Two Jewish Conservative MPs expressed outrage this week after a picture surfaced of two Liberal cabinet ministers “holding hands” with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president who is known for his anti-Semitic policies.
Foreign Minister Melanie Joly and Mental Health and Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks met with Mr. Abbas and Palestinian Authority Minister of Foreign Affairs Riad Malki while visiting the West Bank this week.
Her tweet was accompanied by a picture of her shaking hands with Mr. Abbas while Ms. Saks appeared to be holding the Palestinian leader’s other hand.
The state’s Martyrs Fund pays monthly cash stipends to the families of Palestinians who are killed, injured, or imprisoned while carrying out violence against Israel.
“You held this guy’s hand,” she said. “You have lost your mind Yaara Saks and your constituents now know it.”
Fellow Conservative MP Marty Morantz expressed similar sentiments.
‘Misleading Remarks’
Mr. Abbas is infamous for comments made last August that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s slaughter of six million European Jews was because of their business practices, not their faith.“These people were fought because of their social function related to money, usury,” Abbas said in a speech to senior members of his Fatah movement. “From Hitler’s point of view, they were sabotaging, and therefore he hated them.”
“The speech contained false and grossly misleading remarks about Jews and anti-Semitism,” the EU said. “Such historical distortions are inflammatory, deeply offensive, and can only serve to exacerbate tensions in the region.”
In his doctoral thesis in the 1970s, he downplayed the Holocaust, questioning the extent of the Nazi genocide. He has since distanced himself from those assertions but has continued to make remarks that many have called anti-Semitic.
In one such incident in 2022, he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians. Mr. Abbas apologized, but only after being chastised by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Funding was reinstated because of the “dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” the government said.
Ms. Joly, in her meetings with Mr. Abbas and Mr. Malki, said Canada would continue efforts to provide humanitarian assistance to Palestinians and would push for “increased delivery of aid by all means possible, including through existing land entry points and by sea.”
