Stephan Pollard, Jewish Chronicle, Apr. 17, 2022
“When he wrote his thesis in 1982 he did not ‘deny’ a Holocaust took place. Rather, he distorted and warped it — changing the very nature of the Shoah (and the number murdered) so the blame for their death lies with the Jews themselves.”
Here’s your Starter For 10: Which current serving president believes that the Jews were responsible for the Holocaust?
We’ll come back to that in a moment. Let’s ignore the usual University Challenge rules and deal with the follow up question first: Which current serving president is happy to stand by mutely while another president goes off on one about the Holocaust?
First, it’s a trick question. It’s not a president, it’s a chancellor. Yup — it’s German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Which brings us to the Chancellery in Berlin on Tuesday, where Chancellor Scholz gave a press conference with his guest, President Mahmoud Abbas. The latter was asked if he would apologise for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.
His response was to rant about Israel inflicting “50 Holocausts” on the Palestinians: “If we want to dig further into the past, yes, please, I have 50 massacres that were committed by Israel. Which were also recorded in documentaries … 50 massacres, 50 Holocausts, and to this day every day we have dead people killed by the Israeli army.”
Scholz’s response to that? He shook Abbas’s hand and ended the press conference.
Reading yet another column pointing out that Scholz is a dunderhead isn’t, I grant you, the most useful of ways to spend an August afternoon, so let’s leave the German chancellor there, save to say that he eventually issued a statement hours later, after an eruption of fury from his fellow countrymen, saying that “I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. For us Germans in particular, any trivialisation of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable. I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust.” Which only goes to show that late is actually no better than never.
Let’s return to the original question. It’s possible, I suppose, that they had a version of University Challenge in the Soviet Union. In which case doctoral student Mahmoud Abbas would have been an ideal candidate to answer any questions on antisemitism and Holocaust denial from a — put it this way — position of great practical knowledge. Young Mahmoud completed his studies at the People’s Friendship University of Russia where in 1982 he earned a PhD with his ground breaking thesis, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. … [To read the full article, click here]
