Not in This Museum 

By Charles Krauthammer

Wednesday, January 21, 1998

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is
about to make the worst mistake in its short and
heretofore exemplary history, a mistake that will sully
forever its standing as a repository of Jewish memory.
Its executive committee, meeting today, is expected to
extend an official VIP invitation to Yasser Arafat to
visit the museum. 

At first the museum resisted. But under heavy
pressure from the administration -- Middle East
negotiators Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller came up
with the idea -- the museum is, according to its
chairman, Miles Lerman, about to welcome Arafat as
an honored guest. 

Lerman had originally opposed the invitation
because, with "the Jewish community divided on this
issue," he did not want to get involved in a divisive
"political dispute." But it is both silly and defensive to
duck an issue simply because of internal Jewish
division. Moreover, any decision, whether to invite or
not, would necessarily be political.

Why, then, should Arafat not be welcomed -- let alone
honored -- at the museum? Because so long as
Arafat's own officials and official media continue to
propagate the most vile antisemitic stereotypes (many
of which are lifted without attribution from Nazi
propaganda), to routinely compare Israel to Nazi
Germany, and to teach Palestinians that the
Holocaust is a Jewish invention, it is a travesty to
invite Arafat to the memorial to the Nazis' victims.

How can you invite Arafat, head of the Palestinian
Authority (PA) , when the official PA newspaper
Al-Hayat Al-Jadeedah writes -- on Sept. 3, 1997:
post-Oslo, post-Hebron, post-"peace" -- of "the
cooperation between the Jews and the Nazis during
World War II" and "the forged claims of the Zionists
regarding alleged acts of slaughter perpetrated
against the Jews during the same period . . . "

When it writes: "The similarity between the two racist
ideologies -- the Zionist and the Nazi -- is obvious
and the despicable racial content of each of them is
clear . . ."

When the moderator of a cultural affairs program on
official PA TV says, "The Jews exaggerate what the
Nazis did to them. They claim there were 6 million
killed, but precise scientific research demonstrates
there were no more than 400,000." And his on-air
interviewee explains why: "The Jews have profited
materially, spiritually, politically and economically
from the talk about the Nazi killings . . . so they inflate
the number of victims all the time."

When, on official PA radio, the Arafat-appointed mufti
calls Israeli settlers "the sons of pigs and monkeys."
When Arafat's Adviser on National Political Guidance
says on the Voice of Palestine: "We are fighting and
struggling with an enemy who is Shylock." When his
newspapers present that notorious, antisemitic czarist
forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," as fact.
When his representative at the United Nations
Commission on Human Rights claims that Israel
injected Palestinians with AIDS -- an updated blood
libel and variation on the Nazi theme of Jews as
infectors of mankind.

Has Arafat rebuked his editors and officials for these
statements? Has he apologized for them? Of course
not. He subsidizes and supports them.

Do Ross and Miller and the museum board think that
Arafat, who jailed Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab
for airing criticism of him on Palestinian TV, does not
control the press in his little dictatorship? Or perhaps
they think that, about the Holocaust, Arafat is simply --
touchingly -- misinformed.

Holocaust denial and antisemitic stereotypes are part
of the double game that Arafat plays continuously.
When he comes to the West and speaks in English,
he would not dream of uttering such calumnies. He
speaks of peace. But at home, in Arabic, he speaks of
jihad, and lets his associates fill his people with the
most scurrilous antisemitism, the most vile
"Judeo-Nazi" comparisons and the most malicious
Holocaust denial.

A visit to the Holocaust museum fits perfectly in his
double game. It allows him a show of concern -- to
Americans -- about Jewish suffering, even as his own
people at home are, alternatively, mocking and
denying it.

Last week Lerman justified denying the Arafat
invitation by saying that "when peace will be
established . . . we will be more than happy to receive
Arafat." But that is the wrong standard. What
disqualifies Arafat from being honored at the
Holocaust Museum is not that he has yet to make
peace but that he does not put a stop to the
Jew-hatred that the Palestinian Authority is
propagating. Adversaries are welcome at shrines of
Jewish suffering. Purveyors of antisemitism are not.

It is not hard to understand why Arafat would want to
use the Holocaust Museum as a backdrop to his
lifelong campaign against Israel. But for the
museum's board to allow the museum -- indeed, the
Holocaust itself -- to serve as photo-op and PR prop
for Arafat and that campaign is an act of desecration. 

 © Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company