Standing with Israel, but stepping on all other toes
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has a unique concept of human rights, says Colum Kenny
MARY McAleese might have been better advised to say nothing. Dr Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre certainly would have been.
His allegations against the Hunt family were condemned last year as wildly unsubstantiated when an independent enquiry into the Hunt Museum in Limerick found no evidence that the collection consisted of art that was looted by Nazis from the Jews. Visiting Limerick last week, President McAleese described the allegations as "baseless" and "a tissue of lies". She said that the Simon Wiesenthal Centre had diminished the reputation of the late Simon Wiesenthal.
In fact, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which acts partly as a lobbyist for the state of Israel, is a long way from that Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna which Wiesenthal himself ran and which the Irish President says that she recalls fondly from her youth.
Then, grainy black and white pictures portrayed a single individual's fight for justice. Simon Wiesenthal was a survivor of the Nazi death camps who dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and to hunting down perpetrators who were still at large. He worked out of a nondescript, sparsely furnished three-room office with a support staff of just three.
Like President McAleese, I was inspired by his commitment -- as were others.
Today, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre is a sophisticated international operation with seven offices. Three of them are in the United States, including its headquarters in Los Angeles. It claims to have in the USA what it significantly calls a "constituency" of more than 400,000 family members. Among other activities, it has been opposing former President Jimmy Carter as he embarked on a campus tour to discuss his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
The mission statement of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre commits it to "standing with Israel". Its political power was shown last week, when it elicited a letter from Barack Obama urging the US ambassador to the UN to oppose a motion on Gaza unless rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel
were also condemned in a manner deemed appropriated by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Obama dare not alienate Jewish voters.
However, Rabbi Abraham Cooper insisted last week, "We do not represent any state." From the Simon Wiesenthal Centre HQ in Los Angeles last week, he told me, "No state is infallible, including Israel." He added, "Senior leadership of our centre, including myself, have had numerous meetings with Palestinian activists dating back to the 1980s." He himself regularly meets with Muslims.
But news releases issued recently by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre include one that simply relays a contentious statement by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. None of the centre's public utterances have been concerned with the human rights of people within Israel or its "Occupied Territories of Palestine".
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre describes itself as "an international Jewish human rights organisation dedicated to repairing the world one step at a time". By this, it seems to have in mind a unique concept of human rights.
An Irish or Australian human rights organisation, for example, is involved primarily in the rights of people, especially minorities, within its own state and, after that, elsewhere. This "Jewish human rights organisation" appears to be concerned only with the human rights of Jews: a case of Israel right or wrong, perhaps.
You will search in vain on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre site for any mention of the many violations of Palestinian rights on the West Bank, including the settlement of 450,000 Jews there in contravention of the Geneva Convention.
Nor is the Simon Wiesenthal Centre concerned about farms or homes destroyed so that Israel can build a giant concrete wall and annex its settlements. In 2005, the International Court of Justice voted by 14 to one that this barrier was illegal: only a US judge disagreed. Israel rejected the court's finding.
Oddly, the mission statement of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre also omits any reference to hunting down Nazis. But that is what its Director for International Relations appears to have attempted when he made his allegations against the Hunt Museum.
So why did Mary McAleese get involved? Because the Simon Wiesenthal Centre precipitated the investigation by writing to her, in 2003, on the basis of what transpired to be unproven allegations. It criticised her for earlier praising the Hunt collection, and suggested that the Hunt's receipt of a 'Museum of the Year' award be suspended.
It took four years for an official Irish enquiry to be concluded, which was certainly unsatisfactory, and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre felt unduly excluded from its considerations. Nevertheless, the enquiry was conducted by an independent international expert, who was contemptuous of the allegations concerning looted art. She called them "unprofessional in the extreme", and stated that people whose names were similar had been confused with one another by the Jewish centre.
Last September, the Hunt Museum pointed out that it had also set up a website to allow third parties to query the provenance of any item in the collection. More than 2,000 items were fully catalogued on the website.
"Not one institution, agent or person has come forward with a single query or claim over the provenance of any item in the collection," said a museum spokesperson.
When President McAleese visited the Hunt Museum last week, she might have said nothing about the controversy. However, it has become common for public figures to speak their minds, even when a diplomatic silence is the better alternative.
Dr Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre could not restrain himself either. He waded in again, reportedly "shocked", and described the president's criticisms as "not very presidential" and "unstatesmanlike". He still asserts, "We will be vindicated." He reportedly claims that a separate investigator for the centre will issue a new report on the Hunt Museum "in the next three months".
If no such report appears, or if it lamely fails to produce any hard evidence of the Hunt's involvement with looted Jewish art, then the Simon Wiesenthal Centre may wish to consider the position of its European-based Director for International Relations.
