Never mind about Martin Indyk’s once being stripped of his security clearance for having classified documents on his personal laptop. Let’s not pay attention to the sober Israeli analyst, Isi Leibler, who provided evidence that Indyk was an “anti-Israel apologist.” Let’s overlook that little business involving Qatar’s donations to the Brookings Institution, where Indyk was a distinguished fellow in International Diplomacy, and then was the executive vice president, from 2001-2018. He took a leave from Brookings to serve as the U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations from 2013 to 2014, at a time when deep-pocketed Qatar was lavishing money both on the Brookings ($14 million) and on Hamas; might Qatar’s gift to Brookings have had some effect…ahem…on Indyk’s attitude toward Israel? Let’s forget how, from 1995 to 1997, when he was the American ambassador to Israel, he was said to stride about the land like some viceroy dispensing his authoritative wisdom to the natives.
No, let’s concentrate on one thing: Martin Indyk’s reaction to Mahmoud Abbas’ recent speech about Jews, Hitler, and the Holocaust. He was apparently sent into “despair” by what his “personal friend” (is there another kind?) of thirty years, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Revolutionary Council of Fatah. To refresh all our memories, Abbas claimed that Hitler was not an antisemite, but hated Jews for their “social role,” dealing in “money and usury.” In fact, he observed, that’s why so many Europeans have always hated the Jews. Here are his precise words:
“They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true. It was clearly explained that [the Europeans] fought [the Jews] because of their social role, and not their religion…The [Europeans] fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money and so on and so forth,” he continued.
The Jews did something, you see, to deserve to be hated, not just by Hitler, but by all the Europeans. In the same speech, he also claimed that Ashkenazi Jews were not really Jews at all, but Khazars, a Turkic tribe from Central Asia, and had no claim to any land in the Middle East.
Now, how did Martin Indyk react to the speech of his “personal friend” for 30 years, Mahmoud Abbas? Here’s how: “Another Official Disillusioned,” by Rafael Medoff, JNS.org, September 17, 2023:
A former State Department official who was deeply involved in U.S. Mideast policy for decades is feeling a little unsettled over a recent speech in which Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas justified the Holocaust.
“I have been despairing about how to respond to [Abbas’s] profoundly antisemitic diatribe,” Martin Indyk, a former assistant secretary of state and ex-ambassador to Israel, wrote on X.
“How could someone who has treated me as a personal friend for three decades at the same time harbor such hateful views of my people?”
How dumb is Martin Indyk? Can’t he comprehend that for 30 years his “personal friend” Mahmoud Abbas has been using him, fooling him, leading him on by the nose, so that Indyk would sing his praises in the Washington corridors of power, take his side in negotiations with the Israelis, see the jihad against Israel through a Palestinian prism?
To all people of sense — which leaves out Martin Indyk — there is nothing Abbas said recently that he has not said before. In 1982, he wrote a doctoral dissertation at Patrice Lumumba University, in which he cast doubt on the Holocaust altogether. I wrote about it here:
The best known of the Arab Holocaust deniers is none other than Mahmoud Abbas, President-for-Life of the Palestinian Authority, now in the 15th year of his four-year term. In 1984 he earned his doctorate at Patrice Lumumba University with a thesis entitled The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. According to Abbas, the Zionists were in cahoots with the Nazis: those wicked Zionists figured that if the Nazis persecuted Jews in Europe, more of them would flee to Palestine. And for the Zionists, that was all that mattered.
In his thesis Abbas said the “so-called” Holocaust had been exaggerated and Zionists had created the “myth of the six million dead,” which was, according to Abbas, a ”fantastic lie.”
Here is a key paragraph in Abbas’ dissertation:
It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.”
Elsewhere in his work, Abbas says that perhaps a somewhat greater number or Jews, possibly as many as 800,000, died. But he was sure of one thing – the total was nowhere near six million; that claim ha to have been a deliberate fabrication.
In other words, more than forty years ago, Abbas was denying, or minimizing, the Holocaust, and he has been repeating the same claims ever since. He also first began to write about Jews being hated, and killed, for their “social role” in dealing with “money and usury,” in his doctoral dissertation. How could Martin Indyk have missed that? Did he never read Abbas’ book, or read about his dissertation on which that.book was based, about the supposed collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis, and the “social role” of Jews that engendered such well-deserved hate, and the “true” number of Jewish victims?
In May 2018, in a televised address to the Palestinian Parliament, Abbas blamed European Jews’ “social function” — specifically “usury and banking and such” — as the basis for the animosity toward them that led to their mass murder (“only 800,000” still qualifies as mass murder).
And in that same speech in 2018 — a major address that was well-publicized — Abbas also claimed that Ashkenazi Jews were not really Jews at all, but descendants of a Turkic tribe, the Khazars, and hence had no right to be in the Middle East at all. Did Martin Indyk miss that major speech by his “personal friend” of 30 years?
To sum up, there was not a thing in Abbas’ recent speech that he hasn’t said before — even many times before.
Think of all the terrible things Mahmoud Abbas has done. As a despot, he has refused to hold elections for 14 years. But he remained a “personal friend” of Martin Indyk. A brutal despot, he routinely has his opponents arrested, imprisoned, even tortured and killed. He had his goons beat to death his social media critic Nizar Banat. But through all this, Abba remained a “personal friend” of Martin Indyk. A brutal and corrupt despot, with his sons Tarek and Yasser he amassed a fortune of several hundred million dollars. But he remained a “personal friend” of Martin Indyk. A brutal, corrupt, and terror-inciting despot, he started the “Pay-For-Slay” program, of which he is so proud, that rewards past, and incentivizes future, acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians. Yet despite all this, Abbas has remained a “personal friend” of Martin Indyk. Or did that last speech by Abbas finally cause the scales to fall from the morally myopic eyes of that quondam Distinguished Fellow and Grand Panjandrum of Middle Eastern Matters, the comically obtuse Martin Indyk?
If Martin Indyk, as he claims, has “been despairing about how to respond” to Abbas’ speech — is the world waiting to hear from Martin Indyk? — and the claims Abbas made about the Jews’ “social role” being the cause of their mass murder, his insistence that Hitler was not an “antisemite,” and how Ashkenazi Jews were not Jews at all, then Martin Indyk hasn’t been paying attention for at least 40 years. Yet he has risen high on Washington’s totem pole, from Ambassador to Israel to an even more exalted position as Executive Vice President at Brookings, to his current well-paid eyrie at the Council on Foreign Relations. Can it really be that only now he has come to understand what his “personal friend” Mahmoud Abbas has been like, all along?