Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas peddled falsehoods about the Holocaust and other discredited distortions about Jews, drawing diplomatic fire just as the Biden administration is launching a major diplomatic initiative that could include reviving Israeli-Palestinian talks

In a speech broadcast last month to a body of his Fatah Party, which controls the Palestinian Authority, Abbas, 87, said that Adolf Hitler and antisemites before him hated and persecuted the Jews not because of who they were but because of “their role in society” having to do with “usury, money, and so on and so on”[…]
In his speech, Abbas also peddled a discredited myth and distorted or erroneous claims, including: that Ashkenazi Jews are descended solely from the remnants of a bygone kingdom on the Caspian Sea; that the term “antisemitism” describes animus toward speakers of Semitic languages; and that Jews from Arab lands emigrated to Israel primarily because they were coerced by Zionists