The city of Paris has stripped Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas of the French capital’s prestigious medal for his reported remarks that justified the genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany, the French news agency AFP reported Friday.
Last month, Abbas claimed in a speech that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis because of their “social behavior” and not due to Hitler Germany’s genocidal racial policies.
“In our city, during World War II, tens of thousands of children, women and men of the Jewish faith were rounded up, deported and then exterminated in death camps,” Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo said in a letter addressed to Abbas. “The comments you made are contrary to our universal values and the historical truth of the [Holocaust].”
“You can therefore no longer hold this distinction,” the Paris mayor said while revoking the medal awarded to the PA chief during his 2015 visit.
The French news agency AFP reported:
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has stripped Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas of the French capital’s highest honour after he made remarks about the Holocaust that echoed anti-Semitic tropes, her office said on Friday.Abbas could no longer hold the Grand Vermeil medal after he “justified the extermination of the Jews of Europe” in World War II, her office told AFP.”The comments you made are contrary to our universal values and the historical truth of the Shoah,” Hidalgo said in a letter to Abbas sent on Thursday. “You can therefore no longer hold this distinction.”The text of the letter was published on X, formerly known as Twitter, by Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), an umbrella organisation representing French Jews.”This important decision honours Paris and the city’s ongoing commitment against anti-Semitism,” he wrote.
The Times of Israel reported Abbas’s remarks that were first posted on the social media by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI):
“They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true. It was clearly explained that [the Europeans] fought [the Jews] because of their social role, and not their religion,” Abbas said in August. “Several authors wrote about this. Even Karl Marx said this was not true. He said that the enmity was not directed at Judaism as a religion but at Judaism for its social role.”“The [Europeans] fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money and so on and so forth,” he continued.
While the French mayor took a commendable stance following Abbas’s despicable remarks, this should not come as a surprise to anyone following the Palestinian leader’s track record. The PA chief has made a career out of spreading antisemitism, and inciting hate and violence against the Jews. In 2018, he made similar remarks blaming Europe’s Jews for the Holocaust. Video courtesy the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW):
The PA leader has dedicated his whole life to Holocaust denial. In the 1980s, a young Abbas traveled to the Soviet Union—thanks to his association with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist group—where he wrote a doctoral thesis at the Moscow University drawing on conspiracy theories to deny the Holocaust.
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