The Final Days
[Regnery Publishing: Washington DC,
2001] On Bill Clinton's
last-minute pardon of fugitive Jewish billionaire
Marc Rich pp. 202-203: Walter Reich, a psychiatrist and
professor of international affairs, ethics and
human behavior at George Washington University, was
director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995
to 1998. Reich saw the Rich pardon through his own
lens. He thought the pardon touched "directly on
some of the most incendiary stereotypes about
Jews." Reich was alarmed that Ehud Barak had
lobbied Bill Clinton to pardon one of the
Justice Department's most-wanted fugitives. Rabbi
Irving Greenburg, whom Clinton appointed to
chair the board of the Holocaust Museum, had urged
the president to "perform one of the most God-like
actions that anyone can ever do." It was, Reich wrote, "in a way, as if the 6
million murdered Jews were beseeching the
president, through their official spokesman,
Greenburg, to pardon Rich.... This exploitation of
the Holocaust in support of a billionaire on the
lam is a grave cheapening of Holocaust memory and a
devaluation of its moral force."  | Website note:
Abraham
Foxman, wealthy and controversial
chief of the Anti Defamation League, likes
to refer to himself as a "Holocaust
survivor." As a biography
on this website shows, he was not even
born when Hitler invaded his native
Poland, and he was looked after by Polish
Catholics throughout the war; his parents
also "survived".
Author,
"Never Again? The Threat of the New
Anti-Semitism," foreword by
Elie
Wiesel
($24.95, 304 pages). |
Reich was alarmed because all of this "plays into
the oldest and most damaging stereotypes and
canards, and it is likely to give aid and comfort
to the worst varieties of anti-Semitism... the
canard of the Jewish connection with money and
power that's easily evoked in the public
imagination." Reich found it ironic that one of
those writing on behalf of Rich was Abraham
Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League,
"which is supposed to fight anti-Semitism, not
provide fodder for it." 13 In late March
[2001], Abe Foxman [see box
on left] admitted he had erred in writing a
letter of support for Marc Rich.Conservative commentator Charles
Krauthammer condemned the Clinton pardons
precisely because the power he had abused was so
unique and absolute. "The pardon power is special,"
he wrote. "The American people feel it. Bill
Clinton, oblivious as he was to the reverence due
every other power of his office, from the Lincoln
bedroom to the Oval Office, was supremely oblivious
to the sacredness of this one." Because the pardon
power is God-like, Krauthammer concluded. "It was
not bad judgment. It was sacrilege."
14
Notes:
13. Walter Reich, "Pardons
Jeopardize Good Name of Jewish People,"
Houston Chronicle, March 1, 2001, p.
A27.14. Charles Krauthammer, "The Unpardonable
Offense," Washington Post, March 2,
2001, p. A25.
|
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By Barbara Olsen:
European
prosecutors say that documents identifying Marc Rich -
the American fugitive who won an 11th-hour pardon from
President Clinton - have turned up during a crackdown on
money laundering and the Russian mafia.
David Irving