Center says Anti-Semitic Rants of So-Called “Father Of Peace Studies” Disqualify Him as a Respectable Participant in any Field of Study 

The Simon Wiesenthal Center today denounced the anti-Semitic canards spouted by Professor Johan Galtung, a respected Norwegian academic who linked mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik to Israel, recommended the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion and asserted that Jewish achievements in Germany led to the Nazi Holocaust.

Among other Galtung claims, according to an article in the April 30, 2012 edition of Ha’aretz, six Jewish companies control 96% of the media who, “divert for the sake of Israel.” He also said, “Seventy percent of the professors at the twenty most important American universities are Jewish.” The article also says Galtung bases this doctrine on a piece written by the American white supremacist, William Pierce.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Wiesenthal Center’s associate dean and Mark Weitzman, the Center’s Director of Government Affairs, charged, “The anti-Semitic ravings of Professor Galtung, known as ‘the father of peace studies’, disqualify him from being considered as a respectable participant in any field of study, especially one that deals with peace.” They added, “His promotion of hate-filled canards such as The Protocols of Zion demonstrates that he cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy.”

Cooper and Weitzman said that Galtung’s attempt to link Israel to the acts of a Norwegian mass murderer is, “simply an updated version of the anti-Jewish medieval blood libel.”

“We hope that Norwegian academia, the media and the rest of Norwegian society will repudiate these pernicious stereotypes,” the Wiesenthal Center officials added. “The next book that Professor Galtung should be required to read is Dismantling the Big Lie: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which is the first full length refutation of the Protocols. It might actually inject a dose of historical reality into the anti-Semitic conspiratorial theories that dominate his world view,” they concluded.

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).