Holocaust Museum covers up Armenian Holocaust and ethnic cleansing of Palestine

Reflections on the Holocaust Museum shooting and history
by Jerry Levin

In the mid 1980s when we were living in Washington, DC, my wife and
several friends discovered an empty government building that they were
convinced would be perfect for housing a new museum devoted to
nonviolent peace seeking, peace building, and peacemaking. So they began
to seek support for a congressional resolution that would set the wheels
in motion for making the building available to her group and provide
considerable financial start up support.

But then something entirely unforeseen happened. Powerful and well
heeled apologists for the discriminatory and colonialist Jewish State of
Israel got wind of the building's availability and the attempt by
Sis and her friends to secure it. Very quickly their effort to create a
museum celebrating nonviolence was hijacked by that powerful group. In a
few years the Washington DC Holocaust Museum opened to great fanfare.

Since then there have been a number of protests outside the museum
complaining about its proprietors' obvious xenophobia with respect
to Palestinians and other non-Jews living inside Israel and the occupied
territories. Until June 10th, those vigils were disciplined, peaceful
and, in particular, nonviolent.

The unconscionable attack on the Holocaust Museum that took place that
day indicates how serious the issue of homegrown hate killing still is
in the United States. This is not the first time that domestic hate
killers have gone so far as to murder in order to defend their
unwillingness to look history in the face. However, it is ironic that
the killer sought reprisal against an institution that also has been
failing to provide an entirely impartial view of history.

The museum, like every Holocaust museum in the United States, has a book
store in which publications are offered that tell in detail about other
recent world wide genocidal ethnic cleansing catastrophes, such as
Bosnia and Rwanda. But they do not offer publications concerning the
genocide perpetrated by the Turkish government against Armenia in the
early twentieth century. The reason clearly is because Israel and its
apologists in the United States do not want to offend the sensibilities
of the Turkish government, which has never admitted that the genocide
took place. Turkey is one of the few Islamic nations with which Israel
has full diplomatic relations.

Nor is there anything in Holocaust museum stores concerning the
Palestinian Nakba, the several decades long often deadly ethnic
cleansing of non-Jews from Israel that began in 1947 and still continues
in one form or another in both the occupied territories and inside
Israel. The Nakba is sadly similar to the pogroms in Eastern Europe in
the 19th and early 20th century that forced millions of Jews to flee. It
is also precisely similar to the treatment Native Americans suffered at
the hands of the United States from its colonial beginning well into the
20th century.

It is sadly ironic to think that perhaps the murder in the Holocaust
Museum might never have taken place had its proprietors been willing to
look history in the face and make available publications concerning the
disgraceful events connected with the slaughter of Armenians and the
Nakba too.

So, a tragic lesson connected with this mindless historically heedless
murder is that picking and choosing what to admit with respect to the
facts of history can be dangerously provocative. A partial application
of "never again," may well ensure that such awful violence may well
happen again.

Jerry Levin is a former CNN Middle East reporter, who was kidnapped and
held hostage by Hezbollah in 1984. He escaped after eleven and a half
months in captivity due to the nonviolent behind the scene efforts of
friends and colleagues organized by his wife, Sis Levin. The group
included Muslim, Christian,and Jews in the U.S. and the Middle East.
Since then he has been working for the absolute release of non-Jews in
the region from every aspect of Israeli domination, control,
expropriation, and genocidal violence. Over the years he has worked with
several violence reduction organizations in the West Bank (including CPT
- Christian Peacemaker Teams) and Gaza, and with nonviolent peace and
nonviolent justice organizations in the U.S . In April at a ceremony in
San Francisco he and his were recognized by the Dali Lama as one of
2009's "Unsung Heroes of Compassion.

In addition to this site, he has also created a blog that can be
accessed via http://fromtheinsid elookingout- jerrylevin. blogspot. com/.