All Americans need to understand how and why a state may turn against or enslave a people, with the purpose of exploiting or obliterating them, and to wholeheartedly condemn such political acts.

When its founding chairman Pete McCloskey addressed a conference of the Institute for Historical Review some five years ago, he was not representing the Council for the National Interest. Board members are not responsible to clear their speaking engagements with CNI, and CNI was not even aware of the address until many months after it was made. In any event, Rep. McCloskey later distanced himself from the Institute when he wrote the president of the Institute, Mark Weber, “there was a deliberate policy of extermination of Jews, Poles, gypsies and homosexuals by the Nazi leadership,” and suggested that the Institute give up it views about the Holocaust and focus instead on the distortions of truth promoted by the Anti-Defamation League – one of which was to claim that McCloskey was a Holocaust denier. For McCloskey’s views, see the archives of the San Francisco Examiner, story by Dan Evans April 1, 2002.

CNI is immensely proud of the contribution that Pete McCloskey has made over the years to the American political process, including an appearance in 2003 at a Tikkun Conference in Washington, and toward helping Americans – and especially Jewish Americans – understand that the interests of a foreign state such as Israel, among a number of countries in the Middle East, are not the same as American interests.

As for the address that Mr. McCloskey gave to the Institute, interested readers are able to read the speech for itself elsewhere on the dc.indymedia.com website. He was not addressing the issue of the Holocaust itself, but was focusing on the power of the Israeli lobby in the United States in stopping debate on the merits of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. He was especially eager to bring listeners attention to the illegal activities of the Anti-Defamation League, which he and a group of local activists successfully sued for spying in 2002.

There is no doubt that the Holocaust took place, that it created a profound crisis for the Jewish people, and that it had a profound repercussion on the people of Palestine, who in fact did not participate in it. They, rather than the perpetrators of the Holocaust, have been obliged to accommodate the victims, and to pay for it by ceding their land, property, rights, and until recently their identity. Great social injustices must be rectified, as we think the majority of Americans believe. This can be done through the creation of an independent Palestine, in which its citizens may live as freely as the descendants of victims of the Holocaust now live in Israel.