Yasser Arafat’s right-hand man Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, is often described as a “moderate” Palestinian leader. European Union windbags recently praised Arafat’s proposal to appoint him as the Palestinian prime minister puppethead. He has described the stupidfada as “a mistake” and called for a stop to suicide bombings.

And he is also a Holocaust denier.

The candidate is Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), Arafat’s second in command, and his book, published in Arabic in 1983, translates as “The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement.” It was originally his doctoral dissertation, completed at Moscow Oriental College.

The book repeatedly attempts to cast doubt on the fact that the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews, according to a translation provided by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

“Following the war,” he writes, “word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that a war of extermination was aimed primarily at the Jews…The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is possible that the number of Jewish victims reached six million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller — below one million.”

Abbas denies that the gas chambers were used to murder Jews, quoting a “scientific study” to that effect by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson.

Abbas’ book then asserts: “The historian and author Raoul Hilberg thinks that the figure does not exceed 890,000.”

That is, of course, utterly false. Hilberg, a distinguished historian and author of the classic study “The Destruction of the European Jews,” has never said or written any such thing.

Disgusting is not too strong a word. Yet here is how the BBC’s profile of Mahmoud Abbas describes his literary efforts:

A highly intellectual man, Abu Mazen studied law in Egypt before doing a PhD in Moscow. He is the author of several books.