ZGram - 8/18/2003 - "Right Idea, Wrong Holocaust Museum"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

August 18, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

And they say we aren't making progress?  An editorial, pregnant with meaning:

[START]

Right Idea, Wrong Holocaust Museum

By Walter Reich

August 18, 2003

Los Angeles Times

U.S. officials want Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to visit 
a Holocaust museum. They have the right idea but the wrong museum. 
The museum they have in mind is in Washington. The one to which he 
should go is in Jerusalem.

Abbas wrote a book that distorted, denied or minimized core facts of 
Holocaust history. Were he to visit a Holocaust museum, he would have 
the opportunity to correct his assault on history and at least quell 
some of the Holocaust denial that's rampant in the Arab world.

But he would be able to accomplish that with seriousness and 
credibility not in Washington - where any such act would be seen as 
having been engineered by the American government to enhance Abbas' 
image - but at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, where it would truly be a 
courageous and galvanizing act of humanity and education.

The central argument of Abbas' 1984 book, "The Other Face: the Secret 
Connection Between the Nazis and the Zionist Movement," was that the 
Zionist movement was a partner in crime with the Nazis against the 
Jewish people. After the war, Abbas wrote, the Zionist movement 
inflated the number of Jews killed by the Germans to 6 million in 
order to arouse sympathy. The actual number, he suggested, might have 
been fewer than 1 million.

And regarding the gas chambers - which, Abbas wrote, "were supposedly 
designed for murdering Jews" - he refers his readers to "a scientific 
study" by the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Faurisson, 
Abbas points out, believes they were used "only for incinerating 
bodies, out of concern for the spread of disease and infection in the 
region."

Last April, after Abbas was designated as the prime minister of the 
Palestinian Authority, Tom Lantos, the highest-ranking Democrat on 
the House International Relations Committee and the only Holocaust 
survivor in Congress, knowing of Abbas' writings on the Holocaust, 
offered to guide him through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 
Washington.

According to the congressman, Abbas accepted the offer. But in a 
letter to Lantos written just before his visit to Washington in July, 
the Palestinian prime minister said that his schedule would be too 
tight for a museum visit, adding that he looked forward to seeing it 
on his next trip to Washington.

Lantos should breathe a sigh of relief that Abbas didn't go through 
with the museum visit in Washington, which would have been hijacked 
in the service of political agendas. He should try, instead, to 
convince Abbas to drive a few miles from his home to Jerusalem's Yad 
Vashem.

The unsuitability of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for this kind 
of visit was made evident in 1998, while I was its director, when the 
State Department initiated an invitation for a visit by Yasser Arafat 
- a visit I opposed.

At the time, the State Department was encountering bumps in the path 
of the Oslo peace effort. The hope was that prominent press coverage 
of Arafat surveying exhibits on the Holocaust would induce American 
Jews - many of whom opposed the administration's policy of pressuring 
Israel for concessions because they distrusted Arafat - to see the 
Palestinian leader as a man who could feel their pain and therefore 
could be entrusted to protect the security of the Jewish state.

On the day of the planned visit, Arafat himself demonstrated its 
political essence. He called it off as soon as he learned there would 
be no press coverage. The Monica Lewinsky story had just broken, and 
the Washington press corps had decamped to the White House to cover 
it.

And now the administration is again focused on Israeli-Palestinian 
peacemaking and wants to convince skeptical Jews, in both the United 
States and Israel, that Abbas is not Arafat.

Were Abbas to visit the Holocaust museum in Washington, many Jews 
would see the visit as a diplomatic gimmick set up by the 
administration to manipulate their opinions and as an exploitation of 
the memory of their dead for political purposes. And Arabs would see 
it as a humiliating concession extorted from a weak Palestinian 
leader by a powerful America. The visit's potential to advance 
Holocaust education would be smothered by the reality and appearance 
of politics.

On the other hand, a visit by Abbas to Israel's own Holocaust museum 
would separate the gesture from diplomatic maneuverings by 
Washington. In the Arab world it would raise doubts about Holocaust 
denial; in Israel it would be seen as a genuine acknowledgment of the 
history and fears of Israelis.

Like Anwar Sadat's breakthrough trip to Jerusalem, such a visit would 
be a great act of statesmanship, courage and imagination. It would be 
a journey to the heart of the darkness that is central to Israel's 
nightmares. It would establish Abbas as a leader independent of 
Palestinian politics and taboos and independent of Arafat, and it 
would reveal the bravery of a man willing to risk attack at home and 
to do what few of us are ever willing to do: acknowledge that he was 
wrong. Most important, it could galvanize and reset the dynamics of 
the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.

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[END]

Walter Reich, a professor of international affairs, ethics and human 
behavior at George Washington University, was director of the U.S. 
Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995 to 1998.