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Anne Hidalgo: "Nothing can justify revisionism and Holocaust denial"
Photograph:
KAREN MINASYAN / AFP
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has stripped Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of the city's highest award for denying the Shoah. Abbas had declared in a speech in Ramallah in the West Bank at the end of August that Adolf Hitler "did not kill the Jews because they were Jews." Hitler had said that he was fighting the Jews "because they were usurers," Abbas added.
"They justified the extermination of European Jews during World War II with the obvious intention of denying the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany," Anne Hidalgo wrote in a letter to Abbas. Yonathan Arfi, chairman of the Jewish umbrella organization, published it on Thursday evening in the online service X.
"I condemn her account with the greatest determination, nothing can justify revisionism and denial of the Holocaust," the letter continues: "Your remarks contradict the universal values and historical truth of the Shoah."
The mayor of Paris had awarded Abbas the Grand Vermeil 2015 award, calling him a "man of peace" at the time.
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