The Simon Wiesenthal Center:
A Bastion of Jewish-Zionist Power

By Mark
Weber

Since its founding in 1977,
the Simon Wiesenthal Center has grown to become one of
the most important and influential Jewish organizations
in the world. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices
in New York, Jerusalem, Paris, Miami, Toronto and Buenos
Aires, it reports a membership of more than 300,000 and
an annual income of some $30 million.

The Center’s imposing “Museum
of Tolerance” in West Los Angeles, which presents a
relentlessly Jewish-Zionist version of history, draws
some 350,000 visitors each year, including tens of
thousands of school children who are brought in
busloads.

Although it calls itself “an
international Jewish human rights organization dedicated
to preserving the memory of the Holocaust fostering
tolerance and understanding,” the Center in reality is a
propaganda agency whose agenda is to further
Jewish-Zionist interests. / 1

Political Clout

The Center and its head,
Rabbi Marvin Hier, wield considerable political power.
"Hier has accrued unprecedented clout in the
Legislature, on Capitol Hill, in the city's boardrooms
and even in Hollywood," says the Los Angeles
Times.  / 2

Among the Center’s prominent
and wealthy supporters are President George W. Bush,
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York), Senator Charles E.
Schumer (New York), Los Angeles Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa, and Mortimer Zuckerman, publisher of US
News and World Report and the Atlantic
Monthly. / 3

One of Hier’s most important
backers has been Roland E. Arnall, a California
businessman who played a key role in getting the Center
off the ground. With a fortune estimated at $2 billion,
he has for years been a major player in state and
national politics. / 4  Other major financial
contributors, likewise Jewish, have included Ivan
Boesky, who is perhaps best known for his prominent role
in a mid-1980s Wall Street insider trading scandal, and
Gary Winnick, founder and chairman of Global Crossing,
Ltd., who donated $40 million for the Center’s “Museum
of Tolerance” in Jerusalem. / 5

Public Funding

The Center’s annual income in
the 2002-2003 fiscal year (the most recent for which
detailed data is available) was $30 million, of which
some $17 million was from public donations, and $10
million – one-third of the total -- was from taxpayer
funds. / 6  Of that $10 million in taxpayer money,
$6 million was from the state of California, $2.6
million was from the US federal government, $1 million
dollars came from New York City, and $328,147 was from
New York State.  / 7

That such a large portion of
its budget is from public funds is an expression of the
Center’s political muscle. Even during times of fiscal
belt-tightening, Hier’s already wealthy Center can count
on indulgent treatment by pliant politicians. In 1985,
for example, California lawmakers voted to give the
Center a $5 million grant of state taxpayer funds. /
8  In 1995 the state legislature gave a second $5
million grant. That allocation -- to the Center's "
Museum of Tolerance ” (and equal to the entire
California Arts Council budget for the year 2004) --
came from funds that had been reserved for the state’s
public schools. Backing this extraordinary gift were
prominent politicians of both parties, including
Governor Pete Wilson. / 9

In addition, the Center has
received at least $5 million in federal funds, through
legislation sponsored by US Congressman Henry Waxman. /
10

“…In what’s become a growing
scandal,” the LA Weekly noted, “funds allocated
for the Museum’s `Tools for Tolerance’ program [of the
Wiesenthal Center]  (which trains educators and
police on `diversity issues’) are a budget `line item,’
meaning that it’s pre-allocated every year by the
governor (with legislative approval) – bypassing the
peer-review process of other grants.” / 11  The
paper went on to remark on the political clout that
makes such largess possible: “The Museum’s good fortune
is as much a testament to the lobbying power of the
Wiesenthal Center’s dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier, as to the
much larger social agenda of privatizing public
services. For more than a decade and a half, Hier has
had powerful backers among both Democratic and
Republican lawmakers, from former Governor Pete Wilson
and former Democratic leader Willie Brown, to President
Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who
invited Hier to briefings on the war in
Iraq.”

Among those who receive
generous salaries from the Center are four members of
the Hier family. In fiscal year 2002-2003, Martin Hier –
its founder and “Dean” -- received $482,528 in salary
and benefits, while his wife, Marlene, the Center’s
“Membership Director,” received $312,574. Alan Hier, a
son, received $151,761 in compensation and benefits for
fundraising activities, and another son, Aron Hier,
received $95,656 as “Associate Director.” Abraham
Cooper, the Center’s “Associate Dean,” received $397,622
in salary and benefits. Compensation for other senior
staff members was similarly generous. / 12

In cultural life as well,
Hier’s Center has had considerable success in pressing
its agenda. Through its “Moriah Films” division, it has
produced several movies. “The Long Way Home,” a film
released in 1997, for example, is a fervently
pro-Zionist look at the 1945-1949 period that
sympathetically portrays Jews who survived German camps
and World II, and the triumphal establishment of a
Zionist state in Palestine. Even Jewish terrorist
groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, are presented with
understanding, if not sympathy. / 13

The Wiesenthal Center serves
as an informal film censor. Motion picture makers
routinely ask it to screen films as they are being
considered for production. The Center effectively has
the power to kill a movie. As one journalist who tracks
the Hollywood scene has noted, Hier’s Center “has been
active in the entertainment industry for a number of
years, often reviewing scripts and consulting with
filmmakers and studios on Jewish-related productions.
The Center has worked on everything from New Line’s 1998
film `American History X’ to the 1989 ABC television
mini-series `War and Remembrance’.”  / 14

In 2004 the Center called on
French authorities to ban the French edition of The
Holocaust Industry, a provocative study by American
Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein that has been a
best-seller in Europe. An official of the Center said
that the book “presents a great danger” and should be
prohibited in France because it is allegedly “replete
with Holocaust revisionism and incitement to
antisemitism.”  / 15

A Record of Recklessness

The indulgent treatment of
the Center by politicians is matched by similarly
respectful treatment from the press. With an attitude
that borders on the reverential, the American media
overlooks the Center’s easily verifiable record of
recklessness and deceit.

In its glossy magazine,
Response, and in its other propaganda materials,
the Center relentlessly conjures up a frightening image
of militant, hate-crazed anti-Jewish legions on the
march everywhere, determined to eradicate all Jews in a
genocidal new "Final Solution.” Its record of
exaggerating anti-Jewish sentiment to raise money is no
secret. Even the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), another
major Jewish-Zionist group, has acknowledged that the
Center makes “inaccurate” and “exaggerated claims” about
anti-Semitism to raise money. It found, for example,
that a Center fund-raising letter is “replete with
factual misstatements and exaggerations” about
anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States and Europe. /
16

In 1998 the Center issued a
report that harshly condemned Switzerland ’s treatment
of Jews during World War II. The report, which received
wide media attention, claimed that Swiss authorities
held Jews in “slave labor camps.” During the war years,
its author charged, “the Swiss were really sadistic.
They wanted to hurt the Jews, to deliberately hurt the
Jews.” / 17  In fact, the report was so inaccurate
that Simon Wiesenthal himself took the unusual step of
disavowing it. / 18  Although the report’s
distortions were eventually identified and made public,
the damage had been done. The truth about the Center’s
fraudulent claims received much less media attention,
especially in the American press, than did the Center’s
original, exaggerated accusations.

In 1999 the Center posted on
its website a doctored wartime photograph of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Appearing under the heading
“Photo Gallery: Hungarian arrivals after the
'Selektion'  at Auschwitz,” it was captioned: “As
these prisoners were being processed for slave labor,
many of their friends were being gassed and burned in
the ovens in the crematoria. The smoke can be seen in
the background.” In fact, the photo had been altered by
adding phony “smoke,” apparently to support survivor
testimony about smoke billowing from camp crematory
chimneys. It was only after skeptics identified and
publicized the fraud, that the Center removed the faked
photo. / 19

Many Christians have been
offended by some of the Center’s overblown
pronouncements, such as Rabbi Hier’s charge that Mel
Gibson and his film, The Passion of the Christ,
“stereotype and denigrate the masses of Jews” and “could
potentially imperil Jewish lives.”  / 20  Hier
has also chastised Christian leaders during the Second
World War, “from Pope Pius XII down, who at best looked
the other way, protected their own, were bystanders
rather than activists and sometimes even assisted the
Nazis in carrying out their Final Solution.” / 21
Hier has made the amazing claim, unsupported by any
reputable historian, that Pope Pius XII prayed for
Hitler’s victory in World War II, and gave Church money
to the German leader to fight Soviet Communism. The
campaign to elevate the wartime pontiff to sainthood,
Hier charged, “desecrates the memory of the Holocaust.”
/ 22

Israel and Zionism

The Simon Wiesenthal Center
is a staunch supporter of Israel and its Jewish
supremacist regime.  “What happens to Israel is
every Jew’s business,” says Hier.  / 24
“Let us never forget,” Hier has also said, “that after
the Holocaust when hope was bleak and Jewish life was
decimated, that it was Israel that made us whole again,
restored our pride, our faith, and our determination to
go on.”  / 25  In that spirit, the Center
staunchly defends Israel ’s policies of oppression,
occupation, dispossession, and institutionalized
discrimination against non-Jews. / 23

The Center supports Jewish
religious bigotry, insisting that the Zionist seizure of
the land of Palestine (“Zion”) is ordained by God, as
revealed in the Hebrew scriptures. “In fact,” says Hier,
“the cornerstone of our [sic] return to Zion was always
based on the fact that it was a return to our historic
biblical roots.” / 26

The Center supports policies
of the Zionist state that have been condemned by the
world community and which violate United Nations
Security Council resolutions. For example, it has
repeatedly voiced support for Israel ’s formidable
“security fence,” a hideous barrier that is part of
Israel ’s long-range policy of seizing land of non-Jews,
and which the International Court of Justice says is
illegal. / 27  While the Center denounces violence
and terrorism against Jews, it sanctions Zionist
terrorism against non-Jews. It has publicly honored two
Israeli leaders – Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir –
each of whom has a well-documented record as a
terrorist. / 28

In 2002 the Center announced
plans to build a grand “Museum of Tolerance”Jerusalem.
This was too much even for some Israeli Jews. The former
deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, vented his
exasperation in a piece published in an influential
Israeli daily paper: “It is difficult to imagine a
project so hallucinatory, so irrelevant, so foreign, so
megalomaniac, as the Museum of Tolerance. The mere
attempt to stick the term tolerance to a building so
intolerant to its surroundings is ridiculous… There’s no
need to waste words on the absurdity of a Museum of
Tolerance planted on part of an ancient Muslim cemetery,
some of which has long since been turned into a parking
lot, and will now be topped by spaces in which people
are meant to learn about tolerance, mutual respect and
coexistence.” Benvenisti concluded: “The Museum of
Tolerance project must be eradicated without any
tolerance.” / 29

Propaganda for War

The Wiesenthal Center has a
long record of reckless propaganda for war. Long before
the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it had been
pressing for an American attack against the Middle East
nation, backing its effort with alarmist “Big Lie”
claims about the supposed danger posed by the Baghdad
regime.

In 1990 Hier wrote in
Newsweek magazine: “I think the United States
should go in. Maybe not tomorrow, but very soon… Three
years from now, Iraq will have nuclear weapons.” /
30  In early 1991 the Center announced the
“shocking revelation” that Iranian prisoners of war were
being killed with Zyklon B “in gas chambers specially
designed for the Iraqis by the German company Rhema
Labortechnik.” The Center’s magazine, Response,
went on to assert that the Iraqi “gas chambers were
tiled to look like operating rooms, with a separated
observation room for each gas chamber with reinforced
glass visibility.” / 31

In the months before the US
invasion of Iraq, the Center was offering new propaganda
reasons for America to go to war. An all out attack was
necessary, it claimed in October 2002, because the
Saddam Hussein regime had been “continuing to stockpile
weapons of mass destruction,” and because it “has defied
the world and thumbed his nose at United Nations
Security Council resolutions.” Moreover, the Center went
on to charge: “For while there are other tyrants, Saddam
alone stands as a menace to world order and stability.
While there are others who possess chemical and
biological weapons of mass destruction, only Saddam has
shown an eagerness to use them.” / 32

The Center’s indignation over
the Baghdad regime’s alleged defiance of United Nations
Security Council resolutions is remarkable for its gall,
given Israel ’s own long record of defying such
resolutions.

As the world now knows, the
Center's claims about Iraq– which matched those of the
Bush administration – were empty propaganda pretexts
designed to persuade a skeptical public to support
unprovoked war against a country that posed no threat to
the United States. / 33

Fanning the Flames

In its slick membership
magazine, its films, and its public pronouncements,
Rabbi Hier and his Center skillfully play to Jewish
fears, concerns and sensitivities, above all through
relentlessly emotion-laden exploitation of the Holocaust
story. In fanning the flames of what Jewish American
historian Alfred Lilienthal calls “Holocaustomania,” it
has no equal.

“Rabbi Hier and the
Wiesenthal Center are, in my opinion, the most extreme
of those who utilize the Holocaust,” the director of
Israel 's Yad Vashem Holocaust center has said. “The
Jewish people does many vulgar things,” he went on, “but
the Wiesenthal Center [has] raised it to a complete
level: The optimum use of sensitive issues in order to
raise money ...” /  34  “The enormous success
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center," says New York
Times journalist and author Judith Miller, “has
given new meaning to what was once a macabre in-house
joke ... 'There is no business like Shoah business’,”
(“Shoah" is the Hebrew term for Holocaust). /
35

The Center has been a major
player in what Norman Finkelstein calls the “extortion
racket” by Israel and organized Jewry to blackmail
billions of dollars from European countries and
corporations.  / 36  Finkelstein, himself a
son of Holocaust survivors, calls the Center “a gang of
heartless and immoral crooks, whose hallmark is that
they will do anything for a dollar.” / 37

The Simon Wiesenthal Center
is not only an expression of immense Jewish-Zionist
power in America, it plays an important role in
maintaining that power. In promoting its agenda, it
carries out a well-funded and effective propaganda
campaign of deceit, disinformation and lies in support
of Israeli oppression and war. In partnership with
politicians who put their own interests ahead of the
public good, it both reflects and contributes to the
corruption of American political and cultural life.

Notes

1. See also M. Weber, “The
Simon Wiesenthal Center : An Overview,” The
Journal of Historical Review, July-August 1995, pp.
2-7. Additional useful information about the Center is
posted on David Irving’s website: http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Wiesenthal/

2.  S. Teitelbaum and T.
Waldman, “The Unorthodox Rabbi,” Los Angeles
Times Magazine, July 15, 1990, p. 9.

3. Other prominent supporters
of the Center have included:

President Ronald Reagan,
President George H.W. Bush, Governors Jeb Bush
(Florida), Gray Davis (California), and George E. Pataki
(New York), New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Los
Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, Senator Charles E.
Schumer (New York), Senator Dianne Feinstein
(California), and her investment banker husband Richard
Blum), entertainers Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor,
columnist George Will, television journalist Barbara
Walters, several members of the moneyed Belzberg family,
Alan Greenberg (chairman of the investment firm of Bear
Stearns), and New York financiers Nelson Peltz, Ronald
Perelman and Ivan Boesky.

4.  During the 2001-2005
period,  for example, Arnall, his companies and his
wife, have made more than $8 million in political
donations. He has been a major financial backer of
President George W. Bush and California  Governor
Schwarzenegger. Arnall and his wife gave $5 million to a
group that supported Bush’s presidential reelection
campaign, and he and his companies provided $1 million
to finance Bush’s 2003 inaugural. Source: E. Scott
Reckard, “Ambassador Nominee’s Company is Scrutinized,”
Los Angeles Times, Sunday, August 7, 2005, pages
A1, A28.

5.  S. Freudenheim,
“$40-Million Gift to Fund Israeli Tolerance Center,” Los
Angeles Times, May 10, 2000; D. Colker, “Global Chairman
Defends…,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 2,
2002, pp. C1, C4.

6. According to the Center’s
public IRS Form 990 for the year 2002, filed on May 19,
2004, the Center’s income during the year ending June
30, 2003, was $30,540,845, of which $16,867,991 was from
“direct public support” (donations from the public), and
$10,117,676 was from “government contributions
(grants).”

7.  Information provided
by the Wiesenthal Center.

8.  M. Chazanov, M.
Gladstone, “Museum of Tolerance’: Proposed State Grant
for Wiesenthal Facility Raises Eyebrows,” Los
Angeles Times, May 19, 1985.

9.  D. Morain, “Lean
Times Don’t Imperil Wiesenthal Grant,”Los Angeles
Times, July 18, 1995.

10.  S. Teitelbaum and
T. Waldman, “The Unorthodox Rabbi,” Los Angeles
Times Magazine, July 15,
1990, p. 9.

11.  S. L Morris, “Swimming
with sharks in a sea of arts funding,” LA
Weekly, June 27-July 3, 2003.

12.  Information from
the Center’s public IRS Form 990 for the year 2002,
filed on May 19, 2004.

13. H. Sheehan, “The Long Way
Home’: A Personal History,” The Orange County
Register, Sept. 19, 1997.

14.  Josh Spector,
”Forget Ebert: Studios Now Look for Thumbs Up from
Special Interest Groups,” Inside Magazine, March
26, 2001. See also: Tom Tugend, “Hollywood Director Says
Wiesenthal Center Nixed Film,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency
(JTA), April 20, 2001; Tom Tugend, “Pressure Power?,”
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, April
6, 2001.

15.  “Simon
Wiesenthal Centre Testifies in Paris Libel Suit Against
Norman Finkelstein,” Die Jüdische,
March 26, 2004.

16.  Miles Corwin,
“Claims About Anti-Semitic Wave Hit by B’nai B’rith,”
Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12,
1984.

17.  “Jews Mistreated in
Swiss WWII Camps, Study Says,” Los Angeles Times,
Jan. 13, 1998; “Swiss Slowed Jews’ Escape, Report Says,”
Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1998; Essays
by Rabbis Hier and Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center, and
by Swiss Ambassador Thomas Borer, “Perspectives on the
Swiss in World War II,” Los Angeles Times, June
17, 1998.

18.  “Wiesenthal
Dismisses Report on Switzerland,” The Orange County
Register, June 18, 1998.

19.  “How
the Simon Wiesenthal Center Falsifies History,”
The Journal of Historical Review, Sept.-Dec. 1999
(Vol. 18, No. 4-5), pages 4-5.

See also: David Irving, “Bowing
to the 'deniers' Wiesenthal Center has finally removed
faked photo from its website.”

20.  SWC news release,
“SWC
and Mel Gibson’s Film The Passion of the Christ,”
February 2004.

21.  M. Hier, “Heroes
Aren’t the Story, Villainy Is,” Los Angeles
Times, Jan. 19, 1995.

For a succinct response to
criticisms of Pope Pius XII for his actions during World
War II, see “The
Myth of Hitler’s Pope,” a review by Thomas E. Woods,
Jr., July 25, 2005. Posted at:

22.  C. Reed, “Wartime
Pope `Prayed for Nazi Victory’,” The Guardian
(Britain), May 15, 1999, p. 18.

23.  On the systemtic
and institutionalized nature of Israeli discrimination
against non-Jews, see:  “Saving
Israel From Itself: A Secular Future for the Jewish
State,” by Bernard Avishai, Harper's
Magazine, January 2005; Norman Dacey,
“Democracy’ in Israel: Government, Social Order and
Institutions (IHR: 1992?); Alfred Lilienthal, The
Zionist Connection (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978),
esp. chap.VI; Issa Nakhleh, Encyclopedia of the
Palestine Problem (New York: 1991).

24. SWC news release, Feb.
12, 2001.

25.  SWC news release,
July 22, 2001. On Hier’s ardent support for Israel and
its policies, see also SWC news release, April 11, 2002
“We Stand With Israel.”

26.  SWC news release of
Jan. 10, 2001, “Israel’s Honor and Soul Should Not Be Up
for Grabs,” Jan. 10, 2001.

27.  SWC “Press
Information” statements of August 20, 2003, and July 9,
2004. For more about the “security fence,” see: “Israeli
Official: Wall to Ensure Jewish Majority,” AP, July
11, 2005; “Stop the Wall” website  http://stopthewall.org/
;  “Israel’s
Confiscation Barrier Through Palestine,” If
Americans Knew .

28.   M. Weber,
“The Simon Wiesenthal Center : An Overview,” The
Journal of Historical Review, July-August 1995, pp.
2-7.

“Both the Stern Gang and the
Irgun, which included [later Israeli] prime ministers
Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were involved in the
bombings of Arab markets, the bombing of the British
military headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel --
an attack that left over 80 Englishmen, Arabs and Jews
dead – and the assassination of UN mediator Count
Bernadotte, author of a June 1948 peace plan calling
for, among other things, an Arab-controlled Jerusalem.”
See: James Ciment, Palestine/ Israel: The Long
Conflict  (New York: Facts on File, 1997),
pages 186-187; George W. Ball, Douglas B. Ball, The
Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with
Israel, 1947 to the Present  (New York: 1992),
p. 141;  Baylis Thomas, How Israel Was Won: A
Concise History of the Arab-Israel Conflict (
1999).

29.  Meron Benvenisti,
“A Museum of Tolerance in a City of Fanatics,”
Haaretz (Israel), Dec. 5, 2002.

30.  Marvin Hier,
“Crisis in the Gulf,” Newsweek, Nov. 26. 1990.
Facsimile in Christian News, Nov. 26,
1990, p. 4.

31. “German Firms Produce
Zyklon B in Iraq," Response: The Wiesenthal Center
World Report, Spring 1991, pp. 2, 4; D. Willis
“German Exports: `Was the Lesson of Auschwitz in Vain?,”
Orange County Register, Feb. 8, 1991.

32.  SWC news release of
October 7, 2002. “Wiesenthal
Center Supports Congressional Resolution on
Iraq.”

33.  A major and
probably crucial factor in the US decision to bomb,
invade and occupy Iraq was to eliminate a regime that
was hostile to Israel and dangerous to Zionist
interests. See: M. Weber, “Iraq :
A War for Israel,” May 2005; James Bamford, A
Pretext for War (Anchor, 2005); Stephen J.
Sniegoski, “War
on Iraq - Conceived In Israel,” Current
Concerns (Switzerland),  Issue No. 1,
2003.

34.  Ha'aretz,
(Israel), Dec. 16, 1988. Reported in:  David Sinai,
"News We Doubt You've Seen," [“Sad”], The Jewish
Press (Brooklyn, New York), Dec. 23,
1988.

35.  Judith Miller,
One by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust (New
York: Simon and Schuster/ Touchstone, 1990), p.
237.

36.  Norman G.
Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (London, New
York : Verso, 2003 [second ed.]), pp. 89, 94, 130, 138,
139

37.  “A
Conversation with Professor Norman Finkelstein.”
Conducted by Don Atapattu, Dec. 13, 2001.

-- September
2005

Mark Weber is director of the
Institute for Historical Review. He studied history at
the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of
Munich, Portland State University and Indiana University
(M.A., 1977). For nine years he served as editor of the
IHR's Journal of Historical Review.

The Institute for Historical
Review, founded in 1978, is dedicated to
promoting greater public awareness of history, and
especially socially-politically relevant aspects of
twentieth century history. It is recognized by the IRS
as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit educational
enterprise.

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