Free The Holocaust Industry by Norman Finkelstein Page A

the Holocaust museum's designer
    wrote, "from any manipulation of impressions or emotions." Yet from conception through completion,
    the museum was mired in politics. 62 With a reelection campaign looming, Jimmy Carter initiated the
    The Holocaust Industry: HOAXERS, HUCKSTERS AND HISTORY
    http://www.geocities.com/holocaustindustry/chapter_2.html (11 of 20) [23/11/2000 15:47:20]
    project to placate Jewish contributors and voters, galled by the President's recognition of the
    "legitimate rights" of Palestinians. The chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American
    Jewish Organizations, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, deplored Carter's recognition of Palestinian
    humanity as a "shocking" initiative. Carter announced plans for the museum while Prime Minister
    Menachem Begin was visiting Washington and in the midst of a bruising Congressional battle over the
    Administration's proposed sale of weaponry to Saudi Arabia. Other political issues also emerge in the
    museum. It mutes the Christian background to European anti-Semitism so as not to offend a powerful
    constituency. It downplays the discriminatory US immigration quotas before the war, exaggerates the
    US role in liberating the concentration camps, and silently passes over the massive US recruitment of
    Nazi war criminals at the war's end. The Museum's overarching message is that "we" couldn't even
    conceive, let alone commit, such evil deeds. The Holocaust "cuts against the grain of the American
    ethos," Michael Berenbaum observes in the companion book to the museum. "We see in [its]
    perpetration a violation of every essential American value." The Holocaust museum signals the
    Zionist lesson that Israel was the "appropriate answer to Nazism" with the closing scenes of Jewish
    survivors struggling to enter Palestine. 63
    The politicization begins even before one crosses the museum's threshold. It is situated on Raoul
    Wallenberg Place. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is honored because he rescued thousands of Jews
    and ended up in a Soviet prison. Fellow Swede Count Folke Bernadotte is not honored because,
    although he too rescued thousands of Jews, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir ordered his
    assassination for being too "pro-Arab." 64
    The crux of Holocaust museum politics, however, bears on whom to memorialize. Were Jews the only
    victims of The Holocaust, or did others who perished because of Nazi persecution also count as
    victims? 65 During the museum's planning stages, Elie Wiesel (along with Yehuda Bauer of Yad
    Vashem) led the offensive to commemorate Jews alone. Deferred to as the "undisputed expert on the
    Holocaust period," Wiesel tenaciously argued for the preeminence of Jewish victimhood. "As always,
    they began with Jews,» he typically intoned. "As always, they did not stop with Jews alone." 66 Yet
    not Jews but Communists were the first political victims, and not Jews but the handicapped were the
    first genocidal victims, of Nazism. 67

Justifying preemption of the Gypsy genocide posed the main challenge to the Holocaust Museum. The
    Nazis systematically murdered as many as a half-million Gypsies, with proportional losses roughly
    equal to the Jewish genocide. 68 Holocaust writers like Yehuda Bauer maintained that the Gypsies did
    not fall victim to the same genocidal onslaught as Jews. Respected holocaust historians like Henry
    Friedlander and Raul Hilberg, however, have argued that they did. 69
    Multiple motives lurked behind the museum's marginalizing of the Gypsy genocide. First: one simply
    couldn't compare the loss of Gypsy and Jewish life. Ridiculing the call for Gypsy representation on
    the US Holocaust Memorial Council as "cockamamie," executive director Rabbi Seymour Siegel
    doubted whether Gypsies even "existed" as a people: "There should be some recognition or
    acknowledgment of the gypsy people . . . if there is such a thing." He did allow, however, that "there
    was a suffering element under the Nazis." Edward Linenthal recalls