It’s not the President. It’s the perennial presidential guest.
It is because he’s not a white nationalist? Is it because he is an embodiment of anti-Semitism on the left, not on the right? Is it because he and his colleagues are geniuses at shifting responsibility for their own failures?
Whatever it is, he, a Holocaust denier of far greater impact and influence than Nick Fuentes, is regularly hosted, indeed fawned over, at the White House.
Former President Donald Trump welcomed Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier on the right, to his dinner table at Mar-a-Lago, Nov. 25, 2022. What if it came out that Trump had said to Fuentes: “I have to commend you” or “I consider you a friend” or “I also consider you a courageous person”? Imagine the uproar! Even greater than the uproar that justly ensued.
Yet, just these words of welcome and appreciation have been extended to the Holocaust denier on the left, in the White House itself.
President George W. Bush to this Holocaust denier: “I consider you a friend.” “I also consider you a courageous person.” (April 28, 2008.)
President Barack Obama to this Holocaust denier: “I want to welcome [ – – ] to the Oval Office.” “I have to commend [ – – ].” (March 17, 2014.)
You may add President Trump on Sept. 21, 2017 and President Biden on July 15, 2022. Both laid out the red carpet for this Holocaust denier.
In 1983, the denier published a book, based on his doctoral dissertation, that challenged the number of Jewish victims in the Holocaust. This is the type of classic Holocaust denial practiced by such well known figures as David Irving. Just last August, in 2022, almost 40 years after his initial foray into Holocaust denial, the denier said that Israel had caused “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians. Painfully to belabor the obvious, anyone who can speak of “50 Holocausts” denies the dimensions of the real Holocaust.
Our Holocaust denier, esteemed visitor in the world’s chancelleries, under due pressure, bobs and weaves.
One day he calls the Holocaust “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era” (2014) and another day he says that the “Nazi murder of Europe’s Jews was the result of their financial activities, not anti-Semitism” (2018).
Whatever is convenient at the moment, he says; but over the long arc — from 1983 to 2022 — he warps the Holocaust beyond recognition. From minimizing the number of victims in 1983 (because, after all, the Zionists bloated the numbers) to disfiguring any true sense of the Holocaust’s dimensions in 2022 (“50 Holocausts”), he tells us what he really thinks.
When caught in his Holocaust denial, he apologizes, but how many times can a person apologize for making the very same point, over and over, and be credited with sincerity? In 2011, The New York Times said that he had “shifted” on the Holocaust. He was a denier no more. But then, in 2018, Jews were murdered for “financial activities” and in 2022 Jews perpetrated “50 Holocausts” of their own.
Our Holocaust denier, as you have no doubt discerned by now, is Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Of course, a head of state must be accorded elementary courtesy by the president of the United States in a way that Nick Fuentes deserves from no one.
The thing is, Abbas is not a head of state. If he were, the perennial presidential-Palestinian agenda would not be how to negotiate a two-state solution. There is no Palestinian state and no Palestinian head of state.
Abbas, as head of the Palestinian Authority, must be accommodated by presidents of the US — up to a point. It makes no more sense to lay out the red carpet for Abbas than it would for the head of Hamas.
Both Palestinian leaders nurture terrorism, which makes the perennial presidential praise of Abbas as a peacemaker, as one who renounces violence, all the more counterproductive. Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, with his full knowledge and support, pays “salaries” to Palestinians for murdering Jews.
That is why it is not difficult to understand how, in Abbas’ mind, Holocaust denial is truth (except when he’s caught). OK, that’s his mind. But what about the minds of American presidents? Why do they accord the credibility to Mahmoud Abbas that they would never accord to Iraq’s late Saddam Hussein, to Syria’s Bashar Assad, to Hezbollah’s al-Nasrallah or to other murderous Arab leaders?
Why are the real Arab peacemakers, such as the heads of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, not given the same accolades at the White House? Why are they not encouraged?
Why this obsession with Mahmoud Abbas, who never delivers on peace — not to Bush, not to Obama, not to Trump, not to Biden — no matter how many concessions he has extracted? Why is this Holocaust denier and autocrat, who is not esteemed by his own people, esteemed in the White House?
Even if it is strategically wise to invite Abbas to the White House, why all the extensive and fallacious praise of a Holocaust denier and a financial accessory to mass murder as a “peacemaker?”
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
