Chelsea Zukowski

He brings a bulging Rolodex and 34 years’ diplomatic experience to annual conference at USF St. Petersburg

Chelsea Zukowski People, Tampa Bay February 13, 2016April 4, 2016 0 Comment

By CAITLIN ASHWORTH
USFSP Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG – In 34 years as an American diplomat, Douglas L. McElhaney witnessed a revolution in Portugal, helped negotiate independence for the African nation of Namibia, and served as ambassador in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

When he retired in 2007, he spent four years teaching at the University of Miami as an ambassador-in-residence before moving to St. Petersburg.

It was a homecoming of sorts for McElhaney, 68. As a child, he often visited his grandparents here, and his parents had moved here, too.

“I feel very at home here,” he said.

That explains how an annual conference on national and international issues featuring prominent speakers from the U.S. Foreign Service, academia, the military and the news media began in St. Petersburg in 2013.

The fourth conference will be Feb. 17-19 on the campus of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, a co-sponsor of the event. More than a thousand people have already signed up to hear from about 60 speakers on 30 panels.

The conference is free and open to the public.

Among the topics: “Russia: imperial aspirations on a beer budget”; “Immigrants: A new wall or a new screen door?”; “Internet earthquake: News in an era when everyone is a reporter and publisher”; and “American jobs: Does anybody want them? Can anybody find them?”

The conference began “when Doug brought the idea to me five years ago, and it’s since taken off,” said political science professor Thomas W. Smith, director of the university’s honors program. “He draws on his Washington rolodex while I tap the academic resources I know.”

The honors program administers the conference with “a lot of help from the community and volunteers,” Smith said.

As a youngster, McElhaney said, he was “curious about the world.”

His father was in the Navy, his mother was a French teacher, and his older sister was a flight attendant for Pan-American. He grew up with an interest in travel and foreign cultures.

In high school, McElhaney said, he got to know foreign exchange students and befriended a Brazilian classmate.

While in college at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, McElhaney stayed with the friend’s family while working for the Brazil Herald, a small English-language newspaper in Rio de Janeiro.

Although his Portuguese was rudimentary, he said, he was able to report for the English speakers in the area and experienced Brazil during a military dictatorship.

“One of the families down the street from where I lived, their son had disappeared and ended up dead in a military hospital,” he said. “He evidently was a campus activist.”

McElhaney earned a master’s in international affairs at Columbia University, then joined the U.S. Foreign Service and moved to Portugal in 1973 to serve as a vice consul stamping visas and passports. That, he said, is the “introduction to international life.”

In 1974, the day after a one-day revolution toppled Portugal’s dictatorship, McElhaney said, he was held up inside the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon for 10 hours while a crowd of demonstrators unsuccessfully tried to break down the doors.

For the next two years, he said, he witnessed the once-fascist dictatorship drastically change to Western ideals. But his time there ended abruptly in 1976.

“They thought I was a spy,” McElhaney said with a laugh. When a newspaper printed his name, phone number and address, he moved out and left the country shortly thereafter.

During his 34 years in the Foreign Service, he also served in Brussels, Rome, Milan, Paris, Sarajevo and Cairo.

In the late ‘70s, McElhaney said, he worked on negotiations that led the independence of the African nation of Namibia. During the `90s, he was the United States’ deputy representative at NATO during the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts.

He served three years as U.S. ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina until he retired in 2007.

McElhaney said he got the idea for a conference after attending a similar forum at the University of Colorado at Boulder. That five-day conference, which was founded in 1948, drew 77,000 people last year, according to its website.

The first St. Petersburg conference, which was held in the USFSP building that once housed the Dali Museum, was developed from his “Rolodex and laptop” and drew 300 people, he said.

The conference is a nonprofit and “all speakers come on their own nickel.”

It’s now his goal to make the conference a weeklong event.

For more on the conference, see http://stpetersburgintheworld.com/conference/

Drawing on Simon Wiesenthal’s legacy, he travels the world to campaign against a resurgence in anti-Semitism

Chelsea Zukowski People, St. Petersburg January 26, 2016April 4, 2016 0 Comment

By SAMANTHA PUTTERMAN
USFSP Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG – Mark Weitzman had just begun working at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in New York City when the famous Nazi hunter stuck his head in the door of Weitzman’s office.

He took one look at the jumble of paperwork atop the desk and declared, “Ah, now I feel at home.”

Wiesenthal sat down to chat, Weitzman recalled with a chuckle, “and it became a conversation that turned into a friendship” that lasted until Wiesenthal died in Vienna in 2005.

Wiesenthal survived the Holocaust and spent the rest of his life tracking down Nazi war criminals.

“When you meet somebody that has had an impact like that on the world, … to move in the orbit of that person is an extraordinary opportunity,” said Weitzman, who was in St. Petersburg on Jan. 25 for a speech to more than 200 people at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. “It leaves you a legacy to draw on.”

Since his first encounter with Wiesenthal in the late 1980s, Weitzman has drawn on that legacy as he travels the world to campaign against a resurgence of anti-Semitism and decry the proliferation of hate and extremism on the Internet.

He is the director of the Task Force Against Hate and Terrorism at the Wiesenthal Center and its representative at the United Nations. The center is an international Jewish human rights organization that claims more than 400,000 members.

Weitzman’s speech was sponsored by the university’s honors program and the Florida Holocaust Museum. It was part of a lecture series endowed by Debbie Sembler, a former member of the USFSP Board of Trustees, and her husband, Brent, a developer.

In his speech, Weitzman traced an increasingly violent undercurrent of hate in America that has been personified by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, Christian Identity, neo-Nazis, the Creativity Movement and Westboro Baptist Church, a small group in Topeka, Kansas, known for its anti-gay protests at public events, including military funerals.

Hate groups have grown steadily since 2000, he said, driven in part by the election of America’s first black president in 2008.

The FBI identified 602 hate groups in this country in 2000, Weitzman said. By 2011, the number had grown to 1,018. And FBI hate crime statistics released in December 2014 showed that Jews “were clearly the greatest target (of religious hate crime incidents), even more than Muslims, more than any other religious group,” he said.

The Wiesenthal Center used to maintain an annual report on what Weitzman called “digital terrorism.” But with the explosion of social media, he said, “we had to stop counting.”

Social networking officials say they can’t police the postings that flood their sites, Weitzman said, but Facebook has established two research groups to respond to complaints.

“We can call Facebook and say, ‘Look at this site; we think it violates your standards,’ and if they agree, they’ll do something about it,” said Weitzman. “If they don’t, we’ll try again the next time. But at least there is a sense of responsibility to it.”

In the interview after his speech, Weitzman said the Wiesenthal Center used to believe that “very few people were radicalized by the Internet. It was a gateway, but someone generally had to make personal contact, for both domestic and international terrorism.

“You can’t say that anymore,” he said. “There are people who have committed (terrorist) acts who have never met anyone. Their radicalization was completely online. (The Internet) is the most potent tool for violent radicalization that I would say has ever existed.”

In his life and travels, Weitzman said, he has encountered anti-Semitism in both diplomats and ordinary people.

Sometimes he reacts, he said, and sometimes he doesn’t.

“In general, I don’t like leaving those things unchallenged. But it’s part of the assessment process. Are you the person to do it? There are people who could make a situation worse when they open their mouth, even if they’re right.”

Weitzman said he has a friend who is a Muslim scholar who leads a Holocaust and genocide study center at a Catholic school in New York City.

“Only in America, only in New York maybe, (can you) have a Muslim woman heading a Holocaust study center at a Catholic school,” he said. “And to me, that sums up where we should be.”