Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas told Germans on Tuesday, in the presence of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that Israel had committed “50 Holocausts.”

The shocking remark came at a press conference at the chancellery itself, after a reporter asked him about the 50th anniversary of the Munich massacre next month.

In 1972, Palestinian terrorists from the Black September terror group, which was linked to Abbas’ ruling Fatah party, broke into the Olympic Village where the Israeli athletes were staying, killing two and taking others hostage. They demanded the release of 234 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, as well as members of the German left-wing Baader Meinhoff terror group, who were held in German jails.

The rest of the eleven hostages and a police officer were killed during a failed rescue attempt by West German police.

The Times of Israel reported:

Asked whether as Palestinian leader he planned to apologize to Israel and Germany for the attack ahead of the 50th anniversary, Abbas responded instead by citing allegations of atrocities committed by Israel since 1947.

“If we want to go over the past, go ahead,” Abbas, who was speaking Arabic, told the reporters.

“I have 50 slaughters that Israel committed….50 massacres, 50 slaughters, 50 holocausts,” he said, taking care to pronounce the final word in English.

Scholz, who later expressed regret about Abbas’s remark, is being criticized in the German media for not doing so in real time.

In Germany, the term “holocaust” cannot legally be used except in the context of the Nazis’ slaughter of six million Jews in World War II.

 

Abbas, 87, has a long history of Holocaust denial. He denied the scale of the Holocaust in his Ph.D. thesis for a Soviet university. Titled The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, the dissertation claims that the six million figure of Holocaust victims was massively exaggerated, in addition to claiming that Zionist leaders cooperated with the Nazis.

He also claimed in 2018 that Jews were responsible for the Holocaust against themselves — a remark for which he later apologized, under pressure.

Abbas was in Germany for talks about progress toward peace — or the lack thereof — in the Middle East. He is now in the 18th year of his supposed four-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority; he was elected in 2005.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.