Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Many Palestinians believe that Jews have deliberately inflated the number of Holocaust victims, in order to receive more sympathy from the world, and in particular, more support for the Jewish state. This Holocaust minimizing can be understood as a more acceptable variant of Holocaust denial, which claims outright that there was no Holocaust, the whole thing having been nothing more than a hoax that powerful Jews, who own the media, have convinced a credulous world to believe.
More on the Holocaust minimizers in the Palestinian Authority can be found here: “Why does the Palestinian Authority still promote Holocaust denial? Because it starts at the top,” by Ephraim D. Tepler and Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch,
Official Palestinian Authority television recently aired yet another segment questioning the reality of the Holocaust. On Oct. 8, 2025, PA TV brought on Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi to claim that the Jewish “victim narrative” is collapsing, and the PA TV host added that even the gas chambers could be dismissed with “simple evidence.”
Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi: “The moral issue that they [the Jews] were victims and the issue that they were subjected to extermination by Hitler allowed them to receive support and a global popular embrace, because there was sympathy. This [victim] narrative has begun to collapse and to go in the right direction…”
Official PA TV host: “There is the narrative that says that the [German] soldier used to drag the Jews to the crematorium while calmly eating a sandwich. How does someone drag a person into a crematorium that has toxic gas and isn’t harmed by it? Meaning, even the narrative can be undone with very simple evidence.”
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals – Tunis, Oct. 8, 2025]…
This preposterous story about a German soldier “dragging Jews into the crematorium that has toxic gas” is a confused mishmash. The crematoria did not have “toxic gas.” The Tunisian fantasist clearly has in mind Jews going to the gas chambers, but none of the victims had to be dragged there by “a German soldier.” They walked in, without resisting, because they believed that they were going to the showers. Only once they were inside, and the doors locked, and the Zyklon-B canisters opened, spewing their poison, did the Jews realize what was happening. The story about a German soldier “eating a sandwich” is also a macabre fantasy.
Given the ideology of the PA’s leadership, this denial is entirely predictable. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas himself laid the groundwork for this narrative decades ago in his doctoral thesis, later published as The Other Side. Abbas argued that Zionists intentionally inflated the number of Holocaust victims for political gain and that the real number of Jews killed was only “a few hundred thousand.” He even claimed that Jews were “offered up” to increase the victim count….
The full title of Abbas’ Holocaust-minimizing book, based on his 1982 Ph.D. thesis at Moscow University, is The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.
Abbas is understanding of Hitler’s plight — the Jews were a threat to him and to Germany; they “caused ruin”; he had to kill them out of “self-defense.” At the same time, the Jews exaggerated the numbers killed in order to gain sympathy for themselves and for their state, the one built on land they stole from the Palestinians; they also wanted to be paid more from the postwar spoils, including the amounts paid by Germany to the families of Jewish victims. So they multiplied the number of victims.
It’s a sickening screed, but few Western leaders appear to be offended by it, for they are happy to welcome its author, Mahmoud Abbas, meet with them in their presidential palaces, chanceries, and even at the Vatican. In the last few months, Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée Palace, Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street, and Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican most courteously received this Holocaust minimizer and sympathizer with Hitler. Is it possible that they are unaware of his book, or of his many statements on the “real number” of Holocaust victims, when less than a minute of their aides searching the internet would reveal the truth?
