Using and Abusing The Holocaust as a Political Weapon
Dr. Walter Reich
November 1, 2006
Mortarta Building
Cosponsor: Program in Jewish Civlization
Dr. Walter Reich, the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior, and Professor of Psychiatry at George Washington University, as well as a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and former Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, spoke on the uses and abuses of invocation of the Holocaust as a political weapon, focusing especially on the realm of foreign policy, such as the tendency to cite the Holocaust to justify particular diplomatic and military policies.
Reich also examined the widespread claims in the Arab/Muslim world of both Holocaust denial and that Israel has committed crimes comparable to that of the Holocaust, the latter having achieved increasingly strident resonance in Europe and elsewhere.