by Rafael Medoff

As Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, began yesterday evening, candles were lit around the world to honor the memory of millions of murdered Jews.

Except in Ramallah, where the leaders of the Palestinian Authority gathered to honor the memory of a man who devoted his life to promoting the mass murder of Jews.

PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas decided that Yom Hashoah evening was the appropriate occasion to posthumously bestow the PA’s highest honor, the “Star of Merit of the Order of the State of Palestine,” upon the late Qadri Abu Bakr.

Abu Bakr was the longtime head of the notorious “Pay for Slay” program, through which the PA provides salaries to imprisoned terrorists, and lifetime stipends to the families of dead terrorists. It currently spends $300 million annually, 8% of the PA’s national budget, on these rewards for murder.

That’s more than the percentage of America’s national budget that the US federal government spends each year on education, training, employment, social services, and transportation—combined.

Beginning in the 1960s, Abu Bakr’s job in the Fatah movement was to provide weapons to terrorists so they could murder Jews. He spent 20 years in Israeli prisons; the Israeli authorities considered him so dangerous that they exiled him to Iraq when he was released from jail. He then served as a senior aide to the notorious terror leader Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir), before the PA named him Commissioner for Prisoners’ Affairs and director of the pay-for-slay program.

Pay-for-Slay is so important to the PA that it’s enshrined in the recently-drafted text of the “Constitution of the State of Palestine”—twice.

Article 24 requires “care for the families of martyrs and the wounded and prisoners and those released from the occupation prisons.”

Article 44 reiterates that there must be “comprehensive care for the families of martyrs, the wounded, and prisoners, and those released.”

Abu Bakr died in a traffic accident three years ago. He’s gone but not forgotten, thanks to PA chairman Abbas, who chose Yom Hashoah evening to honor Abu Bakr’s “distinguished national career and struggle,” and his “leadership role in serving his homeland and the Palestinian people,” the PA’s official news agency, Wafa, reported.

Is it just a coincidence that Abbas chose to honor Abu Bakr on Holocaust Remembrance Day?  Probably not, given Abbas’s own deep interest in the Holocaust.

In his 1983 Ph.D. dissertation-turned-book, titled The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement, Abbas asserted that David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders “collaborated with Hitler” and wanted the Nazis to kill Jews, because “having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiating table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over.”

The “real” number of Jews murdered by the Nazis was “much lower” than six million and might well have been “below one million,” Abbas wrote. “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.”

Asked about his Holocaust writings in a January 2013 interview with a Lebanese television station, Abbas replied: “I challenge anyone to deny the relationship between Zionism and Nazism before World War II.” He added that he has “seventy more books that I still haven’t published” that he says would prove his claims.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that Abbas, a serial desecrator of the Holocaust, chose Yom Hashoah as the occasion to honor a man who devoted his life to facilitating and incentivizing the mass murder of Jews.

Dr. Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and the author of more than 20 books about Jewish history, Zionism and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.