A decade after his death, Yasser Arafat’s legacy is still with us. He perfected the art of saying one thing in English to manipulate the Clinton administration and another in Arabic to reassure the Palestinians that his promises to Clinton were lies he assumed the president was too inattentive to figure out. Arafat may be gone, but the torch has been passed, and Mahmoud Abbas has learned well from his mentor.

The latest evidence of this is Ronen Bergman’s in-depth report today on Abbas’s career as an intellectual fraud. Bergman writes:

The Palestinian Authority’s new media division is putting considerable effort it seems into the construction and maintenance of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’official website. The site is user-friendly and includes information on the familiar parts of Abbas’ resume — from his childhood in Safed to the president’s office in Ramallah. The site details Abbas’ political journey as a Palestinian leader, without forgetting to include all of the awards and citations he has received along the way.

Far from hiding Abbas’s extremism, Bergman reports, the site “glorifies Abbas’ work” and even presents him as a “philosopher with a unique perspective on history, and an important intellectual.” Among the works listed are Abbas’s books, which can be read on the site–in Arabic.

One such book is The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, based on Abbas’s infamous 1982 paper calling basic facts of the Holocaust into question. The book’s central idea is that Zionist leaders saw the Holocaust as beneficial to their cause and worthy of their cooperation, so they struck up an alliance with the Nazis to facilitate the extermination of the Jewish people. A taste:

In this book, Abbas wonders, among other things, “How can one believe that the Zionist movement, which set out to protect a nation, would later become the reason for its destruction? History teaches us about (the Emperor) Nero who torched Rome. But Nero was mad, and his madness rids him of the responsibility to his actions. History also teaches us about leaders who betrayed their people and their country and sold them out to their enemies. But these leaders are isolated. They alone carry the responsibility for their actions. But when a large national public movement conspires against its ‘people,’ well that is embarrassing…

“An Arab proverb says: ‘If a dispute arises between thieves, the theft is discovered.’ This is what happened with the Zionist movement. When ‘Labor’ (Mapai) was in power in the State of Israel, it refused to include the revisionists and those started exposing facts and blowing away the smoke screen of lies. We cannot fail to mention that many of the Zionist movement’s people during the war were amazed of the results of the cooperation between the Zionists and the Nazis, and the massive amount of victims struck them with terror… To this one must add that many documents from the Third Reich had reached many hands, which allowed us to present these documents that illustrate the nature of the relations and cooperation between the Nazis and the Zionist movement.”

Bergman goes into some detail on Abbas’s intellectual development, and his article is worth reading in full. He also points out that Abbas has rejected accusations of Holocaust denial over the years, and yet “The fact the books were recently reprinted with funding from the Palestinian Authority and are recommended on the PA president’s official website, negates the claims made by Abbas and his associates several times that this is just a thesis paper released over 30 years ago.” Bergman also notes that Abbas’s denial of his Holocaust denial has been far more muted in Arab media than to Western audiences.

The fact of the matter is that Abbas is proud of his “achievements” in anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering. The West treats him as though he is something he is not, in large part because they, and the Western media they rely on, don’t read or speak Arabic and don’t really know who Abbas is, despite treating him as a man of peace. (As the State Department still does.)

It also feeds into the anti-Netanyahu obsession of many Western journalists who seem forced to paint Abbas as some sort of moderate in order to build a more damning case against Netanyahu or to blame him for the lack of peace. When Abbas recently put out a statement slamming Israeli proponents of equal prayer rights on the Temple Mount, he disguised it as a call for calm. This prompted Jeffrey Goldberg, one of Bibi’s consistent hecklers, to tweet the following: “Abbas, labeled by Netanyahu gov’t as a Holocaust-denying fanatic, endorses Bibi’s call for calm in Jerusalem.”

Yikes. Not only did that misread Abbas’s message, but it implied that Netanyahu was somehow mistaken to treat Abbas as “a Holocaust-denying fanatic.” As Bergman’s report makes clear, such Western proponents of Abbas’s supposed moderation have a tremendous amount of egg on their face when someone actually makes the effort to read Abbas’s public pronouncements of his own beliefs. Abbas is indeed who his critics say he is. And he wants everyone to know it.