As Alice of Wonderland famously said, things are getting “curiouser and curiouser.”  Mahmoud Abbas has a doctoral degree.  His dissertation is titled “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”.  In 1984, Abbas published his dissertation as a book titled “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”.  In both the dissertation and the book, Abbas said,

“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.”

In both the book and the dissertation, Abbas also said,

“Following the war, word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that a war of extermination was aimed primarily at the Jews…The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is possible that the number of Jewish victims reached six million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller, below one million.”

But this is the most disturbing thing that Abbas said in the dissertation and the book:

“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.”

Yesterday, April 27, 2014, Abbas said that the Holocaust is the “most heinous crime” in modern history.  Which Abbas are we to believe—the one who denies the severity of the Holocaust and blames it on “Zionists” or the one who spoke yesterday?

Candidly, I believe that Abbas is completely untrustworthy and that now he is saying what he thinks Western government leaders want to hear in order to protect continued funding and to guarantee his access to those funds so that he can continue building his personal net worth which already exceeds more than $100 million.  He didn’t accumulate his vast wealth by running falafel stands in Ramallah.  It came from suckers in the U.S. and Europe for the most part—people like Barack Obama and John Kerry who gave Abbas MY MONEY and YOUR MONEY.

Western government leaders have been chumps for the roughly 50 years of the PLO’s existence pouring money into a corrupt and violent organization whose sole reason for being is to destroy Israel, but they don’t need to continue acting like suckers.  It’s time to hold the PA/PLO and its leaders accountable.  Ignore their words and judge by their actions.  If Western leaders will do that and if they are honest, they will stop funding the PA/PLO now.

Neil Snyder is the Ralph A. Beeton Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia.  His blog, SnyderTalk.com, is posted daily.