The Biden Administration Funds Holocaust Revisionism

T his past May, the Biden administration patted itself on the back upon releasing what it calls the “first-ever U.S. national strategy to counter antisemitism.” President Biden supposedly made up his mind about running for president after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., which is why — according to the White House’s statement on its initiative — “he has prioritized action to counter antisemitism and hate of all kinds.”

The All-Lives-Matter-ing of antisemitism in the press release aside, the current president and his administration have at the same time done their part to further bigotry against Jews, at least internationally. In 2021, after former president Donald Trump cut assistance to the Palestinian Authority for programs in the West Bank and Gaza — the latter governed, if it can honestly be referred to in that way, by the Hamas terrorist organization — Biden restored $235 million in aid, which has since ballooned to over $1 billion. On Wednesday, a video of a speech given last month by PA leader Mahmoud Abbas reminded us who exactly benefits from administration funding.

In the speech, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute and posted on X (formerly Twitter) this week, Abbas launched into a tirade that might have made Henry Ford blush. The Palestinian president claimed that Ashkenazi Jews — those descended from the segments of the Jewish diaspora that relocated to Eastern Europe during the exile from Israel — “are not Semites,” that they “have nothing to do with semitism,” by which he meant to say that they are not authentically Jews. Rather than having originated within the Land of Israel, they emerged through the conversion to Judaism of the Khazars, a Turkic tribe, during the Middle Ages. This theory, it must be said, has been discredited time and again.

Abbas then turned his focus, as antisemites seemingly always do, to the Holocaust.

“They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews,” but that is not the case, Abbas explained. It was because of Jews’ “social role and not their religion” that Nazi Germany attempted their extermination. Hitler, Abbas claimed, “fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money, and so on.” It should go without saying that the connection, implied or explicitly stated, between Jews and greed, moneylending, and usury is a time-worn antisemitic canard. It should also go without saying that Hitler did indeed kill Jews for being Jews.

Last month’s speech was far from the first time Abbas has indulged in such pernicious notions. In a 2018 speech, he made the same claims about Jewish descent from the Khazars and the Jews’ having brought the Holocaust upon themselves by virtue of their own avarice and mendacity. As a doctoral candidate at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, Abbas wrote a dissertation titled “The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement,” later published in book form as The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism. In it, Abbas argues that the Holocaust was a plot concocted by both the Nazi government and Zionist leaders in an effort to drum up support for the establishment of a Jewish state. He also writes that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust — in reality, approximately 6 million — was “no greater than 896,000.”

The Palestinian public sector’s embrace and promotion of antisemitism does not end with the man at the top. Textbooks in Palestinian schools praise terrorists who murder Israeli civilians as being “full of pride, boldness and defiance.” They frame the Jewish people as “enemies of Islam.” As the Algemeiner reported in January, curricula in the Palestinian territories are chock-full of calls to kill Jews.

Study cards for eleventh graders accusing Jews of “being in control of global events through financial power,” seventh graders instructed to describe Israeli soldiers as “Satan’s aides” in a textbook chapter imploring Palestinians to “liberate” the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and children gathered to listen to a poem with the following line: “Give me a Kalashnikov, an [M-]14, an axe and a knife”. . . .

In May 2022, it was revealed that a 17-year-old who was shot dead after attempting to invade an Israeli home in the West Bank while armed with a knife attended a school that taught students to murder Israelis. The twelfth grader attended A-Zeer Boys High School in the Bethlehem Governorate, which used textbooks promoting “Jihad and martyrdom” and described Jews as “dangerous” and “perverted in nature.”

While the U.S. State Department roundly condemned Abbas’s speech, the Biden administration is spending Americans’ tax dollars to fund a government entity that encourages hatred of and violence against Jews. Whereas Trump cut the funding as a result of Palestinian intransigence, Biden rushed to restore it. He has come close to surpassing former president Barack Obama as the greatest modern antagonist of America’s closest ally in the Middle East to occupy the Oval Office. From his refusal to invite Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, to his playing footsie with an Iranian regime hell-bent on destroying the Jewish state, to his shameful comparison between British colonialism and the millennia-long history of Jewish inhabitation of the Holy Land, Biden has repeatedly undercut his self-professed role as a friend to the Jewish people and the one state in the world devoted to their protection. The fact that — even with all we know about the Islamic Republic’s designs on eliminating Israel and its noncompliance with the initial terms of Obama’s Iran deal — Biden still wants to engage the mullahs diplomatically speaks volumes about his administration’s lack of concern for Israel’s security.

With the White House’s decision to send money to those who traffic in false history about the Jews and their persecution, Biden has no leg to stand on when discussing antisemitism, and his “national strategy” is all but meaningless.