The Credibility Gap

"This [Israel] is a colonial enterprises that has nothing to do with Jewishness."
"The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the promised land -- call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up."
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas

"Where is the Palestinian Answer Sadat?
"If President Abbas demonstrates he can be that type of leader, we would welcome it. His recent actions demonstrate the total opposite."
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley

"Contrary to popular myths, [Patrice Lumumba University] released from its walls not too many successful politicians -- about a dozen future ministers and only two future leaders of their countries." "[In addition to a president of Guyana, Abbas], who graduated from the law faculty."
2010 article from Ria Novosti, Russian state-owned news agency

"I don’t think it [intelligence revelations that Mahmoud Abbas was once a KGB agent] will affect his standing, such as it is, among the Palestinian public."
"Russia is not that controversial for Palestinians to begin with. He’s at the end of his career anyway. People are already talking about successors and what comes next. And if suddenly tomorrow there was a breakthrough in the peace process, I doubt this would have any bearing whatsoever."
"He would still be the head of the PLO and president of the Palestinian Authority."
Khaled Elgindy, fellow, Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Policy

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the United Nations on Sept. 30, 2015. (Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images)

It has long been known that the PA's President Abbas had, in the early 1980s, written a doctoral thesis while attending Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, titled "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and the Zionist Movement", implicating Zionism with a collaboration with Nazi Germany, acquiescing in the Holocaust to help in promoting international sympathy for the Jewish extermination plight, to foster support for the goal of recognizing a Jewish state to be established in the Middle East.

This typical suspension of belief in the authenticity of the Nazi Final Solution seeking to obliterate a Jewish presence from Europe -- and presumably, with a German victory in World War II, further abroad -- represents the kind of currency prevalent in Arab and Muslim society. Jewish groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center characterized Abbas's thesis for the historical garbage that it represented. Later, when Abbas wanted to portray himself as a 'moderate', to ingratiate himself with the world community, he repudiated some of his own fanciful hypotheses.

He has since, however, re-adjusted and re-invented his re-write of history and in a hysterical tirade against the United States and Israel, reiterated his contention that the Jews have no historical connection to the holy land, that a Judaic heritage never existed, that Jerusalem was never in Jewish hands, that King Solomon never built the original Temple of Solomon in the Old City, that all of Judaism's most sacred symbols are really Palestinian in origin. In so doing, succeeding in persuading UNESCO to agree.

As for the reports of his activities as a spy for the Soviet secret police; he had the code name of "Krotov" (Mole), working out of a Russian security agency in Damascus in the 1980s, under Mikhail Bogdanov, based at that time in Damascus, and now Russia's special envoy to the Middle East, according to two researchers from the Truman Research Institute at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, authenticated by documents smuggled out of the country by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin.


This is the man who blandly asserts his dedication to peace when speaking to the West, and who agitates  unceasingly for "resistance" to the "occupation" by any and all means necessary to avoid "normalization" with Israel, when addressing Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority's complicity in inciting Palestinians to deadly violence against their neighbours has resulted in ongoing lethal attacks killing both Israeli Jews and their attackers; the attackers achieving martyrdom.

Martyrdom equates with heroism and commemorations heralding the courage of those who never hesitate to sacrifice their lives, impelling others to follow suit. The Palestinian Authority follows up with monthly payments to the families of the martyrs; those who survive and are imprisoned also receive generous stipends in recognition of their courage on behalf of the Palestinian cause. A cause geared to destroy Israel's presence entirely so that a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean can replace it.

Fully forty percent of the PA budget is set aside for the support of lifetime stipends to the families of terrorists, living or dead. Playgrounds, schools, public buildings and boulevards are named in honour of the martyrs. While the media controlled by Fatah for the PA, does its bit to encourage violence against Israels, even as successful attacks are praised in news reports from PA television and print media. On social media sites incitements to act out the scenarios recommended by Mahmoud Abbas; spilling precious Arab blood on the Temple Mount is required to ensure that Jewish feet will not desecrate Muslim sites.

The PA's President's discredited conspiracy theories have been finally revealed in public, reflected in the Trump administration's demands that Abbas negotiate in good faith or risk losing all American funding for Palestinian programs. The terms of engagement between the U.S. and the nascent Palestinian state have been transformed. Highlightng the reality of the PA funding terror, unapologetically stating it is the honourable thing to do, and nothing will dissuade them from it.

Mahmoud Abbas, for a leader dedicated to advancing the cause of the Palestinian people has somehow managed to enrich himself with a fortune that he admits to being $100-million, but is reputed to be more than $1.5-billion through years of siphoning off funding from the international community meant to provide for the Palestinian population in their presentation as refugees. Generations of refugee status which somehow the PA has never managed to transform into a thriving community of self-reliant and prosperous people ready for a state of their own.