It is no wonder that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s notorious doctoral dissertation reduced the number of Holocaust victims to “[possibly] below one million,” denied the use of gas chambers, and detailed a “secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism.” It is also no wonder that Abbas’s thesis is widely taught throughout the PA educational system, so much so that the Center for Near East Policy Research Center found that it “is the basis for Holocaust studies in the PA.”
A blurred line exists between anti-Semites on the far left whose eagerness to buy into the Palestinian narrative (historical revisionism at its best) leads them to minimize the Holocaust and those on the far right who are only too eager to repeat it.
Holocaust denial is both a natural precursor to the delegitimization of Israel and a well-traveled bridge between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. And the use of Holocaust rhetoric to further demonize Jews with the intent of relieving the world of its guilt while blaming Jews for persecution against others is a propaganda tool that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.
My father-in-law is among an aging and dwindling population of Holocaust survivors, who were eyewitnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust. It is imperative that all efforts be made to keep the memories of that hellish period alive and in the forefront of our consciousness so that “Never Again” resonates with people from Rialto to Riyadh. Because there is no greater sin against the memory of the Holocaust (and its victims) than to deny its existence.
