The Zionist Organization of America and Mort Klein, its national president, are calling on the Biden administration to rescind its appointment of two individuals to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, which governs the museum.
The decision to name Kimberly Marteau Emerson and Alan Solomont to the council is “horrific and frightening,” given that the two lead “hostile-to-Israel non-governmental organizations,” Klein and the ZOA stated.
“Support for a Jewish homeland” is cited as one of the museum’s focuses in the 1979 report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, which Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel chaired. “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,” Klein and ZOA stated.
Emerson is a board member of Human Rights Watch, which is “Israel-bashing and America-bashing” and is “infamous for falsely accusing Israel of ‘apartheid,’ ‘crimes against humanity,’ ‘persecuting’ and ‘systematic oppression’ and ‘inhumane acts’ against Palestinians,” Klein and the ZOA wrote.
Meanwhile, Solomont sits on the board of the “vicious, hostile-to-Israel groups” New Israel Fund and Israel Policy Forum, the latter of which “is so radical that it was the only group to testify against moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem,” per Klein and ZOA.
“Solomont is currently the national board chair of the notorious anti-Israel group J Street, which promotes anti-Israel UN resolutions; funds anti-Israel political candidates and lobbies for U.S. funding for the Palestinians—which enables the Palestinian Authority’s ‘pay to slay’ payments to Arab terrorists to murder Jews, among many other horrors,” they added.
