[lbo-talk] Yad Vashem's statement on Iran

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu Aug 17 08:10:36 PDT 2006


On 8/17/06, Robert Naiman <naiman at justforeignpolicy.org> wrote:
> I suspect that the US Holocaust Museum would not have made such
> a statement. I could be wrong - I don't follow this closely - but my sense
> in the past has been that they are more judicious about their
> pronouncements, precisely because they don't want Holocaust remembrance to
> become politicized in this way, since, if one's goal is truly Holocaust
> remembrance, this undermines the goal.

All museums are political. Some align their politics with state policy, with or without state funding. That said, the US Holocaust Museum has yet to add Iran to <http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/alert/>. I'm afraid that I can't say it won't, though.

Among the foreign leaders invited to the dedication ceremony of the US Holocaust Museum was none other than the then Croatian President, Franjo Tudjman:

"In a book that started his current political career, Mr. Tudjman wrote that estimates of six million Jewish dead were exaggerated, and said the 'main characteristics' of Jews were 'selfishness, craftiness, unreliability, miserliness, underhandedness and secrecy.' . . . The Croatian President, who has said that charges of anti-Semitism were based on mistranslations of his book, toured the museum for an hour today but refused questions afterward. In addition to Mr. Tudjman, the presidents of Slovenia and Bosnia attended today's ceremony, where the specter of 'ethnic cleansing' in their countries loomed over the memories of genocide. Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian President, was not invited by museum officials, who said State Department officials had advised against it" (Diana Jean Schemo, "Holocaust Museum Hailed as Sacred Debt to Dead," 23 April 1993, <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=travel&res=9F0CE7D8103AF930A15757C0A965958260>).

The only reason they invited Tudjman was probably that the museum officials were "advised" to do so by the State Department, in the interest of Washington's plan for Yugoslavia. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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