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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/swaim11192010.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/swaim11192010.html<br><br>
</a></font><font size=2 color="#990000">November 19 - 21, 2010<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Mamilla Cemetery
and the Simon Wiesenthal Center <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Israel's War Against the
Dead</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By
LAWRENCE SWAIM <br><br>
</font><font size=3>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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
But that is not what happened. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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).<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
On a tour of East Jerusalem in late summer 2010, activist and author
Phillip Weiss wrote on his website Mondoweiss:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>But next door it was a different story:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>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?”<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
“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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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?<br><br>
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?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.mamillacampaign.org">www.mamillacampaign.org</a>.
<br><br>
The press release accompanying the filing said as follows: <br><br>
<dl>
<dd>“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.”<br><br>
</dl>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<div align="center">* * * <br><br>
</div>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
Lawrence Swaim</b> is executive director of the Interfaith Freedom
Foundation.<br><br>
Notes.<br><br>
[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.<br><br>
[ii] Ben Harris, “Rabbi Noah Wienberg, Founder of Aish HaTorah, Dies,”
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 6 Feb. 2009. <br><br>
(This article is based on a column written for InFocus News, the national
Muslim newspaper.)<br><br>
<br><br>
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