all the peace proposals they have rejected.

Then he rejected Obama calling the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation an obstacle to peace, saying "Hamas is a part of Palestinian society".

Now, for anyone who was still in doubt about his views, he denied the thousands of years old Jewish connection to Israel, and said "Netanyahu, you are incidental in history. We are the people of history. We are the owners of history". As PMW point out, even the Koran makes no reference to a Palestinian people, whereas the Jewish history in Israel has been corroborated by archaeological finds.

Abbas' statements are not shocking, they're just idiocy, what's shocking is that he is taken seriously as the Palestinian leader. This blog post isn't about that though.

It turns out Abbas is worse than I thought. In 1984 (yes it may have been a long time ago but he was 50 years old), Abbas wrote a book in Arabic in which he denied that gas chambers were used to murder Jews in the Holocaust, and that it was a "fantastic lie" that six million Jews were murdered. He acknowledged that some were killed, but apparently this was because it was the aim of "The Zionist movement", who "led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule, in order to arouse the government's hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them, and to expand the mass extermination".

The fact that Abbas is a virtual Holocaust denier and crazier conspiracy theorist than he's appeared to be
just makes all his current actions make a whole lot more sense. I was thinking that maybe joining Hamas has started to affect him, but really he's just showing more of his true colours that he's been attempting to hide all these years behind his reformed, supposedly "moderate" character. Maybe that is the effect Hamas have been having on him, who knows. The only certainty is that Abbas is extremist and untrustworthy, and not a really great prospect as a partner for peace.