A post that appeared on major Palestinian political party Fatah’s Facebook page, but then was apparently deleted or blocked by the social media website, suggested that Jews deserved to be killed in the Holocaust, bearing in mind “who they are”, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Its translation, provided by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW,) has it that Jews willingly agreed to bury Russian citizens alive in order to save their own lives.
The post, which Fatah presented as an authentic excerpt from a Russian civilian’s memoirs, alongside multiple images of mass graves, reportedly started off by saying that in 1941, the Germans “made us dig deep pits in the ground”, continuing further:
“When we finished doing what they wanted, they brought a group of Jews, threw them into the pits, and ordered us to bury them”.
Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, then said that Russians refused to carry out the “atrocious act”, with the Germans afterwards ordering “to throw us [Russians] in instead of the Jews and then burry”.
“The Jews began to pour dirt on us without hesitation. The dirt almost covered us, but the Germans stopped them and took us out. We were surprised when the German commander shouted at us: ‘I just wanted you to know who the Jews are and why we are killing them!’" the post reportedly concluded.
Having researched the story referenced in the now deleted post, PMW found that it was indeed documented as a historic happening by JTA in 1942, amending it, however, that “in reality, Jews and Ukrainians all acted historically by refusing to bury each other, and therefore were all murdered by the Nazis,” PMW said in a statement.
Nan Jacques Zilberdik, chief analyst at PMW, took Fatah to task over posting the story without an evaluative comment.
“It did not condemn this story for portraying Jews as evil, selfish, and ungrateful”, Zilberdik said.
“Nor did it distance itself from the Nazi commander’s justification of the murder of Jews in the Holocaust based on the anti-Semitic libel that Jews are defined by these character traits”, Zilberdik stated, adding that this is just the latest in a lengthy list of exampled of “anti-Semitic hatred by Palestinian leadership”, which she says is “poisoning the minds of the Palestinian people, especially its children and youth”, she continued.
The outrage has engulfed Twitter, as well, with many having their say on the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian crunch:
In early February, PMW requested that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg shut down Fatah’s official page on the platform on the basis of the Israeli-based NGO’s assertion that Palestinian terrorists’ 2018 attacks had to do with the promotion of hatred on Fata’s Facebook page.
To prove the point, PMW, which has been especially active since early 2000s, issued a 42-page report illustrating how Fatah’s posts heaped praise on mass murderers and other terrorists responsible for killings of not only Israelis, but Americans and others, too.
The Fatah page was blocked once in June 2015, with Facebook saying the closure was due to a technical error, restoring it in less than two weeks.