Controversies include aiding Washington Redskins owner
Dan Snyder in a lawsuit against the
Washington City Paper.
German reunification Hier was skeptical of the
reunification of Germany because he feared that
anti-Semitism might
reemerge in a reunified Germany. On February 9, 1990, he sent a letter to Chancellor
Helmut Kohl and in it, he expressed his fears: "I am not among those in the cheering section applauding the rush towards German reunification." In his reply to Hier's letter three weeks later, Kohl expressed his disappointment "at how little many opponents of German unity take note of the fact that for decades now especially the young generation in the free part of Germany has been informed without any taboos of the causes and consequences of the National Socialist tyranny: in schools, universities, church or other educational institutions and the media." Later, in the early stages of the First
Gulf War, the center released a report which accused Western companies of complicity in Iraq's chemical weapons program. The report said that 207 companies, 86 of which were West German, had supplied Iraq with chemical weapons components as late as 1989. German companies had sold
Zyklon-B to
Iraq and they also helped it build gas chambers - modeled on those which were used by the Nazis - to exterminate Iranian
prisoners of war, according to the report.
Kenneth R. Timmerman, who prepared the report, wrote: "The picture beginning to emerge is of a vast Iraqi pillage of the treasures of West German technology, aided and abetted by the West German authorities in their lust to increase the nation's export earnings." Despite the allegations in the report, fully endorsed by Hier, the relationship between him and Kohl remained cordial.
World Social Forum The center is very critical of the annual
World Economic Forum-alternative the
World Social Forum. In 2002, the center's Shimon Samuels published in essay titled
With a Clenched First and an Outstretched Arm: Antisemitism, Globalization, and the NGO Challenge in the International Area in the journal
Jewish Political Studies Review run by the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. In the essay, he claimed that the WSF was an amalgamation of "anti-Globalism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism."
Relationship with Barack Obama The center was a harsh critic of president Barack Obama's Middle Eastern policy. In May 2011, Obama proposed that "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps" which implied that Israel should withdraw from most of the territory it occupied in the
Six-day war in 1967. The proposal drew ire from the center which claimed that such a withdrawal "would be Auschwitz borders for Israel," alluding to the infamous
Auschwitz concentration camp. In December 2016 it ranked the Obama administration’s refusal to veto a
UN resolution condemning
Israeli settlement construction as the most anti-semitic/anti-Israel incident that year. The center wrote "The most stunning 2016 U.N. attack on Israel was facilitated by President Obama when the U.S. abstained on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel for settlement construction."
Relationship with Donald Trump In 2017, Hier faced harsh criticism from the Jewish-American community for accepting an invitation by the Trump campaign to hold a prayer at the president elect's
inauguration. Hier defended his decision by saying that he had offered his blessings to presidential candidates before. That didn't placate his critics who claimed that Trump was a different kind of president who targeted minorities and had at times used tropes considered by many to be antisemitic. Criticism came from
Peter Beinart writing in
The Forward that "they will reserve a special mention for the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Rabbi Marvin Hier. Last week, Trump rewarded him by asking him to offer an inaugural prayer." In an interview in The Times of Israel in 2019 Hier praised Trump for his decision to
relocate the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and to recognize the
Golan Heights as Israeli territory: "Speaking as a Jew, so many presidents talked about making Jerusalem the capital of Israel. They made nice speeches, but in the end they couldn't deliver. Trump delivered." Hier and his wife have participated in fundraising events for Trump's 2020 reelection campaign. The center has also at times criticized Trump. In January 2018 it asked the president to withdraw his statements about wanting more immigration from places from Norway, rather than from "shithole countries" like Haiti and those in Africa. Meir and the Kushner family who are Trump's in-laws (related via
Jared Kushner) have known each other for decades. The Kushner family has made several large donations to the center via the Charles and Seryl Kushner Family Foundation.
Opposition to the BDS movement In 2013, the SWC released a report on the
BDS movement which calls for boycotting Israel until it stops the
occupation and discrimination against Palestinian citizens, and allows the
Palestinian refugees to
return. The report claimed that BDS is a "thinly-disguised effort to coordinate and complement the violent strategy of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim 'rejectionists' who have refused to make peace with Israel for over six decades, and to pursue a high-profile campaign composed of anti-Israel big lies to help destroy the Jewish State by any and all means". The report also said that BDS attacks Israel's entire economy and society, holding all (Jewish) Israelis as collectively guilty.
Conflict with the Committee for Charity and Support for the Palestinians On March 8, 2007, the head of international relations for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Stanley Trevor Samuels, was convicted (and later acquitted in an appeal) of
defamation by a Paris courthouse for accusing the French-based
Committee for Charity and Support for the Palestinians (CBSP) of sending funds to the families of
Palestinian suicide bombers. The Wiesenthal Center appealed the court ruling, and the appeal was granted in July 2009.
2006 Iranian sumptuary law hoax In the spring of 2006, Douglas Kelly, the editor of the Canadian
National Post found a column by Iranian in exile,
Amir Taheri, alleging that the Iranian parliament might force minorities to wear identifiable clothing. Kelly phoned the center and spoke with Abraham Cooper and Hier who both confirmed the story as "absolutely true." On May 18, 2006, one day before Kelly's story was to be published, the center wrote a letter to United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan urging the international community to pressure Iran to drop the measure. The letter characterized Taheri as "a well known and well respected analyst on Iranian affairs" and claimed that "a consensus has developed regarding color badges to be worn by non-Moslems: yellow for Jews, red for Christians, blue for Zoroastrians and other colors for other religions." At that point, neither Cooper nor Hier had actually tried to verify the story. The day after,
Taylor Marsh called Aaron Breitbart, a researcher at the center to verify the story. He too said that the story was "very true" and "very scary." He added that Hier had been on the phone for four hours to confirm the story, something Marsh found odd and she wondered how the confirmation could have taken four hours.
Hunt Museum controversy In January 2004, Shimon Samuels of the Paris branch of the center published an open letter to the president of Ireland,
Mary McAleese, requesting the "Irish Museum of the Year Award" recently given to the
Hunt Museum in
Limerick to be retracted, until the conclusion of a demanded inquiry into the provenance of a significant number of items in the collection. In the letter he alleged that the founders of the museum, John and Gertrude Hunt, had close ties to the head of the Nazi Party (NSDP-AO) in Ireland, among others, and that the British had suspected the couple of espionage during the Second world war. The center also claimed, 'The "Hunt Museum Essential Guide" describes only 150 of the over 2000 objects in the Museum's collection and, notably, without providing information on their provenance – data that all museums are now required to provide in accordance with international procedure.' This essentially accused the
Hunt Museum in Limerick of keeping art and artifacts looted during the Second World War, which was described as "unprofessional in the extreme" by the expert Lynn Nicholas that cleared the museum of wrongdoing. The claim was taken so seriously that the examination was supervised by the prestigious
Royal Irish Academy, whose 2006 report is available online. McAleese, who had been written to by the center, then criticized Samuels for "a tissue of lies", adding that the center had diminished the name of Simon Wiesenthal. The center said that it had prepared its own 150-page report in May 2008 that would be published after vetting by its lawyers, but had not done so as of November 2008. The report was finally made on December 12, 2008.
Opposition to Park51 The Simon Wiesenthal Center opposed the construction of
Park51, a Muslim community center in Manhattan in New York, because the planned location was only two blocks away from
Ground Zero where the
September 11 attacks had taken place. The executive director of the center's Museum of Tolerance in Manhattan, Meyer May said it was "insensitive" to locate the centre there.
The Jewish Week noted that the center itself was accused of intolerance when it built a museum in Jerusalem on land that was once a
Muslim cemetery, after gaining approval from Israeli courts.
Accusations of antisemitism against Hugo Chávez The Center criticized
Hugo Chávez for various statements, including a statement in his Christmas speech in 2005: The reference was to
Simon Bolívar, a South American folk hero who led several countries to independence from Spain in the 19th century. But the center in its press release omitted the reference to Bolívar and quoted Chávez as follows: "the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world." It asserted that he was referring to Jews, and denounced the remarks as
antisemitic by way of his allusions to wealth. The
American Jewish Committee, the
American Jewish Congress, and the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela defended Chávez, stating that he was speaking not of Jews, but of South America's white
oligarchy.
Band attire controversies The center has on two occasions criticized bands for wearing attire resembling Nazi uniforms or using Nazi symbolism. In 2011, Abraham Cooper, condemned the Japanese band
Kishidan for wearing uniforms resembling those of the SS, the armed wing of the Nazi party. The band wore military-inspired uniforms, adorned with the German medal Iron Cross and Nazi insignia such as the death skull and SS eagle on
MTV Japan's primetime program "Mega Vector". Cooper said in a written protest to the band's management company
Sony Music Artists, MTV Japan and the Japanese entertainment group
Avex (Kishidan's label at the time being and also the current one) that "there is no excuse for such an outrage" and that "many young Japanese are "woefully uneducated" about
the crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany and
Japan during
the second world war, but
global entities like MTV and Sony Music should know better". As a result, Sony Music Artists and Avex issued a joint statement of public apology on their respective websites. On November 11, 2018, Cooper denounced the South Korean band
BTS with the following statement: "Flags appearing on stage at their concert were eerily similar to the Nazi Swastika. It goes without saying that this group, which was invited to speak at the UN, owes the people of Japan and the victims of the Nazism an apology." The band's management responded to the charge and offered their "sincerest apologies" but claimed that the similarities with Nazi symbols were unintentional.
Ben and Jerry's In December 2023, the Wiesenthal Center renewed objections to
Anuradha Mittal, head of the board of directors at
Ben & Jerry's via
X, accusing Ben & Jerry's of "justifying" the
October 7 massacre by
Hamas. The tweet included a photo of Mittal, causing her to receive hate emails, tweets, and LinkedIn messages, leading to Mittal expressing her objection to the Wiesenthal Center's tweet which made her feel unsafe. ==Reception==