Mahmoud Abbas

Mahmoud Abbas, born 26 March 1935, also known by the kunya Abu Mazen, has been the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation since 11 November 2004 and became President of the Palestinian National Authority on 15 January 2005 on the Fatah (فتح Fataḥ) ticket. Elected to serve until 9 January 2009, he unilaterally extended his term for another year. Rival political party Hamas announced it would not recognise the extension. Abbas was chosen as the President of the "State of Palestine" by the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Central Council on 23 November 2008, a job he had held unofficially since 8 May 2005.
Abbas served as the first Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority from March to October 2003 when he resigned citing lack of support from Israel and the United States as well as "internal incitement" against his government. Before being named prime minister, Abbas led the PLO's Negotiations Affairs Department.
Mahmoud Ridha Abbas was born in 1935 in Safed, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine. His family became refugees during the war of 1948 and settled in Syria. In Syria he attended school and graduated from the University of Damascus before going to Egypt where he studied law.
Later in his life, Abbas entered graduate studies at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where he earned a Candidate of Sciences degree[7] (the Soviet equivalent of a PhD).
He is married to Amina Abbas; they have three sons, including Yasser Abbas, who was named after former PA leader Yasser Arafat.
In the mid-1950s Abbas became heavily involved in underground Palestinian politics, joining a number of exiled Palestinians in Qatar, where he was Director of Personnel in the emirate's Civil Service. While there, he recruited a number of people who would become key figures in the Palestine Liberation Organization, and was one of the founding members of Fatah in 1957. Yasser Arafat was among the other key members.
At the same time he has performed diplomatic duties, presenting a moderating face for PLO policies. Abbas was the first PLO official to visit Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War in January 1993 to mend fences with the Gulf countries for the PLO's opposition to the US attack on Iraq during the crisis. At the 1993 peace accord with Israel, Abbas was the signatory for the PLO on 13 September 1993. He published a memoir, Through Secret Channels: The Road to Oslo (1995).

Abbas' CandSc thesis, completed in 1982 at the Patrice Lumumba University, and defended at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was entitled Relations between the Zionism and Nazism, 1933 – 1945 (Russian: "Связи между сионизмом и нацизмом. 1933 – 1945"), (other translation of the title: The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement) and discussed topics such as the Haavara Agreement. The institute's director at the time, Yevgeny Primakov, appointed a Soviet-Palestine scholar, Vladimir Ivanovich Kisilev (Russian: Владимир Иванович Киселёв) as Abbas's dissertation adviser; he communicated with his student mostly in English and Arabic. In an interview with the Kommersant magazine twenty years later, Dr Kisilev remembers Abbas as well-prepared graduate student, who came to Moscow with an already chosen research topic and a large amount of already prepared material.
In 1984, a book based on Abbas's doctoral dissertation was published in Arabic by Dar Ibn Rushd publishers in Amman, Jordan. His doctoral thesis later became a book, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, which, following his appointment as prime minister in 2003, was heavily criticised as an example of Holocaust denial. In his book, Abbas described the Nazi Holocaust as "The Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed." He also wrote: "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."
Additionally, he claimed that the much smaller number of Jews which he admitted that the Nazis did massacre were actually the victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot: "The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule to arouse the government's hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination."
The California-based Simon Wiesenthal Center publicly called for Abbas to clarify his position on the Holocaust, but no clear statement was forthcoming. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv in the mid 90's Abbas tried to frame the issue in terms of realpolitik. "When I wrote The Other Side…we were at war with Israel," Abbas said. "Today I would not have made such remarks…Today there is peace and what I write from now on must help advance the peace process."
As Abbas was appointed prime minister, the Israel Defense Forces discreetly deleted quotes from their website, providing excerpts from the their new partner’s book, questioning the use of gas chambers and talking of less than one million victims, along with statements supporting terrorism. The English translation of the book was also withdrawn by the Simon Wiesenthal Center prior to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, after a request from the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the American State Department, according to Member of the Knesset, Aryeh Eldad.
In his May 2003 interview with Haaretz, Abbas stated: "I wrote in detail about the Holocaust and said I did not want to discuss numbers. I quoted an argument between historians in which various numbers of casualties were mentioned. One wrote there were twelve million victims and another wrote there were 800,000. I have no desire to argue with the figures. The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it." (wikipedia - www.spiegel.de - therealbarackobama.files.wordpress.com)