NEW YORK-
Neal Sher, former head of the
Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit and
former executive director of AIPAC
[America-Israel Political Action
Committee], has joined the opposition
to the hiring of Prof. John Roth,
who has compared Israel to the Nazis, as
director of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies. The opposition to the
Roth nomination is being led by the
Zionist Organization of America
(ZOA). Sher wrote
in the Washington Jewish Week on
June 18, 1998: "Had the basic
homework been done [by the Museum's
search committee], it would have been
discovered that in 1988 Mr. Roth wrote a
piece for the Los Angeles Times in which
he used the occasion of the 50th
anniversary of Kristallnacht to lecture
the government of Israel on how to treat
the Palestinians. Exposed by Mort
Klein of the Zionist Organization of
America...Roth and his supporters tried to
explain away the article, suggesting that
perhaps it was too 'subtle,' that it had
been 'misinterpreted' or that the
author...was 'misunderstood.' "I've read the
L.A.Times article...it's as subtle as a
sledgehammer. No one reading that piece
can come away with any conclusion other
than that Roth, in an effort to make a
political point, compares Israel to Nazi
Germany. That's the bottom line. Sam
Bloch, a vice-president of the
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors and a prominent supporter of
Israeli causes, spoke for most of his
compatriots when he called Roth's
appointment 'a terrible thing': 'It's not
acceptable to have such a man. It's
impermissible.' Bloch has it
right." In his
statements and writings, Prof. Roth has
compared Israel to the Nazis (Los
Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 1988);
compared the rise of Ronald Reagan to the
rise of Hitler (Current, Fall
1980); compared attitudes toward poor
Americans to attitudes toward the Jews in
Nazi Germany (USA Today, Oct. 11,
1988); |
compared
the Palestinian Arabs to the Jews in Nazi
Germany (Los Angeles Times, Nov.
12, 1988); and authored an essay
(Current, 1983), in which he
equated PLO terrorism and Israeli
self-defense were acts of "evil for the
sake of good"; blamed Israel, in part, for
Arabs' hatred of it; blamed Israel for
Egypt's refusal to normalize relations;
and implied that Israel's policies were
based on Holocaust memories, not
legitimate security concerns. The hiring
of Roth has been criticized by U.S.
Congressmen Michael Forbes (a
member of the House Appropriations
Committee) and Jon Fox (a member of
the Holocaust Museum's Council);
Abraham Foxman, national director
of the Anti-Defamation
League;
Dalck Feith, a founder of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum and a member of
its board for 10 years; Gary
Erlbaum, chairman of the Philadelphia
campaign to raise for the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum; Sam Bloch and
James Rapp, officers of the American
Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors; the noted Holocaust scholar
Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld, director of
the Jewish Studies Program at Indiana
University, who was the first choice for
the position of director of the Museum's
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies;
nationally syndicated columnist and
television commentator George Will;
syndicated New York Daily News
columnist Sidney Zion; the national
Jewish weekly Forward; former
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir; Yossi Ben-Aharon,
former director-general of the Office of
Israel's Prime Minister; and Prof.
Harry Jaffa, Salvatori Research
Professor of Political Philosophy
Emeritus, a longtime colleague of Roth's
at Claremont College in
California.  |
write to David Irving