[News] Israel's War Against the Dead - Mamilla Cemetery and the Simon Wiesenthal Center

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/swaim11192010.html

November 19 - 21, 2010


Mamilla Cemetery and the Simon Wiesenthal Center


Israel's War Against the Dead

By LAWRENCE SWAIM

In June, 2005, the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los 
Angeles began construction in Jerusalem of an 
ambitious new facility. This project was 
variously referred to by Rabbi Marvin Hier, the 
founder and “dean” of the SWC, as the “Center for 
Human Dignity,” the “Center for Human 
Dignity­Jerusalem” and most pretentiously, the 
“Center for Human Dignity­Museum of Tolerance.” 
(Ground-breaking on the construction site had 
occurred in 2004, giving Arnold Schwarzenegger an 
opportunity to fly to Israel for one of his many 
photo ops with Rabbi Heir.) This sprawling 
structure was to be built on a parking lot that 
was supposedly adjacent to a historic Muslim 
ceremony; but which actually turned out to be directly on top of a part of it.

The cemetery, called the Mamilla Cemetary (Ma’Man 
Allah in Arabic), was an extremely old Muslim 
burial ground that was once the most important in 
Palestine, and in the Middle East generally. The 
Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, in 
a petition to the UN and other international 
organizations to stop construction of the 
Wiesenthal Museum, wrote as follows: “The Mamilla 
Cemetery is an ancient Muslim burial ground and 
holy site believed to date back to the 7th 
century, when companions of the Prophet Muhammad 
were reputedly buried there. Numerous saints of 
the Sufi faith and thousands of other officials, 
scholar, notables and Jerusalemite families have 
been buried in the cemetery over the last 1000 
years. The Muslim Supreme Council declared the 
cemetery a historical site in 1927, and the 
British Mandate authorities pronounced it an 
antiquities site in 1944. It was an active burial ground until 1948.”

“After the new State of Israel seized the western 
part of Jerusalem in 1948, the cemetery fell 
under Israeli control, and like other Islamic 
endowment properties, or waqf, Mamilla Cemetery 
was taken over by the Custodian for Absentee 
Property. Since then, Muslim authorities have not 
been allowed to maintain the cemetery.” At that 
time, in 1948, the Israeli Religious Affairs 
Ministry itself acknowledged Mamilla “to be one 
of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where 
seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] 
armies are interred along with many Muslim 
scholars.” It added: “Israel will always know to 
protect and respect this site.”

But that is not what happened.

In the early 1980s, Muslims became aware that the 
cemetery was being encroached on and human 
remains were being disinterred, and protested to 
the United Nations Education, Scientific and 
Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In 1984 Israel 
responded to that protest by stating flatly that 
“no project exists for the de-consecration of the 
site and that on the contrary the site and its 
tombs are to be safeguarded.” In fact even as 
Israel said this, however, it was engaged in 
parceling off pieces of the cemetery for various 
kinds of private developments, even as they 
assured UNESCO that they were protecting it.

Sadly, Palestinians had no legal instrument by 
which they could stop this. Although Mamilla 
cemetery in on a list of “Special Antiquities 
Sites,” it is not protected as a religious site. 
All of the cemeteries in Israel that are 
protected as religious sites are Jewish. (The 
Israeli government designates 137 holy sites that 
receive such protection, but all are Jewish, a 
fact that the US State Department’s International 
Religious Freedom Report of 2009 protested 
against.) Furthermore successive governments have 
sought to obliterate reminders of Palestinian 
culture in Jerusalem; successive governments 
parceled out sections of Mamilla for buildings, 
then for the construction of the parking lot 
mentioned above­and in 1992, the site was 
transferred to the Jerusalem municipality. At one 
point the government built a park over a part of 
the cemetery, which they named Independence Park, 
a reference to the founding of Israel in 1948 
(and a clear attempt to provoke and humiliate Palestinians).

This is completely unlike the treatment meted out 
to Jewish cemeteries. On the Mount of the Olives, 
for example, the Jewish cemetery has been 
lavishly refurbished and even expanded, and 
finally transformed into a “heritage site.” On 
the other hand, Israel’s Muslim cemeteries have 
been allowed to fade into disuse, and are even 
destroyed when the government thinks it can get 
away with it. The 900-year-old Hittin mosque 
built by Saladin in the Galilee region has been 
deliberately fenced off and allowed to go to 
ruin. According to Bethlehem-based journalist 
Jonathan Cook, some mosques are used by rural 
Jewish communities as animal sheds. “And yet 
more,” he writes, “have been converted into 
discos, bars or nightclubs, including the Dahir 
al-Umar mosque­now the Dona Rosa restaurant­in 
the former Palestinian village of Ayn Hawd.”

Meron Benvenisti, a former Deputy Mayor of 
Jerusalem who wrote Sacred Landscape: Buried 
History of the Holy Land Since 1948, has been 
vocal in pointing out that Muslim groups, 
contrary to what the Simon Wiesenthal camp is 
saying, pleaded over the years to be allowed to 
officially refurbish and keep up their sacred 
sites and cemeteries, but were never allowed to 
do so. Many important Islamic sites, he has 
written, have been “turned into dumps, parking 
lots, roads and construction sites.”

The Israeli government has recently added 
Ibrahimi and Bilal Bin Abi Rabah Mosques to the 
Jewish heritage list, which means they are not 
protected as religious sites. This means that the 
Israeli government could easily sell off, close 
or develop the sites, just as it has the Mamilla 
site, which is also on the heritage list but not 
protected as a religious site.

On a tour of East Jerusalem in late summer 2010, 
activist and author Phillip Weiss wrote on his website Mondoweiss:

Maybe the most pitiable sight I saw yesterday, 
inside the West Bank but close to the north 
Jerusalem colonies of Ramot and Ramat Shlomo, 
[was] the hilltop tomb of the prophet Samuel, 
which is worshiped by Jews and Muslims. The tomb 
is both a mosque with a minaret and a Jewish 
place of worship. Well when we visited, busloads 
of Jewish schoolchildren were arriving and 
Israeli soldiers were in the tomb davening and 
Hasidic boys were descending, too.

But next door it was a different story:

The door is chained, pigeons fly into the outer 
rooms, the Palestinian who runs a store there 
told us that the authorities had shut down the 
minaret. There are no Palestinian worshipers.

Weiss points out that this is an Israeli National 
Park in the West Bank, which is supposedly 
Palestinian land and supposedly­if there were 
actually ever to be a two-state solution­the 
future site of a Palestinian state. But being 
under the authority of the Israeli army, the 
Jewish site is protected as a religious site, 
whereas the Muslim worship facility next to the 
tomb of the prophet Samuel has been closed down. 
It is hard not to conclude that the closing and 
degradation of Muslim religious sites is a 
deliberate and coordinated policy of the Israeli 
government to humiliate Palestinian Muslims, an 
extension of the slow ethnic cleansing currently 
underway in the occupied territories. The message 
seems to be, “If you don’t like what we’re doing 
to Muslim holy sites, why don’t you leave?”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center similarly claims that 
Mamilla deserves no protection as a religious 
site, citing the fact that in 1964 the government 
set up a Muslim trust and that the head of that 
council “deconsecrated” Mamilla­and supposedly 
declared it no longer sacred ground, thus opening 
it up to partial development. But the person in 
question was apparently a government plant 
brought in to give political cover to those 
anxious to make money by developing the cemetery. 
(The bogus 1964 proclamation was aggressively 
overturned­or ruled “void”­by the Shari’a Court 
of Appeals in Israel, which found the sanctity of 
cemeteries to be “eternal” in Islam.) Certainly 
one person­especially one who in 1964 had been 
given no authority by Muslims to represent 
them­cannot speak for the many families whose 
ancestors are buried in Mamilla. Although some 
tombstones appeared to have been replaced in 
recent years, individual attempts at upkeep 
haven’t been as successful as organized efforts by a Muslim trust would be.

In Death in Jerusalem, Noga Tarnopolsky writes of 
her friend Sari Nusseibeh, a philosopher and 
university president, who located the tomb of two 
illustrious ancestors in the Mamilla cemetery: 
“Nusseibeh then contacted a friend working at the 
Ministry for Religious Affairs and requested 
permission to place a plaque on the crypt. ‘I 
thought it was important to commemorate this, and 
to tell people that in the case of a family like 
mine, we are not claiming roots here in the 
abstract or national sense, but in the familial 
sense, which is a much closer thing,’ he said.”

“Nusseibeh secured permission and affixed a stone 
plaque explaining that the tomb belonged to 
Islam’s Kabrkabiyyan period and contained the 
remains of one Prince Iddaghji and a certain 
Judge Nusseibeh. The next day it was removed by 
municipal workers, who claimed sole jurisdiction 
over the entire park.” This was despite the 
permission he had supposedly gotten from the 
Ministry for Religious Affairs. This could stand 
as a paradigm interaction of Israel and its 
Palestinian citizens. One can jump through all 
the hoops, do all the paperwork required, but if 
you are Palestinian you can be ignored and shut 
down at any moment, simply because you do not 
have the right religion. And your attorney will 
be able to do nothing for you, because in Israel 
the legal system is completely skewed against Palestinians.

Thus the location for SWC’s “Museum of Tolerance” 
had already been contested ground for some time 
before 2004, and in the opinion of most 
Palestinians a prime example of Israel’s 
swaggering and increasingly aggressive religious 
intolerance. Even the design for the new 
structure­by the internationally-known architect 
Frank Gehry­seems to have pleased nobody. (Gehry 
claims that it represents a bowl of fruit, a 
strange idea that got little traction in 
Jerusalem.)[i] Meron Benvenisti complained about 
its “geometric forms that can’t be any more 
dissonant to the environment in which it is 
planned to put this alien object.” Noga 
Tarnopolsky characterized its design as “the 
image of a supernatural edifice resembling 
nothing so much as a crab in the process of 
hatching a sapphire spider with huge, glassy 
eyes. It is neither beautiful nor ugly; it is 
striking and odd.” The management of the Vad 
Yashem Holocaust memorial were unhappy about the 
competition in Holocaust tourism (there’s a great 
comic novel in there somewhere), and the people 
of Jerusalem, perhaps wary of busloads of 
ecstatic tourists from southern California, were 
generally mystified by Heir’s grandiose ideas.

The “Museum of Tolerance” was built on a parking 
lot that was supposed to be adjacent to Mamilla 
cemetery. In reality it was built over part of 
it. This fact became painfully clear to the 
Wiesenthal Center as workmen began to encounter 
human remains. (Laying electrical cables and 
sewer lines probably resulted in digging deeper 
than had been required for building the parking 
lot.) At first the presence of human remains was 
kept secret by the SWC, but it couldn’t have 
surprised many people in Jerusalem, since they 
knew that the government had been parceling off 
the cemetery for some time. What the government 
had chosen to ignore was how resentful of this 
Palestinians had become over the years, 
especially those families with ancestors buried in Mamilla.

Reports vary, but the Wiesenthal Center workers 
apparently encountered remains of about two 
hundred people; and a decision was supposedly 
made to take the remains to another Muslim 
cemetery and re-inter them there. (What really 
happened can’t be confirmed because the 
Wiesenthal Center won’t reveal where they were 
taken.) The centuries-old remains have been the 
main sticking point for Hier and the SWC, the 
seriousness of which can be inferred from their 
insistence that they “respectfully” re-interred 
the bones. (If that is true, why won’t they allow 
journalists to take photos of their final resting 
place?) If the Wiesenthal Center is simply 
building something on a parking lot, why were 
they engaged in digging up human remains? And if 
the claims of local Muslim families were all 
lies, why was the Wiesenthal Center, by its own 
admission, re-interring those same human remains in another Muslim cemetery?

In fact, Hier and the Wiesenthal Center had known 
for a very long time that they were building 
their “Center for Human Dignity­Museum of 
Tolerance.” on top of an historic Muslim 
cemetery. During the building of the original 
parking lot back in the 1960, hundreds of graves 
were disinterred, which caused anguished protests 
by Muslims; the same thing happened in 1984, when 
they appealed to UNESCO. Furthermore, as early as 
1993 the municipal authorities offered the SWC 
the parking lot for the building of the project. 
Both Teddy Kollek and Ehud Olmert had encouraged 
the Simon Wiesenthal Center to build the current 
or similar projects at precisely this site, and 
they above all were in a position to know that 
the parking lot had been built over part of 
Mamilla Cemetery. Therefore Kollek, Ehud Olmert 
and Rabbi Hier knew exactly what lay under the 
parking lot. In fact, the case can be made that 
Hier wanted to build on a Muslim cemetery, 
especially given his apocalyptic ideas about the 
inevitability of religious war between Muslims 
and Jews. What could be better for fund-raising 
than a nice little religious war, with the 
frenetic Hier leading his faithful troops into the fray?

In 2005, Gideon Suleimani, a Palestinian 
archeologist, personally warned representatives 
of the SWC that the area was an antiquities site; 
at Seleimani’s request, the Israeli Antiquities 
Authority (IAA) dug test trenches, and it was 
revealed that hundreds of graves­as many as four 
layers of graves­were located under the parking 
lot. One has the sense that Suleimani thought 
that he could get the Wiesenthal Center to back 
off if only he could appeal to their common 
humanity. If so, he didn’t know the group he was 
dealing with­the SWC continued, in spite of being 
so advised; and when reports surfaced of their 
digging up remains and carrying them away 
surreptitiously in boxes, several Palestinian 
families in the area decided to act.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) then 
moved to investigate further. Suleimani, who was 
the Chief Excavator on the project, found that 
there were “at least 2000 graves,” on at least 
four levels, with exhumed remains dating back to 
the 12th century, and the lowest level dating 
back to the 11th century. But, as Suleimann later 
testified in an Affidavit, people from the Simon 
Wiesenthal Center began to put pressure on the 
IAA, as did interested politicians who were 
invested in getting the construction done. For 
their part the IAA, according to Suleimani, tried 
to get him to stop his excavating and to alter 
his report. Suleimani also said that 
“representatives of the SWC started coming by on 
a daily basis, pressing for the excavation to 
progress quickly, to prevent the Muslims from 
stopping the project,” not to mention 
entrepreneurs whose connection to the site was 
unclear, but who were now threatening to sue the 
Israeli Antiquities Authority.

In 2006 a lawsuit was filed that resulted in a 
court order that temporarily stopped 
construction. But the pressures were growing on 
the government. The Israeli Antiquities Authority 
decided, while defending against the lawsuit, to 
suppress the evidence their Chief Excavator 
Gideon Suleimani had uncovered. The High Court of 
Israel never found out that there were around 
2,000 graves under the parking lot, going down 
four levels, the lowest level of graves dating 
back to the 11th century. They did not find out 
about it because the IAA suppressed the evidence 
that Seluimani collected, and that the IAA had 
asked him to collect. In an equally cynical move, 
the IAA apparently lied (according to affidavits 
by Suleimani) about his finding that only about 
ten percent of the excavations had been done, 
instead claiming that ninety percent was done.

What caused these criminal misrepresentations to 
the High Court, the first of which was 
suppression of evidence, and the second of which 
was perjury? For one thing, the Simon Wiesenthal 
Center had arranged to pay the workers doing the 
excavation, perhaps a violation of the law, but 
one that gave the SWC greater leverage over facts 
on the ground. Secondly, there is some evidence 
that the “Museum of Tolerance” was part of a 
larger deal which may not have been strictly 
legitimate (since it may have involved patronage 
from politicians). Thirdly, why did the IAA 
falsify the report they had initiated, and what 
did they receive in return from the Simon 
Wiesenthal Center? This critical piece of 
information can’t be determined until the 
principals to the controversy can be examined 
under oath. But given the value of the land 
involved it is hard to believe that they acted 
alone, or that they decided to suppress evidence on their own volition.

The High Court allowed construction to continue 
in October, 2008. Efforts were made to appeal 
this, since the Israel Antiquities Authority had 
repressed the only evidence that really counts in 
this case, which was testimony (and evidence) of 
the Chief Excavator assigned by the IAA itself, 
Gideon Suleimani. Despite the suppression of 
everything he had to say and all the evidence he 
had obtained, the court refused to open the case 
again, and insisted that construction must 
proceed. Exhumation of human remains resumed, and 
there was nothing that could be done about it. 
This constituted the exhaustion of appeals within 
the Israeli system of justice, and made the later 
appeal to the United Nations inevitable.

Contrary to what the IAA had told the High Court, 
ninety percent of the area intended for the 
Wiesenthal Center project still had to be dug up. 
The Israeli Antiquities Authority claimed that 
the disinterring of human remains occurring after 
October, 2008, involved manual removal after 
documentation so that the remains could be 
re-interred, but both the Simon Wiesenthal Center 
and the IAA have engaged in extreme secrecy, and 
it is impossible to say exactly what they did 
with the remains. (Needless to say, they refused 
to consult with appropriate Muslim authorities.) 
It was reported by the Palestinian News Network 
that during one week in 2009, some 300 Muslim 
graves were opened up, and the remains dumped 
into a mass grave. It is impossible to confirm 
this, but one can imagine how such reports affect 
the Palestinians that read them. The apparent 
collusion of the IAA and the Simon Wiesenthal 
group, and the extreme secrecy with which they 
operated­not to mention Rabbi Hier’s violent 
rhetorical attacks on any who oppose their 
projects as terrorists, anti-Semites, and 
“Islamists”­have for the time being removed hope 
for resolution using any of the instruments of Israeli civil society.

Therefore on 10 February 2010, in New York, 
Jerusalem, Geneva and Los Angeles, a petition was 
filed with several United Nations agencies to 
stop desecration of Mamilla Cemetary by Israeli 
authorities and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. 
(Press conferences were held in Geneva, Jersalem 
and Los Angeles.) The UN agencies to whom this 
was appealed were the UN Special Rapporteurs on 
Freedom of Religion and Belief and on 
Contemporary Forms of Racism; the Independent 
Expert on Culture; the High Commissioner for 
Human Rights; and the Director General of UNESCO, 
the agency that was involved in investigations of 
previous desecrations of Mamilla Cemetary in 
1984. The Petition was filed on behalf of some 60 
Palestinians from 15 Jerusalem families whose 
ancestors, going back to the 12th century, are 
buried in the cemetery. The filing was done by 
the Center for Constitutional Rights located in 
New York, which has made information about the 
campaign to save Mamilla available at 
<http://www.mamillacampaign.org>www.mamillacampaign.org.

The press release accompanying the filing said as follows:

“This will be the first known time Palestinian 
individuals have taken collective action against 
Israel to bring such an issue before a UN forum 
and comes after all remedies in Israel were 
exhausted. The families, NGOs, and attorneys 
argue the desecration of the cemetery violates 
international conventions protecting cultural 
heritage, the manifestation of religious beliefs, 
and the right to family.” Maria LaHood, a Senior 
Attorney as CCR, added: “Left with no recourse in 
Israel, families of people buried in Mamilla 
cemetery have come together to petition the 
United Nations to safeguard their international 
human rights to be free from discrimination, to 
manifest religious beliefs, and to have their 
cultural heritage protected. We call on the 
international community to denounce this shameful 
desecration of a historic Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights was found in 
1966 by lawyers involved in the civil rights 
movement in the US, and is “committed to the 
creative use of law as a positive force for 
social change.” In the international arena, the 
CCR sees itself as “dedicated to advancing and 
protecting the rights guaranteed by the United 
States Constitution and the Universal Declaration 
of Human Rights.” Predictably, the Simon 
Wiesenthal Center sees the Petition filed by the 
Center for Constitutional Rights as a scheme to 
overthrown the authority of the Jewish state, in 
the same way that the Goldstone Report is seen by 
them as an unfair use of international law to attack and destroy Israel.

In 2009, in the New York Sun and the Jewish 
press, the Simon Wiesenthal Center presented 
“evidence” (in the form of a story from the 
Palestine Post of 1945) that the Supreme Muslim 
Council of Jerusalem was planning a business 
center on the site of the Mamilla Cemetary in 
1945. The Palestine Post (precursor to the 
Jerusalem Post) was violently Labor-Zionist in 
its politics, and in 1945 was not the best source 
for anything going on within the Palestinian 
community, nor the best advocate for its 
interests. Furthermore, the nominal head of the 
Muslim Council at that time was the notorious 
Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, who although out of the 
country in 1945 was still the Grand Mufti of 
Jerusalem; and who, besides being one of the 
worst anti-Semites of the 20th century, was also 
an enthusiastic propagandist for Hitler and the 
Nazis. Furthermore, the entire Muslim Council in 
Jerusalem at that time was rife with cronyism, 
corruption, and the infighting of various Jerusalem families.

Although it is somewhat dangerous to generalize, 
it could be said that Al-Husayni and Jerusalem’s 
Muslim Council in 1945 represented a snapshot of 
exactly what a great many secular Arab 
nationalists (not to mention the later Islamic 
Revival throughout Muslim-majority countries) 
aimed to get rid of­not merely cronyism, greed 
and class oppression but also, in the case of 
Al-Husaybi, European-style fascism and 
anti-Semitism. The fact that neither Arab 
nationalism nor the Islamic Revival was entirely 
successful in doing so does not change the fact 
that Al-Husayni and the Muslim Council of 1945 
engaged in behavior that the best Arab thinkers 
were irrevocably opposed to. It was for precisely 
this reason that the Palestinian Liberation 
Organization was careful to sideline al-Husayni 
and to downplay his influence in the years before his death in 1974.

In any case, neither al-Husayni nor the Muslim 
Council of 1945 are authoritative guides to the 
important cultural and political decisions that 
face Israel/Palestine in 2010, if for no other 
reason than that both Palestinian and Jewish 
communities today are entirely different than 
they were in 1945, as are their leaders. Sadly 
but not unsurprisingly, that is difficult for 
Rabbi Hier and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to 
accept. For them, there are only “the 
Palestinians,” much as Christians once referred 
to that mysterious entity known as “the Jews,” 
who were supposedly the enemy of Christendom; in 
the same way, Hier sees all Palestinians as enemies of Israeli Jews.

But Hier’s rhetoric is the self-delusion of the 
bully, who projects his own bad conscience onto 
his weaker victim. In reality, there is no they 
in those organizations and individuals who seek 
to defend Mamilla Cemetary, but Muslims, 
Christians and Jews of many different 
temperaments and affiliations who share an 
interest in preserving one of the most important 
and compelling religious sites of the Middle 
East. But Mamilla Cemetery is also a dispute in 
which a dominant group of people have the power 
to hurt and humiliate another and weaker group of 
people, whose religious sites furthermore receive 
no protection from the government. And the most 
dangerous thing in the world is unlimited 
executive power over aggrieved but powerless 
people, with the impunity to hurt them and get away with it.

* * *

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an extreme 
rightwing Jewish organization, tinged by 
neo-fascism and with many of the characteristics 
of a hate organization. It is based almost 
completely on a vulgarized, pervasive form of 
religious nationalism. Its vision for Israel is 
consistent with the neo-fascist Jabotinsky 
tendency within Zionism that was modeled on 
Italian fascism, and it also promotes the 
Likudnik doctrine that Judaism itself has no 
practical or demographic existence separate from 
Israel. The SWC supports the neo-con belief in 
permanent war in the Middle East, and it engages 
in the vigorous dissemination of religious 
bigotry against Muslims in the US. It portrays 
anti-Semitism as worse than it is, partly for 
fund-raising purposes and partly to establish an 
imagined victim status. It similarly uses the 
Holocaust both to discourage criticism of Israel 
and to justify Israel’s own violence, 
aggressively insisting that every criticism of 
Israel is really aimed at destroying the Jewish 
people. Above all, the SWC is a dangerous 
cultural force that seeks religious war as the 
standard for religious authenticity.

What kind of people make up the “400,000 
member-families” the SWC claims as supporters in 
southern California and the US? If the SWC does 
indeed have that many families that contribute 
annually, that makes it very much a mass 
organization, which means that it must be taken 
seriously. One has the sense that Hier’s 
followers are primarily lower (and middle) 
middle-class people, perhaps small 
businesspersons and conservative professionals 
who reject Judaism’s traditional concern for 
social justice, whose level of cultural literacy 
is not particularly high, and who are attracted 
to the us-against-them aggression of religious 
nationalism. The frenetic and frequently 
duplicitous advocacy emanating from the Simon 
Wiesenthal Center has a pronounced middlebrow 
flavor­that is, it is pretentious, 
self-congratulatory and sometimes unintentionally 
funny. (Last year an e-mailed Passover invitation 
to SWC members billed Rabbis Marvin Hier and 
Abraham Cooper as “featured Scholars-in-Residence 
at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel and Spa.”) Above 
all, the “member-families” of the Simon 
Wiesenthal Center are incessantly indoctrinated 
with the idea that Israel­and the Center 
itself­never make mistakes and are never at 
fault, because criticisms of them are invariably the work of anti-Semites.

The Wiesenthal Center’s exaggerations and 
fabrications regarding anti-Semitism and 
anti-Israeli attitudes are well-known. The SWC 
claimed that the 2002 World Social Forum in 
Mumbai was ‘hi-jacked by anti-Israel and 
anti-American forces.’ This was completely 
untrue, as Jewish peace activist Cecilie Surasky, 
who was in attendance, later testified. (The SWC 
also claimed in the Jerusalem Post to be ‘the 
only Jewish NGO’ at Mumbai, whereas in reality 
there were several, including Jewish Voice for 
Peace, with which Surasky is affiliated.) The 
Wiesenthal Center also engaged off a strenuous 
campaign to portray Hugo Chavez as an 
anti-Semite, which they attempted to do by 
strategically doctoring a quote by Chavez. This 
interventionist attitude shouldn’t surprise 
us­the Wiesenthal Center once presented Jeanne 
Kilpatrick, a US diplomatic defender of the 
murderous Pinochet regime in Chile, with its 
Humanitarian of the Year Award. (They also 
honored such noted humanitarians as Ronald 
Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Robert Murdoch.)

The Wiesenthal Center also has the unenviable 
distinction of involvement in one of the worst 
journalistic blunders of modern times. In the 
late spring of 2006, Douglas Kelly, editor of the 
National Post, a Canadian newspaper, became aware 
of an item in a column by Iranian exile Amir 
Taheri, indicating that the Iranian Parliament 
might require Jews to wear yellow stars. A Post 
editor contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, 
thinking it was a legitimate human rights agency. 
Both Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper 
of the SWC excitedly insisted to anybody that 
would listen, both verbally and in an email to 
the Post, that the tale was “absolutely true.” 
The Post went ahead with the story on Page One, 
but Taheri was a neo-con plant, and the story was a fabrication.

Within days, Post editor Kelly was obliged to 
make a long and detailed apology to his readers. 
He referred directly to the Post’s contact with 
both Cooper and Hier at the Wiesenthal Center, 
mentioning pointedly that they had both, on 
separate occasions, confirmed the story. The 
implication of having been consciously betrayed 
by the Wiesenthal Center was quite clear. For 
Hier and Cooper, however, it was a big 
victory­they’d been able to place a great piece 
of propaganda on Page One of a large daily 
newspaper, while managing to make the connection 
between Nazis and Iranians, a staple theme of the SWC.

The Wiesenthal Center is silent on the rise of 
fascism in Israel in 2010, probably because the 
Center’s own tactics are borrowed from classical 
fascism, such as their tireless dissemination of 
religious bigotry. Their more overt activity in 
this area involves their promotion and showing of 
the violently anti-Muslim film The Third Jihad, 
which was a project of the Clarion Fund, a 
shadowy rightwing Zionist operation that produced 
Obsession: Radical Islam’s War with the West. 
According to recent investigative reporting by 
Pam Martens appearing in Counterpunch, the 
Clarion Fund’s main financial supporters­Donor 
Capital Fund and Donors Trust­are managed by 
people who have a long association with Charles 
G. Koch, billionaire donor to the Tea Party.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center also cooperated with 
Aish HaTorah, a extremist rightwing Jewish group 
that Atlantic Magazine’s pro-Israel pundit 
Jeffrey Goldberg has referred to as “just about 
the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism 
today,”[ii] a group that has strong ties to the 
racist settlers in Israel’s occupied territories. 
Before the election of 2008, the Clarion Fund 
functioned as a loosely-constituted front group 
in America for Aish HaTorah, whose operatives had 
produced a film in 2003 alleging Palestinian 
incitement against Israel and Jews. Then, in the 
heady post-9/11 atmosphere, the Clarion Fund went 
ahead to produce Obsession, and then The Third 
Jihad, both wildly inflammatory propaganda films 
that were supposedly about a minority of 
“radical” Muslims, but which made fantastic 
allegations about mainstream Muslims 
organizations in the US such as the Council on 
American Islamic Relations (CAIR), alleging them 
to be part of a hostile international plot to infiltrate and take over America.

In the spring of 2009, the Clarion Fund released 
The Third Jihad, with the Simon Wiesenthal Center 
in Los Angeles enthusiastically opting to sponsor 
its West Coast premiere on May 17th, 2009, 
thereby making it a major event in their spring 
calendar. The Wiesenthal premiere was 
co-sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, an 
unsavory far-right group that was unabashedly 
Islamophobic and pro-torture (books by John Yoo 
and Marc Thiessen were on sale at their website). 
The Washington D.C. opening of The Third Jihad, 
which occurred at the same time as the SWC event 
in Los Angeles, was co-sponsored by the 
International Free Press Society, another 
unsavory rightwing group, this one authentically 
neo-fascist. Two months before the Washington 
Premiere, the IFPS had been involved in 
publicizing and promoting Geert Wilders, the 
well-known Dutch neo-fascist with links to 
several far-right parties in Europe.

The climax of The Third Jihad was a supposed 
Federal Bureau of Investigation discovery of a 
subversive document­a “Grand Jihad 
Manifesto”­outlining a Muslim plot to take over 
America. Why the FBI wasn’t out making arrests, 
if the plot violated any laws, was left 
unanswered. The document was depicted as being so 
sensitive it couldn’t be released to the general 
public, perhaps because it would demoralize the 
nation. (Or perhaps, on the other hand, it really 
doesn’t exist.) “The 15-page document outlines 
goals and strategies for the infiltration and 
domination of America from within,” The Third 
Jihad insists. “Among the strategies discussed is 
the establishment of ‘moderate’ groups, mosques 
and Islamic centers across North America in an 
effort to strategically position Islam so that it 
might weaken western culture and promote the 
implementation of Sharia Law.” (The resemblance 
of the alleged secret “Grand Jihad Manifesto” to 
the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was not lost on Jewish progressives.)

The Wiesenthal Center’s cooperation with Aish 
HaTorah, the group behind the Clarion Fund, is 
problematical for other reasons. Experts on cults 
suggest that Aish HaTorah has either become a 
cult or developed profoundly cult-like behavior. 
Some information about these concerns­including 
the first-person account of a Jewish mother whose 
son was indoctrinated­appears on the website of 
the Ross A. Rick Institute, which monitors cult 
behavior. Ross writes that cult-like Orthodox 
Jewish groups like “Aish HaTorah and Ohr Somayach 
have generated serious and repeated complaints 
from Jewish families, including Orthodox Jewish 
families
.Aish/Ohr has repeatedly been accused of 
‘brainwashing’ American Jewish tourists in 
Israel. These are typically young people that 
started out on vacation and were instead sucked 
into Aish/Ohr. These recruits then often gave up 
school, work, previously set goals and 
relationships to study at times for years with Aish/Ohr and stayed in Israel.”

Ross continues: “Recruiting was often done at the 
Western Wall and began with a simple invitation 
to a dinner or ‘Shabbat.’ Families should be 
aware of all this before sending their kids to 
Israel for any programs or vacations
.Some of the 
most hateful and nasty emails I have ever 
received from any group mentioned on the Ross 
Institute database have been from Aish and Ohr 
participants, which have denounced other Jews 
(e.g. Reform and Conservative) and have expressed 
often extreme, bigoted and even violent 
sentiments.” Like many cults, Aish HaTorah uses 
various excerpts from holy books to rationalize 
coercive or violent behavior by leaders.

At present Aish HaTorah is also little more than 
an extension of the worldwide Israeli propaganda 
effort. People associated with Aish Hatorah 
devised the Hasbara Fellowships, which invite (or 
lure) young people to Israel, indoctrinate them, 
and send them back to fight “the enemies of 
Israel.” Honest Reporting, which claims to be the 
world’s largest pro-Israel media organization, is 
also a product of Aish HaTorah­its claimed 
150,000 members worldwide that report on 
journalism they believe to be “anti-Israel.” Aish 
HaTorah is also known to partner with a national 
US Jewish fraternity to run a three-week tour of 
Israel trip for their undergraduate members, who 
then receive “education” from the group. Aish 
HaTorah runs a plethora of groups and seminars 
that purport to teach “core values” of Judaism, 
but which actually teach a fanatical, apocalyptic 
version of rightwing religious Zionism. For its 
leaders, the final goal of life is the death or 
defeat of Palestinians and Arabs. In some 
interviews, Aish HaTorah participants have made 
statements that suggest that they believe that it 
is God’s will that the Al Aqsa Mosque in 
Jerusalem be destroyed­an eventuality that would, 
of course, spark a major religious conflagration.

It is this background of incessant Islamophobia 
and extremely aggressive religious nationalism 
that must be kept in mind when considering the 
Wiesenthal Center’s motivation for building the 
“Center for Human Dignity­Museum of Tolerance.” 
Rabbi Hier and the SWC knew very well about the 
bodies buried under the parking lot at Mamilla 
Cemetery in Jerusalem. They had reportedly 
contemplated buying the site since at least 1993; 
they have been repeatedly warned that the site 
was built over a historic Muslim cemetery; and 
they have repeatedly refused suggestions of both 
Muslims and Jews to build somewhere else. Leaders 
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center cannot say that 
they did not know the potential for conflict in 
their choice. At its core the conflict over 
Mamilla Cemetery is, besides its potential for 
sparking religious conflict, one more attempt by 
rightwing Zionists to redefine Judaism as a 
religion that can somehow redeem the Holocaust by 
hurting and humiliating Palestinians.

Words like “Tolerance” and “Dignity” from the 
liberal and social-democratic past of European 
Jewry are gleefully flaunted by the SWC, but are 
used in the same way that Stalinists used words 
such as “democratic“ or “liberation,” to disguise 
the real nature of Stalinism. There is nothing 
“ironic” about the use of such words, as many 
liberal and religious-liberty groups believe, 
because this use of language it is a ploy, a part 
of SWC strategy; it serves the main function of 
deliberate Orwellian language, which is to 
communicate contempt for logic and to distract 
with its absurdity. Finally, it is an expression 
of raw illegitimate power, saying in effect to 
the Palestinians: “We control everything, even 
language. If we say that black is white, we will 
force you to accept it, because we have the power 
to humiliate and kill you.” Finally, like most 
extremist rightwing movements, people in the 
leadership of the Wiesenthal Center will lie and 
misrepresent things anytime they think they can get away with it.

The Mamilla Cemetery site was chosen for a 
reason. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s real 
objective in building the “Center for Human 
Dignity­Museum of Tolerance” in Jerusalem is 
almost surely to ignite religious conflict, and 
ultimately religious war in the region. It is 
this pathological aggression that makes the Simon 
Wiesenthal Center, and its fundamentalist allies 
like Aish HaTorah, so dangerous. The fight over 
Mamilla Cemetery is a dispute in which Rabbi 
Hier, the very incarnation of the charismatic but 
morally corrupt religious fanatic, seeks to 
invent a new Judaism that, like medieval 
Christianity, defines itself by its ability to 
wound and torment the underdog. As American 
neo-conservatives made clear in their famous 
letter to Netanyahu in 1996, the American empire 
they seek depends on a state of permanent war in 
the Middle East. By all appearances, the Simon 
Wiesenthal Center aspires to be a pivotal part of 
this approaching religious war.

Lawrence Swaim is executive director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation.

Notes.

[i] Gehry latter pulled out of the project. In 
November, 2010, Jewish Voice for Peace announced 
that Gehry had joined a group of theatre 
professionals and people in the arts that were 
boycotting the Ariel performance center in the West Bank.

[ii] Ben Harris, “Rabbi Noah Wienberg, Founder of 
Aish HaTorah, Dies,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 6 Feb. 2009.

(This article is based on a column written for 
InFocus News, the national Muslim newspaper.)




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