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Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) National President Morton A. Klein released the following statement:
ZOA and I, Morton Klein, as a child of Holocaust survivors who lost most of my family to Hitler’s Holocaust, condemn and urge rescission of President Biden’s recent horrific and frightening appointment to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council (the governing board of trustees of the Museum) of two board members of hostile-to-Israel non-governmental organizations: Kimberly Marteau Emerson and Alan D. Solomont.
Congress established the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to memorialize Holocaust victims and “carry out the recommendations of the President's Commission on the Holocaust in its report to the President of September 27, 1979.” 36 USC §2301. The 1979 President’s Commission report called for the Holocaust Museum to focus both on America’s failings in the Holocaust, including the Evian conference (p. 14), the inability to believe the Holocaust was happening, and failure of effective action (p. 10-11), as well as America’s achievements, including America’s “support for a Jewish homeland.” (p. 11). Thus, the Holocaust Memorial Museum – which by law is mandated to carry out “support for the Jewish homeland” – should never have board members of anti-Israel organizations on the Museum’s governing board.
Since 2012, Kimberly Marteau Emerson has been an active member of the Board of Directors of the Israel-bashing and America-bashing Human Rights Watch (HRW), which is infamous for falsely accusing Israel of “apartheid,” “crimes against humanity,” “persecuting” and “systematic oppression” and “inhumane acts” against Palestinians. HRW calls for dismantling Jewish communities where 800,000 Jews live in the lawful Jewish homeland in Jerusalem and Judea/Samaria; forcibly removing these Jews to the other side of the artificial 1948 ceasefire line; free movement of Arabs to and from Gaza; dismantling much of the security fence that protects Israelis from terror attacks; and a one-sided “return” of Palestinian Arabs to overrun Israel. (HRW April 2021 apartheid report against Israel, p. 205)
Emerson’s name appears on HRW reports, such as the HRW 2017 World Report, which complained about “expanded police and intelligence powers over terrorism-related cases,” and complained that the International Criminal Court (ICC) did not yet open formal investigations “implicating U.S. officials for unprosecuted torture in Afghanistan or Israeli officials for their policy of illegally transferring Israelis to settlements in the occupied territories.” [Note: Judea/Samaria is Jewish land, not “occupied territory” – and Jews living there are not illegal].
The same HRW report on which Emerson’s name appears also promoted antisemitic boycotts, by reiterating a 2016 HRW report in which “HRW concluded that it is impossible to do business in Israeli settlement communities without contributing to injustice and discrimination against Palestinians.” HRW also joined in an antisemitic boycott campaign, saying in the same report that “by advertising, selling and renting homes in settlements, the Israeli franchise of the real estate company RE/MAX contravenes best practices for corporate social responsibility and its responsibilities to uphold human rights.”
In other words, Kimberly Martel Emerson has lent her name and supported to the deeply antisemitic proposition that selling or renting homes to Jews is a human rights violation! Someone who puts her name to reports espousing such views cannot run a Museum memorializing the murder of six million Jews that began with the Nazis enacting boycotts against Jews.
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