Who is Mahmoud Abbas?

To his great credit, President Bush has not made one mistake his predecessor made repeatedly – inviting the father of modern-day terrorism, Yasser Arafat, to the White House.

But President Bush is doing the next worst thing this week – inviting Arafat’s puppet, Mahmoud Abbas, to meet with him in Washington.

Abbas, or Abu Mazen as he is also known, is perceived by some, including the president, as a “moderate” hope for peace.

I do not agree with this assessment. In fact, Abbas is a fraud. Abbas is evil in his own right. Abbas is a deceiver. Abbas is an anti-Semite and a hater. And I can prove it.

Many have heard the story of how Abbas, as a doctoral candidate at Moscow’s Oriental College in 1982, wrote a thesis suggesting far fewer than 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. But, Abbas did much more than that. He actually accused the Jews of conspiring with Adolph Hitler to annihilate European Jewry. He accused the Jews of deliberately inflating the numbers of those killed in concentration camps to pave the way for a Jewish state. He may have been one of the first to equate Zionism with Nazism.

“The Zionist movement’s stake in inflating the number of murdered in the war was aimed at ensuring great gains,” he wrote, adding that “this led to confirm the number [6 million] to establish it in world opinion, and, by so doing, to arouse more pangs of conscience and sympathy for Zionism in general.”

In the version of his doctoral paper later published under the title, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement,” Abbas denied the German use of gas chambers and suggested the total number of Jews killed was fewer than 1 million.

But perhaps the most horrifying and revolting charge by Abbas is that Zionists were complicit with the Nazis in the murder of Jews.

“The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule, in order to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them, and to expand the mass extermination,” Abbas wrote.

Abbas has danced around this treatise for many years. He has attempted to put it in perspective. He has tried to explain what he really meant when he denied 6 million Jews were murdered. But he has never publicly retracted his accusation that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis in the extermination of Jews.

Despite this incredible charge, Abbas still enjoys the reputation of a “moderate.” He still enjoys the reputation of a “pragmatist.” He still enjoys the reputation of a “statesman” – perhaps even an indispensable statesman.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Abbas was one of the principal planners of the Munich Olympics terrorist attack. He was the guy who wrote the checks and embraced the operatives as they headed off to one of the most sensational terrorist attacks of its time in 1972. More recently he said the “intifada” – the violent uprising by Arabs against Israel that has raged since the fall of 2000 – “must continue.” He has never renounced armed struggle as a legitimate means of achieving his precious Palestinian state.

In the Soviet school in which he was educated, Abbas served a useful purpose. It’s called the dialectic.

What’s the dialectic? An idea or event generates its opposite, leading to a reconciliation of opposites, or a synthesis. That is how progress is achieved – through conflict, whether it’s real conflict or phony conflict manufactured by two or more conspirators.

When you see a schism develop between Arafat and Hamas, or Arafat and Abbas, understand what is at work. There is no schism. It’s not real. They are play-acting. They are reading off the same page. It’s the dialectic at work. The fix is in.

Abbas is not a champion of peace. He is a master of artful conflict.

President Bush’s advisers do not serve him well if they have not explained this simple con game.