Once again Time and its reporter Karl Vick’s bias, or naivety at best, is revealed regarding the Arab-Israel conflict. In his “The Stateless Statesman” [Oct.15, 2012] story he refers, using Orwellian adjectives, to Mahmoud Abbas as a, “bookish moderate” and an “avuncular, grandfatherly…modern man, free from violence.”  The kind of person one would introduce to ones daughter.

Is this the same man who regarding the recognition of Israel recently stated, in Arabic; “You can call yourselves whatever you want. But I will not accept it?” Is this the same man who approved a law authorising lump-sum payments of $2200 (mainly from foreign donations to the PA) to the surviving family members of terrorists, who he refers to as “shahids” (martyrs), including suicide bombers?

Is this the same man who refers to the the sovereign State of Israel as the “Zionist enemy,” and in December 2010, reiterated, in Arabic, his longstanding position that if a Palestinian state were to be established, no Jews would be permitted to enter it: “We have frankly said, and always will say: If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it?”

Is this the man whose doctoral thesis from Moscow University later became a book (titled The Other Side: The Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement) which denied both the scope and gravity of the Shoah? According to Abbas, ”only a few hundred thousand Jews” were killed in the Shoah and those mostly through collusion between the Nazis and the Zionists.

Is this Time and Karl Vick’s peace-loving “hero?” Ecce homo!

Clearly Abbas has a very different message to his Arabic speaking constituency than he does to English speaking western reporters. The root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the failure of the Arab side to even recognise the legitimacy of a Jewish right to a homeland in the Land of Israel.