Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas released a special message on Sunday in Arabic and in English on the occasion of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which he decried the murder of Jews in the Holocaust as "the most heinous crime against humanity in modern history.But what's it got to do with anything now?
Apparently it represents a bit of a turnaround for Abbas:
They shouldn't do that conflation if they don't want people denying the holocaust. So you see what they did?A number of senior Israeli officials, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Strategic and Intelligence Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, have declared over the past year that Abbas is anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier. Their claims were based on Abbas' doctoral thesis from the University of Moscow, which asserted cooperation between elements in the Zionist Movement and Nazi Germany in the years before the Holocaust.Abbas had since retracted these claims. In interviews he gave in recent years he maintained that he was not denying the Holocaust and that he recognizes the fact that six million Jews were killed during World War II.
Abbas' doctoral thesis from the University of Moscow.....asserted cooperation between elements in the Zionist Movement and Nazi Germany in the years before the HolocaustAsserting the very well documented fact that the zionist movement, that is the mainstream of the zionist movement, collaborated with the nazis before and during the holocaust, and after, given that some zionists went on to testify for nazis at Nuremberg, is not the same as denying that the holocaust happened.
So what was Abbas's thesis? That the holocaust didn't happen? or that it did happen and zionists collaborated?
What does it matter anyway what Abbas is forced to say now or what he used to say? It seems like only yesterday that Ha'aretz was saying that "Israel should be more than Yad Vashem with an air force". Apparently they don't believe their own position on this.
http://www.bricup.org.uk/news/RosenheadLeeds.html
Here is Ben White’s corrective to Robert Fine’s argument:
http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/debate/10722-losing-the-debate-boycott-opponents-rely-on-legal-threats-
Here’s something by me on Robert Fine’s approach to these matters:
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/academics-for-israel-robert-fine-and.html