“Moderate” Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday used his opportunity to address to the European Union Parliament in Brussels to screech out wildly unsubstantiated conspiracy theories regarding Israel.

In allegations echoing a popular medieval anti-Semitic libel, Abbas charged, “Only a week ago, a number of rabbis in Israel announced, and made a clear announcement, demanding that their government poison the water to kill the Palestinians. Isn’t that clear incitement to commit mass killings against the Palestinian people?”

Abbas and his regime based their claim off a Turkish state news agency report that a “Rabbi Shlomo Mlma, chairman of the Council of Rabbis in the West Bank settlements”, had called on Jewish settlers to poison Palestinian water supplies.

But investigations by Reuters and other news agencies were unable to find any such edict, or, indeed, a rabbi named Shlomo Mlma or an organization called the Council of Rabbis.

In other words, the entire affair was fabricated.

But that didn’t stop the European lawmakers from giving Abbas a standing ovation following his libelous speech.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that this happened on the very same day, in fact just hours before the British public rocked the EU by voting to pull their nation out of the politico-economic union, a move that could have devastating economic consequences for the continent.