Israel Minister Slams Abbas as 'No.1' Anti-Semite

Israel's intelligence minister said Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is the world's most anti-Semitic leader following the departure of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's president last year.

"Since Ahmadinejad left the political stage, Abu Mazen is the number one leader in injecting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel poison," Yuval Steinitz told a Tel Aviv security conference Wednesday, using the name by which Abbas is popularly known in Arabic.

"Under Abu Mazen the level of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement in the (Palestinian) Authority has reached new highs, where the bottom line is the destruction of Israel," said Steinitz, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party.

"As someone who denied the Holocaust in his youth, he today denies the very existence of the Jewish people and their right to their own state," he told the annual conference of the Institute for National Security Studies, according to a transcript on the INSS website.

"As long as we do not see substantive change in the (Palestinian) educational system and media, a peace agreement is an illusion."

In his doctoral thesis at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University, Abbas questioned the figure of six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust, suggesting the number could have been "fewer than one million".

But, he added, "the controversy over the figure cannot minimize in any way the atrocious crime committed against the Jews".

Israel accuses Abbas's Palestinian Authority of encouraging hostility against Israeli through school textbooks and in broadcasts on its official TV and radio stations.

In U.S.-sponsored peace talks launched in July, Netanyahu is demanding the Palestinians recognize Israel as the national state of the Jewish people.

But the Palestinians refuse, fearing it could preclude the right of exiled Palestinian refugees and their descendents to return to land they fled or were evicted from when Israel was created in 1948.