Official US Holocaust Museum to Open in April in Washington, DC
After several delays, the largest and costliest Holocaust Museum anywhere is finally scheduled to open in Washington, DC, in April 1993. The “United States Holocaust Memorial Museum” will be formally dedicated on April 22, and will open to the public on April 26.
Major political figures will att the formal dedication ceremony. President Bill Clinton has been invited to speak. (As we go to press, he has not yet responded to the invitation.) Newspaper and television journalists from across the United States and many foreign countries will also be present.
The Museum is being built on federal government land by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, a taxpayer-funded federal government agency created by Congress in 1980.
Museum construction costs are being covered by donations. So far more than $130 million has been pledged–almost all of it from wealthy Jewish donors.
The US Holocaust Memorial Council and its fris in the media have been unable to generate widespread support for the Museum project.
In 1980, the Congress limited the budget of the Holocaust Council to $2.5 million. But ever generous with the people's money, the Congress later went far beyond this figure, and has since appropriated $33 million above the originally authorized amount.
Last June, the Congress voted an additional $18.3 million in taxpayer money to fund the US Holocaust Memorial Council for fiscal year 1993. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that for the fiscal years 1994 to 2000, the Council will receive $15.4 million tax dollars annually (adjusted for inflation). The taxpayer bill for the Holocaust Museum between 1993 and 2000 will easily amount to at least $110 million. (Congressional Record – House, June 16, 1992, pp. H 4742-4744.)
Remarkably, the Holocaust Museum's operating budget is expected to exceed that of the nearby Air and Space Museum, the most visited museum in the world, and will be seven times the operating cost of the Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington memorials combined.
As numerous public opinion polls reflect, most Americans deeply resent having tens of millions of their tax dollars spent on such special-interest projects, particularly at a time of astronomical federal budget deficits.
The US Holocaust Museum will “memorialize” non-Americans persecuted by other non-Americans. If any new Memorial is really appropriate in the nation's capital, though, it should be dedicated to the memory of dead Americans.
Over the years, Zionist groups, the US government and the major media have applauded the ritual atonement by Germany (and Germany's wartime allies) for the mistreatment, both real and imagined, of European Jews. The Holocaust lobby has insisted that Germany (and other European countries) must atone forever for wartime persecution of Jews.
If this expression of collective guilt is right and proper, then it should be no less appropriate for Americans to collectively atone for the mistreatment of American Indians, or Black slavery.
It is likewise noteworthy that there is no comparable memorial museum in the United States for the victims of Communism even though, as historians acknowledge, the victims of Soviet dictator Stalin alone vastly outnumber those of Hitler.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is a pseudo-religious monument to the enormous power and influence of a small minority, and to the venal corruption of the politicians who appropriated the people's money to finance it.
Revisionist activists around the country are expressing interest in making sure that the occasion of the April 22 dedication ceremony is used to express the outrage of America's “silent majority” at this outrageous misuse of their money.
“Most Patriotic”
Every Jew alive today is a Holocaust survivor, and I feel that also will be true for every Jew in the future… The Holocaust survivors are the most patriotic, most loyal American citizens we could have.
–Neil Sher, director of the US government's “Office of Special Investigations,” speaking at a “Yom HaShoah” meeting in Long Island, New York. Quoted in Jewish World (Long Island), May 8-14, 1992.
Jewish Concern with Holocaust 'Obsession' Means New Holocaust, Says Rabbi
“There is almost nothing more sacred or more sensitive for Jews living in the generation after the Holocaust than the memory of the six million martyrs of Nazi genocide… Now that `revisionists,' who seek to deny the Holocaust, have become even more brazen, sensitive Jews are reacting with even greater obsession.
“But obsession with the Holocaust is exacting a great price. It is killing America's Jews.… Jews as a group are drifting away from their religion… Unless there will be, within the very near future, a dramatic turnaround in the patterns of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage, we are probably witnessing the last generation of Jewish life in America as we now know it.
“… Right now the priority seems to be building Holocaust memorials. More than $500 million has already been pledged or spent to build 19 Holocaust memorials and 36 research centers or libraries in America. Some cities, like Los Angeles, have two or three competing Holocaust memorials…
“There is a Holocaust taking place in America right now. We can't hear it, because there are no barking dogs… We can't smell it because there are no gas chambers. But the net result is exactly the same.”
–Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, “The Holocaust is Killing American Jews,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1992.
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Bibliographic information about this document: The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 13, no. 1 (January/February 1993), p. 46f.
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