Brian Greenspun shares Rabbi Hier’s thoughts on intolerance

Sunday, June 24, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance is a special place. Within its walls they teach millions of visitors the meaning of tolerance and the ugliness of intolerance. That should be enough.

But we all know that isn't enough. Man's inhumanity to man continues to manifest itself in horrific ways and in ways that practically numb the ordinary senses and common sense of otherwise good people.

Last week the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles held its 2007 Tribute Dinner at which it not only honored two most deserving humanitarians, Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne from New Line Cinema, but also singled out three people for special medals of valor. One was Ann Curry of "Dateline NBC" for her gut-wrenching portrayals of violence and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Darfur. The other two medals were given posthumously to former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the recently murdered and totally selfless professor Liviu Librescu of Virginia Tech.

In introducing the honorees, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Museum of Tolerance, spoke out against the latest form of anti-Semitism, intolerance, bigotry and stupidity. This time it was aimed at a bunch of people who should know better - college professors. And he didn't hold back.

Because this is an issue that also has gained some traction in the United States, I think it is useful to reprint Rabbi Hier's remarks so that all Sun readers will have some context if the issue of boycotts does arise. With the Rabbi's permission and some editing for space, it follows:

By Rabbi Marvin Hier

"Last week, during our visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, we were taken to a small 10-by-6 room that is not part of the public tour. The room is where Anne Frank wrote her diary and is exactly the way she left it when she and her family were arrested by the Gestapo.

Pasted up on the wall there were some 20 items, pictures, postcards and pages from books. It was like her own reference library and her only contact with the outside world since she could not open the curtain and look out the small window.

"It occurred to me that during her two-year confinement, as she sat at the desk and wrote her remarkable diary, she must have stared at those items again and again. It was her only way to connect with the real world - the rest she could only imagine.

"One of the postcards that caught my attention was a picture of the entrance to the old city of Jerusalem showing Jews on their way to pray at the Western Wall. Of course, there was no state of Israel then - had there been, the entire story of the Holocaust would have been quite different.

"For the truth was that no country was prepared to take the Franks in. As recent documents reveal, her father, Otto, wanted to emigrate to the United States, but could not do so because of strict immigration quotas.

"Two weeks ago I was in Israel among the tens of thousands gathered at the Western Wall commemorating the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem. I thought of all those who, like Anne Frank, had perished and whose feet never walked on these ancient cobblestones - whose eyes never had the privilege of seeing the Kotel (Western Wall).

"I thought of the survivors of the Holocaust, the few who made it, but from whom everything was taken, still sitting there, unwanted, all alone in the DP (displaced persons) camps with no place to call home.

"That is why I was so shocked by the campaign in Britain to ostracize Israel from the academic world. Suggestions first made by the Association of British Journalists, followed by a group of architects and, finally, the vote engineered by only a few hundred anti-Israel activists from the largest union of teachers to contemplate a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

"Let me make it perfectly clear. There is nothing wrong in criticizing Israel. That is everyone's right - friend or foe. She is not perfect and, like any other nation, including our own great country, she will continue to make mistakes.

"But to be obsessed with her, ad nauseam, to wear binoculars preprogrammed to detect Jewish warts only , is not objective criticism. Plain and simple - it is a case of subjective bigotry and anti-Semitism.

"When these boycotters cannot find anyone to boycott over Darfur - no one to blame in the Arab world for failure to prevent the genocide there - no one to criticize Ahmadinejad's Iran, where religious police go around whipping women in the streets for defying the dress code - no condemnations against countries whose imams sanction beheadings and suicide bombings - no architects to organize a "stop the building" campaign in Saudi Arabia where women are second-class citizens and everybody knows it.

"Where are these academics and architects when it comes to condemning Hamas when the whole world sees what they're doing to their own people in Gaza?

"But my friends, we have something to say to these British intellectuals. This is 2007 and not 1942. We have learned the bitter lessons of history and we are not going into hiding anymore. Today, a blue and white flag proudly flies amongst the community of nations.

"Just yesterday, 51 Nobel Prize Laureates signed a petition condemning the British boycotters, calling their actions an act of bigotry. We salute those Nobel Prize Laureates and tonight, we say to the people of Israel, these haters will not prevail."