Posted on 01/25/2007 8:55:10 PM PST by West Coast Conservative
Former President Jimmy Carter once complained there were "too many Jews" on the government's Holocaust Memorial Council, Monroe Freedman, the council's former executive director, told WND in an exclusive interview.
Freedman, who served on the council during Carter's term as president, also revealed a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian was rejected from the council's board by Carter's office because the scholar's name "sounded too Jewish."
Freedman, now a professor of law at Hofstra University, was picked by the council's chairman, author Elie Weisel, to serve as executive director in 1980. The council, created by the Carter White House, went on to establish the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Freedman says he was tasked with creating a board for the council and with making recommendations to the White House on how best to memorialize the Holocaust.
He told WND he sent a memo to Carter's office containing recommendations for council board members.
He said his memo was returned with a note on the upper right hand corner that stated, "Too many Jews."
The note, Freedman said, was written in Carter's handwriting and was initialed by Carter.
Freedman said at the time the board he constructed was about 80-perent Jewish, including many Holocaust survivors.
He said at the behest of the White House he composed another board consisting of more non-Jews. But he said he was "stunned" when Carter's office objected to a non-Jew whose name sounded Jewish.
Freedman said he could not provide the historians name to WND because he did not have the man's permission.
"I got a phone call from our liaison at the White House saying this particular historian whose name sounded Jewish would not do. The liaison said he would not even take the time to present Carter with the possibility of including the historian on the board because he knew Carter would think the name sounded too Jewish. I explained the historian is Presbyterian, but the liaison said it wouldn't matter to Carter."
Freedman said he was "outraged by this absurdity."
"If I was memorializing Martin Luther King, I would expect a significant number of board members to be African American. If I was memorializing Native American figures I'd expect a lot of Native Americans to be on the board.
"I do not for a moment consider it inappropriate to build a Holocaust council with a significant majority of the board being Jewish," Freedman stated.
Freedman describes himself as "self-proclaimed liberal." He said he decided to speak out after the release of Carter's latest book, "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid," which some have accused of being biased against Israel.
This would not be the first time Carter's messages on right hand corners of letters generated a Holocaust-related scandal.
Last week, in an interview with the Tovia Singer Show on Israel National Radio, a former U.S. Justice Department official said he received a letter advocating "special consideration" for a confessed Nazi SS officer accused of murdering Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.
Neal Sher, who served in the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation, said that in 1987 he received a note from Carter petitioning for re-entry into the U.S. for Martin Bartesch, who had been deported by Sher's office to Austria after it was established he served as an SS officer.
Sher said his office had "extraordinary evidence" Bartesch shot Jews.
Bartesch originally immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Chicago. He later admitted to Sher's office and the court he had voluntarily joined the SS as a teenager and served in its Death's Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. Bartesch also confessed to having concealed his SS service at concentration camp from U.S. immigration officials.
Sher said the Justice Department obtained a journal kept by the SS and captured by the U.S. Armed Forces listing Bartesch as having shot to death Max Oschorn, a French Jewish prisoner.
Bartesch's daughters, who still lived in the U.S., attempted in 1987 to appeal to politicians to allow the former Nazi officer to enter the country. They wrote a note in which they claimed it was "un-American" to persecute a man for crimes committed when he was only 17 and 18 years old.
Sher said he was shocked when he received the daughter's letter replete with a handwritten note from Carter on the upper right corner stating the former president wanted "special consideration" for the Bartesch family for humanitarian reasons.
The note, containing Carter's signature, was obtained this week by the NY Sun.
I swear, if I passed by Carter and he was on fire, I wouldn't pi$$ on him to douse the flames.
A little earlier I gave you the benefit of the doubt and endeavored, in my own clumsy way, to respond to your concerns. You have failed to respond to my thoughts but the above words by you to another FReeper shows that you are definitely not a person of good will. You're going to be "lone" for a long time to come.
And for your information, vengeance is very Jewish. You should read the front part of your Bible (assuming you have one). You know, the part that tells how the poor innocent Egyptians were so offended by Holocaust monuments that they turned against the Jews? [/sarcasm]
If you do not understand that uniqueness, I cannot help you. I do not know how else to explain something so readily apparent.
All that being said, the uniqueness of the Holocaust is tied to the Divine Election of Israel (the source of Israel's uniqueness), which means that teaching the uniqueness of the Holocaust in a secular society must at some point become problematic and perhaps oxymoronic.
The answer to anti-Semitism is a world that has rejected false religions and accepted the G-d of Israel, not a secular world in which Jews are seen to benefit from a double-standard because they are an oppressed minority.
Shove it.
Lyle: Mr. Carter, I sure do hate to see ya like this. What if me and the boys were to shoot all dem Jews dead? Would that make ya feel better?
Jimmy Carter: Well that might help.
In my last post to you, I said I wondered what you were.
Now I know.
You with your ridiculous post, just suggested Jews shut up so people won't hate them and that the world already hates jews.
You are so full of it.
LOL, Well maybe not.
But I've always wondered about that bunny attack.
I mean, what kind of person does it take to make a bunny attack you ?
Why the jousting on this issue? What is it that bothers you about Holocaust memorialization?
One thing that distinguishes the Armenian from the Jewish genocide is that the Jews promote theirs much more aggressively that the Armenians do theirs. What other genocide has a name for it like the Holocaust? This aggressive promotion while making people aware may have unintended consequences, alienation of the Jews. The Armenians and Jews now have countries in the same area of the world. They have both experienced genocide. But, the world is directing its hate toward the Jews only. Why?
Think about the South. The vanquished erected statues and memorials to their heroes after the Civil War. A hundred years later Blacks and their political brethren are tearing these down. Memorials are bad public relations. Somewhere, some group finds a reason - envy, jealousy, hate, whatever to get worked up over them.
Jimmy Carter, the joke that keeps on giving
Yep, I pegged it. You have Jooooooo issues:
But, the world is directing its hate toward the Jews only. Why?
You're insinuating this "world hate" is the Jews' fault. That is spectacularly offensive.
INBTZ ?
Holy Cow! This is the most moronically innovative thing I have ever read regarding Israel on this site. You're saying that European, Arab, and Islamic hatred of Jews and Israel is based on over promotion of the Holocaust awareness? Somebody phone Olmert, AIPAC, and the Knesset!
All they have to do is stop talking about the most horrific episode of human extermination in Jewish history and no one will hate them! You might get the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Award for figuring this out.
Sarcasm aside, you are the most anti-Semitic boob I have ever read on FreeRepublic.
Bookmark (78)
Might I ask a question with an honest answer please ?
Semitic, Anti Semitic matters not.
Aren't all of these people that the SW center went after already declared "War CRIMINALS" ?
It looks to me that the SW center is hunting down and catching criminals. Good Job. And as far as the Museums go, yes we need them so history does not repeat itself.
Oh man...I saw that. It was pretty good.
People who cannot tolerate hearing about the holocaust, who get all out of joint about it, who criticize jews for talking about are almost always antisemitic and cannot face up to what people who held the same antisemitic feelings did. They find it intolerable.
They just want Jews to shut up. Where is alan Dershowitz when we need him?
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