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From: dgannon@techbook.techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
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Subject: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: A Costly and Dangerous Mistake
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Date: 21 Apr 1993 07:55:09 -0700
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   THE U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM: A COSTLY AND DANGEROUS MISTAKE

                         by Theodore J. O'Keefe


HARD BY THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT, within clear view of the Jefferson
Memorial, an easy stroll down the Mall to the majestic Lincoln Memorial,
has arisen, on some of the most hallowed territory of the United States of
America, a costly and dangerous mistake.  On ground where no monument yet
marks countless sacrifices and unheralded achievements of Americans of all
races and creeds in the building and defense of this nation, sits today a
massive and costly edifice, devoted above all to a contentious and false
version of the ordeal in Europe during World War II, of non-American
members of a minority, sectarian group.  Now, in the deceptive guise of
tolerance, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum begins a propaganda
campaign, financed through the unwitting largess of the American taxpayer,
in the interests of Israel and its adherents in America.

     How did the federal government allow the creation of such a
monstrosity?  What is its meaning for American policy and for American
values?  And what must the American people do to regain control of the land
their servants in Washington handed over to a foreign interest and to
establish an enterprise thereon, whether a museum or otherwise, informed by
and conducted according to American principles and interests?

[Photograph captioned, "The five-story, $150 million US Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C. was built and is operated by a taxpayer-funded
federal agency.  In the foreground is the museum's six-sided "Hall of
Remembrance."


ORIGINS

     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 6 million Jews by the Germans during World War II, 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.(1)


     Why the urgency of this campaign? Two factors were paramount:  first,
the beginnings, more than three decades after the end of World War II, of
an objective scholarly assessment of the facts of the alleged German policy
to exterminate European Jewry.(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.(3)


THE U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL COUNCIL

     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
October 7, 1988, 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..."(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 April 22, 1993.


A SECTARIAN, ALIEN AGENDA

     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 fundraiser 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 fundraising 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 Wexler 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 Hashoah (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?


THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM'S ONE-SIDED "HISTORY"

     Although the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council during its early years
made noises about recognizing the ordeals of non-Jews during World War II,
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 World War II, 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.(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."

        
RED LIBERATORS?

     The museum's message that support for Jews is the sole measure of
decency during World War II 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 fire-bombing of
Tokyo and Dresden, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet
slaughter of their 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.(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..."(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, [former] 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"?


ISRAEL IN THE MUSEUM

     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.(8)


"HISTORICAL CORRECTNESS"

     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 6 million.  This despite a considerable
body of research and scholarship that has arisen over the past two decades
in many lands, and which contests, by academic means, the substance of the
Holocaust "extermination thesis."(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 "combating this pernicious trend," *while
neglecting to specify a single error of revisionist scholarship.*(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.


A CENTER FOR EDUCATION?

     U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council Chairman Harvey Meyerhoff has stated:
"The museum is primarily an educational institution."(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 fundraising chairman, Miles Lerman, of ensuring
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.(12)


THE AMERICAN RESPONSE

     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."(13)

     Nearly 150 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."(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 Americans 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.


NOTES

     1. _The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Newsletter_
(Washington, D.C.), August, 1990, "Survivors Play Major Role in
Establishing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum," p.1. Meed is president of
the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, and chairman of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council's Content and Days of Remembrance committees.

     2. In l976, Prof. Arthur Butz's book _The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry_ was
first published in England; in November of 1978 Prof. Robert Faurisson's
article "The Problem of the Gas Chambers" was published in the Paris daily
_Le Monde_. Butz has commented on the simultaneous and independent
appearance of a variety of earlier academic criticisms of the wartime
propaganda version of Jewry's ordeal in "The International Holocaust
Controversy," _The Journal of Historical Review_, Spring, 1980, pp. 5-22.

     3. By Resolution of the UN General Assembly on Novembe 10, 1975,
Zionism was condemned as "a form of racism and racial discrimination."

     4. Public Law 96-388, 1, October 7, 1980, 94 Stat. 1547.

     5. Statements regarding the museum's permanent exhibit, except where
otherwise noted, are derived from the floor plan and photographs in _United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum_, a brochure published by the USHMC in
Washington 1991.

     6. _U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Newsletter_, Sept., 1991, "French
Resistance Fighter's Weapon Will Help Tell Story of Underground Movement."
p.4

     7. _U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Newsletter_, fall. 1992, "Russian
Embassy Presents Flags of Liberating Units to Museum," p.6.

     8. For the most complete account of relations between the Nazis and
the Zionists, see Francis Nicosia, _The Third Reich and the Palestine
Question_, Austin: University of Texas, 1985

     9. The most complete survey of holocaust revisionist writings to date
is Carlo Mattogno's "The Myth of the Extermination of the Jews--Part II,"
in _The Journal of Historical Review_ (fall, 1988), pp. 261-302.

     10. _U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Newsletter_, May, 1992, "Denying
the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth," p.6.

     11. _U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Newsletter_, November, 1991,
"Wexner Family donates $5 Million to Fund Interactive Learning Center,"
p.1.

     12. The "identity cards" and other features of the museum are
described in the brochure cited in note 5 above; Lerman's statement was
included in a fundraising letter sent by the museum to potential Jewish
contributors in 1991.

     13. From "A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom," 1779, in
_Jefferson: Magnificent Populist_, edited by Martin Larson, Greenwich,
Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1981. p.319.

     14. "Speech at Peoria, Illinois." October 16, 1854, in _The American
Intellectual Tradition_, Vol. 1, edited by David Hollinger and Charles
Capper, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 382.

___________________________________________________________________________

     Theodore J. O'Keefe is an editor with the Institute for Historical
Review.  Educated at Harvard University, he has studied history and
literature on three continents, and has published numerous articles on
historical and political subjects.
___________________________________________________________________________


     The IHR publishes numerous revisionist books, tapes and other
materials, as well as the bi-monthly _Journal of Historical Review_.  Send
$2 for a complete catalog and selection of literature.  More copies of this
leaflet are available, postpaid, at the following prices:

                             10 copies, $2
                             50 copies, $5
                    100 copies or more, 8 cents each

                    INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW
                             P.O. Box 2739
                        Newport Beach, CA 92659

-=End


-Dan Gannon

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