- Thus, Mahmoud Abbas, because his family was more financially equipped, grew up as a teenager in Damascus, Syria and attended the University of Damascus, where he acquired a BA in Middle Eastern Law. During the Cold War, Syria was a client state of the Soviet Union. While a young man, Abbas moved to the former Soviet Union and earned his Ph.D. in history from Moscow's Oriental College. His life spent in the Soviet Union came at the very height of the Cold War, and therefore much of his philosophical training became rooted in Communistic anti-American ideology. This ideology paralleled his own anti-Israel fundamentalism, and led ultimately to his association with the Marxist backed Fatah movements agenda to liberate all of Palestine from Israel. In the mid 1950’s Abbas became heavily involved in underground Palestinian politics, joining a number of exiled Palestinians in Qatar, where he was positioned as Director of Personnel in the emirate's Civil Service. While there, Abbas recruited a number of people who would later become key figures in the PLO, and was one of the founding members of the notorious Fatah terrorist organization. Yasser Arafat first brought Abbas into the embryonic PLO after the Sinai Fedayeen raids in 1956, any by 1959 they were organized enough that Arafat could incorporate Abbas as the principle Fatah financier who could begin raising funds for Fatah’s guerrilla campaigns in Palestine.
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Abbas’s background in anti-Israel propaganda and indoctrination with Soviet Marxist geo-political strategies in the Middle East made him a likely partner for another anti-Israel client with Soviet backing, Yasser Araafat. Apparently, at the behest of the Soviet Union and the Arab League, Arafat recruited an inner band of underground Palestinian political agitators. Among those who collaborated on the formation of the Syrian based Fatah movement was Mahmoud Abbas. These two figures met for the first time while both were still in their 20’s. Abu Mazen's duties on behalf of the PLO were thus built on his abilities for securing funding for the Palestinian guerrilla movement rather than actually formulating the terrorist infrastructure of Fatah, as was the case with Arafat, who had a hands-on managerial role of the terrorism. Unlike Abbas, who was a legitimate Palestinian Arab, Yasser Arafat was an Egyptian, (Egypt was also then a Soviet-Russian client) born in Cairo, and served in the Egyptian military against Israel in the 1948 war.
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In 1982, Abbas wrote a doctoral dissertation, referring to so-called “Holocaust deniers,” claiming secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist movement. In 1984, a book based on Abbas' doctoral dissertation was published in Arabic. His doctoral thesis later became a book, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, which, following his appointment as Palestinian Prime Minister in 2003, was heavily criticized by some Jewish groups as an example of Holocaust denial. In his book, Abbas raised doubts that gas chambers were used for the extermination of Jews, and suggested that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was "less than a million."
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The Palestine Liberation Organization was undoubtedly one of the most infamous terrorist organizations in the world. Its terror-laden image has been surpassed in recent years though because of two factors. (1.) The PLO’s public political charade of having abandoned terror. (2.) Its post-Oslo reliance on sub-structured terrorist cells to carry out terrorist operations. (3.) the rise of comepting terrorist organizations. The mere letters PLO used to conjure images of murder and mayhem. Those three letters gained world-wide notoriety in the 60’s and 70’s for many insidious acts of terrorism, including the massacre of Jewish athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games. Under the cunning leadership of Yasser Arafat, the PLO created havoc in Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and throughout Europe. Yasser Arafat made the PLO organization a euphemism for modern terrorism, and with covert skills acquired from the Soviets, basically invented airline hijackings. Yasser Arafat was the face of international terrorism for much of the 20th century. Yasser Arafat and his Fatah operatives won the support of the Palestinian Congress in 1964, and pledged to give a voice to the large number of Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon by waging guerrilla terrorist attacks on Israel. It was not long before the group began to splinter into various factions, all of whom believed they knew the best way to achieve Palestinian liberation. Most notable of these groups were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, and al-Fatah. Each of these factions remained more-or-less under the umbrella of the PLO and never strayed too far from the fold of Yasser Arafat’s direction. By 1967 the PLO had decided that their primary goal was the total destruction of the state of Israel. For the next ten years, this goal was the primary focus of the massive terrorist campaign by which their infamous reputation was formed. And in this mission, Mahmoud Abbas continued as Arafat’s right hand man, and continued to raise funds throughout the Middle East for the PLO campaigns against Israel.
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