Here is the conclusion of the extraordinary article written by Allen C. Brownfeld that appeared in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It is a landmark article on the uses and abuses of the Holocaust by Israel.
Brownfeld:
Unfortunately, the politicization of the Holocaust and its confusion with the contemporary politics of the Middle East is also alive and well in the United States. After a brutal assault upon him by those who disagreed with his views of the current Israeli government and its policies, Professor John Roth of Claremont McKenna College in California, an internationally respected Holocaust scholar, resigned as director of the Holocaust Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, a post he was slated to officially begin in August.
Michael Berenbaum, who served as director of the U.S. Holocaust Research Center and was project director for the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and is now professor of theology at the University of Judaism and president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles, declared: "...When Roth walked away, indecency and falsehood triumphed, and we have to continue to live in a Jewish community shaped by character assassination and quiescent to such assaults..."
Zundelsite:
Michael Berenbaum is a fine one to talk. He, more than most, is guilty of promoting a false history at that Museum of Hate!
Brownfeld:
(still quoting Berenbaum) "Professor Roth is a scholar of impeccable credentials. He is the author of more than 20 books in American studies, philosophy, ethics and the Holocaust. In 1988, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching chose him as the nation's outstanding teacher/scholar for his work on The Holocaust and the American Experience.
"As to the attackers, the Talmud asks who is a powerful person - one who makes an enemy a friend. I wonder what our sages would say of one who shamelessly and without foundation labels a friend an enemy?...This is a sad day for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and an even sadder day for public Jewish life in the United States."
Zundelsite:
One more Talmudic wisdom wilfully ignored by the Jewish leadership every day of their lives!
Brownfeld:
In another instance of confusing the Holocaust with Middle East policy, a controversy has emerged over the best-selling book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Harvard Professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Goldhagen argues that the Germans' collective history of homicidal anti-Semitism led inevitably to the Holocaust.
Many Holocaust scholars have been critical of some aspects of Goldhagen's work and a book, A Nation On Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth by Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Bird, was recently published by Henry Holt & Co.
According to The Jerusalem Report (Aug. 3, 1998), Abraham H. Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, sent a letter to Sara Bershtel, the book's editor, urging her to drop it because Finkelstein's "irreversibly tainted, glaring" anti-Zionist bias "disqualified" him from commenting on the Holocaust.
"The issue," Foxman suggested, "is not whether Goldhagen's thesis is right or wrong but what's legitimate criticism and what goes beyond the pale."
Zundelsite:
So here we have it: Foxman, the Holocaust user and abuser, decides what is legitimate criticism of Israeli and Zionist actions!
Brownfeld:
Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, according to The Report, "went over Bershtel's head to Holt publisher Michael Naumann, a longtime friend. Wieseltier, too, cited Finkelstein's anti-Zionism...Both Foxman and Wieseltier asserted to the publisher that their concern was less with defending Hitler's Willing Executioners than with 'upholding scholarly standards.' 'There's an encyclopedia of criticism on Goldhagen's thesis by thousands of reputable scholars,' Foxman told The Jerusalem Report. 'All we asked was why did a mainstream publisher have to turn to the fringe for two ersatz scholars - a notorious anti-Zionist and a little-known scholar with few credentials."'
Zundelsite:
This is ***some*** article! Finally the Gentiles are finding out that there is lots of Angst! Fear stalks the Jewish corridors of power!
Brownfeld:
The Jerusalem Report declared: "'Ersatz scholars' may be stretching it. The German-born Bird (a noted war crimes researcher in Canada), who did her Ph.D. on the SS and the Nazi police at Stuttgart University and a post-doctorate at MIT, is the foremost authority on the German Ludwigsburg archives where Goldhagen conducted his primary research. Finkelstein, who holds a Ph.D. on the theory of Zionism from Princeton, admits to being no Holocaust expert but asserts his exegesis on Goldhagen's internal contradictions requires no expertise beyond common sense."
Zundelsite:
One almost feels a revival coming on! Right on, Brother! Right on!
Brownfeld:
Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, likened Holt & Co. to "garbagemen" for deciding to bring out the book. Jonathan Mahler of The Forward compared the publisher's decision to that of St. Martin's Press, which in the early 1990s decided to publish British revisionist historian David Irving's biography of Joseph Goebbels, but backed down after lobbying from Jewish groups .
Zundelsite:
Amazing! Here Allan Brownfeld says in plain English what David Irving is trying to prove to Judge Gray in England - even as we speak!
Brownfeld:
Michael Neumann, the Holt publisher, declared: "Clearly, there was a campaign of hardball politics to stem publication of this book. The interpretation of the Holocaust has left, it seems, the realm of remembrance and entered the realm of lobby politics."
Zundelsite:
Robert Faurisson and Ernst Zundel have stated exactly that since 1981 - and David Irving since 1989!
Brownfeld:
The book's editor, Sara Bershtel, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, disputes Foxman's view that the "issue is not whether Goldhagen's thesis is right or wrong but what's legitimate criticism." She declares that the issue is precisely whether Goldhagen was right or wrong and wrote back to Foxman to say so.
Zundelsite:
Good for her! Some Jewish women have chutzpah!
Brownfeld:
She says she is "frightened, angered and appalled" by Foxman's attempt to interfere with her editorial freedom. "It's a model of censorship when you don't even care if someone is right or wrong and you want to slap that person down."
Zundelsite:
Foxman has gotten away with that against people like David Irving, Ernst Zundel and others for so long that he must be shocked by her criticism.
Brownfeld:
Professor Finkelstein, who teaches at New York University and Hunter College, says he is being criticized for his previous books on Israel rather than his thesis concerning Goldhagen.
Finkelstein, whose parents are survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, is the author of two books on Israel's Palestinian policies in which he charges that Israel is guilty of human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza which "besmirched the memory of the six million Jewish martyrs."
Zundelsite:
A voice in the wilderness - but, nonetheless, a voice!
Brownfeld:
The Jerusalem Report states: "It's because of those books that, from the moment Holt approached him and Bird about a book, the project has lurched from one altercation to the next."
To make the Holocaust a political issue in today's debate over the Middle East is to trivialize one of the greatest horrors in the annals of history. Sadly, there are many both in the U.S. and in Israel who are prepared to do just that.
Zundelsite:
To quote Herbert Hoover: A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus.
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Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues , the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
Thought for the Day - still quoting Herbert Hoover:
"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war."
(Speech, Republican National Convention, Chicago, June 27, 1944)