The German chancellor calls on the head of the Jewish state government to disfigure the Palestinian president’s attempt to “minimize or deny” the genocide
A day after publicly condemning the parallelism made on Tuesday in Berlin by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, comparing Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank with the Holocaust, Foreign Minister Olaf Scholz made a new attempt to distance himself from the controversy. Amid criticism for being slow to respond to the controversial comment, the head of the German government called his counterpart in the Jewish state, Yair Lapid, by phone on Thursday to make it clear that any attempt to “minimize or deny” the Nazi genocide is “unacceptable”.
The Israeli prime minister’s office said in a statement that at the beginning of the conversation Scholz emphasized that he rejected and condemned the comments and said it was important to clarify this personally to Lapid, as well as publicly. “Prime Minister Lapid thanked him, both as Prime Minister of Israel and as the son of Holocaust survivors,” the government said in its note. For its part, the German Chancellery
The Israeli prime minister’s office said in a statement that at the beginning of the conversation Scholz emphasized that he rejected and condemned the comments and said it was important to clarify this personally to Lapid, as well as publicly. “Prime Minister Lapid thanked him, both as Prime Minister of Israel and as the son of Holocaust survivors,” the government said in its note. For its part, the German Chancellery said the two leaders agreed to meet soon in Berlin and agreed to continue cooperation between their two countries in various fields.
Scholz’s reaction, in any case, comes late in the eyes of German public opinion. Not surprisingly, there have been many voices and the country’s media that have criticized him for not having reacted as soon as Abbas’s controversial intervention took place at the press conference they held jointly in the capital. In this regard, a spokesman for the German Executive has taken the blame for ending the conference before the chancellor could respond.
hostage taking
At Tuesday’s hearing Abbas was asked if he would apologize for the Palestinians who carried out a hostage-taking during the 1972 Munich Olympics that killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. “From 1947 to today, Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian cities (…) 50 massacres, 50 holocausts, and even today there are deaths caused by the Israeli army every day,” he replied in Arabic.
Following the torrent of criticism, Abbas has decided to “clarify” his position in a statement in which he described the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, in which 6 million Jews died, as “the most heinous crime in modern human history.” . “The president did not deny the massacres suffered by the Jews under Nazi Germany, but rather told the world not to lose sight of the massacres inflicted on the Palestinian people,” added Palestinian Prime Minister Mohamed Shtayyeh.
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