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U.S. Holocaust Museum Whitewashes Arab-Nazi Ties
By Shelomo Alfassa
January 18, 2006 The Jewish Press p.7
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is America’s national institution for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. Yet this premier public-private organization is deficient in its scholarship, leaving out of the historical record any reference to the 1930’s and 1940’s Nazi-Arab conspiracy — no doubt yet one more instance of political correctness trumping truth.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) was officially chartered by a unanimous act of Congress in 1980 and inaugurated in 1993. This grand facility on the National Mall receives millions of yearly visitors who come to learn the truth about what happened during the Holocaust. You wouldn’t think so, but USHMM is the second most popular Washington tourist attraction after the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
The USHMM mission statement describes the Holocaust as the "Systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945." This is not just an incomplete description — it is erroneous.
Today historians and genocide scholars realize that Hitler’s hand and influence stretched across North Africa from Morocco to Egypt and through the Arab countries to the north and east. The goal of the German leadership was to cleanse not only Europe but the whole world of Jews.
Though the primary mission of USHMM is to advance and disseminate knowledge about the Holocaust, the museum has made no effort, in either its permanent or temporary exhibits, to educate Americans about the role top Islamic leaders played in the Holocaust.
For example, the museum fails to recognize or discuss the Holocaust-era pogrom known as the Farhud, perpetuated by a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in June 1941. The museum maintains an unspoken taboo against conducting programs or sponsoring research on the Farhud, the deportation of Jews from North Africa to concentration camps, or the relationship of Nazis and Islamic leaders in Egypt, Syria, etc. It is a documented fact that Islamic troops under direction of the Nazis played a significant role in the Holocaust. This is not opinion or "anti-Islamic sentiment" — it isfact.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum declares that it stands as "The nation’s preeminent institution for Holocaust education and remembrance," even while it overlooks the fact that Hitler and the Islamic leadership conspired together to murder the Jews in both the Balkans and the Arab countries. And while USHMM says it serves as the world’s preeminent center "for scholarly research of the Holocaust," visitors will not find among its exhibits documents or information regarding the intimate relationship between Hitler and Amin al-Husseini, the Islamic leader (grand mufti) of Jerusalem.
Al-Husseini made an important contribution to the Axis war effort by recruiting 20,000 Bosnian Muslims in Croatia to serve in SS units. Known as the Handjar (Sword) legion, these Nazis murdered 90 percent of the Jews in Bosnia, hunted for Jews in Croatia, and served as auxiliary police in Hungary. In 1943 the Mufti established the Arab Institute for Research into the Jewish Question in Berlin, an Arab version of the existing German model that was actually financed by Nazi funds.
(Al-Husseini was the uncle of the late Arab terror chief Yasir Arafat. Born Mohamed Abdel-Raouf al-Husseini, Arafat shortened his name to obscure his relation to his notorious Nazi uncle. Even so, al-Husseini would help Arafat by playing a central role in the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, using his influence to raise funds for the terrorist organization.)
In time, Nazi ideas seeped into the Arab world. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published in Arabic and the Nazis supplied informational "bulletins" to the Arab press. Nazi agents encouraged Arab nationalists to travel to Germany and study there, while movie theaters in Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus received German propaganda films and newsreels. The Ba’ath Socialist Party in Iraq that existed until the capture of Saddam Hussein got its start following the mold of German National Socialism.
A quasi-governmental organization like the American Red Cross, USHMM is funded in large part by American taxpayers. In 1994 USHMM had a budget of $11 million; by 2000 it was up to $21 million, an increase of 91 percent. The museum is supported by a combination of government and private funds, with the U.S. shelling out over 60 percent of the funding. In fiscal year 2003, the budget was $57.2 million ($38.4 federal; $18.8 private).
An internal USHMM 2004 Performance and Accountability Report declared that the museum’s work "has never been more pertinent or more urgent." That may be so, but while Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, is discussing the German-Arab ties and while the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust devotes more space to the Mufti of Jerusalem than to any Nazi leader other than Hitler, USHMM continues to ignore the ugly truth.
USHMM has exhibits on the genocide in the Eastern Congo and Rwanda and on the persecution of homosexuals, but it makes no mention of Arab anti-Semitism — not of its history in the last century or of its current existence. Other than one brief sentence on anti-Semitism in a Muslim context by Dr. Aron Rodrigue of Stanford University, the USHMM website has nothing on Arab anti-Semitism.
Hitler is long gone, but the paradigm he created by inciting the Arabs join with him remains very much with us today and is one of the main reasons for the virulent anti-Semitism of the Arab world. Mein Kampf is selling briskly in Islamic countries to hungry readers while new generations of Arab children are being indoctrinated to hate Jews.
Little wonder, then, that Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY) and many Jewish academic and social organizations are calling on USHMM to include the relationship between Hitler and al-Husseini in its presentation of Holocaust history. Full-page advertisements have been placed in Jewish publications and public forums have been scheduled. The goal is to ensure that the history recorded at USHMM is both accurate and fully inclusive.
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