Sunday, April 26, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Almost two years ago in this space, I shared with our readers some reflections from Rabbi Marvin Hier on the issue of intolerance. Rabbi Hier is the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Intolerance.
I mentioned at the time that this museum in Los Angeles is a special place: “Within its walls they teach millions of visitors the meaning of tolerance and the ugliness of intolerance.”
I thought it was time again to hear another special message from Rabbi Hier, especially because the United Nations conference on racism last week shamefully allowed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak. Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier who has vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, once again spewed his hateful, vile rhetoric — this time on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, also known as Yom Hashoah.
The United States government, Israel and a number of other nations wisely boycotted the event. Nonetheless, a number of nations attended the gathering.
In this guest Where I Stand column, I am offering our readers excerpts from Rabbi Hier’s Tuesday address, “This Is Not the First ‘Ahmadinejad’ We Have Encountered,” which was delivered at the Museum of Intolerance commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day.
By Rabbi Marvin Hier
This week, Jews around the world commemorated the Holocaust, when millions trapped in Hitler’s Europe hoped that someone would remember them and come to their aid. They waited at the trains, in the forests, the concentration camps and ghettos, but they waited in vain for none came and few cared.
Can you believe it? On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, President Ahmadinejad used the platform of the United Nations Durban II conference in Geneva to question Israel’s right to exist — calling it a country created under the pretext of “Jewish suffering.” Or as he told Der Spiegel magazine, “The Zionist regime is the result of WWII — what does any of this have to do with the Palestinian people ... I believe we must get to the root of the problem — if one doesn’t consider the causes there can be no solution.”
In short, what he’s saying is that Israel shouldn’t have been created after World War II and there will be no solution until there is no Israel. The distributed text also included the verse, “The West had used the ambiguous and dubious question of the Holocaust in setting up the State of Israel,” which he didn’t include.
It was only 71 years ago that the Evian Conference was held in Switzerland, where the nations of the world met to discuss Europe’s Jews and then left them to Hitler. Now, another world conference there and, once again, only one nation, Israel, is singled out for criticism.
It’s true — 23 nations walked out of the hall, but it is also true that the United Nations, an organization founded as a result of World War II, gave a platform to a Holocaust denier who came there specifically to rail against the Jews.
The world first learned about the gas chambers in Nazi Germany from an ordinary Jew named Szlamek. He was deported to Chelmno on Jan. 7, 1942, as part of a work detail assigned to the mobile gas units responsible for pulling out bodies and burying them. At the end of the first week, he discovered and buried his own parents.
That night, an SS guard ordered him to lead his group in a song, so Szlamek led them in the Hatikva. There was no Jewish State then. To Szlamek and his fellow Jews, it was only a dream.
But to Jews around the world, that dream has become a reality and that reality, the State of Israel, is carrying the Jewish people on her shoulders. Without her, the post-War revival of Judaism would never have occurred.
Let no one be fooled; Ahmadinejad means all of us — every Jew and friend of Israel who sings the Hatikva is his enemy.
Of course, the Mullahs have a broader agenda — they seek the end of Western civilization but few sane people believe that Iran will ever attack France or Britain, but no one should doubt their irrational hatred for the people of Israel.
Today, more than 5 million Jews live in the State of Israel. What took Hitler five years to implement through his Final Solution, could take just a few hours to accomplish should Iran acquire nuclear weapons.
Since the Holocaust, American Jews, the strongest most prolific Jewish community in the world, have learned what is expected of them. They remember well how little was done by America’s Jews to save their brothers and sisters during the Nazi Holocaust. A new generation of activists has risen determined not to repeat those mistakes.
Some have great difficulty in accepting this new activism and have begun a campaign to cast aspersions on the right of American Jews to speak up for the security of a sister democracy — America’s only dependable ally in the Middle East.
When Charles Freeman, President Obama’s appointment to head the National Intelligence Council responsible for coordinating all of America’s intelligence operations, announced his resignation, he blamed the Jewish lobby saying, “The libels on me ... show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired. ... The tactics of the Israel lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency.”
This is the same line used by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, in their book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” who argue that American Jews make “a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel’s interest.”
Apparently, these critics do not want to grant the same rights to American Jews that are regularly granted to The New York Times, The Washington Post and millions of other Americans because, to them, American Jews who support Israel have an unworthy political agenda and simply cannot be trusted.
In 1938, a young boy, Eric Lucas, was uprooted from his home in Germany. He desperately tried to bring his parents to England, but failed. His parents wrote him one final letter.
“We shall never see you again, was there no space in the whole wide world for us two old people?
What happened to the parents of Eric Lucas and to six million others will never happen again.
To the president of Iran, we say this — you’re not the first to attempt to destroy us. We’ve met up with your ancestors many times in our 3,500-year history — we were burned at stakes, persecuted in Crusades, force baptized in Inquisitions, robbed and pillaged in pogroms, gassed in crematoria — even in your land, in ancient Persia, Haman plotted to destroy us — but we survived all of them — depositing them in the dust bins of history as we shall survive you, undeterred and committed to building a civilization based on tolerance and human dignity, a civilization worthy of passing on to our children and grandchildren.
