Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas expressed no regrets on Tuesday for the murderous attack by Palestinian terrorists on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics half a century ago.
He also claimed that Israel had committed “Holocausts” against Palestinians over the years, reported the AP.
When asked if he intended to apologize to Israel and Germany in advance of the 50th anniversary next month of the massacre of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes during the 1972 summer games, Abbas instead mentioned alleged atrocities committed by Israel.
“If we want to go over the past, go ahead. I have 50 slaughters that Israel committed,” Abbas, a longtime Holocaust denier, told reporters after a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin.
Absolutely shameful. Mahmoud Abbas in Germany refuses to apologize for the Munich massacre (which he helped finance) and accuses Israel of “50 Holocausts” in what @ArminLaschet called the “most disgusting speech ever heard in the German Chancellery”
— Emily Schrader – אמילי שריידר (@emilykschrader) August 16, 2022
The mention of the word “Holocausts” drew a grimace from Scholz but no denunciation, according to the AP. Prior to that, he disagreed with the Palestinian leader when he called Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “apartheid.”
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said Abbas’ remarks about “50 Holocausts,” made on German soil, were “not only a moral disgrace, but a monstrous lie.”
“Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including one and a half million Jewish children,” Lapid tweeted. “History will never forgive him.”
Germany’s popular BILD newspaper published an outraged website-leading story about the incident, under the title “Antisemitism scandal at the federal chancellery.” It expresses shock that “not a word of dissent [was said] in the face of the worst Holocaust relativization that a head of government has ever uttered in the chancellor’s office.”
In a statement to the paper, Scholz said: “Especially for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable.”
The Munich massacre was an attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, by eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, who took nine members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage, after killing two more. All nine were killed during a failed rescue attempt by the German police who were gravely unprepared for such an operation. An article in 2012 in a front-page story of the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that much of the information pertaining to the mishandling of the massacre was covered up by the German authorities. For twenty years, Germany refused to release any information about the attack and did not accept responsibility for the results.
Funds for the terrorist operation were provided by Mahmoud Abbas, Chairman of the PLO since 11 November 2004, and the operation was endorsed by his predecessor and mentor, Yasser Arafat. Abbas’ dissertation at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia was completed in 1982 and published as a book in Arabic titled “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”. Considered to be an egregious example of Holocaust denial, the dissertation claimed that Zionist agitation had been the cause of the Holocaust. Abbas dismissed as a “myth” and “fantastic lie” that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, writing that the real figure was at most “890,000” or “a few hundred thousand”. The number of such deaths, he claimed, had been exaggerated for political purpose by the “Zionist government.”
During a meeting of the Palestinian National Council in 2018, Abbas stated that Jews in Europe were massacred for centuries because of their “social role related to usury and banks.
