Fatah Facebook page says Jews deserved to die in the Holocaust - report
A post on Fatah’s official Facebook page says that Jews deserved to be killed in the Holocaust because of “who they are.”
By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMANPalestinian Media Watch identifies a Fatah Facebook post explaining Jews deserved to die in the Holocaust.(photo credit: PALESTINIAN MEDIA WATCH)
A post on Fatah’s official Facebook page said that Jews deserved to be killed in the Holocaust because of “who they are.”According to the February 27 post, translated and highlighted by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), Fatah presented that Jews willingly and eagerly agreed to bury Russian civilians alive in order to save their own lives.“In 1941, the Germans made us dig deep pits in the ground,” the Fatah Facebook post read. “When we finished doing what they wanted, they brought a group of Jews, threw them into the pits, and ordered us to bury them. We refused to carry out this atrocious act. So, the Germans ordered to throw us in instead of the Jews and ordered them to bury us. 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!’”Fatah presented this passage, alongside three images of mass graves, as an authentic quote from the memoirs of a Russian civilian.Although a screenshot of the post is made available through PMW, The Jerusalem Post could no longer locate the February 27 post, indicating that since then it must have been removed by Facebook or hidden by the page administrator.PMW researched the story referenced in the original post and found that while it bears some similarities to a historical account documented by JTA in 1942. “In reality, Jews and Ukrainians all acted historically by refusing to bury each other alive, and therefore were all murdered by the Nazis,” writes PMW in a statement.Nan Jacques Zilberdik, senior analyst at PMW, said that Fatah posted this story without 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 antisemitic libel that Jews are defined by these character traits.“This is just the latest in a long list of examples of antisemitic hatred by the Palestinian leadership, which is poisoning the minds of the Palestinian people, especially its children and youth,” she continued.This is not the first time that the Fatah Facebook page has been called out for incitement against Jews or for promoting terrorism.
In early February, PMW submitted a request to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to close Fatah’s official Facebook page based on the Israeli watchdog group’s belief that Palestinian terrorists carried out attacks in 2018 influenced by Fatah’s glorification of murder and its promotion of violence on its Facebook page.Fatah’s official page currently has 148,486 likes, an increase of more than 2,000 people since February 8, when The Jerusalem Post last checked the count.PMW’s 42-page report on the Fatah Facebook page demonstrated how Fatah’s posts glorified mass murderers and other terrorists who were responsible for hundreds of murders, which include not only Israelis but Americans and others.The Fatah page, administered by Munir al-Jaghoub, was shut down once in June 2015. However, at that time, Facebook said it was closed due to a technical error and not based on violations. The page was reopened in less than two weeks.
