Abbas Claims Jews' Behavior Caused Holocaust

In yet another long and disoriented rant, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday took his anti-Semitic sentiment to a new level.

Abbas told a Palestinian National Council session that the Jewish people — not anti-Semitism or the Nazis — caused the Holocaust through their "social behavior," the Times of Israel reported.

According to Abbas, the mass genocide of more than 6 million Jews was a result of the Jews "social behavior, [charging] interest, and financial matters."

Abbas also claimed that Israel is a European colonial project, that European Jews have "no historical ties" to Israel, and that "those who sought a Jewish state weren't Jews."

Denying Jewish identity and Jewish rights to any part of Israel are other forms of anti-Semitism that Abbas frequently embraces.

He also repeated his stubborn rejection of any peace plan proposal led by the Trump administration, even before it has been formally presented.

In a series of public statements since Trump's announcement to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Abbas has propagated claims that are outlandish even by his own, often radical, standards.

In a Jan. 14 address to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Council, Abbas spent more than two hours ranting about the history of Zionism in a conspiratorial fashion. He claimed that Jews moved to Israel solely for ideological and colonial reasons, not because of persecution "even during the Holocaust."

In the same speech, he went off on a blatantly anti-Semitic tirade that attempted to de-legitimize any Jewish presence in the state of Israel, "The significance of Israel's functional character is that colonialism created it in order to fill a specific role; it is a colonialist project that is not connected to Judaism, but made use of the Jews so they would serve as pawns . . . "

These anti-Semitic comments are reminiscent of his Holocaust denying doctoral thesis, which grossly underestimates the number of Jews killed in the genocide and focuses on an unsubstantiated relationship between Zionists and Nazis.

While trying to present a moderate face for years, recent developments show that the Palestinian president has become a hostile and outwardly racist leader that continues to alienate the Palestinian people.

Steven Emerson is executive director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism. He was a correspondent for CNN and a senior editor at U.S. News and World Report. Read more reports from Steve Emerson — Click Here Now.