The Truth About Mahmoud Abbas; President George W. Bush calls him a 'man dedicated to peace,' but others say the new Palestinian prime minister is both a terrorist and a Holocaust denier

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 8, 2003 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Byline: Kenneth R. Timmerman, INSIGHT

For Germany, the 1972 Munich Olympics were supposed to be "the Carefree Games." There was to be no barbed wire, no Nazi spectacles, no storm troopers. Mimes and street bands wandered through the Olympic Village, while athletes and visitors chugged beer. The only guards, known as "Olys," were armed with walkie-talkies and wore turquoise-colored blazers. The 1972 games were intended as a sybaritic festival of repudiation of the last Olympics held on German soil, the 1936 orgy of Nazi hate in Berlin. It was party time for the new Germany.

But Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, more commonly known as Abu Daoud, had other plans. In the predawn light of Sept. 5, 1972, he helped the last of a dozen armed Palestinian terrorists scale the wall of the Olympic Village, just 12 miles from Dachau, and storm the compound where 11 Israeli athletes and trainers were sleeping. Within minutes, the Palestinians had shot two of the Israelis, and for 17 hours held the world on edge as they negotiated their own release with the German authorities.

In the botched rescue attempt by the German police at a nearby airport, most of the Palestinians were killed, but not before they murdered the remaining nine Israelis in cold blood. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir vowed revenge, and Mossad "hit teams" were sent around the world to track down the terrorists and kill them.

For nearly 30 years Daoud remained in the shadows as memories went dim and passions cooled. At one point, after the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Israelis even gave him a VIP pass that allowed him free passage between his home in Amman, Jordan, and the West Bank and Gaza.

But recently all that has changed, and many Israelis and their supporters in the United States are furious less because of what Daoud did in Munich than because of what he has revealed about his partners in that crime. For among them, Abu Daoud says in a 1999 memoir published in French, and in a more recent interview with Sports Illustrated, was Mahmoud Abbas, the man President George W. Bush has called a "man dedicated to peace."

Daoud's book, Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich, reaffirms what many terrorism experts and Israeli officials long suspected that the Black September organization, which Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) always claimed was a renegade outfit, was in fact tightly controlled by Arafat. Even more shocking, however, was the allegation that Abbas, then a top Arafat deputy, provided the financing for the Munich massacre.

Daoud's revelations went virtually unnoticed in the United States until recently, when an Israeli human-rights lawyer, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, cited them in a letter to President Bush and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder that called for an investigation of Abbas' role in the Olympic massacre and questioned whether he was a reliable partner for peace. Since then, the revelations have been circulated widely.

In his memoir, Daoud points out that Abbas went to the White House Rose Garden in September 1993 for the signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords with Arafat, president Bill Clinton and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. "Do you think that ... would have been possible if the Israelis had known that Abu Mazen was the financier of our operation?" he wrote, referring to Abbas by his PLO nom de guerre. "I doubt it."

Bitter that the Israelis had yanked his travel credentials while elevating his partner in crime, Daoud contacted Sports Illustrated last year on the 30th anniversary of the attack and told his story once again. This time, he revealed that Arafat and Abbas both had wished him luck and kissed him when he told them his plans.

When Insight asked U.S. officials and Middle East policy experts in Washington what they thought of allegations that the new Palestinian prime minister had financed the 1972 Munich massacre, the reactions ranged from shrugs to outright laughter.

"Terrorist? Who isn't?" one official remarked. "The Israelis don't need to make peace with their friends."

Edward Abbington, a former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem who now works as a paid lobbyist for the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Washington, tersely dismissed the allegations as "not relevant." A senior aid to Abbas, Maen Areikat, scoffs at the story and tells Insight in a phone interview from the West Bank that Daoud's account "bears no relationship to reality." He adds: "Since the mid-1970s, [Abbas] has been advocating contacts with Israelis, even when it was considered taboo."

For radical Islamic groups in Gaza and the West Bank, such as Hamas, contacts with Israelis other than violence still are taboo. After Israeli helicopter gunships failed to assassinate him in a rocket attack in Gaza on June 8, Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantissi told reporters that his movement would continue to carry out suicide attacks "until not one Jew is left in Palestine." Abbas met with Rantissi and other Hamas leaders shortly before that attack, hoping to negotiate a temporary halt to the terror.