Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas went to the United Nations to sell his peace agenda to diplomats from around the world.  His address was widely anticipated as the latest Palestinian move toward statehood.

But when he rose at the rostrum of the General Assembly, Abbas did not deliver anything resembling a rational, sensible two-state solution.  Far from it.

Abbas’s speech instead was devoted almost entirely to a barrage of vicious slanders against Israel – a torrent of bad-mouthing attacks against the Jewish state.

Israel, he told the delegates, is a “colonial occupying power preparing for a new Nakba" (Palestinian catastrophe).

But that was just for starters.

Abbas went on to accuse Israel of “genocidal crimes – war crimes carried out before our eyes.”

Retribution, he declared, was inevitable – “we will not allow war criminals to escape punishment.”

Israeli policies, he remarked, are based on “occupation, apartheid and colonial” pursuits – carried out by “racist and armed gangs” in the “most abhorrent forms of apartheid.”  And as he kept spewing his bile against Israel, Abbas also complained of “racism” throughout “Israeli political and media discourse.”

When he wasn’t fulminating, Abbas delivered a completely uncompromising set of demands – a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza, the entire West Bank, and all of Jerusalem, including the entire Old City and the Western Wall – Judaism’s holiest site.

And if that wasn’t enough, Abbas added for good measure that a peace agreement would have to give millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants a “right of return” to ancestral homes in Israel – a prescription for elimination of the Jewish state by demographic means.

This was not a prelude for negotiations that might lead somewhere.  Far from it.

Yet this was not Hamas terrorism at the U.N.  This was  supposedly a promising peace partner – a “moderate” Palestinian leader.

“Moderate,” my eye.

This was Abbas furnishing vile anti-Israel propaganda poison pills to every anti-Semite on the face of the globe.  His real legacy in full view.

 Leo Rennert is a former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers.