{"id":1935,"date":"2023-10-29T21:53:53","date_gmt":"2023-10-29T20:53:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/?p=1935"},"modified":"2025-06-10T15:37:01","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T13:37:01","slug":"abbas-stripped-of-top-french-medal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/abbas-stripped-of-top-french-medal\/","title":{"rendered":"Abbas stripped of top French medal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Abbas stripped of top French medal<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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On August 24, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas delivered a grossly anti-Semitic speech at the 11th session of Fatah\u2019s Revolutionary Council.
\nIn his speech he heaped up untruths and propaganda claiming that European Jews are not Semites but descendants of Tatars from the Caucasus and that the persecution they were subjected to by Hitler therefore had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo met Mahmoud Abbas in 2015 when she presented him with the French capital\u2019s Grand Vermeil medal. Now the French mayor withdraws the honor. Photo: Facebook<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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T<\/span>he statement prompted the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, to strip Mahmoud Abbas of the French capital\u2019s top medal.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Abbas may no longer hold the Grand Vermeil medal awarded to him in 2015 after he \u201cjustified the extermination of Europe\u2019s Jews\u201d during World War II, Hidalgo\u2019s office told the AFP news agency. \u201cThe comments you made are contrary to our universal values and the historical truth of the Shoah,\u201d Hidalgo wrote in a letter to Abbas Thursday 7 September. The letter stated: \u201cYou may therefore no longer hold this award.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abbas\u2019 claims are not new. In the 1980s, while he was an agent of the Soviet intelligence service KGB, Mahmoud Abbas earned his doctorate on Holocaust denial (\u201cThe Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism\u201d) at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. He has also written an entire book that trivializes the persecution of Jews during the Second World War.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Historical background<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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On February 1,1972, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued a directive on \u201cfurther measures to combat the anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism,\u201d wrote Izabella Tabarovsky, a senior researcher at the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, in the Jewish journal, \u2018Tablet\u2019 at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n

The Social Sciences Section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences soon established a permanent commission for the coordination of scholarly criticism of Zionism at the academy\u2019s prestigious Institute of Oriental Studies (IOS) in Moscow.<\/p>\n

For the next 15 years, IOS would serve as a key partner in the Communist state\u2019s fight against the \u201cglobal Zionist conspiracy\u201d that Soviet security services believed was sabotaging the Soviet Union internationally and domestically. In 1982, Mahmoud Abbas received doctoral student status precisely at IOS, noted Tabarovsky.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Abbas\u2019 falsification of history<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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It was the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) that in September translated and published Abbas\u2019 anti-Semitic speech. In his address, the Palestinian leader said that Hitler attacked the European Jews because of their usury and money-dealing and that the Holocaust was not about anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

He also claimed that Jews from Arab countries did not really want to emigrate after the establishment of the Jewish state, but were forced to do so by Israel. Abbas claimed that Israel\u2019s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, had not wanted Jews from Arab countries to immigrate to Israel, but was forced to accept them at Churchill\u2019s urging, because there were no more Jews left in Europe.<\/p>\n

He said Ben Gurion carried out attacks on Jewish institutions in Arab countries to persuade them to emigrate. Abbas continued: \u201cThe Jews did not want to emigrate but were forced to do so through pressure, coercion and murder.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Abbas stripped of top French medal On August 24, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas delivered a grossly anti-Semitic speech at the 11th session of Fatah\u2019s Revolutionary Council. In his speech he heaped up untruths and propaganda claiming that European Jews are not Semites but descendants of Tatars from the Caucasus and that the persecution they were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1931,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-historic-flashback"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1935"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3574,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1935\/revisions\/3574"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}