I don’t know if I have it in me to comment on this. Tablet:
After years of protests and an unsuccessful legal challenge, architect Frank Gehry has pulled out of a project to build a Jerusalem counterpart to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance that is slated to stand on a site that was once part of an ancient Muslim cemetery.
“We are no longer involved in it,” said Craig Webb, the design partner in charge of the project for the firm of Gehry Partners. He said the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which opened its original Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles in 1993, no longer had the right to use Gehry’s design and was considering alternatives. The center’s website currently reads “please check back soon” under a page devoted to the Jerusalem initiative. As the blogger Philip Weiss noted last week, all references to Gehry and images of the $250 million project have been removed from the site.
I shouldn’t have to explain to anyone why this is an obscenity. Neither should Rabbi Yoffie, who commented, “There is something profoundly disturbing about the idea of putting a Jewish Museum of Tolerance on a plot of land where Muslims have been burying their dead for most of the last 800 years.” I do not understand why the Wiesenthal Center, which I have always understood to be a deeply humane organization, is doing something so misguided and offensive.



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I lost all respect for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance when Rabbi Marvin Hier, its founder and dean, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to support the Gaza pogroms even as they were taking place. There should be no place in a Museum of Tolerance for someone who can open an article supporting the wanton killings of Palestinians with:
and close it with:
The only double standard here is that of Rabbi Hier. He has indeed forgotten the real lesson of World War II – that militaristic racism is unalloyed evil. The dean of the Simon Wiesenhal Center and its Museum of Tolerance is a racist so we should not be surprised when the Museum expresses its racism with this disrespect of Muslims who have lived and died in their homeland for hundreds of years.