A quasi-governmental organization like the American Red Cross, USHMM is funded in large part by American taxpayers. In 1994 USHMM had a budget of $11 million; by 2000 it was up to $21 million, an increase of 91 percent. The museum is supported by a combination of government and private funds, with the U.S. shelling out over 60 percent of the funding. In fiscal year 2003, the budget was $57.2 million ($38.4 federal; $18.8 private).
An internal USHMM 2004 Performance and Accountability Report declared that the museum’s work “has never been more pertinent or more urgent.” That may be so, but while Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, is discussing the German-Arab ties and while the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust devotes more space to the Mufti of Jerusalem than to any Nazi leader other than Hitler, USHMM continues to ignore the ugly truth.
USHMM has exhibits on the genocide in the Eastern Congo and Rwanda and on the persecution of homosexuals, but it makes no mention of Arab anti-Semitism – not of its history in the last century or of its current existence. Other than one brief sentence on anti-Semitism in a Muslim context by Dr. Aron Rodrigue of Stanford University, the USHMM website has nothing on Arab anti-Semitism.
Hitler is long gone, but the paradigm he created by inciting the Arabs join with him remains very much with us today and is one of the main reasons for the virulent anti-Semitism of the Arab world. Mein Kampf is selling briskly in Islamic countries to hungry readers while new generations of Arab children are being indoctrinated to hate Jews.
Little wonder, then, that Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY) and many Jewish academic and social organizations are calling on USHMM to include the relationship between Hitler and al-Husseini in its presentation of Holocaust history. Full-page advertisements have been placed in Jewish publications and public forums have been scheduled. The goal is to ensure that the history recorded at USHMM is both accurate and fully inclusive.
