The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has condemned Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas for a recent speech in which he offered a revolting justification of the recent tide of Palestinian stabbings, car rammings, and murders of  innocent Jews. Several dozen Jews have been murdered and scores more maimed.

During a speech delivered to mark the United Nation’s International Anti-Corruption Day at the Red Cross and Red Crescent headquarters in El-Bireh, Abbas described the terrorist attacks that have claimed the lives of twenty Israelis as “justified popular unrest” supposedly triggered by “the despair of young Palestinians over the lack of a political horizon for the two-state solution, the invasion [sic] of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the continuation of settlement building and military checkpoint deployment … [Young Palestinians have given up on seeking a Palestinian state because they had seen that] our state doesn’t exist because of the settlements and checkpoints, and despair started to seep in” (‘Abbas: “Justified popular unrest” triggered by despair of young Palestinians,’ Times of Israel, December 14, 2015).

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “As an organization that has repeatedly for years exposed the lies, deceptions, pro-terror and anti-peace acts of Mahmoud Abbas, we cannot claim to be surprised by this speech. But we nonetheless condemn it for offering a shameless justification for the Palestinian campaign of stabbings, car-rammings, and shootings  that have killed, wounded and endangered the lives of ordinary Israelis simply walking the streets of Israeli cities.

“There is nothing ‘justified’ about murdering innocent Jews; and the great unnamed elephants in the room are PA incitement to hatred and murder and the supremacist attitudes towards Jews that fertilizes and maintains the Palestinian war on Israel’s existence.

“Mahmoud Abbas is not only justifying terrorism and murder of Jews but, with his recent, ugly, supremacist incitement to violence over Jews that are lawfully and peacefully visiting Judaism’s holiest site, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, he is largely responsible for it.

“It was Abbas who lied to Palestinian Arabs, saying that that the Al Aqsa Mosque was being attacked and declared ‘The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours … and [the Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet … We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem … blood spilled for Allah.’

“Abbas subsequently added further fuel to the flames, promoting the despicable lie that Israelis had killed, not knife-wielding terrorists, but were intentionally ‘executing’ young Palestinian Arab teenagers.

“With this record, it is not hard to understand why young Palestinians might have ‘given up’ on a Palestinian state alongside Israel –– they don’t want one and have never been educated or encouraged to seek peace.

“It is high time that international leaders condemn Abbas’ ugly pro-terror, anti-peace record, and cease the cynical pretense that he is a moderate or man of peace  – when he is neither.”