April 24, 2006

Mr. Fred Zeidman

Chairman

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council

Washington, D.C. 20024

Dear Mr. Zeidman:

Having visited the museum’s revised exhibit on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the most notorious and harmful anti-Semitic forgery in modern times, I would like to share with you my impressions of both its strengths and weaknesses.

Compared with last year’s exhibit on the same topic, the museum’s second attempt represents a definite and important step forward. No longer does the museum hide the fact that the “Protocols,” the propaganda linchpin of Hitler’s vicious anti-Semitic campaign that culminated in the Holocaust, is today most prevalent as a genocidal incitement tool in the Arab/Muslim world.

For this, you and the museum are to be congratulated: Better late than never. So let me start with the pluses of this new exhibit:

Visitors are told right off the bat that the Iranian president and the “Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas” use the “Protocols” to promote “hatred, violence and even genocide.” In these days when the Washington Post, the New York Times and most mainstream media readily use the term “terrorism” when it occurs in non-Israeli lands but never in Israel, it’s good to see the museum eschew Orwellian semantics and not play around with euphemisms like “militant,” “guerrilla,’ or “radical” to soften Hamas’s image.

Having spotlighted a global resurgence of anti-Semitism, the exhibt moves to a major wall panel documenting the origin of the “Protocols” as the supposed agenda of Jewish leaders for world domination.

The second wall panel, visually the most compelling, proceeds to shed light on the importance of the “Protocols” in the Nazi era as a key weapon in Hitler’s drive to portray Jews as sub-human and thus worthy of extermination.

The third wall panel, “The ‘Protocols’ Today,” gets down to the continued publication and circulation of the “Protocols” worldwide and, in the process, deals with its wide use in the Arab/Muslim world, where in the exhibit’s own words: “it is a “mainstream text endorsed by intellectuals and government leaders who seek to legitimize violence against Jews and the State of Israel. Many school textbooks teach the ‘Protocols” as fact. Countless political speeches, editorials, and even children’s cartoons are derived from the ‘Protocols.’ In 2002, Egypt’s government-sponsored television aired a miniseries based on the ‘Protocols,’ an event condemned by the U.S. State Department.

“The Palestinian organization Hamas draws on the ‘Protocols’ to justify its terrorism against Israeli civilians.”

Thus, the museum commendably spotlights the very active presence of the ‘Protocols’ in the Arab/Muslim world as a dagger pointed at Israel’s very existence.

This wall panel features 11 covers of the ‘Protocols’ to illustrate both their global reach and their special place in today’s Arab/Muslim world. It was refreshing to see the exhibit point to an Arabic translation of the ‘Protocols” on the Palestinian Authority’s own web site, a recent Syrian version embellished by claims that 9/11 was orchestrated by a Zionist conspiracy and a prediction of the eventual destruction of the State of Israel, and an Iranian version peddled at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year.

The exhibit also does a good job of highlighting repeated exposes of the ‘Protocols’ as a fraud (without obviously making any great impact) and its prominent presence on the Internet.

So, overall, I’m pleased that the museum, with its great popularity and vast educational potential, is finally confronting the most dangerous kind of anti-Semitism today.

But lest you get the feeling that this exhibit is perfect, let me quickly disabuse you from any such notion. There are palpable minuses which I hope you and the governing council will ponder and share with the staff. Let me point out the most obvious shortcomings:

The exhibit has a bargain-basement (it’s actually tucked away in the basement), once-over-easy, rather superficial feel to it. With displays of 19 ‘Protocol’ covers from around the world over the last century, it offers visitors at best only a cursory examination of this vicious anti-Semitic tract. Compared with other special museum exhibits which have far more meat and detail, this is a stripped-down, poor-relation kind of effort.

It was also disheartening to find that, while the information desk readily guides visitors to the exhibit, it has no pamphlets or booklets that they can take with them to the exhibit or, more important, to take home or share with friends and relatives. In contrast, I was able to pick up an 18-page booklet about another special exhibit, “Deadly Medicine – Creating the Master Race,” that is a most helpful addendum to that particular exhibit. Why couldn’t the same have been done for the ‘Protocols” exhibit? When I posed the question to three different staffers at the information desk, they told me they didn’t know why this exhibit was without a detailed pamphlet or booklet, and didn’t know whether one might materialize later during the run of the exhibit.

As to the light the exhibit shines on contemporary use of the ‘Protocols’ in the Arab/Muslim world, the museum could and should have done a better job of using its vast curatorial knowhow to grab the attention of visitors. The most arresting wall panel is the one about the ‘Protocols’ during the Nazi era with its searing visual illustrations and large bold-letter quotes from Goebbels and Hitler. I was particularly struck by the passage from “Mein Kampf,” in which Hitler declared that “Once the ‘Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken.” Question: Why couldn’t the exhibit similarly feature in bold, large letters a citation from the Hamas charter specifically linking its anti-Semitic ideology to the ‘Protocols’?

Also, while the exhibit rightly devotes an entire wall panel to the Nazi era, it shies away from giving similar prominence to the “Protocols” in the Arab/Muslim world today. Instead, the latter are squeezed in with “Protocols” covers from Mexico, the United States, Austria, Spain, Russia and Japan. I think we coul agree that genocidal anti-Semitic propaganda via the ‘Protocols’ in the Arab/Muslim world is more dangerous than the sale of the “Protocols” in Tokyo today.

If the museum were to put together tomorrow an exhibit on “Genocide in Africa,” visitors might find it a bit odd to discover that it played up Rwanda more than Sudan, where the danger is currently far greater. Ditto with the visually blazing “Nazi era” wall panel in contrast to the more pallid presentation of the ‘Protocols’ in the Arab/Muslim world.

Finally, anti-Semitic images and publications, including the “Protocols,” that one sees today in the Arab/Muslim world are virtual replicas of what the Nazi propaganda machine spewed out. This is not just a coincidence. Prominent Arab leaders like the Mufti of Jerusalem who threw in their lot with Hitler, helped export this kind of genocidal incitement to the Middle East with all the familiar caricatures and conspiracy theories. But this nexus with Nazi Germany is totally absent from your exhibit.

So for all the above-mentioned points – pluses and minuses – I would give the revised ‘Protocols’ exhibit a grade of B-minus, a big improvement over the F-grade merited by last year’s version, but significantly short of doing full justice to this spreading and rising menace.

Sincerely,

LEO RENNERT

Bethesda, Maryland