Jimmy Carter: Too many Jews on Holocaust council

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."

"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.

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.

And your reference to the "holocaust drum" is so repellent that it makes me wonder what you are

Do you stand up and scream hunt down the Turks who murdered Armenians?

Do you stand up and scream hunt down the Indonesians who murdered East Timoreans?

Do you stand up and scream hunt down the Russians who murdered Georgians?

Do you stand up and scream hunt down the Japanese who murdered Chinese?

Do you stand up and scream hunt down the NAZI's who murdered Christians?

Do you stand up and scream hunt down the NAZI's who murdered homosexuals?

Do you stand up and scream hunt down the NAZI's who murdered Gypsies?

If you search the Internet querying for Nazi extermination statistics, you read overwhelmingly about the debate on Nazi'z killing Jews. In fact, the Jews killed, 5,754,000, represent about 15 percent of the total civilians murdered in WWII. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
for an interesting collection of statistics.

The danger for the Jews by singling themselves out for persecution in continuous Holocaust memorials is to further alienate themselves from others. Look at black activists who label New York City as "Hymie Town." Black activists point to the settlements given "Holocaust" family survivors as a just reason for whites to compensate blacks. This will not endear other Americans toward the Jews. The world already despises the Jews. They don't need to alienate themselves from the friends they still have in America.

For Jewish liberals the "uniqueness of the Holocaust" has replaced the Divine Election of Israel (Bechirat Yisra'el). It is also an oxymoron: the absolutely unique, one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated example of what could theoretically happen to anyone else at any time.

But deep behind all this is the inescapable fact that the Jewish People are indeed the Chosen People of G-d. They can't get away from it. The more the liberals among them try to become merely one more minority among many others the Jewish Soul reasserts itself and the "uniqueness of the Holocaust" is the result. Yes, it is, as some critics contend, a secularized Judaism, but it merely serves witness that Judaism--real Judaism--is indeed from the Creator of the Universe. Yes, it can be interpreted as a way to keep the Jewish People at the center of history even once belief in the G-d of Israel has been abandoned, but the Jewish People are at the center of history. Everyone knows it. It is as objective an historical fact as there is. The Jews have always and at all times been recognized by all peoples as different because it is TRUE.

There is a reason for the disproportionate influence of Jews on the world: G-d meant it to be that way! The very nature of the Jewish soul is different from the non-Jewish soul. It comes arises from a separate area of the G-dhead. It enters the Jewish body later than the non-Jewish soul enters the non-Jewish body. The Jewish soul channels G-dliness into the world so that non-Jewish souls can then spread the G-dliness throughout the world (these things, which I state very crudely, are elaborated upon in Jewish mystical teachings). When large numbers of Jews rebel against G-d the consequences are much more disastrous than were it any other people. But at the same time, should Israel ever return whole-heartedly to the Holy Torah, it would bless the world in ways unimagined.

Liberal Jews cannot but be a parody of Torah Jews because that is the nature of the holy Jewish Soul. Instead of being the people who convey the Creator's teachings to the world we have the spectacle of a people whose sufferings at the hands of religious people is supposed to teach the world to abandon G-d and turn to secular humanism. Laws against denial of Biblical events are decried as unthinkable but denial of the Holocaust is criminalized. Creches are banned not because they are idolatrous but because they are "offensive" and chanukkiyyot are erected in their place not to proclaim the triumph of the One G-d but to celebrate "tolerance and diversity." Yes, liberal Jews are a perfect parody of Torah-true Jews and under their influence the United States is becoming a parody of a theocracy, but this is not due to nefariousness or conspiracy. And least of it all does it disprove the claims of Judaism--instead it confirms them!

I am a non-Jew. I get as upset as anyone over loud liberal Jewish demands to acknowledge Jewish suffering without acknowledging the Jewish G-d. But think for a moment. Why don't non-observant Jews simply live lives of meaningless ease as do so many other people? Because they can't!!! Their Jewish souls won't let them! How miserable they must be, starving for something they cannot identify, which compels them, drives them, to search for "meaning," "justice," or what-have-you! What torment they must endure, never to have any rest! And it's not just among liberals that one finds such starved Jewish crusaders; think for a moment of self-described agnostic and former radical David Horowitz, who does so much for conservatism. His soul is as starved for Torah as that of any destructive Jewish liberal.

The thing to remember is that, as hard as it is to believe, secular Jews (at least on an intellectual level) reject Jewish uniqueness. But the more they fight against it, the more visible and unique they appear (though not in a good way). Even all the Holocaust museums and commemorations are for Jewish liberals (at one level or another) an attempt to be "just like everyone else," as incredible as that may seem. But because of the nature of the Jewish soul and the way G-d created the world even this "non-uniqueness" comes across as chronically unique.

There is enormous destructive power in the Jewish soul if it is not in submission to the Yoke of Heaven (much more than in a non-Jewish soul). But the beneficial power of a pious Jewish soul is just as powerful. One day the world will see this.

Despite all the frustrations one may feel, the fact remains that Jewishness uniqueness and centrality to history is an objective fact acknowleged by all, both friend and foe. Chr*stianity is splintered into numerous theological and ethnic groups, both ancient and modern, but Judaism (apart from liberal heretics and a few Qara'ites) remains united and its identity undisputed. Only Judaism's Scripture begins with the Creation of the World. Only Jewish history is identical to world history. Only to the Jews did the invisible, unincarnated, unmediated G-d reveal Himself at Sinai. Only the Torah, of all the ancient scriptures of the world, has existed among all Jews in all times for the past 3300+ years exactly as it exists and is written now (the only variations are among the Yemenites and consist of a few vowel letters that change none of the meanings). Only the Jewish Scriptural tradition contains the rules and regulations that assure that the Torah will always be written and preserved exactly as Moses first wrote it down at HaShem's dictation.

And most importantly, only Israel's G-d is absolutely, assuredly, undeniably G-d. All chr*stian denominations admit that Judaism was the true religion at one time in the past, but they can't agree on what took its place. No amount of Jewish liberalism can change any of these simple facts. One either sits at the feet of Gedolei-Yisr'ael or gives up and goes home. There is nowhere else to go.

I hope these thoughts are of some help to you. For your further perusal, here is an essay containing more of my thoughts on the centrality of the Holocaust in the liberal (and to a certain degree general secularist) worldview.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.