Political Correctness Trumping History at the US Holocaust Museum?

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America’s national institution for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. Yet, this premiere public-private organization is deficient in their scholarship, leaving out of the historic record, reference to the 1930’s and 1940’s Nazi-Arab conspiracy, probably because of political correctness once again surpassing truth.

With its origins within the Carter administration, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) was officially chartered by a unanimous Act of Congress in 1980 and was inaugurated in 1993 in Washington, DC. 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 the USHMM is considered the second most popular Washington tourist attraction after the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

The USHMM mission statement declares the Holocaust was a state-sponsored, “Systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945.” However, this is not complete, as a matter of fact 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 not to cleanse Europe of Jews, but the whole world of Jews. In regards to Hitler and the Jews from Arab countries, Hitler was clear in his objective, “Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews…Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle....” [1]

The USHMM has as primary mission to advance and disseminate knowledge about the Holocaust, yet, 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. As an 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. In addition, the Museum maintains an unspoken taboo on conducting programs or sponsored research regarding the Farhud, deportation of Jews from North Africa to concentration camps, and the interrelationship of the 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, it is not ‘anti-Islamic sentiment,’ it is fact.

The USHMM declares that it stands as, “The nation’s preeminent institution for Holocaust education and remembrance,” all the while overlooking the fact that Hitler and the Islamic leadership conspired together to murder the Jews in both the Balkans and the Arab countries. And while they say they serve as the world’s preeminent center, “For scholarly research of the Holocaust,” visitors do not see among their 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.

As time went on, Nazi ideas diffused into the Arab world. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published in Arabic and the Nazis supplied information bulletins to the Arab press. Nazi agents encouraged Arab nationalists to travel to Germany and to study there, [2] while movie theaters in Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus received German propaganda films and newsreels. [3] 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. [4]

Amin al-Husseini also had established a relationship with Mussolini and described his 1941 meeting with the Italian dictator in Rome as a success, finding Mussolini as a potent Jew hater like himself. Elliott Green in his article, “Arabs and Nazis - Can it Be True?” writes:

A quasi-governmental organization like the American Red Cross, the USHMM is funded in large part by the taxpayers of the United States. In 1994 the USHMM had a budget of $11 million that climbed to $21 million by 2000, an increase of 91%. The museum is supported by a combination of government and private funds, with the US shelling out over 60% 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 said that in a world with increasing ethnic violence and extremism, rising anti-Semitism, and continuing genocide, “Our work has never been more pertinent or more urgent.” Yet, while this is true, the silence and lack of interest on matters relating directly to the conspiracy between Hitler and Amin al-Husseini during the Holocaust seems nothing more than a sad example of de facto revisionism, possibly borne out of ignorance, or possibly worse—political correctness. While Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Museum is discussing the German-Arab ties, and while Encyclopedia of the Holocaust devotes more space to the Mufti of Jerusalem than to any other Nazi leader except Hitler, the USHMM is covering its eyes and ears unashamedly ignoring historical facts.

Despite the fact that the USHMM has exhibits on significant issues such as propaganda, genocide in the Eastern Congo and Rwanda, persecution of homosexuals and other issues, it makes no mention of Arab anti-Semitism—not of its history in the last century—not of its current existence. Other than one brief sentence on anti-Semitism in the Muslim context by the well respected Dr. Aron Rodrigue of Stanford University, the USHMM Website has no discussion on Arab anti-Semitism and the Museum has no permanent or even temporary exhibit on the same.

The USHMM makes no mention that al-Husseini was the uncle of the now deceased Arab dictator, Yassar Arafat. Born as Mohamed Abdel-Raouf al-Husseini, Arafat (who once called his uncle “our hero”) 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 Palestinian Liberation Organization, using his influence to raise funds for the terrorist organization. Although Hitler is long gone and the Nazi regime has been crushed, the paradigm that Hitler created by inciting and having the Arabs join with him remains in place today and is one of the top reasons for continued virulent anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Mein Kampf is being sold throughout Islamic countries to hungry readers while new generations of Arab children are being indoctrinated to radically hate Jews. While the USHMM stands up on issues of murder and hatred in certain African countries, it inexplicably leaves out mention of the same existing in the Arab world today. This begs the question, is the USHMM, a facility funded mostly by the federal government, not discussing a subject which is unmistakably inline with their mission because they risk offending Muslim citizens or Muslim religious leaders?

It is no wonder why Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY) and many prominent U.S. Jewish academic and social organizations are now publicly calling on the USHMM to fully include the relationship between Hitler and al-Husseini, as well as their goals, successes and failures in the annals of Holocaust history. Advertisements have been placed in prominent Jewish publications and public forums have been scheduled. The goal—to ensure that history recorded at the USHMM be historically accurate by being fully inclusive, not selective. And if that means revising the mission statement of the USHMM because it only makes mention of Jews in Europe, then it will need to be changed.

It is without question that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum serves the greater public good, but in the ongoing contemporary war being perpetuated by Islamo-facists against the Jews and other non-Islamic people, one of the victims has become intellectual integrity because of extensive political correctness. While the bureaucracy at the USHMM states they aim to, “Develop a national initiative on Holocaust education and civic responsibility,” they ought to be examining themselves, they ought to be reassessing their own responsibility for truth and accuracy.

[1] Record of the Conversation Between the Fuhrer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941, in the Presence of Reich Foreign Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin, Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Series D, Vol. XIII, London, 1964, p. 881ff in Walter Lacquer and Barry Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, (NY: Facts on File, 1984), pp. 79-84.

[2] Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, London, 1966; 312-13.

[3] Hirszowicz 131

[4] Eric Rouleau, "The Syrian Enigma: What Is the Ba'ath?" New Left Review, No. 45, September-October 1967.

[5] NY Jewish Times March 22, 2005