No to war, bigotry and oppression!
No to the Wiesethal Center!
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, based in Los Angeles, is one of the most influential Jewish organizations in the world. It reports a membership of more than 300,000 and an annual income of $27 million, including $10 million in taxpayer funds.
The Wiesenthal Center and its head, Rabbi Marvin Hier, wield considerable political power. "Hier has accrued unprecedented clout in the Legislature, on Capitol Hill, in the city's boardrooms and even in Hollywood," the Los Angeles Times Magazine has noted.
Marvin Hier
The Center's imposing "Museum of Tolerance" in West Los Angeles, which presents a relentlessly Jewish-Zionist version of history, reportedly draws 350,000 visitors yearly, including tens of thousands of school children.
Although it claims to promote "tolerance," and makes a pretense of concern for humanity, the Center's real agenda is a narrowly Jewish-Zionist one.
The Wiesenthal Center is a staunch supporter of Israel and its Jewish supremacist regime. It fervently defends Israel 's policies of oppression, occupation, dispossession, and institutionalized discrimination against non-Jews. The Center supports Israeli policies that violate United Nations Security Council resolutions. It applauds Israel 's "security fence," a hideous barrier that is part of a long-term Zionist effort to seize land of non-Jews, and which the International Court of Justice says is illegal.
Israel's 'Security Fence'
While the Center denounces violence and terrorism against Jews, it sanctions Zionist terrorism. The Center has publicly honored two Israeli leaders – Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – each of whom has a well-documented record as a terrorist.
Shamir, Bush, and Hier
in 1989
The Center has a long record of reckless disregard for truth.
Even the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a rival Jewish-Zionist group, has acknowledged that the Wiesenthal Center makes "inaccurate" and "exaggerated claims" about anti-Semitism to raise money. In an internal memorandum, ADL official Justin Finger cited a Center fund-raising letter that is "replete with factual misstatements and exaggerations" about anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States and Europe.
In its support for the US invasion of Iraq, the Wiesenthal Center made alarming accusations against the Baghdad government. War against Iraq, the Center insisted in an October 2002 statement, was necessary because the Saddam Hussein regime had been "continuing to stockpile weapons of mass destruction." Moreover, the Center went on to assert: "For while there are other tyrants, Saddam alone stands as a menace to world order and stability. While there are others who possess chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, only Saddam has shown an eagerness to use them."
As the world now knows, these claims were not true.
Some years earlier, the Center charged that Iraq was killing Iranian prisoners in German-built gas chambers. In the Spring 1991 issue of its glossy magazine, Response, the Center claimed that German firms were producing Zyklon B gas in Iraq, "the chemical used by the Germans to murder millions of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust." Iranian prisoners of war, the Center's magazine went on to assert, were being killed with Zyklon B "in gas chambers specially designed for the Iraqis by the German company Rhema Labortechnik... An eyewitness reported the [Iraqi] gas chambers were tiled to look like operating rooms, with a separated observation room for each gas chamber with reinforced glass visibility."
These fantastic claims had no basis in reality.
Many Christians have been offended by the Center's irresponsible rhetoric, including charges by Rabbi Hier that Mel Gibson and his film, The Passion of The Christ, "stereotype and denigrate the masses of Jews," and "could potentially imperil Jewish lives." Hier has also made sweeping denunciations of Christian leaders for alleged complicity in mass killings of Jews during World War II. He scathingly denounced Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders, "from Pope Pius XII down, who at best looked the other way, protected their own, were bystanders rather than activists and sometimes even assisted the Nazis in carrying out their Final Solution."
In the view of Dr. Frank Knopfelmacher, a leading Australian Jewish scholar, the Wiesenthal Center foments "ethnic hatred." Australia government officials, he says, should have "banned the members of the Simon Wiesenthal Center from entering Australia and should have deported those who were here."
Through its Museum, its glossy magazine, Response, and other propaganda materials, the Center relentlessly exploits painful memories of the Holocaust and Jewish suffering during World War II to raise millions of dollars annually. "The enormous success of the Simon Wiesenthal Center," writes New York Times journalist Judith Miller in her book, One, by One, by One, "has given new meaning to what was once a macabre in-house joke ... 'There is no business like Shoah business'." ("Shoah" is the Hebrew term for Holocaust).
"It's a sad fact," acknowledges the Center's chief financial backer, Canadian-Jewish financier Samuel Belzberg, "that Israel and Jewish education and all the other familiar buzzwords no longer serve to rally Jews behind the community. The Holocaust, though, works every time."
"Rabbi Hier and the Wiesenthal Center are, in my opinion, the most extreme of those who utilize the Holocaust," says the director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center. "The Jewish people does many vulgar things," he went on, "but the Wiesenthal Center [has] raised it to a complete level: The optimum use of sensitive issues in order to raise money ..."
The Wiesenthal Center has been a major player in what American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein calls the "shakedown" campaign by Israel and organized Jewry to extort billions of dollars from European countries and corporations. Finkelstein, author of the bestselling study, The Holocaust Industry, calls the Center "a gang of heartless and immoral crooks, whose hallmark is that they will do anything for a dollar."
The Wiesenthal Center deserves the scorn and contempt of every decent person. It is particularly outrageous that at a time of severe budget deficits, millions of dollars in taxpayer funds go to support this wealthy bastion of Jewish-Zionist power, and its bigoted, self-serving agenda.
-- Mark Weber
June 2005
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