Abu Mazen's Words

Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen)

• Speaking about Hamas: "there is no dialogue with those murderous terrorists," (June, 2007)
  
  
• Hamas replaced the "national project" with "its project of darkness," (June, 2007)
  
• Upon his election as President of the Palestinian Authority: "little Jihad [holy war] had ended, and now the big Jihad is beginning." (January, 2005)
  
• Shortly before the election, he referred to Israel as the "Zionist enemy."
  
• In his doctoral thesis he denied that the Holocaust had left 6 million Jews dead. Abbas wrote that the estimated number of Jews killed during World War II was “less than one million.” Abbas stated that the Zionist leadership collaborated with the Nazi regime to “facilitate the wide-spread destruction” of Jews. He wrote of "The Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed."

Trying to "undo" what he wrote, Abu Mazen has commented: "When I wrote The Other Side...we were at war with Israel," Abbas said. "Today I would not have made such remarks...Today there is peace and what I write from now on must help advance the peace process."

About Abu Mazen:

Born in the village of Safed, in what is now northern Israel, Mazen and his family fled to Syria during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He laid floor tiles for a living, became a teacher and earned a law degree from the University of Damascus. Mazen has written several books, one of which claimed that only 1 million Jews -- not the 6 million historians estimate -- were killed in the Holocaust. He has since recanted that account.