To: Ms Sara Bloomfield, Executive Directive, US Holocaust Museum

      Mr Fred Zeidman, Chairman of the Board, US Holocaust Museum

Dear Ms Bloomfield and Mr Zeidman,

I am writing you after reading a report by the Holocaust Museum Watch that referred to your “whitewashing” of the character of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini. I understand that an offending biography has been removed from your website, yet your lack of serious focus on the issue of Arab anti-Semitism is glaring.

Obviously the work of the Holocaust Museum in studying the Holocaust and racism and genocide in all their forms is praiseworthy and vital.

Yet study of the Holocaust and reference to modern day atrocities has been ”mainstreamed”, has become part of the consensus. What intelligent, semi-enlightened individual today does not condemn the Holocaust or the beastly events of Rwanda or Darfur?  In a way, paradoxically, addressing these events has become the easy way out for the Holocaust Museum.

And so it seems to me that the mettle of a Museum such as yours must be judged by its willingness to contend with issues that are unpopular, outside the consensus. After all, in the 1930’s institutional opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism in the United States was rare and controversial. When exposure of and opposition to the real intentions of Nazism might have done some good, the vast majority of governmental and also Jewish institutions were silent or ambivalent about acting, as you well know.

The Holocaust Museum refers prominently on its website to the atrocities being committed in Darfur. Yet from what I see it obstinately refrains from putting this situation in perspective. To be understood these events must be seen against the backdrop of the rise of Islamo-fascism, or as Thomas Friedman calls it, Islamo-Leninism, which, like Nazism, uses racist and religious justification and sickening brutality to achieve political ends.

The fact that the Museum does not take a much more prominent stand against this threat to peace and human values, and does not  conspicuously deal with the issue of Arab (and indeed Moslem) racism and anti-Semitism, both contemporary and historic, leaves a dangerous void. It raises serious questions about the Museum’s understanding of what I would hope would be one of its main purposes: to vigorously confront issues of intolerance, anti-Semitism and racism in “real time”, whether or not it is politically correct to do so.  Your failure here is both a betrayal of your mission to bear witness for the victims of the past and a reneging on the Museum’s mission to prevent such colossal wrongs in the future.

Yours truly,

Robert Nechin

Ein Hod, Istrael