Abbas Rejects Charges of 'Blood Libel' against Jews
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said on Saturday he opposed "any attack on any religion" after Israel accused him of libeling the Jewish people in an address to the European Parliament.
"Palestine is the cradle of the three monotheistic faiths. We stand strongly against any attack on any religion," Abbas said in a statement.
In apparently unscripted Arabic remarks to the European Parliament on Thursday, Abbas said that recently "a number of rabbis in Israel made a clear declaration and asked their government to poison water to kill the Palestinians".
He gave no source for the accusation, but said it was part of wider Israeli campaign of incitement against the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office responded by accusing Abbas of disseminating "a blood libel in front of the European Parliament".
Abbas's office acknowledged on Saturday that the reports on which his comments had been based had proved without foundation.
"It has become evident that the alleged statements by a rabbi on poisoning Palestinian wells, which were reported by various media outlets, are baseless," it said.
Abbas "didn't intend to do harm to Judaism or to offend Jewish people around the world".
The accusation that Jews were poisoning the wells of Christians gained traction in 14th century Europe as a plague swept across the continent.
Another allegation from the Middle Ages -- that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes -- gave rise to the term "blood libel".
The Jerusalem Post newspaper reported on Tuesday that the well-poisoning story had resurfaced in a statement by the Palestinian foreign ministry naming a "rabbi Mlad" as authorising contamination of Palestinian water.
The Post and other Israeli media said they had failed to locate any such person or edict.
25 June 2016, 17:19
31
Abbas died in 1994, long before the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, entered his present coma. The skin of Abbas was stuffed with US thousand dollar bills to keep it hydrated and flexible. Specialists within Israel proper calculate that the skin will last at least another thousand years. "It might be a little greenish as time goes on," said one leading researcher.
26 June 2016, 16:45
10
Under Israeli law, Sharon, despite being in a coma and as you say, now "dead" in some technical sense, remains the Prime Minister of Israel. So it is his executive order, number xxx (number redacted), that created Mahmud Abbas "President for life-plus for all Palestinians", which removes the legal necessity for elections among Palestinians. This is all according to law. You may have heard that Israeli researchers are working on ways to return Prime Minister Sharon to full functionality. Among promising lines of research, they discovered a way to return Franz Kafka to life and even gave him a seat on the Cabinet. However, he turns out to be a self-loathing Jew, having insisted on moving in with Mordechai Vanunu, which is against the law.
25 June 2016, 18:11
31
Many opinion polls interviewing Jews in Israel show that the majority has no place for non-Jews in their vision of Israel. A Jewish state is by definition genocidal of non-Jews: wishing to remove the tribal Other. "Gens" means "tribe". Lebanon is based on the supremacy of its Christian minority via Article 24 of the Constitution which reserves half of Parliament to them. This is not only wrong in a legal or moral sense, it is self-destructive. Israel is gradually committing suicide.
25 June 2016, 21:33
12
When the British newspapers just today carried letters from readers claiming that the UK is a Christian State, no-one there demanded the genocide of the Moslems, Jews, Sikhs and all the other religioists, so why do you come out with your bombastic remark saying that because Israel is a Jewish State it means that all non Jews have to be wiped out. Utter unadulterated nonsense and mudthrowing.
26 June 2016, 00:41
10
oh! then anglicans must be muslims or buddhists if they are not christians LOL
25 June 2016, 21:29
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An apartheid state, which has an Arab High Court Judge, dozens of lower court judges, thousands of lawyers, army and police officers, doctors, nurses and whatever other profession you would like to name, not to mention that over 10% of the members of the Parliament are either Arabs (Moslems and Christians) or Druze.
In what other country in the Middle East is the number of Christians rising each year. That is not apartheid. If you could go to Israel and see the way the people are living in the mixed cities of Jaffa, Ramla, Lod, Acre, Haifa, Beersheba, and not to mention Jerusalem you would quickly change your mind. In which country of the Middle East does the Moslem citizen have the highest standart of living? You guessed right, Israel. That is not apartheid.
26 June 2016, 16:26
01
By your definition, which Muslim states are not apartheid states? How about the Vatican?
