Is Nothing Sacred? A V.I.P. Visit To The Holocaust Museum For Arafat Would Defile It — And Whitewash A Murderer Of Jews

(Washington, D.C.): The Clinton Administration’s insistence that the U.S. Holocaust
Museum
grant Yasser Arafat a V.I.P. tour while he is in town for a meeting with the President is morally
repugnant. Such a photo op. would make that shrine to the memory of six million Jews who died
in Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution a tawdry prop for one of our time’s premier Holocaust-deniers —
and a man responsible in his own right for the death of untold numbers of Jews and other
innocents.

As such, it would defile those who were murdered and denigrate those who
survived. It
will also disserve, not advance, the cause of peace in the Middle East.

Arafat and Company’s Lies About the Holocaust

Yasser Arafat and his followers have systematically sought to discount or otherwise dismiss
the
horrors of the Holocaust. They have done so in speeches, television appearances, interviews and
books; they have done so both before and after the Oslo accords were signed; they
have done so
with malice aforethought and without apology. A few examples documented by the Zionist
Organization of America⁽¹⁾ illustrate the point:

• “In its editions dated 23 December 1989 and 30 December 1989, the Cyprus-based PLO
  journal El Istiqlal ran a two-part series of articles under the headlines ‘Burning of the
  Jews in
  the Nazi Chambers is the Lie of the 20th Century in Order to Legitimize the New
  Nazism’….The articles asserted that ‘While Jews are complaining about their treatment by
  the Gestapo, the truth is that they were served healthy food as proven by the dining
  rooms observed there…’”

• “The July 1990 issue of Balsam, published by the PLO-affiliated Palestinian Red
  Cross, printed
  an article asserting that ‘The lie concerning the gas chambers enabled the Jews to
  establish
  the State of Israel,’ and ‘Jews regard themselves as the landlords of humanity, and the
  Nuremberg courts were manned mainly by Jews and their friends.’ The article also quoted
  from the writings of the prominent French Holocaust-denier, Robert Faurisson.”

• “[According to the 26 January 1995 edition of the Jerusalem Post,]
  Mahmoud Abbas (Abu
  Mazen), the Number 2 official in the PLO and architect of the Oslo accords, authored
  and has
  refused to retract a book claiming that ‘the Zionist movement was a partner in the
  slaughter of the Jews.’ The book is entitled The Other Side: The Secret
  Relationship
  Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement. The book also claims that the Nazis may have
  really killed less than one million Jews.”

• “[According to the 11 May 1997 edition of Ha’aretz,] in an address to the PLO’s
  Palestinian
  Council in Ramallah on 10 May 1997, the eve of Israeli Independence Day,
  Arafat said that
  the anniversary of the creation of Israel is ‘Palestine Holocaust Day’ and ‘the Palestinian
  people were subjected to the worst holocaust in history.'”

• “During a 25 August 1997 cultural affairs program on PLO television, the moderator
  asserted:
  ‘It is well-known that every year the Jews exaggerate what the Nazis did to them. They claim
  there were 6 million killed, but precise scientific research demonstrates that there were
  no
  more than 400,000.’ A featured guest on the show added the accusation that the Jews
  ‘have
  profited materially, spiritually, politically and economically from the talk about the Nazi
  killings. This investment is favorable to them and they view it as a profitable activity so they
  inflate the number of victims all the time.'”

• “On 3 September 1997, the official newspaper of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority,
  Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah featured an article calling the Holocaust ‘the forged
  claims of the Zionists
  regarding the alleged acts of slaughter perpetrated against the Jews during the same
  period.’“

Such statements are not off-hand remarks or comments that are merely insensitive or
insufficiently sympathetic. They represent, instead, a deliberate effort to downplay one of the
most deplorable events in world history and, in so doing, to undercut a principal impetus for the
re-establishment of the Jewish State. It is amazingly patronizing, and a monstrous fraud, to imply
— as the Administration-euchred Museum visit does — that these and many similar assertions are
the product of Arafat’s ignorance, that if only he is exposed to the facts in the Holocaust
Memorial the disinformation issued by him, his lieutenants and his propaganda organs will cease.

Arafat and Company’s Moral Equivalence

No less appalling is the prospect that Arafat will use his visit to the Holocaust
Museum (at
the time or subsequently) as new grist for his agitprop machines’ efforts to equate Israel’s
actions with those of Nazi Germany and to equate the Palestinians’ plight with the
suffering
inflicted by the Holocaust. For example, consider the following examples cited by ZOA:

• “On 4 January 1996, by PLO Justice Minister Freih Abu-Medein, who told Israel Radio:
  ‘Israel did not hesitate to receive reparations from the government of Germany but it refuses to
  pay reparations to the victims of the intifada.'”

• “[According to the 25 January 1996 edition of Yediot Ahronot,] on 24 January
  1996, PLO
  official Affif Safiah declared at a Jerusalem gathering, ‘Israel must apologize to the Palestinian
  people for its conduct in the past, just as Germany apologized to the Jewish people for hunting
  them down in Europe.'”

• “On 22 April 1996, the PLO’s Palestinian Authority distributed a document titled Statement
  Issued by the Ministry of Information on the Palestinian Prisoner’s Day. It said: ‘While the
  Israeli government is speaking about the atrocities committed against the Jews at Auschwitz,
  Birkenau and Dachau concentration camps, the violations against the human rights of the
  Jewish individual, and the tragic consequences of the massacres and collective punishment, it
  [the Israeli government] is directly involved these days in weaving plots and causing two major
  catastrophes to their neighbors.'”

• “The [aforementioned] document accused Israel of persecuting Palestinian and Lebanese
  Arabs, then referred to ‘the inhumane legacy’ of the Holocaust and adds: ‘As a Palestinian
  people we are still experiencing the legacy of this catastrophe, being applied against them by
  the ancestors of those Jews who have suffered one day its consequences. Our homeland was
  transformed into a big concentration camp….'”

• “[According to the Associated Press of 8 August 1997,] on 7 August 1997, PLO Health
  Minister Riyad al-Zaanoun said that Israel’s use of blockades to help capture terrorists was
  comparable to the actions of the Nazis. ‘I wonder how Jews who suffered collective
  punishment from the Nazis can practice such punishments on the Palestinian people,’
  al-Zaanoun said.”

• ZOA reports that, “The same comparison of Israel to the Nazis has been made by, among
  others: Nabil Ramlawi, Arafat’s representative to the UN in Geneva (Jewish Telegraphic
  Agency, 2 December 1994); PA official Affif Safiah (Yediot Ahronot, 25 January
  1996); PA
  Justice Minister Freih Abu-Medein (Israel Radio, 4 January 1996); PA Health Minister Riyad
  al-Zaanoun (Associated Press, 8 August 1997). The PA newspaper Al-Hayat
  Al-Jadidah
  charged on 17 August 1997 that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is acting ‘in the European
  style of the German armies so that he will be able to impose Greater Israel and establish their
  superiority of the Hebrew race.'”

The Bottom Line

For millenia, philosophers have observed that, when virtue is taken to extremes, at some point
it
crosses the line into vice. While peacemaking is meant to be a virtuous activity, the Clinton
Administration has clearly engaged in wretched excess in its efforts to cultivate an image of
statesmanship of which Arafat is unworthy — at the expense of millions whose agony in life should
not be compounded in death by such a defiling of their memory.

The Center for Security Policy believes that the Holocaust Museum’s chairman Miles Lerman
was
correct when he initially declined to allow his institution to be sullied with politics. Should it
indeed depart from that principled position, the Museum and its leadership will not be the only
ones to suffer the consequences.

If Arafat had genuinely accepted the full horror of the Holocaust — and were prepared to
educate
his people about its reality and the legitimacy, in the wake of this experience, of the Jewish
people’s quest for a secure nation in their ancient homeland — there would be plenty of symbolic
means of reinforcing those messages. It is, on the other hand, odious that such symbolism is
being provided to a man who remains unreconciled to the suffering of the Jews and determined to
inflict still more upon them in the future. Only yesterday, Arafat threatened a new “intifada”
against the Jews.

Still more despicable is the fact that it is the United States government that is
orchestrating
this effort to whitewash Arafat’s image as a man who has committed terror in the past,
gives the green light to Hamas and continues to incite violence against the Jews by praising
suicide bombers as “martyrs, heroes and stars.”

– 30 –

1. See the ZOA’s Press Releases of 23 December 1997 and 19 January
1998 entitled, respectively,
“PLO Ministry of Information Says Israeli Policies Are ‘More Brutal’ than Nazis” and “Arafat
and Aides Have Denied or Distorted the Holocaust; Museum Should Not Welcome Him.”
(ZOA’s Web site is www.zoa.org.)