JERUSALEM (JTA) — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has summoned the P.A.’s ambassador to Chile after a video surfaced showing him denying the existence of Jews.
Imad Nabil Jadaa was called back to Ramallah on Thursday, the Palestinian Wafa news agency reported, for remarks he made to the Conference for Peace in Palestine and Israel held in Santiago, Chile. In the May address, Jadaa also cited the anti-Semitic book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
“About the hatred we have against the Jewish people, as Palestinians, first, we don’t have hatred,” Jadaa said in the videotaped speech. “Second, we don’t recognize the existence of the Jewish people — there is no Jewish people.”
An English translation of Jadaa’s Spanish-language speech was made public last week by the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy.
“Until 1896 when a group of academic intellectuals, financial advisers, majority being non-Jewish Europeans, decided to create the Zionist movement with one pretext/excuse: the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people,” Jadaa said. “Although the truth is that this (the goal) is to protect their plans of dominating life in the entire planet.”
Americans for Peace Now in a statement Wednesday called on Abbas to repudiate the comments and dismiss Jadaa, as well as “to remind Palestinian officials of the terrible impact of hate-speech on the cause of peace.”
