Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, left, speaks during a news conference after a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, right, at the Chancellery in Berlin, Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2022. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022, that \u201cFor us Germans in particular, any relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable. I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust.\u201d ( Wolfgang Kumm\/dpa via AP)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz\u2019s statement on Twitter came a day after Abbas refused to condemn a deadly attack by Palestinian militants on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Instead, Abbas countered by saying he could point to \u201c50 Holocausts\u201d by Israel.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,\u201d Scholz said. \u201cFor us Germans in particular, any relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable. I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scholz was criticized both in Germany and Israel for not rejecting Abbas\u2019 comments immediately at the press conference he held with him on Tuesday night at the Chancellery.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for Scholz told reporters that his office had summoned the head of the Palestinian mission in Berlin on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The chancellor\u2019s foreign and security policy advisor conveyed that Scholz expects the Palestinian president \u201cto acknowledge the singularity of the Holocaust without any qualification,\u201d Steffen Hebestreit said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis gaffe yesterday casts a dark shadow over Germany\u2019s relations with the Palestinian Authority,\u201d Hebestreit said, referring to Abbas\u2019 comments. He added that Scholz has arranged a telephone call with Israeli Prime Minister Lapid for Thursday in order to be able to speak directly with him about this incident as well.<\/p>\n
Standing next to Scholz at Tuesday\u2019s press conference, Abbas explicitly used the word \u201cHolocausts\u201d in his reply, drawing a grimace from the German chancellor. Germany has long argued the term should only be used to describe the Nazis\u2019 singular crime of killing 6 million Jews before and during World War II.<\/p>\n
While Scholz had earlier rejected the Palestinian leader\u2019s description of Israel\u2019s treatment of Palestinians as \u201capartheid,\u201d he did not immediately rebuke Abbas for using the term \u201cHolocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n
Abbas said that \u201cfrom 1947 until today, Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian villages.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFifty slaughters. Fifty Holocausts,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
During the Third Reich, the Germans and their henchmen murdered 6 million Jews across Europe.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Abbas appeared to walk back his comments.<\/p>\n
In a written statement, his office said that \u201cPresident Mahmoud Abbas reaffirms that the Holocaust is the most heinous crime in modern human history.\u201d<\/p>\n
The statement stressed that \u201chis answer was not intended to deny the singularity of the Holocaust that occurred in the last century, and condemning it in the strongest terms.\u201d<\/p>\n
Abbas\u2019s remarks drew strong condemnation by leaders across Israel\u2019s political spectrum. Caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid called the comments, \u201cnot only a moral disgrace, but a monstrous lie.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dani Dayan, chairman of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center, had called Abbas\u2019s remarks about the Holocaust \u201cappalling\u201d and urged the German government to respond to the \u201cinexcusable behavior done inside the Federal Chancellery.\u201d<\/p>\n
The remarks came a few weeks before the planned commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Munich attack, in which Palestinian militants killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. Relatives of the slain Israeli athletes said<\/a> they plan to boycott the ceremony after failing to reach an agreement on bigger compensation from the German government.<\/p>\nGermany\u2019s leading Jewish group also sharply criticized the comment and expressed shock that Scholz did not repudiate Abbas\u2019 comment immediately.<\/p>\n
Abbas \u201ctramples on the memory of six million murdered Jews and damages the memory of all victims of the Holocaust,\u201d said Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. \u201cSuch statements cannot be left uncommented. That a relativization of the Holocaust, especially in Germany, at a press conference in the Federal Chancellery, goes unchallenged, I consider scandalous.\u201d<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Ben Zion reported from Jerusalem.<\/p>\n
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By Ilan Ben Zion and Kirsten Grieshaber, August 17, 2022 BERLIN (AP) \u2014 Germany\u2019s chancellor said Wednesday that he was \u201cdisgusted by the outrageous remarks\u201d made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin, accusing Israel of committing \u201c50 Holocausts\u201d against Palestinians over the years. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, left, speaks during a news conference after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13761"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13761"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13764,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13761\/revisions\/13764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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