A Holocaust museum censors a Holocaust survivor
JVL Introduction
You couldn’t make it up.
Holocaust survivor Rene Lichtman, 86, has been declared persona non grata by the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Michigan.
For the last decade Lichtman has been an active educator, speaking in schools and elsewhere about growing up as a Jew in France during the Holocaust, entrusted to a Catholic family so that he should survive.
But he is an active member of Jewish Voice for Peace and has felt obliged to speak out and act against the genocide in Gaza and that is too much some.
He argues that what is going on in museums and universities today is “McCarthyism — Jewish McCarthyism”.
“Never have we seen the Palestinians as human beings. We dehumanize them in the same way that we’ve been dehumanized during the Holocaust.”
RK
This article was originally published by Forward on Fri 31 May 2024. Read the original here.
A Holocaust museum cut a survivor from its speaker’s list — for protesting the war in Gaza
Rene Lichtman says a Detroit-area Holocaust museum dropped him after he protested in front of its building
Loading article text…
Below is a cut down version of the letter I sent to the Zekelman Holocaust Centre today at [email protected]. The full version can be found at
https://tinyurl.com/z2u94azx
I suggest people write to them.
Dear Zekelman Centre,
I have just read the article ‘A Holocaust museum cut a survivor from its speaker’s list — for protesting the war in Gaza.’ This is just one more proof that the Holocaust Industry has but one purpose. To provide the State of Israel with an alibi for genocide, conscripting the memory of the 6 million.
You Zionists have no shame or morality. You draw no universal lessons from the Holocaust. Your conclusions are racist and chauvinist ones. Jewish lives count, Palestinians lives are worthless. They are ‘human animals’ in the words of Yoav Gallant, Israel’s ‘Defence’ Minister.
Himmler, the head of the SS, used exactly the same phrase about Jews in a speech in Posen, 4 October 1943, when justifying why Jewish children had to be murdered too.
To date Israel has murdered at least 15,000 Palestinian children but to you they are the wrong kind of child. Like Himmler you no doubt approve of the justification for their deaths – that they would otherwise avenge their dead parents.
It is clear that you are in full agreement with Gallant and Himmler. To you Palestinians are the untermenschen and Rene Lichtman, a holocaust survivor, must be silenced in order that you can fulfil your main duty which is one of harnessing the holocaust to Zionism’s current genocide.
You are a bystander to the genocide taking place today. Indeed you are worse. You are a justifier and clearly too amoral to draw the parallel between the holocaust and Israel’s murderous behaviour today.
If there are no universal lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust then …
[cut to our limit of 300 words – admin]