German police opened a preliminary investigation into Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s statement that Israel committed ’50 holocausts’ against Palestiniansfor possible incitement to hatred, the German press reported this Friday.
A police spokeswoman told the Bild newspaper that the preliminary investigation is in the hands of a “specialized department of the State Criminal Police.” The police opened the case after receiving a formal criminal complaint, according to the US agency AP.
Minimizing the Holocaust is a criminal offense in Germany, but opening a preliminary investigation does not automatically mean a full investigation.
The German government said Abbas will benefit from legal immunity because he was on an official visit to Germany as a representative of the Palestinian Authority.
Germany does not recognize the Palestinian Territories as a sovereign state, a position reaffirmed on Tuesday by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz when he received Abbas.
That day, after a meeting in Berlin, the two leaders held a joint press conference, during which Abbas was asked about the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics.
On September 5, 1972, Palestinian militants kidnapped Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village in Munich, in an attack that left 17 dead: 11 members of the Israeli delegation, five attackers and a German policeman.
Abbas refused to apologize for the Munich attacks, replying that he could point to “50 holocausts” committed by Israel.
From 1947 to the present day, Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian towns. Fifty massacres, 50 holocausts”, he said in reference to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
Abbas was criticized in Germany and Israel, although Scholz, for his part, did not react immediately, which also earned him some comments. Later, the Social Democratic chancellor expressed himself “outraged by the scandalous comments” of Abbas.
“For us Germans, in particular, any relativization of the uniqueness of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable. I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust,” Scholz wrote on Twitter.
Despite the controversy and calls to suspend aid to the Palestinians, the German government confirmed this Friday that it maintains its support program of more than 340 million euros, approved for 2021 and 2022, the weekly Der Spiegel reported this Friday.
The German government does not directly finance the Palestinian Authority, but has a humanitarian aid program for the Palestinians and development support.
In Israel, Prime Minister Yair Lapid was also outraged by Abbas’s comments, all the more so because they were made in Germany, whose Nazi regime, under Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), was responsible for the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1930s. 1940.
“Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, including 1.5 million Jewish children. History will never forgive,” Lapid recalled Wednesday.
The “final solution” policy, as the Nazi regime called it, consisted of the systematic elimination of Jews (extended to other communities, such as Gypsies), including the use of gas chambers in concentration camps.
The Nazi regime was overthrown with the German defeat in World War II (1939-1945), which Hitler started three years after using the Berlin Olympics as a propaganda operation for the ideology of his National Socialist German Workers Party. , better known as the Nazi Party.
Source: Observadora
