Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Sunday (March 10) attended the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam even as pro-Palestine protesters staged demonstrations in the country demanding a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

The demonstrators denounced Herzog's presence at the event stating that it was "absurd that the president of Israel, committing war crimes at this very moment, is present at the opening of this important memorial".

Protesters, according to news agency Reuters, chanted "Never again is now" and "Ceasefire now" at a square close to the museum, while holding Palestinian flags and signs that said "Jews against genocide" and "The grandchild of a holocaust survivor says: Stop Gaza Holocaust".

Human rights group Amnesty International had placed signs around the museum directing Herzog to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague&nbsp;

South Africa has cited some of the remarks by Herzog in its International Court of Justice lawsuit against Israel.&nbsp;

He previously has said that not only militants but "an entire nation" was responsible for the attack that took place on Oct 7 and that Israel will fight "until we break their backbone".

Herzog claimed that his comments were misrepresented and that only a part of what he said was cited in the lawsuit in order to frame a case against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The museum officials said that the invitation to Herzog was extended before the war broke out between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The museum released a statement saying it recognised that Herzog's presence raised questions however, it said he represented the homeland of Dutch Holocaust survivors who moved to Israel.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/israel-hamas-war-canada-sweden-to-resume-funding-to-unrwa-but-still-taking-terror-allegations-seriously-698589">Israel-Hamas war: Canada, Sweden to resume funding to UNRWA but still taking terror allegations seriously</a>

<h2>Israel says Hamas hardening stance on hostage deal</h2>

Meanwhile, in a continued effort to secure the release of hostages still held captive in Gaza, the Israeli spy chief met with his US counterpart on Saturday (March 9), Tel Aviv said.

"The head of the Mossad, David Barnea, met yesterday (Friday) with the head of the CIA, Bill Burns, as part of the ceaseless efforts to advance another hostage release deal," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement on behalf of the Mossad.

"Contacts and cooperation with the mediators continue all the time in an effort to narrow the gaps and reach agreements," said Mossad.

The statement comes amid mediators scrambling to secure a new ceasefire deal in the Gaza war before Ramadan which could begin as early as Sunday, depending on the lunar calendar.

"At this stage, Hamas is entrenching its positions like someone who is not interested in a deal and is striving to inflame the region during Ramadan at the expense of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip," it said.

Mossad also stated that Hamas was aiming for unrest in the area to worsen during Ramadan.&nbsp;

Israeli officials have stated that the conflict between the warring sides would come to an end only with the defeat of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

(With inputs from agencies)

Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Sunday (March 10) attended the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam even as pro-Palestine protesters staged demonstrations in the country demanding a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Sunday (March 10) attended the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam even as pro-Palestine protesters staged demonstrations in the country demanding a ceasefire in the Gaza war. The demonstrators denounced Herzog's presence at the event stating that it was "absurd that the president of Israel, committing war crimes at this very moment, is present at the opening of this important memorial". Protesters, according to news agency Reuters, chanted "Never again is now" and "Ceasefire now" at a square close to the museum, while holding Palestinian flags and signs that said "Jews against genocide" and "The grandchild of a holocaust survivor says: Stop Gaza Holocaust". Human rights group Amnesty International had placed signs around the museum directing Herzog to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague South Africa has cited some of the remarks by Herzog in its International Court of Justice lawsuit against Israel. He previously has said that not only militants but "an entire nation" was responsible for the attack that took place on Oct 7 and that Israel will fight "until we break their backbone". Herzog claimed that his comments were misrepresented and that only a part of what he said was cited in the lawsuit in order to frame a case against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The museum officials said that the invitation to Herzog was extended before the war broke out between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The museum released a statement saying it recognised that Herzog's presence raised questions however, it said he represented the homeland of Dutch Holocaust survivors who moved to Israel. Also read: Israel-Hamas war: Canada, Sweden to resume funding to UNRWA but still taking terror allegations seriously Israel says Hamas hardening stance on hostage deal Meanwhile, in a continued effort to secure the release of hostages still held captive in Gaza, the Israeli spy chief met with his US counterpart on Saturday (March 9), Tel Aviv said. "The head of the Mossad, David Barnea, met yesterday (Friday) with the head of the CIA, Bill Burns, as part of the ceaseless efforts to advance another hostage release deal," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement on behalf of the Mossad. "Contacts and cooperation with the mediators continue all the time in an effort to narrow the gaps and reach agreements," said Mossad. The statement comes amid mediators scrambling to secure a new ceasefire deal in the Gaza war before Ramadan which could begin as early as Sunday, depending on the lunar calendar. "At this stage, Hamas is entrenching its positions like someone who is not interested in a deal and is striving to inflame the region during Ramadan at the expense of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip," it said. Mossad also stated that Hamas was aiming for unrest in the area to worsen during Ramadan. Israeli officials have stated that the conflict between the warring sides would come to an end only with the defeat of the Palestinian militant group Hamas. (With inputs from agencies)

Israeli President Isaac Herzog attends opening of Holocaust museum in Amsterdam amid pro-Palestine protests

Roman Kent, who as an orphaned teenager endured the horrors of Auschwitz and other hellish camps and later channeled his sorrow and rage into helping to lead an American movement to memorialize the Holocaust and provide reparations for aging Jewish survivors, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Susan.

While many Holocaust survivors have chosen to stay quiet about their experiences or share them only with close friends and other survivors, Kent believed that the world needed to be reminded of the 6 million Jews who perished at the hands of the Germans and their collaborators, and that Germany needed to repay the remnants of European Jewry for what they suffered and whom they lost.

Elie Wiesel, with his eloquent speeches and vivid writings, compelled the world to recognize the enormity of what had happened and appealed for an end to silence and indifference in the face of persecution. A handful of others, like Benjamin and Vladka Meed, Ernest Michel, Josef and Hadassah Rosensaft, Sigmund Strochlitz, Sam Bloch, Norbert Wollheim and Kent did the painstaking work of galvanizing and organizing survivors into a movement.

“I didn’t want our past to become our children’s future,” Kent would often say.

Several times each year the survivors would gather in large numbers at cavernous temples or local arenas and, by their presence and the shattering power of their stories, remind the world of how it had stood by for years while millions of Jews were oppressed, humiliated and eventually slaughtered.

Kent did not attend Michel’s world gathering of 6,000 survivors in Jerusalem in 1981, but he was so inspired by the event’s scale and impact that he helped organize succeeding convocations in Washington and Philadelphia. Along the way, the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants was formed. Kent was its chairman at his death.

In 1988, he joined the board of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which has negotiated most of the $80 billion that Germany has paid in assistance to survivors and for educational and memorial programs. He eventually served as the organization’s treasurer and co-chairman of its negotiating committee.

Stuart Eizenstat, a former deputy secretary of the treasury and the conference’s chief negotiator, said Kent had used his visceral knowledge of the enduring problems of survivors when prodding Germany to augment monthly pensions, provide $9 billion for survivors still living in the former Soviet Union and Iron Curtain countries, and, as survivors lived into their 90s, set aside $554 million for home care.

“I had some talent as a negotiator, but Roman was able to add that personal commitment, that drama, that passion,” Eizenstat said, “He understood the issues from the perspective of the survivor, which I couldn’t.”

Menachem Rosensaft, a second-generation Holocaust activist, said that Kent “had the ability to engage the German government officials and persuade them to go beyond their original commitments.”

At various times Kent was president of the International Auschwitz Committee, whose purpose is to inform the world about the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.1 million people — almost 1 million of them Jews — were slaughtered in gas chambers or perished from hunger and disease. He also served as president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which provides aid to non-Jews who had hid Jews or helped them escape.

“He was not seeking revenge; he was seeking justice,” Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, who worked with Kent on Auschwitz remembrance efforts, said in a phone interview. “He was a person who looked to the future instead of the past.”

On a visit in 2019 to the Auschwitz exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan, Kent seemed to explain his zeal for immersing himself so fully in Holocaust remembrance.

“How can I forget the smell of burning flesh that constantly filled the air?” he said in a trembling voice as tears rolled down his cheeks. “Or the heartbreak of children torn from their mothers? Those shouts of terror will ring in my ears until I am laid to rest.”

Roman Kniker was born April 18, 1929, in the manufacturing center of Lodz, Poland’s second largest city, with 600,000 people, one third of them Jews. His father, Emanuel, was a textile manufacturer, and his mother, Sonia (Lipszytz) Kniker, tended to the home and the four children, including Roman’s two older sisters, Dasza and Renia, and his younger brother, Leon.

The family lived comfortably, spending summers horseback riding and bicycling at a villa they owned 30 miles outside Lodz. Roman attended a private school for Jews with a Hebrew curriculum. When he walked past a public school he was often the target of slurs and sometimes stones. He and his brother spent much of their free time kicking a soccer ball in a courtyard in his father’s factory.

The German army invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and the occupiers confiscated the factory and the apartments across the street. Roman’s family squeezed into a small side building on the factory grounds. By the end of the year, they and the city’s other Jews were forced into a squalid ghetto that had no electricity, running water or medication, although in the early days gentile workers at his father’s factory slipped food to the family, Kent recalled in a video interview. Thousands succumbed to malnutrition, disease and cold temperatures. Among them was Roman’s father, who died in 1943.

The ghetto was emptied in the fall of 1944, its inhabitants crammed into cattle cars and deported to concentration camps, mainly the sprawling Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. When they arrived, Roman was separated from his mother and two sisters. He would never see his mother again.

Roman and Leon were assigned to a work detail and transferred to other labor camps to feed the ravenous industrial and military needs of the German army as it lost battle after battle. The brothers were interned in Gross-Rosen and Flossenburg, and from there forced at gunpoint on a death march to Dachau in Germany. They were liberated along the way by the U.S. Army in April 1945.

They searched for their relatives and learned that their mother had died at Auschwitz but that their sisters were alive in Sweden. The four siblings were briefly reunited, but Dasza, still sick from her wartime ordeal, died a few months later. Renia remained in Sweden and married there.

In the postwar years, when the American government was reluctant to lift immigration quotas, even for the 250,000 Jewish survivors who had been deported to concentration camps or otherwise displaced, Kent was among the first to enter the United States. He and Leon did so as a result of a special directive by President Harry S. Truman that admitted a few thousand orphans.

The brothers lived with foster families in Atlanta and attended Emory University. Leon studied medicine and became a neurosurgeon, while Kent studied business and started successful companies that imported cookware, dinnerware, guitars, hospital gowns and other products from Europe and China.

After Emory, the brothers moved to New York and simplified their last name to Kent. Roman met Hannah Starkman, a Lodz native who had survived three concentration camps, on a visit to the New York area; they married in 1957. They had two children, Jeffrey and Susan, who survive him, as do three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Hannah Kent died in 2017.

Roman Kent was a vigorous supporter of Holocaust education, and in a speech he gave in 2015, on the 71st anniversary of the Lodz ghetto’s liquidation, he explained why. It was the obligation of adults, he said, to get children to understand “what happens when hatred and prejudice are allowed to flourish.”

Roman Kent, who as an orphaned teenager endured the horrors of Auschwitz and other hellish camps and later channeled his sorrow and rage into helping to lead an American movement to memorialize the Holocaust and provide reparations for aging Jewish survivors, died Friday at his home in Manhattan.

Roman Kent, who as an orphaned teenager endured the horrors of Auschwitz and other hellish camps and later channeled his sorrow and rage into helping to lead an American movement to memorialize the Holocaust and provide reparations for aging Jewish survivors, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Susan. While many Holocaust survivors have chosen to stay quiet about their experiences or share them only with close friends and other survivors, Kent believed that the world needed to be reminded of the 6 million Jews who perished at the hands of the Germans and their collaborators, and that Germany needed to repay the remnants of European Jewry for what they suffered and whom they lost. Elie Wiesel, with his eloquent speeches and vivid writings, compelled the world to recognize the enormity of what had happened and appealed for an end to silence and indifference in the face of persecution. A handful of others, like Benjamin and Vladka Meed, Ernest Michel, Josef and Hadassah Rosensaft, Sigmund Strochlitz, Sam Bloch, Norbert Wollheim and Kent did the painstaking work of galvanizing and organizing survivors into a movement. “I didn’t want our past to become our children’s future,” Kent would often say. Several times each year the survivors would gather in large numbers at cavernous temples or local arenas and, by their presence and the shattering power of their stories, remind the world of how it had stood by for years while millions of Jews were oppressed, humiliated and eventually slaughtered. Kent did not attend Michel’s world gathering of 6,000 survivors in Jerusalem in 1981, but he was so inspired by the event’s scale and impact that he helped organize succeeding convocations in Washington and Philadelphia. Along the way, the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants was formed. Kent was its chairman at his death. In 1988, he joined the board of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which has negotiated most of the $80 billion that Germany has paid in assistance to survivors and for educational and memorial programs. He eventually served as the organization’s treasurer and co-chairman of its negotiating committee. Stuart Eizenstat, a former deputy secretary of the treasury and the conference’s chief negotiator, said Kent had used his visceral knowledge of the enduring problems of survivors when prodding Germany to augment monthly pensions, provide $9 billion for survivors still living in the former Soviet Union and Iron Curtain countries, and, as survivors lived into their 90s, set aside $554 million for home care. “I had some talent as a negotiator, but Roman was able to add that personal commitment, that drama, that passion,” Eizenstat said, “He understood the issues from the perspective of the survivor, which I couldn’t.” Menachem Rosensaft, a second-generation Holocaust activist, said that Kent “had the ability to engage the German government officials and persuade them to go beyond their original commitments.” At various times Kent was president of the International Auschwitz Committee, whose purpose is to inform the world about the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.1 million people — almost 1 million of them Jews — were slaughtered in gas chambers or perished from hunger and disease. He also served as president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which provides aid to non-Jews who had hid Jews or helped them escape. “He was not seeking revenge; he was seeking justice,” Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, who worked with Kent on Auschwitz remembrance efforts, said in a phone interview. “He was a person who looked to the future instead of the past.” On a visit in 2019 to the Auschwitz exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan, Kent seemed to explain his zeal for immersing himself so fully in Holocaust remembrance. “How can I forget the smell of burning flesh that constantly filled the air?” he said in a trembling voice as tears rolled down his cheeks. “Or the heartbreak of children torn from their mothers? Those shouts of terror will ring in my ears until I am laid to rest.” Roman Kniker was born April 18, 1929, in the manufacturing center of Lodz, Poland’s second largest city, with 600,000 people, one third of them Jews. His father, Emanuel, was a textile manufacturer, and his mother, Sonia (Lipszytz) Kniker, tended to the home and the four children, including Roman’s two older sisters, Dasza and Renia, and his younger brother, Leon. The family lived comfortably, spending summers horseback riding and bicycling at a villa they owned 30 miles outside Lodz. Roman attended a private school for Jews with a Hebrew curriculum. When he walked past a public school he was often the target of slurs and sometimes stones. He and his brother spent much of their free time kicking a soccer ball in a courtyard in his father’s factory. The German army invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and the occupiers confiscated the factory and the apartments across the street. Roman’s family squeezed into a small side building on the factory grounds. By the end of the year, they and the city’s other Jews were forced into a squalid ghetto that had no electricity, running water or medication, although in the early days gentile workers at his father’s factory slipped food to the family, Kent recalled in a video interview. Thousands succumbed to malnutrition, disease and cold temperatures. Among them was Roman’s father, who died in 1943. The ghetto was emptied in the fall of 1944, its inhabitants crammed into cattle cars and deported to concentration camps, mainly the sprawling Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. When they arrived, Roman was separated from his mother and two sisters. He would never see his mother again. Roman and Leon were assigned to a work detail and transferred to other labor camps to feed the ravenous industrial and military needs of the German army as it lost battle after battle. The brothers were interned in Gross-Rosen and Flossenburg, and from there forced at gunpoint on a death march to Dachau in Germany. They were liberated along the way by the U.S. Army in April 1945. They searched for their relatives and learned that their mother had died at Auschwitz but that their sisters were alive in Sweden. The four siblings were briefly reunited, but Dasza, still sick from her wartime ordeal, died a few months later. Renia remained in Sweden and married there. In the postwar years, when the American government was reluctant to lift immigration quotas, even for the 250,000 Jewish survivors who had been deported to concentration camps or otherwise displaced, Kent was among the first to enter the United States. He and Leon did so as a result of a special directive by President Harry S. Truman that admitted a few thousand orphans. The brothers lived with foster families in Atlanta and attended Emory University. Leon studied medicine and became a neurosurgeon, while Kent studied business and started successful companies that imported cookware, dinnerware, guitars, hospital gowns and other products from Europe and China. After Emory, the brothers moved to New York and simplified their last name to Kent. Roman met Hannah Starkman, a Lodz native who had survived three concentration camps, on a visit to the New York area; they married in 1957. They had two children, Jeffrey and Susan, who survive him, as do three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Hannah Kent died in 2017. Roman Kent was a vigorous supporter of Holocaust education, and in a speech he gave in 2015, on the 71st anniversary of the Lodz ghetto’s liquidation, he explained why. It was the obligation of adults, he said, to get children to understand “what happens when hatred and prejudice are allowed to flourish.”

Roman Kent, who reminded the world of the Holocaust, dies at 92

Rising extremism, hate crimes, and religious persecution have stark similarities with the story of the Holocaust. The genocide of Jews during World War II taught the world several lessons which still remain relevant.&nbsp;

The Jews were victims of Hitler's plan for a master race. He considered Jews as inferiors and during the Holocaust Nazis referred to them as rats.

Hitler's worldview divided the world population into high and low races and the result of this was one of the darkest moments for the modern civilisation.

Six million Jews were killed in a state-sponsored genocide. The holocaust was the worst conclusion of a culture of prejudice and racism, fuelled by an economic crisis and popular rhetoric. Shades of which can be found even today.

Could something like this happen again? This question invariably comes to the mind as we revisit the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp 75 years later.&nbsp;

Hitler rose to power in a liberal set up. His rise reflected the anger, frustration and resentment of the German citizens. Germany had lost World War I and had to surrender in 1918. The country was looking for a scapegoat.&nbsp;

Hitler blamed the Jews, he used Germany's democratic institutions to pass laws to marginalise them. On March 23, 1933, Germany passed the Enabling Act.

It gave Hitler complete control over the country, he could issue decrees at will, without consulting the President or Parliament. Consequently, Civil liberties were abolished. Germany transformed into a legal dictatorship and the mass murder of Jews was ordered.

An authoritarian regime was born, one that was driven by hatred against one particular race. Some leaders around the world have been able to erect their own forms of the Authoritarian rule. President Robert Mugabe ruled over Zimbabwe for 37 years, he was ultimately ousted in a military coup and left an ailing economy behind.

In Iran, power rests in the hands of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In Pakistan, the elected government serves as a facade for the rule of the military. But none of these examples come close to Hitler's Germany.&nbsp;

International checks and balances have improved, we have international organisations, institutions like the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which have posed some difficulty for authoritarians.

But their relevance in the 21st century is increasingly being questioned that brings us to a dramatic shift is happening in global politics.

There is a new wave of leadership taking charge, the face of global politics is changing. From Donald Trump in America to Boris Johnson in England, to Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India.

They have the power to not only shape the destinies of respective countries but the entire world order.

What happened in Hitler's reign was one of the worst episodes of brutal oppression. It reminds us what majoritarianism can morph into as the world remembers the victims of the Holocaust, global leaders must pay heed to the lessons of the past before they start shaping tomorrow. 
 
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)&nbsp; 
&nbsp; 
 
&nbsp;

Rising extremism, hate crimes, and religious persecution have stark similarities with the story of the Holocaust. The genocide of Jews during World War II taught the world several lessons which still remain relevant.

Rising extremism, hate crimes, and religious persecution have stark similarities with the story of the Holocaust. The genocide of Jews during World War II taught the world several lessons which still remain relevant. The Jews were victims of Hitler's plan for a master race. He considered Jews as inferiors and during the Holocaust Nazis referred to them as rats. Hitler's worldview divided the world population into high and low races and the result of this was one of the darkest moments for the modern civilisation. Six million Jews were killed in a state-sponsored genocide. The holocaust was the worst conclusion of a culture of prejudice and racism, fuelled by an economic crisis and popular rhetoric. Shades of which can be found even today. Could something like this happen again? This question invariably comes to the mind as we revisit the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp 75 years later. Hitler rose to power in a liberal set up. His rise reflected the anger, frustration and resentment of the German citizens. Germany had lost World War I and had to surrender in 1918. The country was looking for a scapegoat. Hitler blamed the Jews, he used Germany's democratic institutions to pass laws to marginalise them. On March 23, 1933, Germany passed the Enabling Act. It gave Hitler complete control over the country, he could issue decrees at will, without consulting the President or Parliament. Consequently, Civil liberties were abolished. Germany transformed into a legal dictatorship and the mass murder of Jews was ordered. An authoritarian regime was born, one that was driven by hatred against one particular race. Some leaders around the world have been able to erect their own forms of the Authoritarian rule. President Robert Mugabe ruled over Zimbabwe for 37 years, he was ultimately ousted in a military coup and left an ailing economy behind. In Iran, power rests in the hands of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In Pakistan, the elected government serves as a facade for the rule of the military. But none of these examples come close to Hitler's Germany. International checks and balances have improved, we have international organisations, institutions like the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which have posed some difficulty for authoritarians. But their relevance in the 21st century is increasingly being questioned that brings us to a dramatic shift is happening in global politics. There is a new wave of leadership taking charge, the face of global politics is changing. From Donald Trump in America to Boris Johnson in England, to Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India. They have the power to not only shape the destinies of respective countries but the entire world order. What happened in Hitler's reign was one of the worst episodes of brutal oppression. It reminds us what majoritarianism can morph into as the world remembers the victims of the Holocaust, global leaders must pay heed to the lessons of the past before they start shaping tomorrow. (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)

Wion Edit: The lessons from the Holocaust

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has said it was stripping Myanmar&#39;s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi of a prestigious human rights award, accusing her of doing little to halt the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her long campaign against the country&#39;s military dictatorship, was awarded the Holocaust Museum&#39;s Elie Wiesel award six years ago &quot;for her courageous leadership and great personal sacrifice in resisting tyranny and advancing the freedom and dignity of the Burmese people.&quot;

But the Museum said it was rescinding the award due to her inaction over what it called &quot;mounting evidence of genocide&quot; committed by the Myanmar military against civilians from the Rohingya minority.

&quot;As the military&#39;s attacks against the Rohingya unfolded in 2016 and 2017, we had hoped that you -- as someone we and many others have celebrated for your commitment to human dignity and universal human rights -- would have done something to condemn and stop the military&#39;s brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population,&quot; the museum said in a letter to Suu Kyi.

Instead, it said, her political party, the National League for Democracy, has refused to cooperate with UN investigators and added to the anti-Rohingya rhetoric. 
The party has also obstructed journalists trying to report on the mass murder and expulsion to Bangladesh of the Rohingya.

&quot;The military&#39;s orchestration of the crimes against Rohingya and the severity of the atrocities in recent months demand that you use your moral authority to address this situation,&quot; they said.

In November a joint report by the Museum and Southeast Asia-based watchdog Fortify Rights -- based on testimony they gathered in the field -- documented &quot;widespread and systematic attacks&quot; on Rohingya civilians.

The award was named after Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Nazi genocide against Jews who spent much of his life campaigning for human rights, himself winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Suu Kyi, the country&#39;s symbol of democracy for decades, has come under heavy criticism for her refusal to stand up for the Rohingya.

In January US diplomat Bill Richardson resigned from a Suu Kyi-appointed panel set up to ease tensions with the Rohingya, assailing her for an &quot;absence of moral leadership.&quot;

About 700,000 Rohingya have fled over the border to Bangladesh since August, with horrifying testimony of murder, rape and arson by soldiers and vigilante mobs.

In Geneva on Wednesday the UN human rights chief Zeid Ra&#39;ad Al Hussein called for a new body tasked with preparing criminal indictments over the Myanmar atrocities.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her long campaign against the country's military dictatorship

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has said it was stripping Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi of a prestigious human rights award, accusing her of doing little to halt the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her long campaign against the country's military dictatorship, was awarded the Holocaust Museum's Elie Wiesel award six years ago "for her courageous leadership and great personal sacrifice in resisting tyranny and advancing the freedom and dignity of the Burmese people." But the Museum said it was rescinding the award due to her inaction over what it called "mounting evidence of genocide" committed by the Myanmar military against civilians from the Rohingya minority. "As the military's attacks against the Rohingya unfolded in 2016 and 2017, we had hoped that you -- as someone we and many others have celebrated for your commitment to human dignity and universal human rights -- would have done something to condemn and stop the military's brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population," the museum said in a letter to Suu Kyi. Instead, it said, her political party, the National League for Democracy, has refused to cooperate with UN investigators and added to the anti-Rohingya rhetoric. The party has also obstructed journalists trying to report on the mass murder and expulsion to Bangladesh of the Rohingya. "The military's orchestration of the crimes against Rohingya and the severity of the atrocities in recent months demand that you use your moral authority to address this situation," they said. In November a joint report by the Museum and Southeast Asia-based watchdog Fortify Rights -- based on testimony they gathered in the field -- documented "widespread and systematic attacks" on Rohingya civilians. The award was named after Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Nazi genocide against Jews who spent much of his life campaigning for human rights, himself winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Suu Kyi, the country's symbol of democracy for decades, has come under heavy criticism for her refusal to stand up for the Rohingya. In January US diplomat Bill Richardson resigned from a Suu Kyi-appointed panel set up to ease tensions with the Rohingya, assailing her for an "absence of moral leadership." About 700,000 Rohingya have fled over the border to Bangladesh since August, with horrifying testimony of murder, rape and arson by soldiers and vigilante mobs. In Geneva on Wednesday the UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein called for a new body tasked with preparing criminal indictments over the Myanmar atrocities.

US Holocaust Museum strips Myanmar's Suu Kyi of rights award