BY KEVIN HECHTKOPF

DECEMBER 11, 2011 / 1:42 AM EST / CBS NEWS

Newt Gingrich is standing by comments he made earlier this week when he called the Palestinians an “invented” people.

“Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire,” the former House speaker told the Jewish Channel this week. “And I think that we’ve have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab community, and they had the chance to go many places.”

Gingrich’s comments immediately caused a stir in the Middle East and elsewhere. A Palestinian legislator said Gingrich had “lost touch with reality,” while another official described called him “ignorant,” according to the Associated Press.

Gingrich was then asked about the comments during Saturday night’s Republican presidential debate from Iowa, which was sponsored by ABC News.

Gingrich was then asked about the comments during Saturday night’s Republican presidential debate from Iowa, which was sponsored by ABC News.

“Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes,” he answered. “Are we in a situation where every day rockets are fired into Israel while the United States? The current administration tries to pressure the Israelis into a peace process… Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left? We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, enough lying about the Middle East.”

Historical facts that can’t be denied:

During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, around 10,000 Jews were forced to evacuate their homes in Palestine or Israel. The war indirectly created a second, major refugee problem,  In the 20th century, approximately 900,000 Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries. Partly because of the war between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived in the Arab states were intimidated into flight, or were expelled from their native countries, most of them reaching Israel. The immediate reasons for the flight were the popular Arab hostility, including pogroms, triggered by the war in Palestine and anti-Jewish governmental measures.