Biden Regime Appoints Holocaust Museum Board Member From Org That Accused Israel of Apartheid
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BY DANIEL GREENFIELD
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
A Human Rights Watch board member does not belong on a Holocaust museum board.
I have written about the problems with the Holocaust Museum in D.C. before. It’s a government museum and like most of those pursues predictable political agendas that have nothing to do with the Holocaust or Jews.
The Holocaust Memorial Council acts as the board of trustees, but like a lot of government institution boards, it’s a prestigious line to add to the biographies of major donors or political allies. There have been some whoppingly bad appointments by past administrations In a final insult to the Jewish community, Obama appointed Ben Rhodes, the lead advocate for the Iran nuke sellout, to the council.
Biden has appointed Kimberly Marteau Emerson. Kimberly, the wife of John Emerson. a Democrat operative and financial bigwig, picked by Obama to be his ambassador to Germany.
Kimberly Marteau Emerson.has been on the board of directors for Human Rights Watch since 2012.
HRW has repeatedly and falsely accused Israel of “apartheid”. Its personnel have done little to conceal their desire for the destruction of the Jewish State and the extermination of its population.
Joe Stork, who served for many years as HRW’s Deputy Director of Middle East issues. Before being hired by HRW, Stork openly supported Palestinian terror attacks against Jewish civilians, and opposed any and all peace treaties between Israel and Arab states.
Stork even traveled to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for a conference on “Zionism and Racism.
Analyzing Israel’s victory in the 1967 War, Stork suggested what would be needed for the Arab states to reverse the outcome and destroy Israel:
This was part of a pattern.
In 2009, HRW bizarrely defended its senior military analyst Marc Garlasco following revelations that he was an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia and had even authored a book about Nazi-era medals. According to The Guardian, Garlasco once commented that a leather SS jacket made “my blood go cold it is so COOL!”
And nothing much has changed.
HRW founder Robert Bernstein blasted the organization’s pathological anti-Israel animus in a 2009 op-ed published in The New York Times, in which he lamented the turn the organization had taken regarding the Middle East. At HRW, Bernstein wrote, the organization originally drew distinctions between liberal and repressive states, focusing on the latter. However, HRW, “with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.”
Bernstein observed that this change in focus was most apparent in the Middle East, where HRW “has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region,” even though the region “is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records.”
In the spring of 2009, Sarah Leah Whitson, the organization’s top Middle East official, traveled to Saudi Arabia and, as part of her pitch, said that she needed to raise funds to fight “pro-Israel pressure groups.”
To get a sense of HRW’s disturbing anti-Israel bias, consider this: over the past five years, the NGO has authored seven special reports on Israel. In comparison, the organization published none condemning North Korea, one of the worst criminal regimes in the world; and only three reports addressed the human rights violations of the repressive, theocratic regime in Iran.
That’s because HRW wants Israel to be destroyed.
The report’s primary author is Omar Shakir, HRW’s Israel/Palestine director, who signed a pledge in 2015 to “honor the BDS call.” The founder and leader of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement has stated openly that his movement aims to see Israel dismantled
Kimberly Marteau Emerson is a completely inappropriate choice. No HRW official or board member should ever have a position in a Holocaust memorial organization.
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Kimberly Marteau Emerson
Kimberly Marteau Emerson is a lawyer, civic leader, and human rights advocate. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, and is Chair of the Board of Governors of Bard College Berlin. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, and on the Advisory Boards of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the Thomas Mann House, and United Way in Germany. Emerson served in the Clinton Administration as spokesperson and public liaison for U.S.I.A. From 2013 to 2017, she worked in Berlin alongside her husband, U.S. Ambassador to Germany John B. Emerson (retired) to drive projects on multiple platforms, including the Embassy’s efforts to combat anti-Semitism and its integration efforts during the 2015 refugee crisis. She has twice been an election observer in Nigeria, and worked on relief projects, among others, in Lesbos, Greece, during the 2015/2016 crisis, and in Sri Lanka post-Tsunami. She has received several awards for her civic engagement, including annual or special awards from the American Jewish Committee, People for the American Way, the Music Center of Los Angeles County, the LA Children’s Chorus, and United Friends of the Children. She holds a B.A. from UCLA, a J.D. from UC Hastings College of the Law, and a D.E.S.U. from l’Université de Droit d’Aix-Marseille.