This past weekend, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Jews who dared to visit one of the religion’s most holy sites, known as the Temple Mount, a “herd of cattle.”
Israeli authorities, on the other hand, allow free passage for Muslims to pray at the site Palestinians refer to as the Dome of the Rock. Jews are largely restricted from praying at that site, for fear that their presence alone may enrage Muslims, and that sharing a holy site with Jews may incite them to commit acts of violence.
In reporting the incident, the Associated Press described the Jewish people visiting their most holy site as “settlers.”
On Friday, President Abbas said that the Jewish community does not have the right to set foot on what has been described as Islam’s third most holy site. And according to Arutz Sheva, Abbas also referred to the Jewish people visiting the Temple Mount as “settlers.”
“It is not enough to say the settlers came, but they must be barred from entering the compound by any means,” Abbas said. “This is our Aqsa … and they have no right to enter it and desecrate it.”
In 2011, the Simon Wiesenthal Center designated the Palestinian leader as the #1 anti-Semite of the Year.
Some have described Abbas’s PhD dissertation as a staple for Holocaust denial in the Arab world. Abbas wrote, “Many have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions–fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.” Palestinian President Abbas also blamed “Zionist” Jews for inciting Nazis to kill them: “The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination.”
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