-Caveat Lector- <http://opinionjournal.com/wsj/?id=80000398> HOUSES OF WORSHIP Enemies: A Museum Story President Bush should fire the head of the Holocaust Memorial Council--just as Clinton did eight years ago. BY IRA STOLL Monday, January 1, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST "The outburst of Israeli Arab demonstrations during this period led to very severe clashes with police. . . . It's entirely possible in my judgment that they overreacted, and that overreaction killed people unnecessarily, and that was a serious violation of Jewish ethical power. . . . I would not be shocked if 5% or 10% or 20% of those casualties were [the result of] scared soldiers or people overreacting. . . . There will be some errors or some soldiers who were gun-happy." So says the chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg. Rabbi Greenberg's comments blaming Arab casualties in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza over the past few months on "overreaction" by "gun-happy" Israeli soldiers and police will come as a surprise to many who haven't been paying attention to the record of the institution he heads. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council--a presidentially appointed, taxpayer-funded panel that, among other things, administers the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington--has become, in recent years, something of a playpen for Clinton loyalists. They've ventured far beyond Holocaust remembrance, preferring to dabble in left-wing politics of the anti-Israel and anti-American kind. Perhaps George W. Bush will set things right. Susan Estrich, a prominent defender of President Clinton during his impeachment, is a council member, as is Lanny Breuer, who was a White House lawyer with scandal duties. The council also is home to such major Democratic National Committee donors as trial lawyer Stanley Chesley, a big player in antitobacco and breast-implant lawsuits, and William Lerach, the California class-action lawyer who specializes in suing companies when their stock prices drop. In 1998 the council named to a top museum job John Roth, who once wrote an op-ed piece likening Israel's treatment of the Palestinian Arabs to the Nazis' treatment of European Jews. Mr. Roth eventually apologized for the article and withdrew from his position. But he never apologized for a piece drawing a parallel between the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of Hitler. The Holocaust Council stood firmly behind Mr. Roth during the controversy. Only one member, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, voted against reaffirming the Roth appointment. Then, in the summer of 1999, the museum marked the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Convention by hosting a book signing for a work that accused Israel of war crimes, including "ethnic cleansing of Arab areas by Jews" during the 1948 war of independence. The council chairman at the time, Miles Lerman, at least had the decency to acknowledge that that event was a mistake. In February 2000, the Holocaust Museum moved farther from its mission of preserving the memory of Nazi crimes by showing "Scandalize My Name," a film about the McCarthy-era blacklist and its racial implications. A month later, the museum hosted "Memory and Truth After Genocide: Guatemala," moderated by Kate Doyle of the National Security Archive, a private research institute. Ms. Doyle inveighed against "the triumphalist attitude of the U.S. about its role in the Cold War," and called for a "truth commission" to probe the American role in what she and the Holocaust Museum have apparently determined was a CIA-backed "genocide." And now come Rabbi Greenberg's remarks, made last month in Chicago. "I don't consider what I said to be a criticism; I consider it to be an assessment," he said then. When I rang up Rabbi Greenberg last week, he said he made the remarks as an individual, not as chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and noted that they came in the context of a speech that praised Israel for having generally behaved as ethically as realistically possible in its response to the Arab violence. He called back later and said it would be "a misrepresentation to the point of falsehood," even "McCarthyism," to describe his remarks as an attack on Israel. One might be tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt--were it not for John Roth, the book signing, the McCarthy movie and the Guatemalan "genocide" event. After President Clinton took office, he asked for the resignations of the Holocaust Memorial Council's then chairman and vice chairman. That raised some eyebrows. But in installing his own team, Mr. Clinton established a precedent that President-elect Bush would do well to emulate. Mr. Stoll is a contributor to OpinionJournal.com and editor of Smartertimes.com. ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: *Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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