As Philip Klein points out, it’s a good thing that this “history lesson” comes from the Left’s favorite Palestinian moderate. Lord knows how this would have unfolded with a less rational personage than Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas. The Palestinian leader opened the first Palestinian National Council in 22 years yesterday, hoping to firm up his credibility enough to establish his preferred line of succession as well as unite Palestinians under his leadership. And what better way to accomplish this than some unadulterated and absolutely bat-s*** crazy anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?

In a long and rambling at speech in Ramallah at a rare session of the Palestinian National Council, Abbas touched on a number of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories during what he called a “history lesson,” as he sought to prove the 3,000 year-old Jewish connection to the Land of Israel is false. …

Pointing to Arthur Kessler’s book “The Thirteenth Tribe,” which asserts Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars, Abbas said European Jews therefore had “no historical ties” to the Land of Israel.

Abbas tied this together this by arguing that the creation of Israel was a European strategy to colonize the Middle East for themselves, pointing to the Balfour Declaration as proof. That at least has some connection to reality, but it ignores two very salient facts. First, Jews had lived in the region for millennia, and not just in the narrow places within the mandate where the British and French planned for a Jewish homeland under their control. Second, it was almost literally the worst possible land in the region for colonization, having no material mineral or agrarian value (until the Israelis developed the latter on the kibbutzim, which first launched a few years before the Balfour Declaration). The Brits in particular were more interested in the oil fields of Iraq, which … is an entirely different topic.

Read more at Hot Air.