Edward Rothstein, in his review of the U.S. Holocaust Museum's new exhibit on Nazi propaganda acknowledges its dramtic focus on the terrifying visual impact of Nazi posters that demumanized Jews as a prelude to the Holocaust.

But Rothstein concludes that the Museum missed the boat in failing to spotlight the most telling Nazi propaganda legacy that is ominously well and alive throughout the Muslim world.

Here's how Rothstein puts it:

The exhibit, he reports, ends by informing visitors that the Museum is preparing a curriculum to teach children about awareness of how propaganda can be used to create distortions in media and adverrtising today.  But in generalizing about propaganda distortions, he warns, the Museum is on a slippery slope of lessening the real import of how Nazis carried such distortions to a unique and extreme degree.  In other words, such a curriculum risks trivializing Nazi-type anti-Semtic propaganda.

Rothstein writes that the Museum exhibit notes that the Nazis financed anti-Semitic broadcasts by the Mufti of Jerusalem and points a finger at Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

But what greatly disturbs him is the Museum's failure to show the range and depth of Nazi-like anti-Jewish vilifications throughout the Muslim/Arab world.  As examples of what is NOT in the exhibit, Rothstein calls attention to the widespread libel in that part of the world that Jews use children's blood to bake matzos, that the mother of all Jewish conspiracy hoaxes, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which Hitler also propagated, now is peddled as gospel throughout the Middle East, the tirade of an Egyptian cleric that Jews are "as smooth as a viper" and his prayer that Allah "dispatch those sons of apes and pigs to the Hellfire," or the prayer of another Egyptian cleric, "Oh Allah, count their numbers and kill them, down to the very last one."

Rothstein concludes his critique by faulting the exhibit's failure to demonstrate that the extent and depth of such anti-Semitism in the Arab/Muslim world, how it's systematically taught to children and secularized into political action so that "the strongest contemporary analogy to Nazi propaganda MAY BE THE ONE THE EXHIBITION LEAVES UNMENTIONED."

This unpardonable lapse by a museum entrusted with giving witness to the full scope historical impact of what the Nazis wrought down to our own day is sadly not new.

The Museum similarly erred in an earlier exhibit of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which also failed to spotlight the most obvious contemporary use of the "Protocols" -- namely its best-selling status in the Arab/Muslim world.  Only after a wave of protests did the Museum follow up with a revised exhibit that took note of this obvious fact.

And more recently, the Museum posted on its Website a whitewash biography of the World War II Mufti of Jerusalem, triggering another wave of protests that resulted in a prompt withdrawal of this sanitized version of the Mufti.

And now, in connection with its Nazi propaganda exhibit, it has posted another Mufti biography that again avoids tagging him with the most monstrous Holocaust crimes and complicity as Hitler's premier ally in the Muslim/Arab world.   From Rothstein's review, it appears that while the Nazi propaganda exhibit mentions the Mufti's anti-Semitic broadcasts during World War 2, it fails to show visitors how the Mufti propagated Nazi-like vilification and dehumanization of Jews in the Arab world that continues to thrive today and again fuels genocidal threats to Jews -- this time in their own homeland.

LEO RENNERT

Read the full Rothstein review: 'State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda'