Germany Investigating Mahmoud Abbas Over His ‘Fifty Holocausts’ 

Mahmoud Abbas came home from Germany to a hero’s welcome in Ramallah. It was the most enthusiastic crowd that had ever met him. His murder of Nizar Banat, his 18th year of a four-year term as president, his cancellation of the elections he had promised to hold in 2021, the $400 million fortune he has amassed with his sons Tareq and Yasser through grand theft of foreign aid meant for the Palestinians – none of that mattered for now. He was a hero, after all. He had stood up for “Palestine” by refusing to answer insulting questions about the killing of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972. Just because his Fatah faction had financed the Munich murderers, what business was it of his? Besides, it happened 50 years ago; only Zionist agents would keep bringing up the topic. No, Mahmoud Abbas would not be drawn into any discussion of that little affair in Munich so very long ago. And even more did Palestinians swell with pride that Abbas, their putative paladin, had dared to tell the Germans, and the whole world, the truth about the “Fifty Holocausts” that the Jews had inflicted on the innocent Palestinians. If the Germans couldn’t bear to hear the truth, that was their problem. Abbas would not be cowed.

The same reaction, however, was not to be found anywhere else in the Arab countries, where Abbas’ “Fifty Holocausts” remark was mostly passed over in embarrassed silence. Non-Arab Iran, of course, was a different matter. There the delight was palpable.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz did not respond immediately to Abbas’ outrageous remarks, as he ought to have done, then and there, in Abbas’ presence, though he grimaced in obvious disapproval. Underlings took the blame for his lack of a response, claiming they had officially ended the press conference and not given him more time to respond, but this excuse is absurd: of course Chancellor Scholz could have simply overridden them, and made a statement, whether it ran over the allotted time for the press conference or not. Such a rebuke would have been most powerful if made in the presence of Abbas himself. An opportunity was lost. After fierce criticism from Germans across the political spectrum, Scholz chose a day later to make this tweet: “For us Germans in particular, any relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable. I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.” A vast number of Germans from across the political spectrum said the same thing. It is impossible to imagine that Mahmoud Abbas will ever be invited back.

Now the denouement many of us had dared to hope would come has been announced: the German police have decided to investigate President Abbas for trivializing the Holocaust, which is a crime under German law. A report on this latest most welcome development is here: “German Authorities Investigating Criminal Complaint Against PA President Mahmoud Abbas for Denigrating Holocaust,” by Ben Cohen, Algemeiner, August 19, 2022:

German police have opened an investigation into Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas over remarks he made during a joint press conference with Chancellor Olaf Scholz in which he denigrated the Nazi Holocaust — a crime under German law punishable with a prison sentence of up to five years.…

A major question centers on whether Abbas, as a foreign leader, can be legitimately prosecuted in Germany. German news outlets reported that the country’s Foreign Ministry was working with the assumption that Abbas enjoys diplomatic immunity.

Why should Mahmoud Abbas be eligible for diplomatic immunity? He does not represent any existing state. The “state of Palestine” is a fiction, that Germany, like all the rest of the Western countries, does not recognize as an independent country.

However, a leading law professor told the Bild news outlet that he was skeptical on this point, and that Abbas had clearly broken German law.

“The comparison is completely misplaced and can therefore be evaluated as a trivialization of the Holocaust,” Prof. Michael Kubiciel of the University of Augsburg said. “The disturbance of the public peace is blatant.”…

I think the German establishment is sufficiently outraged at this point to want to punish Abbas in any way it can. The prosecutors should reject Abbas’ lawyers’ claim of diplomatic immunity; Germany does not recognize “Palestine” as a state. The trial itself should be swift and sure: there is no doubt that Abbas is guilty of breaking German law by trivializing the Holocaust. His subsequent statement in which he claimed that yes, of course, he recognized the Holocaust as a terrible crime will not convince anyone familiar with his long history of Holocaust denial (of which one form is Holocaust minimization), going back to his time as a doctoral student at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow , where he wrote a thesis on the supposed links between the Zionists and the Nazis, and further, dismissed the figure of six million victims, claiming that “at most there may have have been 800,000 Jews” killed — this gross minimization of the number of victims is itself a form of Holocaust denial.

Abbas will not appear in a German court to be tried, nor if convicted, ever serve time in a German jail. He’s not going to extradite himself. But the trial itself can be an occasion to lay out for the whole world his long history of Holocaust denial and his recent grotesque trivialization of that greatest crime in human history with his “fifty Holocausts” accusation against the Jewish state. He’s offered Berlin a teaching moment. May the Germans make the most of it.