Anne Frank’s Tragic Legacy Abused by the Left

Summary: The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect (AFC) is a political attack group posing as a Holocaust education organization. The AFC has evolved from a quiet nonprofit into a personal propaganda machine for its flamboyant executive director, Steven Goldstein—who uses Anne Frank’s tragic victimhood and Holocaust imagery to advance its anti-Trump agenda.

Introduction

If there’s one group that proves the American Left can make anything rotten, it’s the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect. Don’t let that name fool you; this is a run-of-the-mill example of a group co-opted and retooled by the Left into a hard-driving propaganda machine. Under new ultra-partisan ownership, it’s become a self-anointed one-man crusade against anti-Semitism and other -isms, sporting a slick, heart-tugging moniker aimed at garnering as much mainstream media coverage as possible. There’s only one problem—a big one—the Anne Frank Center has nothing to do with Anne Frank. Instead, it’s a partisan attack dog aimed at assailing the Donald Trump administration.

Anne Frank is, of course, a powerful symbol of the lives lost in the Holocaust, and a source of education to millions about the danger of tyranny. Unlike the young German Holocaust victim it takes its name from, however, there is nothing genuine about the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect (AFC). It has changed its name, its leadership, and its mission statement to the point where it has become unrecognizable from its original iteration. Even the first AFC—supposedly founded in 1959 as the American Friends of the Anne Frank Center—has dubious connections to the young German-Jewish girl who died in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945.

The AFC claims Anne’s father, Otto Frank, established the organization in New York; yet officials at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Fonds (which owns the rights to her diary) in Switzerland deny the connection. The facts are hazy. The wife of AFC’s first president relates, “I think my husband met with [Otto Frank] once or twice.” Members of the original staff claim the AFC was started in 1977 (when it achieved its IRS 501(c)(3) status). Grayson Covil, the AFC’s executive director in the 1980s, puts it plainly: “I don’t believe that Otto Frank started the American Friends of the Anne Frank Center.”

For an organization that was supposedly founded less than six decades ago by a world-renowned Holocaust survivor, the Anne Frank Center sure has a hard time proving where it came from.

In almost every regard, too, the AFC is vastly different from the public image it cultivates. It has no mass membership or scholarly board. It isn’t Jewish, and it doesn’t seek to educate about the Holocaust. In fact, it’s difficult to find anything about the group that isn’t illusion or flat-out lie, with one exception: the Anne Frank Center has exceptional Left-wing credentials.

Sean Spicer: Holocaust Denier?

On April 11, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer delivered remarks on the chaotic Syrian Civil War:

“We did not use chemical weapons in World War II. You had someone as despicable as [Adolf] Hitler who did not even sink to using chemical weapons.”

Strictly speaking, Spicer was correct; the sarin gas used to murder victims of the Nazi death camps was never defined as a “chemical weapon.” During the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, Albert Speer, the German Minister of Armaments and War Production, testified that the Nazis purposely avoided using chemical weapons in warfare in order to avoid like retaliation and, in his own words, “international crimes which could be held against the German people after they had lost the war.” Ironic as his statement was, the prosecutors understood the difference between chemical weapons used in combat and the sarin gas employed in the death camps.

Spicer was referencing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the dictator’s use of deadly gas on Syrian citizens, but for the Left-wing press it was tantamount to denying the Holocaust.

The run of Democratic hacks—Nancy Pelosi and Barbra Streisand, to name a few—launched a predictably shrill salvo calling for Spicer’s resignation. Spicer quickly offered his heartfelt apologies, explaining he had been referring to the use of sarin gas in combat, not in the setting of Nazi “holocaust centers.” This second slip-up (he should have said “concentration camps”) earned the beleaguered press secretary yet another round of phony lamentations as the Left howled aghast and rent its collective clothes.

It was political opportunism; even MSNBC host Chris Matthews stated in 2013 that Adolf Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons, and he was never called a “Holocaust denier.” But one voice rose above the general cacophony. Safely ensconced in cosmopolitan New York City, Steven Goldstein—executive director of the Anne Frank Center—launched a flurry of social media attacks implying Spicer is a Holocaust denier:

“BREAKING NEWS: SEAN SPICER DENIES HITLER GASSED JEWS DURING THE HOLOCAUST. MR. PRESIDENT, FIRE SEAN SPICER NOW.”

“On Passover no less, Sean Spicer has engaged in Holocaust denial, the most offensive form of fake news imaginable, by denying Hitler gassed millions of Jews to death. Spicer’s statement is the most evil slur upon a group of people we have ever heard from a White House press secretary.”

The vitriol emanating from an outlet named for a 15-year old Holocaust victim took many by surprise, even on the Left. The AFC is tiny, and before mid-2016 was hardly known outside of its New York headquarters. But this wasn’t the first time its vocal new executive director had assailed the Donald Trump administration for its supposed anti-Semitism. On January 27, the White House released its International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement and came under immediate fire from Goldstein:

“[Trump’s] statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting Antisemitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record. Make no mistake: The Antisemitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration.”

What was the President guilty of? The statement left out the word “Jew” in its attempt to honor the myriad groups victimized by the Nazis. After the Left spent decades expanding Holocaust education to include non-Jewish victims (such as homosexuals and gypsies) in order to universalize the tragedy, it’s rich that Trump could be accused of anti-Semitism for neglecting to mention Jews in his 117-word statement.

Never mind the fact that it was a Jewish aide descended from Holocaust survivors who wrote the statement. It is anti-Semitism in Goldstein’s eyes—and this from an organization with “Mutual Respect” in the name. So who is Goldstein, and what does the AFC actually advocate for?

 A New Mission

Prior to 2016, the AFC was a sleepy educational charity with a staff of less than ten that ran its little storefront museum in New York City. All that changed when the AFC was made the target of a hostile Left-wing takeover. Ten members of the original 21-person board were replaced, and the original staff quit or were fired. In their place came the usual cadre of whingy stage actors, hardened Democrat campaign veterans, and “social justice warriors.” Their staff biographies veritably sparkle with leftist slogans; they really want you to know they are “staunch social justice advocate[s]” who fully realize “the fight for total equality is never over.”

Even former staff—hardly staunch conservatives themselves—admit the AFC has taken a radical turn. Yvonne Simons, former executive director and herself a vocal progressive, noted that the board of directors “changed its mission after my 10-year tenure.”

The prior board chair was replaced with Peter Rapaport, a Manhattanite and private-wealth manager. Rapaport, in turn, led the push in June 2016 to appoint Steven Goldstein as executive director to the new Anne Frank Center. Since that time, Goldstein has closed the AFC’s modest museum, slapped the words “Mutual Respect” onto the name, and waded it shrilly into the fetid bog of Left-wing activism.

Like many co-opted outlets, the AFC hardly conceals its real motives. It only halfheartedly tries to blend in among legitimate anti-Semitism organizations, and admits it isn’t Jewish. William Shulman, president of the respected Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO), divulged in an interview that the AFC is “inactive” in the AHO beyond paying its dues. Not that the AFC has a problem with this; Rapaport fully admits that “it isn’t our focus to be pro-Jewish or to be just a Holocaust-education [organization].” After all, why would anyone assume that the Anne Frank Center had anything to do with the Holocaust?

The new AFC apparently felt strong enough about the Jewish connection that it almost immediately dissolved the last thing actually linking it to Anne Frank—its advisory board of Holocaust experts. Goldstein explained the move with specious credulity: “Nobody knew what their purpose was.” As everyone knows, the last thing a nonprofit dedicated to combating anti-Semitism needs are Holocaust experts.

Activist Leadership

But this isn’t Goldstein’s first foray into the fever swamps of Left-wing hysteria.

Steven Goldstein (b. 1962) is a political activist from New Jersey. His degrees are from elite, typically Left-wing universities: Brandeis University (B.A.), Harvard (M.A., Public Policy), the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Columbia Law School.

Goldstein is a longtime Democratic Party operative, starting out as co-campaign manager in 2000 for Sen. Jon Corzine (D-NJ), then as press secretary to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), followed by a stint with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and last as a counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. In the early 2000s Goldstein worked as a television producer for NBC. In 2004 he founded Garden State Equality, a New Jersey same-sex marriage campaign. He left in 2013 when Rutgers University-Newark hired the activist to be its Associate Chancellor for External Relations. Bizarrely, Goldstein briefly owned Attention America, a now-defunct Manhattan public affairs firm that was approached by the bin Laden family in October 2001, seeking a PR company to distance themselves from Osama bin Laden, following the 9/11 attacks.

This self-proclaimed “Harvey Milk of New Jersey” (taken from a June 2016 interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) first wormed into the national spotlight in 2006 during the Laurel Hester debacle. Hester, a police lieutenant in Ocean County, NJ, diagnosed with lung cancer, had sought to extend survivor benefits to her lesbian partner. Goldstein leaped at the chance to showboat—in his words, to flash his “sense of camp.” He claimed the County’s decision to extend Hester’s benefits to her partner as a personal victory, which would lead to the 2015 feature film Freeheld, where Goldstein is played by actor Steve Carell. In the movie Goldstein is portrayed as a self-serving ideologue bent on making an issue of survivor benefits into a broader gay marriage campaign—to the point where he nearly costs Hester her victory.

David Smith, the AFC’s deputy executive director, also has a long history in Left-wing politics. Smith notes his time working for Goldstein as deputy executive director for Garden State Equality. He touts his “extensive background in Democratic political campaigns,” and served as a delegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

If these two sound like the B-team still learning on the job, they’re finding success in bamboozling much of the media into believing they’re real Holocaust experts. Together, Goldstein and Smith are prepared to take the AFC to new lows in the vague but tireless quest to “call out prejudice, counter discrimination and advocate for the kinder and fairer world of which Anne Frank dreamed.”

Anne Frank: Social Justice Warrior

Or so they say. It’s difficult to imagine exactly what kind of world this little girl would have embraced and defended. Anneliese Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 12, 1929, but lived most of her life in Amsterdam, where she penned the diary that made her name synonymous with Holocaust tragedy. In July 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in the secret annex of a building on Prinsengracht, in Amsterdam. They survived cooped up there until August 1944, when they were discovered, arrested, and sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. Anne was soon relocated to the camp at Bergen-Belsen where she died, likely from a combination of exhaustion and typhus in early February 1945.

Otto Frank was a key mover in the effort to make his daughter’s diary famous. In 1963, he founded the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel, Switzerland, where he’d relocated following Germany’s defeat in May 1945. After his death in 1980, the Fonds continued as the legitimate owner of Anne’s diary and related materials.

 It is true that Otto Frank actively promoted his views on racial tolerance after the war; but the earliest Anne Frank organizations were apolitical. The AFC, though, would have you believe that the Frank family lived on the bleeding edge of 21st century progressive politics. Goldstein has inanely called Anne “one of the greatest feminist and social justice leaders in history.” Implying—if not flatly stating—that this fifteen-year-old led the charge to fight “sexism, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, [and] bias against the differently abled” is patently absurd. Worse, it creates immoral equivalents between modern “victims” of phony hate crimes and actual Holocaust victims.

Goldstein and his toadies are hardly the first to appropriate the Holocaust tragedy for their own political ends, but their use of Anne Frank as a generic fill-in for any and all social justice campaigns is especially galling. It is, in the end, terribly convenient for the AFC that Anne cannot speak for herself; otherwise she might sound suspiciously unlike the social justice guerrilla the AFC has made her out to be. It’s hard to know, for example, what Anne might have felt upon seeing a man wearing a dress claiming to be a woman who used to be a man—but being the product of a middle-class background in an era before the general acceptance of such shenanigans, she probably wouldn’t have reacted in a positive way.

Still, a little history couldn’t stop Goldstein from bravely posting his vitriol across social media, where the AFC has twisted and warped Anne Frank into a screeching “snowflake” commando armed with her trusty hashtags. “Some ask: How dare you use Anne Frank’s name to stand up for Muslims as you would for everyone else?” the AFC wrote in one post. “We respond: You haven’t a clue as to what Anne Frank stood for.” What? Who could have imagined in 1945 that Anne Frank would one day be a full-throated defender of Black Lives Matter, or a bare-knuckle brawler taking on the supposedly racist proponents of Islamophobia?

This kind of revisionist invective would be comical if it weren’t so cynical: Rolf Wolfswinkel, an actual Anne Frank scholar and former member of the AFC’s expert board, doesn’t conceal his distaste for the new bulked-up, progressive Anne: “To believe that Anne Frank is a sort of Mother Teresa, or a universal symbol of tolerance and goodness—I don’t see it in the diary…” he writes. “By taking the Jewishness out of the Holocaust, are we still talking about the same thing?”

Another Front in the War Against Trump

On its Twitter banner, the AFC displays an image with a smiling Anne superimposed on a photo depicting crying Arab children and hijab-sporting Muslims. “America denied immigration to refugee Anne Frank,” the caption reads, “Open your heart to refugees and immigrants today.” The image was created in response to President Donald Trump’s lawful and constitutional executive order temporary halting immigration from six terrorist-breeding countries in the Middle East. Goldstein’s minions wasted no time in decrying the “RACIST MUSLIM BAN” and peppering AFC’s social media with what passes for witty commentary in leftist circles.

That a young Jewish victim of anti-Semitism is cast as the poster-child for “victimized” anti-Semites in the Middle East is an irony Goldstein likely can’t fathom. But like the AFC in general, the outrage over anti-Semitism is a Potemkin village; the real fight is with President Trump.

Steven Goldstein has taken it upon himself to wage holy war against the Trump administration. A vocal Hillary Clinton supporter during the 2016 election, he is quick to assail the Republican Party while attempting to disguise himself behind the veil of nonpartisanship. In March, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson gave a speech in front of department employees, referring to African slaves as “immigrants:”

“There were other immigrants who came in the bottom of slave ships, who worked even longer, even harder, for less, but they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

It was hardly the stuff to spark revolution. “This is as offensive a remark as it gets,” an outraged Goldstein nevertheless pronounced. “You do not get a pass because you are African-American, any more than President Trump gets a pass for his delayed and sometimes nonexistent responses to [anti-Semitism] because he has Jewish relatives.” A devastating salvo, to be sure, yet one which raises a question: why should Steven Goldstein, a white Jew, be more offended at a remark about black slaves than Ben Carson, the descendant of African slaves? Moreover, Carson’s words have the weight of the English language behind them. Webster’s Dictionary defines “immigrant” as “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.”

 A Bridge Too Far… Left?

It’s a rare and entertaining spectacle, but on occasion even leftists turn on each other: In this case, Steven Goldstein may have pushed the envelope beyond what the conventional Left is prepared to accept.

In spring 2017 the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam released a statement distancing itself from Goldstein’s political comments:

“The Anne Frank [House] is a museum and an educational organisation [sic]. We too see social developments that cause us great concern, including an increase in antisemitic [sic] incidents and other forms of discrimination. We stay out of the political playing field, and see it as our task to achieve our mission—combating anti-Semitism, racism and discrimination—through our educational activities.”

The world of nonprofits dedicated to educating about anti-Semitism is crowded, and for the most part, attempts to stay removed from controversy. But, of course, the Anne Frank Center isn’t a real part of that world, judges David Benkof, a Jewish historian. “Armed with a great organizational title,” Benkof writes in the Daily Caller, “incendiary but ready-to-print quotes; and a gullible media slavishly lapping it all up, Goldstein is finding tremendous success” promoting his “civil rights” warrior career aspirations.

Neither is the center-Left Atlantic magazine buying the AFC’s narrative. “[B]ecause it talks a big game and wields the name of Anne Frank, the media has awarded [the AFC] authority it never earned.” Even the Anti-Defamation League—another organization co-opted by the Left—refrained from accusing Sean Spicer of Holocaust denial.

Nevertheless, it isn’t clear that the belligerent Anne Frank Center 2.0 is having any effect on the Trump presidency. Far from undermining the administration, Goldstein’s frequent eruptions seem to have galvanized the President and his supporters.

Following a spate of bombing attacks on Jewish community centers in early 2017, the AFC launched yet another round of invectives accusing Trump of committing “grotesque acts and omissions reflecting Antisemitism [sic].” This time, however, the Donald responded. In a mid-February press conference, Trump condemned the violence, adding, “It won’t be my people” who would be discovered as the perpetrators. “It will be the people on the other side.”

Predictably, the Left imploded. Jonathon Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League and a longtime Obama operative, said, “We are astonished by what the President reportedly said.” Sen. Chuck Schumer called the comments “absurd and obscene.” Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, the disgraced former head of the Democratic Party, characteristically blabbed: “[Trump has] given license and permission to anti-Semites” and “opened the floodgates” to anti-Semitic attacks. Steven Goldstein blasted Trump’s prediction as “anti-Semitism in itself.”

Then, in March, police charged Juan Thompson, an African American Left-wing journalist, for making bomb threats against Jewish sites and organizations in the United States; later that month Israeli police arrested a Jewish Israeli-American teenager for doing the same—both likely “false flag” attacks designed to smear the reputation of President Trump, his supporters and other conservatives. But the Left was deafeningly silent on the motivation behind these miscreants’ activities and quickly let the matter drop.

Despite the rhetoric, there is no evidence to support the narrative that Donald Trump’s supporters are responsible for a rise in anti-Semitic crimes, if indeed there has been a rise—the data is thin on this question. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in February found that Republicans and evangelical Christians are more favorable towards Jews than Democrats are—and they’ve grown even more affectionate since Election Day.

That doesn’t stop the endless, apoplectic accusations of anti-Semitism. In a typical tweet, Goldstein accused Dr. Sebastian Gorka—a Hungarian-American member of Trump’s national security advisory staff—of having links with a neo-Nazi outfit in Hungary. In fact, Gorka’s family hid Jews during the Holocaust. The “crime” which brought him under fire is his tough stance on fanatical Islamists; ironically, the same zealots who quite vocally seek the violent death of Jews.

In the rush to defame the Right for fictional crimes by blanketing the Trump administration in accusations of anti-Semitism, however, the Left has made some interesting revelations. Alan Dershowitz, a liberal author and notable Harvard professor, nailed it:

This “guy who claims to be the head of the [Anne] Frank Center [Goldstein]… is a total phony. There is no such thing, this is a minor institution with no credibility within the Jewish community. He is constantly trying to get headlines by overblowing everything.

“[Sean Spicer] screwed up. And he apologized from his heart, and I am prepared to give him a pass on this. You know who I am not prepared to give a pass on this? The Democratic National Committee.

“They have immediately decided to [politicize] this…. This is the same Democratic National Committee, who has as co-chairman Keith Ellison, who didn’t recognize the fact that he was working for an anti-Semite, [Louis] Farrakhan. This is just hypocrisy and I think we should not make politics out of this.”

Dershowitz is right, of course, save for one thing: the Left intends to “make politics” out of everything. What these radicals have unwittingly done, though, is uncover their own anti-Semitic transgressions.

It was former President Barack Hussein Obama who authorized a staffer to call Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu “chickenshit.” It was Obama who lectured the Jewish state endlessly on the right of Palestinians to build settlements on Jewish land and negotiated Israel into a corner by all but rubber-stamping Iran’s nuclear program. Obama’s first Secretary of State, the choleric Hillary Clinton, called Bill Clinton’s 1974 congressional campaign manager a “f***ing Jew bastard.”

In his last act as President, Obama’s second Secretary of State, John Kerry, refused to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring Jews have no connection with East Jerusalem—managing to malign millennia of Jewish history, permanently damage Israeli national security, and secure his boss’s place as the most anti-Israel president in modern U.S. history. The Simon Wiesenthal Center ranked the move the most anti-Semitic incident of 2016.

Trump the Philo-Semite

Contrast that with Donald Trump, whose brief time as president has already brought tangible victories to Jews in America and Israel.

For one, pro-Israel Jews and gentiles hold key positions in the Trump administration. His pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel is David Friedman, the devout Orthodox son of a New York rabbi and a brilliant economist, physicist, and legal scholar. (In contrast, the British ambassador to Israel is blandly touted for being openly gay; the French and Canadian ambassadors are lauded for being female; and none of them are Jewish.)

Trump’s highly competent Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, is Jewish. Jason Dov Greenblatt, the administration’s special representative for international negotiations, is a longtime personal friend of Trump who has been described by a leading American rabbi as a serious Jew and devoted friend of Israel.

Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and the Trump administration’s U.N. ambassador, has made combating the U.N.’s ubiquitous anti-Semitism her goal as the new “sheriff in town.” “I am here to underscore the ironclad support of the United States for Israel,” Haley said, “I’m here to emphasize the United States is determined to stand up to the U.N.’s anti-Israel bias.” On June 13, Haley criticized a report issued by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, calling it the “latest example of the Human Rights Council singling out Israel rather than focusing on the world’s actual human rights abusers.”

Donald Trump has familial reasons to sympathize with the tribe. Jared Kushner—the President’s beloved son-in-law and trusted adviser—is a Modern Orthodox Jew. His wife, Ivanka, converted to Judaism from Presbyterianism shortly before their marriage in 2008, and the couple has raised their children in the Jewish faith; decisions apparently supported by Trump.

Of course, these facts are meaningless to zealots like Steven Goldstein.  Goldstein and his cronies remain convinced beyond all evidence to the contrary that they’re living in an alternate reality perpetrated by a conservative cabal. In a February 2017 CNN panel, a growling Goldstein was reduced to sputtering rage at the mere mention of Donald Trump:

CNN contributor Kayleigh McEnany: “So, you think the President does not like Jews and is prejudiced against Jews? You think that about the President of the United States?”

Steven Goldstein: “You. Bet.”

McEnany: “Does he hate his daughter? Does he hate his [son-in-law]?”

Goldstein: “You know what, Kayleigh? I am tired of commentators like you from the Right trotting out his daughter, trotting out his son-in-law, as talking points against the President’s anti-Semitism. They are Jewish, but that is not a talking point against anti-Semitism…”

And on it goes. But just like the rest of the Left’s impotent attempts to slander the Right, these cries of “anti-Semitism” fall on deaf ears. In an op-ed to The Hill, Rabbi Dov Fisher points to the “professional Democrat Jews” who are as “false as the Fake News they spread about the President of the United States:”

“If these leftists are so concerned about anti-Semitism, why is it that so many among them never once sought to protect me or Israel from Barack Obama or John Kerry? When Obama and Kerry combined to imperil Israel by entering into an horrific deal with Iran, they were quiet.

“They do not condemn the anti-Semitism of an Al Sharpton, nor challenge why an Obama began his second Presidential campaign by meeting with Sharpton’s organization. 

“This President of the United States, Donald Trump, is the most philo-Semitic President of my lifetime, perhaps in American history.… We Orthodox Jews know what anti-Semitism really is, what it sounds and feels like, at work and at play.”

Israel has returned the warm feelings. A May 22 Politico piece notes that one in four Israeli Jews would vote for Donald Trump. A plurality thought he would be best at “representing Israel’s interests” over the other 2016 candidates, including Hillary Clinton. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a sincere friend of the Republican Party, said that “for the first time in many years and first in my lifetime, I see a real hope for change.” Conservative Israelis in particular delight in Trump’s tough stance on growing Iranian hegemony in the Middle East (Israel’s most pressing concern), and his determination to eradicate the Islamic State.

In his weekly address during Passover and Easter, a reverent Trump praised the “incredible people” of Israel who have “raised up the face of humankind.” The state of Israel, he went on, “stands as a monument to their faith and endurance.” And like Israel, “America is a nation of believers…. We have a beautiful country, an abundant countryside, and an amazing people with a truly bright and wonderful future…. As long as we have faith in each other, and trust in God, we will succeed.”

Conclusion

The perennial war between statism and liberty is fought every day, and on countless fronts. The armed gangs which do the fighting go by many names and proclaim many -isms—environmentalism, social justice, anti-anti-Semitism, feminism—but they are bound up in the same insidious cause. Steven Goldstein and his cronies at the AFC may be small fry living in perpetual delusion, but they are also critical foot soldiers in the very real struggle to steal America from those who cherish it.

Sometimes they hide that goal successfully. Other times they don’t—as with the so-called Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, which Rabbi Fisher muses is “akin to someone forming a ‘Martin Luther King Center’ to sell discount tickets to baseball games and ski resorts.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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Hayden Ludwig is a communications assistant at Capital Research Center.

Read previous articles from the Deception & Misdirection series.