Continuing a well-worn theme in the Palestinian Authority, a top diplomat in the PA on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of using “Goebbels tactics of the big lie” to smear the reputation of PA chief Mahmous Abbas.
Israel Radio quoted Nimar Hamad, a top security advisor to Abbas, as saying that “Netanyahu is using propaganda and lies to convince the world community of his point of view. This is exactly what Goebbels, the chief of Nazi propaganda did – lie, lie, and lie.”
Hamad was speaking in an interview on official PA television, responding to comments Netanyahu made a day earlier at the Herzliya Conference.
“I committed to two states at Bar Ilan,” Netanyahu said in his hour-long speech, referencing his controversial 2009 speech voicing support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. “The solution as I see it is a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state.”
In the last round of peace talks, the Palestinian Authority (PA) adamantly refused to recognize Israel’s existence as the Jewish state, Netanyahu said. “The Palestinians expect us to recognize a Palestinian state. But they won’t recognize a Jewish state for the Jewish people. That’s what we want. Mutual recognition.”
All lies, said Hamad; the PA had “long ago” recognized Israel, and it was Netanyahu who was preventing talks. “Just like the Nazi propagandists, Netanyahu spreads the big lie in the hope that it will be ‘bought’ by naïve people.”
“Goebbels,” of course, refers to Paul Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.
As one of Adolf Hitler’s closest associates and most devoted followers, he was one of the Nazi regime’s most capable orators, known for the “big lie” tactic, which entailed, he said, repeating a statement over and over until it was taken for “fact.”
The PA has often used Nazi imagery to describe Netanyahu and Israel in general.
Last year, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) quoted a PA newspaper as saying that the Prime Minister acted like a Nazi because he has Nazi genes.
“It is possible that Netanyahu has preserved it [racism] and acquired it genetically from the days of the Nazis and the Aryan race,” said the Al-Hayyat Al-Jadida newspaper, an official PA publication.
“Instead of Netanyahu disassociating himself from any act that would remind him of Hitler’s racism, he imitates it and wants to replicate it against the people of Palestine, its inhabitants and nation and even against the citizens of the State of Israel themselves!,” the paper said.
The PA has actually been fascinated with Nazism for years. Abbas – who penned a thesis claiming Jews “exaggerated” the scale of the holocaust – has in the past lionized the notoriously pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.
Abbas has also consistently said that any future Palestinian state would be free of Israelis and Jews, much like the Nazis wanted Germany to be “Judenrein” (free of Jews).
Netanyahu addressed the phenomenon in October 2013, pointing to a deep link between the Palestinian national movement and Germany’s Nazi regime.
Netanyahu noted that Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the founder of “Palestinian nationalism,” was an admirer and supporter of Adolf Hitler, had met the Nazi Fuhrer on numerous occasions and was actively involved in encouraging Hitler and his henchmen in their project of annihilating the Jewish people.
Far from playing a “minor role” in the Holocaust, as some have claimed, the Mufti played an “important” part in ordering the extermination of Jews and “was directly involved in The Final Solution”, Netanyahu said.
