Every major American city has at least one Holocaust museum or memorial. Worldwide there are more than 250 Holocaust museums and memorials, most of them in the US and Europe. The largest is the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which is run by a taxpayer-funded federal government agency, and draws some two million visitors yearly.
What’s behind the Holocaust remembrance campaign? Whose interests does it serve?
The Holocaust Remembrance campaign encourages sympathy and support for Jews and Israel. It helps to justify America's massive and on-going support for Israel, and to excuse otherwise inexcusable policies of the Zionist state.
Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar who teaches at DePaul University in Chicago, writes in his bestselling book, The Holocaust Industry, that “invoking The Holocaust” is “a ploy to delegitimize all criticism of Jews.” He adds: “By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure... Organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel's and its own morally indefensible policies.”
Paula Hyman, a professor of modern Jewish history at Yale University, has observed: “With regard to Israel, the Holocaust may be used to forestall political criticism and suppress debate; it reinforces the sense of Jews as an eternally beleaguered people who can rely for their defense only upon themselves. The invocation of the suffering endured by the Jews under the Nazis often takes the place of rational argument, and is expected to convince doubters of the legitimacy of current Israeli government policy.”