In the late 1970s, during the presidency of James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, a propaganda campaign to promote the "Holocaust," the alleged systematic slaughter of some six million Jews by the Germans during the Second World War, was organized and carried out from Hollywood and New York. As Benjamin Meed, an important functionary of the council which controls the Holocaust museum, wrote in 1990:
Almost a dozen years ago, a new phenomena [sic] developed. The Holocaust was introduced into schools, colleges, and universities. Television broadcast programs on the Holocaust and millions of Americans watched them. Soon, Americans took great interest in the lessons of the Holocaust, its uniqueness and its universal message. (note 1)
Why the urgency of this campaign? Two factors were paramount: first, the
beginnings, more than three decades after the end of the Second World War, of an
objective scholarly assessment of the facts of the alleged German policy to
exterminate European Jewry. (note 2)
Second, the need to justify Zionist
theory and practice in the face of unprecedented international resistance to
Israeli intransigence (including the famous UN General Assembly Resolution which
equated Zionism with racism), and to defend Israel's aggressive policy under the
leadership of the former terrorist, Prime Minister Menachem Begin. (note 3)
In 1978 President Carter, his administration beleaguered at home and abroad,
succumbed to pressure from the new "Holocaust" lobby (and thus America's
influential Israel-first minority) by creating, through executive order, the
President's Commission on the Holocaust. Two years later, on 7 October 1987,
Congress passed -- unanimously -- a law establishing the United States Holocaust
Memorial Council, charged principally with constructing and overseeing the
operation of "a permanent living memorial to the victims of the holocaust" and
with providing "for appropriate ways for the Nation to commemorate the Days of
Remembrance, as an annual, national, civic commemoration of the Holocaust . . ."
(note 4)
A priceless tract of public land was turned over to the
Council, and, after years of costly delay (during which the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council's budget swelled from $2.5 million to over $18 million a year),
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has been completed and readied for opening on
22 April 1993.
The Holocaust Memorial Council, besides soliciting tens of millions of
dollars in tax-deductible donations to finance the Holocaust museum, has busied
itself with promoting an agenda of unalloyed support for minority, Zionist ends.
The membership of the Council, a U.S. federal agency, has been
overwhelmingly Jewish since its founding in 1980. The Council's two different
chairmen -- Elie Wiesel and Harvey Meyerhoff -- have both been committed to the
support of the State of Israel, and the chairs of the Council's most important
committees have been likewise Jewish and Zionist.
The chief fund-raiser
for the Holocaust museum, Miles Lerman, was formerly American vice chairman for
the State of Israel Bonds Organization, promoting tax-free investment in a
country which receives by far the largest amount of U.S. foreign aid per year.
Working the same wealthy Jewish-Americans he has long dealt with in his
fund-raising for Israel, Lerman has helped raise nearly $160 million in
tax-deductible contributions. The biggest donors have been rewarded by having
various components of the museum named for them, e.g. the Wexner Learning
Center.
Nor is erecting and operating the Holocaust Memorial Museum the
only function with which the Holocaust Memorial Council has been charged.
Another of its duties is to commemorate the Days of Remembrance for Victims of
the Holocaust, which Congress has raised to "an annual, national, civic
commemoration of the Holocaust." Like the Israeli Yom ha-shoah (Day of the
Holocaust), on which they are based, the Days of Remembrance are dated according
to the lunar Hebrew calendar, and thus, like Passover or Chanukah, fluctuate
from year to year. These foreign days of lamentation are currently celebrated,
under the flag of the Republic, to prayers and chants in Hebrew, in governmental
settings from the Capital Rotunda to city halls, across the land. Need it be
stated that no group of American victims of persecution, let alone another
foreign group, enjoys any such federally mandated and tax-supported day, or
days, of recognition?
Although the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council during its early years made
noises about recognizing the ordeals of non-Jews during the Second World War, by
every indication from advance literature published by the Council the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum is relentlessly Judeocentric. While, according to a
preliminary ground plan of the permanent exhibit, here and there are nods to
non-Jewish groups oppressed by the German National Socialists (never to groups
victimized by Germany's enemies, above all by Stalin's USSR), the larger
holocaust of the Second World War, which claimed an estimated 75 to 80 million
lives around the world, is ignored in preference to the Jewish ordeal. Thus, to
cite just one telling example, the Museum's "Life before the Holocaust" exhibit
refers strictly to Jewish life before the Holocaust. (note 5)
Where, in
fact, non-Jews figure in the Museum, they figure largely as villains: the
Germans and their allies and collaborators; the Western allies, including
America, who refused to accept a large immigration before the war; the American
political and military leaders who refused to authorize costly bombing raids on
the Auschwitz "gas chambers."
The Museum's message that support for Jews is the sole measure of decency
during the Second World War leads to anomalies which, in an American museum
raised on ground hallowed to the principles of liberty on which this republic is
based, can only be called shocking. That the victims of World War II atrocities
by the Allies -- massacres such as the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden, the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet slaughter of Polish
prisoners at Katyn, the mass rapes carried out by the Red Army at the war's end
-- receive no mention is deplorable. But the Museum's treatment of the armed
forces which defended Stalin's savage Soviet tyranny is nothing short of
grotesque.
In the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Communists appear only
in the guise of "resistance fighters" and "liberators." For example, the
submachine gun and false papers of Samuel Weissberg, a Communist Party member
who rose to high rank in a Communist guerrilla group in North France, are on
honored display, no less precious a relic than the standard heaps of shoes and
hair, in the Museum's permanent exhibit. (note 6)
Even more unsettling
is the honor given to Stalin's notorious Red Army, which compiled a bloody and
shameful record of atrocities across Europe during, and after, the war. As the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council's newsletter fulsomely puts it, "Flags will hang
in the museum to honor the millions of Soviet soldiers who drove Nazi forces
westward and who were the first allied forces to liberate and publicize the
existence of the camps." In the words of Council chairman Harvey Meyerhoff,
these martial banners of the Red tyranny have a single association: "Much more
than simply wartime memorabilia, these military artifacts are a significant
contribution to memory, one that will remind future generations of the pivotal
role Soviet forces played in defeating Nazism . . ." (note 7)
What must
the millions of Americans originating or descending from the European nations --
Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia -- for which the Red "military
artifacts" symbolized invasion, tyranny, oppression, and persecution of religion
think as they see the fierce armies of their persecutors hailed as
"liberators"?
Just as one might guess from the circumstance that the Museum's director, Yeshayahu Weinberg, and the head of its "Learning Center," Yechiam Halevy, were brought in from Israel, the Museum's treatment of the state of Israel is adulatory. An emotive tribute to the founding of Israel is an integral part of the exhibition. That the establishment of Israel, and its expansion in subsequent wars, has meant colonial occupation and oppression for millions of the land's native Palestinians, and dispossession and exile for millions more, goes unmentioned -- another grotesquery in an American museum supposed to instruct in the dangers of intolerance and disregard of human rights. As for the momentous collaboration between Hitler's German state and the Jewish Agency in the 1930s, which through the Ha'avara Agreement enabled the transfer of vital capital and the influx of tens of thousands of highly skilled Jewish immigrants to Palestine, that is passed over in utter silence. (note 8)
The Holocaust Museum's skewed history is not simply a matter of one-sidedness
and omission. The Museum has further committed itself to a fixed and final
interpretation of the surprisingly scanty and sometimes suspect evidence for a
German policy of annihilating European Jewry, largely in gas chambers, in
numbers approaching six million. This despite a considerable body of research
and scholarship that has arisen over past two decades in many lands, and which
contests, by academic means, the substance of the Holocaust "extermination
thesis." (note 9)
That the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council is aware of
the work of the revisionists is clear: the Council's literature is replete, not
with substantive refutations of revisionist scholarship, but with slander and
polemic. To cite one characteristic example, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum Newsletter of May 1992 featured a front-page attack on Holocaust
revisionism by Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Occidental College in which the
author decried the revisionists for producing material that looked scholarly,
then lauded the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as "among the most efficacious
ways" of "combatting this pernicious trend," while neglecting to specify a
single error of revisionist scholarship. (note 10)
The U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council recognizes that there is a historical debate on the Holocaust,
but takes official notice of the dissenting position only to attack it. That an
American institution, supported by the taxes of all Americans, should commit
itself to inflexible historical orthodoxy -- in the service of a single American
minority -- is an intolerable imposition on our First Amendment rights, as well
as a mockery of the Western, and American, ideal of objective scholarship.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council Chairman Harvey Meyerhoff has stated: "The Museum is primarily an educational institution." (note 11) From the Council's own literature, however, it is clear what Meyerhoff means by education. The "role-playing" for children as well as adults who visit the Museum (visitors are to be issued "identity cards" bearing the name and alleged fate of various Holocaust victims); the high-tech computer and video effects and the recordings of speech and music which augment the Museum's tendentiously described artifacts; and the Museum's goal, as proclaimed by its Zionist fund-raising chairman, Miles Lerman, of insuring that "Children in Dubuque, families in Tucson, and schoolteachers in Atlanta will learn the history and the lessons of Auschwitz as thoroughly as they learn the history of their own communities": all these show that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is a propaganda enterprise that seeks to indoctrinate all Americans in a uniquely and partisanly Jewish (and Zionist) version of not merely the past, but the present and the future. (note 12)
What is the American response to a partisan museum constructed in a place
solemnly consecrated to the heroes and the values of our Republic, to be
lavishly operated with taxpayer dollars at a time when, even in our country's
capital, thousands sleep homeless in the shadow of our national monuments? What
is the American response to an ambitious propaganda agenda that aims to impose a
sectarian "Holocaust remembrance" in schools where our children cannot pray, in
town halls and federal buildings from which the religious symbols of the
majority are banned in the name of freedom of worship?
Over two
centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "To compel a man to furnish contributions
of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is
sinful and tyrannical." (note 13)
Nearly 140 years ago, Abraham Lincoln
said: "I insist, that if there is anything which it is the duty of the whole
people to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the
preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions." (note 14)
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Council which runs it, as
agencies of the government in which the American people is sovereign, must be
removed from the special interest that now controls it.
The scope and
purpose of the Museum must be expanded, from its present one-sided emphasis on
foreign Jewish sufferings, real and imagined, in Europe during the 1930s and
1940s to a compassionate yet realistic concern for all victims, but above all
for American victims, of historic injustice.
The Museum must be made a
place where American of every heritage, and scholars of every viewpoint, may
gather, educate, and be educated, without accusation and in the absence of
propaganda. Until it is, the men and women who founded and built and suffered
and fought and died for America, of every race, nationality and creed, will rest
uneasy.