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Daniel Mariaschin: Stop trivializing the Holocaust

9/17/2019

 
Read on Fox News


My earliest recollection of hearing about the Holocaust came in the mid-1950s, as our family sat around the Passover Seder table. My parents had invited my mother’s best friend to join us that evening, and I remember listening intently to the discussion about families lost and the devastation wrought by Nazi rule throughout Europe.

That mental image reappeared when I read that Amazon UK had taken down a promotion by the company Harma Art for the sale of T-shirts and hoodies bearing a silkscreened reproduction of “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa,” one of the most widely circulated photos of Nazi brutality.

A lone Jewish victim sits on the edge of a ravine with his face to the camera, as a member of a Nazi Einsatzgruppe (the SS paramilitary death squad) is about to shoot him in the back of the head. Fourteen other Einsatzgruppen troops stand behind the one with the pistol, about to witness just one more brutal killing in a day that must have taken hundreds, if not thousands of innocent victims.

That photo always gets to me. It personalizes the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust to one terrified victim. For a brief moment, you can try to imagine the fear that each individual experienced just before death.

What did Harma Art intend when it had those T-shirts and hoodies manufactured? Was it looking to market that apparel to Neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic far-right operatives who might don the shirts at rallies and demonstrations?

It’s not readily apparent. The blurb that accompanied photos of the merchandise promoted it this way: “Choose from our great collection of authentic designs and stand out from the crowd!”

Shock value! Be the first in your neighborhood to wear a hoodie with a photo of a Jew about to be shot!

The ease with which this marketing pitch was made tells us volumes about the global trivialization and desecration of the Holocaust, even while there are still survivors with tattoos on their arms who witnessed the worst moral depravity in history.

We saw an early indication of what was to come in 1965, with the airing of the comedy series “Hogan’s Heroes” on CBS, with its bumbling Nazi characters. Later, in 1995, “Seinfeld” undermined the depravity of Nazis by introducing a mean shop proprietor, labeling him “the Soup Nazi.”

In the nearly 25 years since, we’ve seen dozens of examples of Holocaust-related terms, or the word “genocide” being applied to situations that are neither appropriate nor analogous.

Israel often is the target of such intentionally misplaced opprobrium. Its defensive barrier is compared to being akin to the Warsaw ghetto.

Editorial cartoonists have been engaged in this for some time, with depictions of Israeli soldiers as Nazis. One that I particularly recall was in the Danish newspaper Politiken. In a play on another famous photo from the Holocaust, in which Nazi soldiers, with guns pointed, are rounding up Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, and a young boy has his hands up, this cartoon substitutes Palestinians for Jews, and Israeli soldiers for Nazis.

And then there was the homework assignment in Oswego County, New York, that asked students to make arguments for or against the “Final Solution.”

Even members of Congress are not immune to the spread of this kind of trivialization. In the debate over health care reform, members from both parties traded barbs that contained Holocaust-era imagery, including references to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, “the big lie,” and appeasement (as in the Munich Pact, which preceded the outbreak of war in Europe).

Comparisons of undocumented immigrant detention centers to Nazi concentration camps is the most recent example. Pro-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) legislation introduced in Congress only weeks ago alluded to the need for imposing an economic boycott of Israel, just as we had done with Nazi Germany (and the Soviet Union and South Africa).

Notwithstanding efforts in many places to institute Holocaust education programs, the passage of time has presented Jewish educators and organizations with a tremendous challenge.

A poll commissioned by the Conference on Material Claims Against Germany (known as the Claims Conference) found that among American millennials, “22 percent have not heard of or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust.” Further, 41 percent in the poll “believe that 2 million Jews or less were killed in the Holocaust.” And 49 percent could not name one concentration camp or ghetto. An astounding 66 percent were not able to identify the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Research in Canada, Austria and Germany revealed somewhat similar findings. Millennials in the latter two countries felt overwhelmingly that Holocaust education was important (many had participated in such programs); yet in Austria, 17 percent of those polled believed that only “100,000 or fewer Jews were murdered” in the Holocaust.

And that brings us back to the Internet offering for clothing adorned with the searing photo from Vinnitsa. The passage of time, 24/7 coverage of civil wars, executions and a daily plethora of amateur videos of shootouts and shoot-ups that come to us as “Breaking News” have dulled the senses to genocides and violence of historic proportions.

And though there are dueling arguments about the effect of video games, can one really doubt that such fare at least makes young people inured to violence, past or present?

Four decades ago, when I began my career in community relations, I used to have a line in my speeches that said: “There’ll come a time when the last survivor, who was there and could tell us about what he or she experienced, will be gone. And then there will be no one here to answer, with first-person authority, the Holocaust minimizers and deniers.”

We’re close to that point. We need to redouble our efforts, at every level, to educate and remember. Media outlets cannot be flippant or careless when these images and comparisons are aired.

The mega-Internet community, already under fire for allowing “anything goes” content policies to prevail over common sense and good taste, needs to be far more vigilant than it claims it is. And officeholders, at every level, need to dial back completely the kind of harmful hyperbole which often gets a pass for being just good old political rhetoric.
​
The slippery slope of Holocaust trivialization is upon us. We owe it to the victims, and ourselves, to ensure now that it be reversed.

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Daniel S. Mariaschin is CEO of B'nai B'rith International.

Op-Ed By CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin In The Jerusalem Post - What I Learned At The Dinner Table: Talking About Antisemitism

11/26/2018

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Growing up in New Hampshire in the 1950s and 1960s, we received most of our international news from our trusty, burgundy Bakelite GE radio that sat on our kitchen table. Our local radio station was a CBS affiliate, and I ate many a breakfast and dinner hearing broadcasting icons like Lowell Thomas, Charles Collingwood, Dallas Townsend and Alexander Kendrick.

Most mornings, my father would pick up a copy of the New York Herald-Tribune at Donahue’s, a newsstand on Main Street, and in the afternoon, he’d buy the Keene Evening Sentinel, our main source for local news. But it was at the kitchen table, with the radio on most of the day, that we’d discuss the important events of the day.

For Jews in the 1950s, memories of the Holocaust were fresh, already indelibly etched in the psyche not only of those who experienced it, but also those who had the good fortune to be living in the United States. My parents frequently referenced it: my mother would often mention her having received letters from relatives in Lithuania who passionately asked for help in coming to America. No one in our family knew anyone – a politician, someone high up in the federal government, even a journalist – who could move heaven and earth to issue visas to get them out. It always bothered my mother that she was helpless to save them.

So we talked a lot about the Holocaust and what brought it about. My father came to America from Czarist Russia when he was 13, and while he had no first-person stories about pogroms, he would frequently mention them as a point of reference in any discussion about antisemitism. My mother had a copy of John Roy Carlson’s Under Cover in our bookcase, which focused on the German-American Bund and other pro-Nazi organizations that thrived in the United States in the 1930s. She would also mention the pro-fascist, antisemitic radio broadcasts of Detroit’s Father Charles Coughlin, whose rants ruled the airwaves at exactly the same time.

We also talk about the Virginia-based American Nazi Party, led by George Lincoln Rockwell who would lead his arm band-clad “storm troopers” at demonstrations in the Washington, DC area and elsewhere. My mother would cite Rockwell as an example of how antisemitism was still not stamped out, despite the Holocaust, and that he was operating here in America.

We were keenly aware of discrimination against Jews in hiring, public accommodations, and higher education. I heard the word “quotas” at a very early age. Friends and relatives went to certain schools because other universities just wouldn’t admit many Jews. Indeed, you’d have to state your religion on your college application, and paste on a photo as well. Bank hiring? Forget it. Hotels and resorts?  Some welcomed Jews as guests; many didn’t. Private clubs were notorious for excluding Jews as members. Jewish actors and actresses had, for years, anglicized or changed their names based on the belief that Jewish-sounding surnames could be a bar to popular success.

It wasn’t that many years before I was sitting in on these discussions at the dinner table that the motion picture Gentleman’s Agreement pulled the curtain on the extent of antisemitism – genteel or otherwise – that existed in post-war America. Gregory Peck’s portrayal of a non-Jewish journalist, posing as someone who was Jewish, testing the restrictive, antisemitic social environment that prevailed, was a monumental breakthrough in mainstreaming popular understanding of an age-old scourge.

A check of the B’nai B’rith archives came up with three examples of this kind of discrimination; they are typical of thousands of other instances of everyday antisemitism that the American Jewish community experienced.

A letter dated March 3, 1947, from the Hotel Winona and Park Hotel in Winona, Minnesota, responded to an inquiry for rooms from Mr. Nathan Scharf. The hotel’s representative wrote that “First, due to restrictions around our lakes, I must know whether you are Jewish or not, as Jewish people are not allowed….”

Another letter, from the Woodland Lodge in Elcho, Wisconsin, dated July 10, 1947, advised Mrs. R. Uslander that “We are returning your check for $5, for we cannot provide for you at the time requested. After seeing your letter we note that you are associated in some manner with Camp Maccabee. Perhaps we should advise you that we do not cater to people of the Jewish (sic) race.”

And this, dated July 29, 1959, from the headmistress of a girl’s school in Charleston, South Carolina to a mother who had submitted an application and entrance fee for her daughter:

“We appreciate your interest in the school but we have found that it is a wise policy not to accept students of religious faiths different from the majority of the girls here….

“While we are a non-sectarian school, our resident girls are all members of Christian churches. Past experience has taught us that the Jewish girls find it difficult to fit into our schedules because of different times of church services and religious holidays.”

These were the very visible barriers that beset an otherwise well-educated, hardworking, patriotic Jewish community. At dinner, or later in the living room, we’d discuss these kinds of stories and met them with a mixture of shrugs and some anger, always accompanied by an expression of hope that things would change for the better.

In fact, they did.

There were many contributing factors, among them Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, which made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or religion in public accommodation and hiring. Pope John XXIII’s determination to address centuries of antisemitism within the Catholic Church, culminating in 1963’s Nostra Aetate declaration, opened the doors to other advances in interfaith relations. In the process, non-Jews became more accepting, and Jews, more confident.

Into the 1970s, barriers began to fall. In 1974, there were three Jewish members of the United States Senate, one of whom was filling a vacancy, and just 12 Jewish members of the House of Representatives.  One Jewish political figure, interviewed in Stephen Isaacs’s Jews and American Politics (1974), said Jews were hesitant oftentimes to run for office, so worked on campaign fund-raising or as media advisors. Fifteen years later, the numbers were eight in the Senate and 23 in the House. And into this century, those numbers grew even larger.

Today, entertainers use their own names, and no one blinks an eye. Yiddishisms have entered the vernacular, and many universities offer Jewish and Holocaust studies programs.  Quotas in university admissions are long gone. And corporate suites in businesses that were previously off-limits to Jews have opened, as well.

AND, YET…
That’s why the shootings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue came as such a body blow to our community. The warning signs were definitely there. Even before that horrific day, three separate Jewish community centers had shooting incidents, in Los Angeles, Seattle and Overland Park, Kansas. The Tiki-torch-bearing demonstrators in Charlottesville shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” The Internet is chock full of websites, blogs and comments that trumpet unadulterated hatred of Jews. And the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement, which calls Israel an “apartheid state,” and which uses Nazi imagery to describe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, only thinly veils the antisemitic tenor of its campaign to delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state.

If my parents were here today, there’d be plenty to discuss at the kitchen table. We’d surely talk about the threats and the challenges to our community. The spike in antisemitism in Europe, from the Left and the Right, would be a main topic of discussion. We might, at a certain point of discouragement, even repeat the Passover Haggada admonition that “in every generation they rise against us to destroy us.”
But then we’d be grateful for good friends, personal as well as in the broader community – who speak out, as they did after the Pittsburgh shootings, about the dangers posed by the new antisemites. What separates this country from others when antisemitism rises to the surface is the breadth of solidarity that results when it occurs. In the wake of the Tree of Life horror, I heard words of outrage and comfort from classmates, foreign diplomats and others whose first reactive response was to reach out to the Jews they know.

With that, we’d rise from the table, secure in our Jewishness, worried about what might come next after Pittsburgh, pledging to do what we could – letters-to-the-editor, conversations with neighbors, keeping up on the latest reports of antisemitic acts at home and abroad – to meet the challenge when antisemitism “rears its ugly head.”

We certainly have our work cut out for us. We need to re-double our efforts to greatly expand the number of public schools that have Holocaust education programs. We need to confront, head-on, the explosion of hate on the Internet, notwithstanding First Amendment guarantees of free speech; privately-owned companies whose platforms allow this kind of verbiage to proliferate need to police themselves. This is a “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” moment. And we must see the BDS movement for what it is: the next level of global antisemitism.

Looking back, that small kitchen was indeed my classroom, preparing me well for the difficulties that lie ahead.


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Daniel S. Mariaschin is the CEO and Executive Vice President of B'nai B'rith International.

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Op-Ed by CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin in the Jerusalem Post: UN Funding Perpetuates Palestinian Narratives

10/12/2018

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The annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly, with its dozens of speeches by presidents, prime ministers and other dignitaries, has concluded. But there is trouble ahead relating to UN expenditures to fund various, notoriously biased bodies.
The UN will now return to its usual business, much of it devoted to perpetuating the Palestinian narrative, at UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in Paris, at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, and others of its agencies. The politicization of the UN system, especially when it comes to defaming and delegitimizing Israel, continues to degrade the organization’s original mission.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration’s cutoff of funds to UNRWA (UN Relief Works Agency) pending the reform of that bloated and biased organization, has grabbed international attention. Over decades, it has exhorted Palestinians to see Jews and Israel through an antisemitic lens, and to believe that all Palestinians will one day “return” to the entirety of what is now Israel. And rather than promoting peace and reconciliation, it has cooperated with terrorist organizations, particularly in Gaza, that seek Israel’s destruction.

UNRWA does its business in the Middle East, but it is in New York where the brain trust of this effort is situated. In the wake of the infamous 1975 Zionism=Racism resolution adopted by the General Assembly, came the so-called Palestinian committees and division, specifically established and funded by the UN to advance the Palestinian political agenda. The Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and the Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR) exist for the singular purpose of promoting an anti-Israel message worldwide – in the name of the UN.

Indeed, CEIRPP sponsors conferences and photo exhibitions worldwide, which demean Israel and promote “the return” of all Palestinians. There are 26 countries that sit on the committee, including Malaysia, Bolivia and Venezuela. Twenty-four countries sit in as observer states, including many members of the Arab League.

The DPR, housed within the UN Secretariat (the only people to be so recognized), is staffed full-time by UN employees, and has been charged with assisting CEIRPP on a day-to-day basis to advance its mission. Its entire budget is paid by the UN for the purpose of engaging in the worldwide dissemination of Palestinian anti-Israel propaganda. So much for the UN being a member of the Quartet (together with the United States, Russia and the European Union), which was ostensibly organized to promote negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and not be a partisan for one side over the other.

The DPR uses the UN’s Department of Public Information and its 63 information centers around the word to get its anti-Israel message out. Among the programs of the DPR, as listed on its website are: “[Organizes] international meetings and conferences in various regions and encourages the participation of all sectors of the international community. These meetings and conferences ‘are to mobilize international support for and assistance to the Palestinian people.’”

Just how the DPR uses the system is revealed in this point from the website: “Annual training programs are conducted for the staff of the Palestinian Authority, getting staff of the PA to acquire professional expertise in the various aspects of the work of the United Nations and multilateral diplomatic work.”

Is it any wonder, with this kind of infrastructure in the world’s most important multilateral organization, the Palestinians have no incentive to negotiate with Israel?

The annual budget for both CEIRPP and the DPR comes to over $6 million. But if you add in the value of the work done by the DPI to advance the agenda of these two bodies, the amount is substantially higher. Rather than an investment in peace, which the UN set up business to do in 1945, this financial support by UN member-states has exacerbated the conflict, not helped to resolve it. It has enabled and supported full-throated expressions of the most extreme positions on the Palestinian side, including intentionally misleading millions of Palestinians to believe that they will return to what is now Israel and demographically overwhelm its Jewish population.

Might it not be better to take the funds and channel the money into programs like micro-financing for Palestinian women, or other economic-empowerment projects that would give people a stake in a peaceful future?

The UN budget is approved for two years, with the next one to be presented in 2019. The General Assembly does, however, extend the mandates and the funding authorizations for the Palestinian committee and division annually, and that vote will come up in November. Over the past few years, it’s been a mixed voting bag. For DPR and CEIRPP the no votes went up slightly, as did the yes votes, while abstentions held steady. The special committee was most dramatic with a fall to only 83 yes votes last year.

But nothing would strike a more resounding note for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than eliminating these centers of rejectionism and hate. As long as the Palestinians feel they have the international wind at their back – including the use of the UN system as their private public relations mechanism – all talk of a serious “peace process” will continue to fall on deaf ears among Palestinians and their supporters in the international community.

Indeed, while the PA leadership speaks in one way about a two-state solution, its activity in the UN says something entirely different. UNRWA, CEIRPP and the DPR, by promoting the Palestinian “right of return” as the main element of their programs, suggest an objective of a one-state solution, in which the demise of the Jewish state is achieved by the mathematics of demography.

Many countries speak, oftentimes in rote pronouncements, about the need for peace in the region. Voting “no” next month at the UN on continued authorization of the Palestinian committees would be a good way for them to “walk the walk.”

The writer is CEO and executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International.

To read the original version on the Jerusalem Post, click here. 

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Six Days Remembered: The Battle Is Not Over

6/8/2017

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The Algemeiner ran an op-ed written by B'nai B'rith International CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin on the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War, and the current tensions between Iran and Israel.

You can read the full op-ed below or click to read it on algemeiner.com
Click Here To Read

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CEO and Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin
The 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War will be commemorated in many ways in the coming days. Media retrospectives, conferences, new documentaries and first person remembrances of the battles and their aftermath will be seen and heard in Israel, here in the United States and elsewhere.
​
For those of a certain age, we’ll be asking each other: “Do you remember where you were on June 5, 1967?” I do.

I vividly recall being in my high school cafeteria waiting for the bell to ring for first period. Each morning, a group of us would gather at the back of the cafeteria, just shooting the breeze, as high school seniors do. But this morning was different; one of my friends, who had obviously seen the news before leaving for school, perhaps on the Today Show, said to me, “You guys are really beating the Arabs.”
 
I knew immediately that the war had begun. It was the culmination of more than three weeks of threats to destroy Israel emanating from Cairo and Damascus. Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Syria’s President Nureddin al-Atassi, and those who represented them, were clearly signaling their intention to finish off the Jewish state.
Actually, these threats began months earlier. A New York Timesheadline on October 15, 1966, read: “Israel Tells UN Syria Plans War to Destroy Her.” Abba Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, addressed the Security Council, referencing dozens of Syrian threats against the Jewish state.

​Between then and May 1967, hardly a day passed without threats from Nasser. On March 8, he declared: “We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil covered in blood.” A month later, Syria Information Minister Mahmoud Zubi predicted that, “this battle will be…followed by more severe battles until Palestine is liberated and the Zionist presence ended.”

The pace picked up throughout May, with both official radio outlets in Cairo and Damascus promising to defeat the “Zionist entity.” Egypt demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula, who had been stationed there since the Suez campaign of 1956. Then Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, considered by some to be an act of war. Neither the UN, nor the international community, seemed willing — or even the slightest bit interested — in taking Israel out of its isolation. The best UN Secretary-General U Thant could utter, after Egypt’s demand that the peacekeeping forces leave, was a weak, “…may I advise you that I have serious misgivings about it… [the] withdrawal may have grave implications for peace.”

The closing of the Straits was criticized by both the United States and the United Kingdom as contravening international law, with Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Wilson stating “[Egypt’s blockade] must not be allowed to triumph; Britain would join with efforts to open the Straits.” But, in the end, nothing was done to stand up to Cairo and Damascus’ march toward war.

The Egyptians and Syrians were so confident of victory that Hafez Assad, then Syria’s defense minister and later its president, said on May 20: “Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse any aggression, but to initiate the act ourselves, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland of Palestine. … I believe that the time has come to begin a battle of annihilation.”

Sitting in our living room in New Hampshire, my family watched and listened to this litany of threats unfold, one more belligerent than the next. Egypt’s UN Ambassador Mobared El-Kony and Syria’s, George Tomeh, were particularly threatening in Security Council debates on the crisis. We worried endlessly about our relatives living on a kibbutz not far from the Syrian border.

​Each day brought even greater boasts from the region, and we took them all seriously. We comforted ourselves only by watching and listening to the oratorical skills of Eban, whose speeches at the UN Security Council not only outlined the Arab threats, but the rightness of Israel’s cause.

On May 30, Nasser ratcheted up the tone even more: “The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel…to face the challenge, while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation. The act will astound the world…”

And Iraq’s President Abdul Rahman Arif couldn’t have been more direct, when he said on May 31: “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear — to wipe Israel off the map.”

The rest is history. Israel’s defense forces routed the Arab armies in six days, and the war — which was named for its length — has been enshrined in Jewish history as one of its most glorious chapters.
I rushed home from school on the afternoon of June 5, turning on CBS News on our local station, WKNE, to hear Michael Elkins reporting from Israel that the Israeli Air Force had destroyed the combined Arab air forces on the ground. We were jubilant.

Back at school the next day, I was able to follow events on the radio in the high school office. In the small city in which we lived, my father took a petition supporting Israel to merchants and friends on Main Street, asking that they sign in support of Israel. Nothing else in our lives mattered that week. As the days passed, the feelings of relief turned to triumph and then to pride in what we never imagined happening.

​Today, it is the Iranian regime that is making the threats to annihilate Israel. The Jewish state is a “cancer” that needs to be eradicated, its leaders say. Tehran paints those very words on the sides of ballistic missiles that it parades, with hubris, in full sight of international TV coverage. Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and it makes no difference, really, if it is in mothballs for a few years. Already, European officials say that Tehran is shopping for dual use technologies to utilize when it is ready to do so. And Iran provides thousands of rockets to Hezbollah, and mentors and supports Hamas, both of which call for Israel’s destruction many times daily.

And the United Nations, which stood idly by in 1967, today has under its roof agencies like the UN Human Rights Council and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which year after year have sought to delegitimize, demonize and marginalize Israel.  In 1967, Britain’s Sir Alec Douglas-Home, speaking about the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, presciently said: “…the first casualty (of this crisis) had been the United Nations. It would need an immense effort, an almost superhuman effort, to restore the prestige of that organization.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. The UN continues to risk irrelevancy by allowing the pummeling of Israel to continue.

The Six-Day War was a miracle, aided by courageous leaders and soldiers who had no choice but to win. It was a defining moment for young Jews of our generation. And it fortunately established the Jewish state as the regional power it is. But the battles that followed, including the Yom Kippur War, the First and Second Lebanon Wars and the Gaza campaigns, attest to the continuing desire of Israel’s enemies to bring it down — one way or another.
Iran is only the latest of these foes to threaten Israel, and its newfound bounty, by way of the nuclear agreement, has left it flush with cash to attempt to carry out its objectives. While we observe those momentous six days, let us all be sure to sleep with one eye open.

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EVP Dan Mariaschin Remembers Shimon Peres

9/29/2016

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​WATCH B'nai B'rith International EVP Dan Mariaschin as he reflects on the life of Shimon Peres.
 
Mariaschin calls Peres the "last of his generation" of "those men and women who were present at the creation and who were responsible for founding the modern state of Israel."

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Times of Israel EVP Op-Ed: Europe’s Uneven Hand on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict

8/15/2016

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The Times of Israel ran an op-ed written by B'nai B'rith International Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin on Europe's tilt toward the Palestinian's and how many EU countries help the Palestinians game the the United Nations against Israel in the conflict.

You can read the full op-ed below or click to read it on TimesOfIsrael.com
Click Here To Read

PictureExecutive Vice President
Daniel S. Mariaschin
Through this summer’s din and uncertainty of Brexit, the migration crisis and a wave of terror, Europe has remained constant in one respect: its singular fixation on a wrong-headed policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

If the Middle East were an arrivals and departures board at a train station, the Israeli-Palestinian question would be down somewhere at the fifth or sixth spot, behind the war on ISIS, the Syrian civil war, the Libya fiasco and Iranian hegemonism. All those decades in which the mantra “if you solve the Palestinian issue, all outstanding issues will fall into place,” has been proven to be nothing more than hollow conventional wisdom. The Sunni-Shia divide has become a roiling ocean, creating aftershocks in nearly every corner of the region — and beyond.


For years, the Palestinian leadership has become accustomed to “pride of place” on the issue, picking up supporters and apologists globally, but no more so than in Europe itself. Explanations for this are varied: some countries were concerned at one point about the spread of PLO terrorism in Europe, and sought accommodation with the terrorist organization. Some European governments were driven by ideological considerations and looked the other way at the thuggery, then the obstructionism of the PLO and its successors, while coming down hard on a succession of center-left and center-right Israeli governments. Some European leaders saw themselves as mediators and interlocutors, worrying that a shortage of obeisance to the Palestinian narrative would disqualify them from being “honest brokers.”

Indeed, since its 1980 Venice Declaration, in which the then-EEC (European Economic Community) supported the Palestinian’s call for “self-determination,” Europe has always tilted to the Palestinian side, despite the existence of generally good bilateral relations between a number of European Union (EU) countries and Israel.

As the EU grew in size, some differences in this approach became discernible. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, a number of the new democracies could be found voting against, or abstaining on issues considered to be biased against Israel at the United Nations (U.N.) and other international fora. Increasingly, though, the demand for consensus in EU voting has seen the voting independence of the former Central and Eastern European states dissipate in the face of pressure from Brussels and from a number of the senior EU member capitals.

The 2012 decision to upgrade the status of the Palestinians to “non-member state”—despite the EU’s call for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, with the object of reaching a two state solution—was supported by no less than 14 EU members. Only the Czech Republic voted against; 12 others abstained. The message to the Palestinian Authority couldn’t have been clearer: why negotiate with Israel when the international community, including key European countries, could do the heavy lifting for it?

Gaming the U.N. system has become a PA specialty.

One recent case in point is a resolution singling out Israel recently adopted at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) World Health Assembly in Geneva. The measure, introduced by Kuwait on behalf of the Arab Group and Palestine, singled out Israel for “physical and procedural barriers to health access” in the territories, east Jerusalem and what they call the “Syrian Golan.” The text also cited the “prolonged occupation and human rights violations on mental, physical and environmental health…”

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the daily lives of Israelis and Palestinians knows that emergency rooms and hospital wards in Israel treat Palestinians on a daily basis. Indeed, the Israeli organization, Save a Child’s Heart, which performs, gratis, pediatric cardiac surgery, has treated more than 2,000 Palestinian children since its inception in 1996. Beyond that, Israel has been treating hundreds of cases of civilians from across Syria who have been wounded in the barrel bombings and other carnage of that bloody war in medical facilities in the northern part of Israel.

And yet, 107 countries supported this libelous WHO resolution, including all 28 EU member states. On a continent where the blood libel against Jewish communities was a prominent fixture of life in the Middle Ages, and on the basis of facts widely known in European capitals, it is both incomprehensible, and reprehensible that Israel should be castigated in this way.

Another recent example of Palestinian influence at the U.N. is the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Executive Board’s vote in favor of a resolution on “Occupied Palestine.” There are 40 points in the resolution, some of it rehashing previous resolutions condemning Israel for all manner of absurd accusations of “desecrating” holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem. But this measure makes no reference at all to the Temple Mount, only to its Islamic/Arabic name, Al-Haram Al-Sharif. In the resolution, the plaza in front of the Western Wall is referred to as the Al-Buraq Plaza; “Western Wall Plaza” is noted in quotes only.

This isn’t only a matter of semantics, or “sensitivity.” In the past, the United Nations documents have referenced the holy site by both the name recognized by Judaism and Christianity (the Temple Mount) and Islam (Al-Haram Al-Sharif). This current re-writing of history, and the elimination of both the Jewish and Christian places in that history, was supported by 33 countries overall. Four EU countries actually supported the measure, and five did oppose, with two abstentions. But why was there a division in Europe over this blatant historical revisionism?

To the Palestinians, all of this has a purpose: to erase or delegitimize Israel’s, and the Jewish people’s claim to the land. That European countries, no strangers to either the Jewish narrative on their own continent or to the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, would, for the sake of diplomatic expediency, dismiss that history with a simple keystroke or a voting show of hands, is unacceptable.

There’s even more counterproductive meddling beyond the U.N. system. Case in point: Last fall’s EU directive to label products from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights prejudges an issue (settlements) that belongs in a direct negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians. The EU itself, as a member of the Quartet (which also includes the United States, the United Nations and Russia), wants to have it both ways. Calling for face-to-face negotiations but siding with the Palestinians before those talks have even begun on this issue.

This all amounts to flawed diplomacy. Those European countries which engage in this kind of voting behavior or in extra-curricular diplomacy could better spend their time encouraging the Palestinians to end their quixotic sullying of Israel, rather than enabling it. These resolutions set back what remains of the peace process, they don’t advance it. Palestinian expectations are inflated when Europe backs these initiatives, and in Israel, the belief that it can never get a fair break at the U.N. and other international fora is reinforced.

It’s time for Brussels and other European capitals to send a simple message to Ramallah: if you’re serious about peace, get to the table. If not, there is no shortage of crises to occupy our time and attention.

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Australian Jewish News EVP Op-Ed: Taking on today’s terrorists 

8/12/2016

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The Australian Jewish News ran an op-ed written by B'nai B'rith International Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin and B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission Chairman Dvir Abramovich reflecting on the 40th anniversary of the Israeli raid on Entebbe, and how international terrorism and the way it's handled has changed over that time. 

Mariaschin is visiting Australia and will deliver the 2016 B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission Gandel Oration.

You can scroll down to read the op-ed or click below to read it on the Anti-Defamation Commission's website.
Click here to read

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Business as Usual at the U.N. Human Rights Council

3/18/2016

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In an op-ed for The Times of Israel, Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin has returned from the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva and he can report: It’s business as usual. Agenda Item 7 persists as the only country-specific item, maligning Israel year-in and year-out, while a number of regimes around the world violate their own people’s human rights. While in Geneva, Mariaschin spoke with a number of foreign representatives and diplomats, urging them to say “no” to Item 7. 

Click here to read the op-ed on TimesofIsrael.com


PictureExecutive Vice President
Daniel S. Marischin
It has been business as usual at the U.N. Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva this month.

​Here’s why it matters.

Notwithstanding the need for urgent attention to such serial abusers as Syria’s Assad regime, which continues to barrel-bomb its own citizens in the midst of a destructive civil war, and Iran, which most certainly vies for the lead in any number of human rights abuses, including the execution of juvenile offenders, Israel is still singled out for special opprobrium.

If this sounds like a broken record, it is. Each year, all countries up for discussion are lumped together into one agenda item, while Israel is always separated out from the rest for individual scrutiny under Item “7” which applies solely to the Jewish state, the only democracy in the Middle East. Subsumed under that item this year are a basket of separate resolutions, as well as six reports. The resolutions, which make no pretence at being objective, hammer Israel for “the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” settlements, human rights abuses in the Golan Heights and a call for Palestinian self-determination.

The special reports include updates on the infamous Goldstone Commission Report, which was written in the wake of the 2009 Gaza war, and which suggested Israel might be guilty of war crimes. Judge Richard Goldstone, who chaired the group which wrote the report, ultimately backed away from its one-sided findings. In the U.N. system, however, vituperation against Israel has a life of its own, so the report lives on.

What does all of this have to do with the real world in 2016? The Middle East is not only in chaos, it is in meltdown mode in Iraq and Syria. Libya has now become the new ISIS target of opportunity. Iran, soon to be flush with cash from the nuclear deal with the P5+1, sends its Revolutionary Guards to Syria, along with its wholly-owned subsidiary Hezbollah, the terrorist organization that has taken over control of Lebanon, to back the Assad regime. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost in this conflict, Christians and Yazidis have been massacred and subject to humiliation, eviction and dispersal, with millions becoming part of the biggest refugee migration in decades.

This situation has received scant attention from a U.N. body “re-formed and reformed” 10 years ago to address real human rights crises. Its 47 members have really done no such thing. It is dominated by countries from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Non-Aligned Movement, and something called the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries, said to represent 50 percent of the world’s population, whose worldview includes protecting many of those countries who are in the first line of human rights abusers.

This session, as a result of membership rotation, the United States is not on the Council. Nevertheless, it has spoken out strongly against the double standard Israel receives at the hands of the members of the body. Neither is Canada, which has been a staunch defender of Israel over the past decade. The EU countries choose not to participate in the debate on Item 7, though several of its member states, critical of Israel, find a way to do so. The EU could act more forcefully against this on-going diplomatic charade, but it refrains from doing that—another example of how its actions often don’t measure up to the values it claims to uphold.

As for the Palestinians it once again proves that, though largely crowded out of the news because of events in the region, their ability to manipulate the U.N. system continues. Whether it was attaining full membership at UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), non-member state status at the General Assembly, or getting its flag flown in front of the U.N. in New York and other U.N. venues (including Geneva), they continue to plug away, not feeling any pressure to return to the negotiating table with Israel. And why should they? The Palestinians feel they have the international community’s blindly supportive wind at their back—even at a time when the Middle East neighborhood in which the Palestinians are based, is imploding.

One European diplomat I met in Geneva, after a spirited discussion about how annual denunciations of Israel only embolden the Palestinians and discourage the Israelis, told me point blank that if they were to say “no’ to Item 7, “the Palestinian door would be closed to us.” My rejoinder was that if the EU—which has often been the Palestinians’ friend in court and which has for years funded the salaries of Palestinian Authority (PA) civil servants—really sought to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue, they would spend their time urging the PA to move to the negotiating table, rather than allow this yearly lacerating of Israel to continue.

So as the Middle East burns, Nero—in this case—the Human Rights Council, fiddles. An aversion to doubling down on real abusers of human rights, and a propensity to let the anti-Israel rhetoric flow in Item 7 and its accompanying reports, speaks to the hypocrisy and emptiness of the Council and the system that has produced it.

Living in a time where, from our smart phone screens we can learn, real time, about the abuses of human rights everywhere, a global conscience is AWOL. Each day it stays that way, real opportunities to help those who suffer, pass. Instead, at the Human Rights Council and elsewhere, there is always time to unfairly castigate Israel.
​
What a terrible waste.


Daniel S. Mariaschin is the Executive Vice President at B'nai B'rith International, and has spent nearly all of his professional life working on behalf of Jewish organizations. As the organization's top executive officer, he directs and supervises B'nai B'rith programs, activities and staff in the more than 50 countries where B'nai B'rith is organized. He also serves as director of B'nai B'rith's Center for Human Rights and Public Policy (CHRPP). In that capacity, he presents B'nai B'rith's perspective to a variety of audiences, including Congress and the media, and coordinates the center's programs and policies on issues of concern to the Jewish community. To view some of his additional content, Click Here.
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EVP OP-ED: Post-Iran Nuclear Agreement: Business as Usual in Latin America

1/28/2016

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In an op-ed for The Algemeiner, Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin that Iran President Hassan Rouhani is on a victory lap following the lifting of sanctions and that Tehran’s friends in Latin America will be sure to bask in the glow.Mariaschin details which Latin American countries will continue to support the regime in Iran, and why even though we’re often transfixed on the chaos of the Middle East it’s important to keep an eye on what’s happening south of our border.

Click here to read the op-ed on The Algemeiner's website.

PictureExecutive Vice President
Daniel S. Mariaschin
The sight of Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani now globetrotting his way to world capitals on what he surely sees as a victory lap after signing the nuclear agreement is yet another reminder of how quickly the Tehran regime is being rehabilitated.

He’s not yet made his way to Latin America, but he may yet do so: Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have been staunch friends of Iran over the years. Surely those countries will want to bask in Tehran’s newfound diplomatic luster and supp at the trough of its economic promise, now that most sanctions have been lifted.

Iran’s penetration of Latin America goes back more than 20 years. The bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, and the attack on the AMIA social welfare building in 1994, which killed more than 80 people, can be laid at the doorstep of Iranian operatives and their terrorist proxies, Hezbollah.

With the coming to power of the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Iran ratcheted up its operations in the hemisphere, including the infamous Tehran-Caracas IranAir flight, which symbolized the close ties the two regimes established. Fellow travelers Bolivia and Ecuador — part of the South American anti-West club — soon joined eagerly, surely benefiting from Tehran’s “walking around” largesse, used to expand its influence in the region.

Indeed, Venezuela has fallen further into an economic abyss under Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, making more likely Caracas will become even more indebted (and not just financially) to the Iranians.

The result has been not only an Iranian friendship circle, but a bloc of countries pledged to anti-Israel rhetoric and activity at the United Nations and other multilateral fora.

A recent report in London’s Al-Awsat Arabic newspaper speaks of Hezbollah cells operating in at least five countries in the hemisphere, which comes as no surprise. Similar reports have been cropping up over the now nearly 25 years since the terrorist acts in Buenos Aires.

Against this backdrop of Iranian activity in our backyard, there is some encouraging news. The new government in Argentina, led by Mauricio Macri has rolled back a “memorandum of understanding” between the previous Argentine government and Iran, the purpose of which was to bury the longtime investigation into the AMIA bombing — and with it Tehran’s clear fingerprints — and its terrorist presence in that country. It has also given new impetus to an investigation into the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, the chief Argentine prosecutor in the case — and who was on the verge of disclosing details that may have incriminated Argentine government operatives, as well as the Iranians.

As a result, Argentine-Israeli relations are expected to vastly improve. That may also be the case in Uruguay, which now holds a UN Security Council seat, and whose previous government was often seen as sympathetic to Palestinian and radical positions on a wide range of issues. Uruguay’s new (and former) President Tabare Vazquez did post-doctoral work at the Weizmann Institute years ago, and takes a much more open-minded view of Middle East issues than his predecessor.

And then there is Paraguay. For years, the locus of one third of the infamous tri-border area (together with Brazil and Argentina), a lawless center for smuggling and hospitable to radical elements, the country is led by a president, Horacio Cartes, who has taken principled stands — at odds with his neighbors — including votes at the United Nations relating to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Our attention is often so riveted on the concentric circles of chaos, terrorism and violence in the Middle East and North Africa, we sometimes lose sight of what transpires south of our border. For more than two decades now, Iran has seen our neighborhood as a target of opportunity, and has cultivated it with impunity: terrorist bombings for which it has never paid a price, flattering the likes of Chavez and his circle for strategic gain and creating cells of agents moving about from here to who-knows-where.
​
Now out-and-about that they are free of official international opprobrium, the ties they have created in Latin America bear special scrutiny. Rather than having to work largely out of the public eye, they can do so now to a large extent above board. Look for “official visits” of Rouhani and others to our hemisphere, in short order. Ignoring this threat, like so many others that characterize the regime in Tehran, would be at our peril.


Daniel S. Mariaschin is the Executive Vice President at B'nai B'rith International, and has spent nearly all of his professional life working on behalf of Jewish organizations. As the organization's top executive officer, he directs and supervises B'nai B'rith programs, activities and staff in the more than 50 countries where B'nai B'rith is organized. He also serves as director of B'nai B'rith's Center for Human Rights and Public Policy (CHRPP). In that capacity, he presents B'nai B'rith's perspective to a variety of audiences, including Congress and the media, and coordinates the center's programs and policies on issues of concern to the Jewish community. To view some of his additional content, Click Here.
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Amid the Chaos: Israel-Gulf Ties Entering a Second Act?

12/22/2015

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In a blog for the Times of Israel, Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin explores Israel's past efforts to create permanent ties to the Arab world with the news that the Jewish state will open an office in Abu Dhabi.
From the Camp David agreement with Egypt in 1979 to the 1991 Madrid Conference to the Israeli-Jordanian treaty of 1994, Mariaschin looks various points in time that seemed promising in opening relations, to the regression of those relations in the current day.
Could the Abu Dhabi office be the start of a new relationship between Israel and the Arab states? 

Click here to the read the blog on The Times of Israel website. 

PictureExecutive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin
Israel’s announcement that it will soon open an office in Abu Dhabi recalls a period in the mid-1990s which demonstrated some promise about the possibility of Israeli ties to the Arab world.

When considering those ties, the right place to begin the discussion would be the Camp David agreement and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt in 1979.The Israeli-Jordanian treaty of 1994 could be considered either the bookend of that effort begun in Jerusalem and Cairo, or the beginning of a second—and what appeared to be promising—stage in Israel’s relations with the Arab world. In the wake of the 1991 Madrid Conference, which openly brought Israelis and Arabs into the same room together, a number of Arab countries opened “offices” in Israel. Included among them were Morocco, Oman, Tunisia and Qatar. Little publicity surrounded the presence of these offices, which were not embassies or consulates, per se. They were billed primarily as “trade representations.”

The post-Madrid period produced other important results. India, which had diplomatic ties with Israel since 1950, upgraded its relations to full ambassadorial status. That “era of good feeling” also produced the relatively short-lived “multilateral talks” aimed at moving forward a nascent Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Indeed, no less than 11 Arab states participated in these discussions, on such topics as economic development and the environment. In addition to the core participants—Israel, Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinians—the multilaterals included 26 other countries (primarily from Europe and Asia) and several agencies of the United Nations.

I recall visiting Tunisia with a B’nai B’rith mission in December 1994 where, coincidentally, the Arms Control and Regional Security multilaterals were being held in Tunis. There was a real sense that a diplomatic and psychological Rubicon had been crossed, with Israelis and Arabs mingling and talking alongside diplomats from key members of the European Union and Asian economic giants.

Though Saudi Arabia participated in the multilaterals, I have always believed that had Riyadh not been a fence-sitter at a crucial moment, had it taken the leap and itself opened an “office” in Israel, we might have been much further along on the road to some kind of Israeli-Palestinian accommodation than we were then—or certainly are, today. Had the Saudis sent a clear message in that direction by actually opening an office or some other demonstration of cooperation, the Palestinians (who were certainly major recipients of Saudi largesse in those days), might have had to sit up and take notice.

Instead, the Yasser Arafat-led Palestinians pushed away intense efforts to strike a deal in the closing months of the second Clinton Administration. That rejectionism, in turn, fueled the Second Intifada, which took 1,000 Israeli lives in a paroxysm of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.

That then began a regression from the once-promising steps on a path toward normal relations with the Arab world, culminating in the abrupt closure of the Moroccan, Qatari, Omani and Tunisian offices in Israel in the wake of the Second Intifada.
The conventional wisdom at the time was that if the Israeli-Palestinian problem could be solved, all other Middle East issues would fall into place. But looking back, it suggests that the Palestinian leadership had no serious interest in any deal that was not zero-sum in its favor.

Fast forward to 2015. The decades-old Arab fixation on the Palestinians has faded rapidly in some quarters with an ascendant and threatening Iran and the rise of ISIS. Iran’s hegemonistic designs on the region have created palpable apprehension in a number of Arab capitals, generating an important commonality of interest between Israel and some of its Middle East Arab neighbors.

Hamas makes no bones about calling for Israel’s destruction. The Palestinians are divided into two warring camps, in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian leadership in the latter seems unwilling, or unable, to move toward a free and fair negotiation with Israel. The shibboleth that solving the Palestinian issue would fix all of the region’s problems has given way to a Sunni-Shiite fight-to-the-finish in one country after another in the region. The Arab Spring has become a misnomer, now commonly derided as the Arab Winter. Big powers now compete in Syria, as the old World War I-era borders are erased in a blaze of religious-secular warfare. New definitions of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ are being written daily.

From all of that comes the announcement of the Israel office in the UAE. It will not be a diplomatic mission; instead it will be a representation among some 144 countries who sit at the International Renewable Energy Agency, which is headquartered in Abu Dhabi.

This is not something that was done in the dark; announcements about the office have appeared and have been reported on everywhere. Where this welcome development will lead is not clear; it may just end with this; or, it may foretell a return to the promise of the mid-1990s, which began with the Madrid Conference.

There is clearly now a realization in some places in the Arab world that, contrary to being a threat, relations with Israel can serve everyone’s interest, and not just on the threat posed by Iran. Arab states have squandered decades in which, had they widely accepted Israel, they could have created a different environment in the region. But that need not be the case going forward.
​
As chaos grows in the region, some important things, fortunately, seem not to be spinning out of control.


Daniel S. Mariaschin is the Executive Vice President at B'nai B'rith International, and has spent nearly all of his professional life working on behalf of Jewish organizations. As the organization's top executive officer, he directs and supervises B'nai B'rith programs, activities and staff in the more than 50 countries where B'nai B'rith is organized. He also serves as director of B'nai B'rith's Center for Human Rights and Public Policy (CHRPP). In that capacity, he presents B'nai B'rith's perspective to a variety of audiences, including Congress and the media, and coordinates the center's programs and policies on issues of concern to the Jewish community. To view some of his additional content, Click Here.
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