If an American tourist visits Lithuania, walks through the state’s genocide museum—a museum dedicated almost entirely to Soviet crimes against Lithuanians, not to the murder of the 96.4% of Lithuanian Jews who were annihilated—absorbs the official version of history, and then posts a Facebook comment questioning what actually happened to the Jews, what exactly is the legal risk?

Lithuania’s prosecution of Artur Fridman provides the answer. Fridman, a Jewish citizen, posted about the documented record surrounding partisan commander Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, whom Lithuania has elevated to head-of-state status. Lithuania answered with travel restrictions, criminal charges under Articles 170-2 §1 and 313 §2 of the Criminal Code, and a prosecutorial dossier running to 220 pages. According to the published record, Fridman posted on May 9, 2024; on January 8, 2025, authorities imposed a written pledge restricting his travel; and on October 30, 2025, prosecutors filed charges. That is not a justice system confronting crime. It is a state enforcement mechanism for protected myths.

The issue is selective enforcement—and under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, it is a recognizable form of institutional discrimination. Lithuania has spent decades denying, minimizing, revising, laundering, distorting, falsifying, inverting and excusing Holocaust perpetrators and eliminationist language from its own national figures. The state and its affiliated historians have strained to interpret language from Kazys Škirpa and the Lithuanian Activist Front in the most innocent possible way, even when the historical record shows where such language led. Yet when a Jewish citizen uses direct language about the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry and the men Lithuania honors, the full apparatus of criminal law awakens. Eliminationist euphemism from national heroes receives interpretive charity. Historical criticism from a Jew receives prosecution. The IHRA definition identifies as potentially antisemitic the application of double standards by requiring of Jews behavior not expected of any other group. That is precisely what Lithuania has done.

Lithuania has never punished a single Lithuanian through its own courts for participation in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust. Approximately 96.4 percent of Lithuanian Jewry was annihilated — the highest destruction rate in occupied Europe. Zero punishments. It is reprehensible to deny or minimize Soviet crimes, Nazi crimes, or Lithuanian crimes — I reject all three. But the government of Lithuania opposes the glorification of Soviet crimes while fully engaging in and practicing the denial of Lithuanian crimes. That is the operating double standard: Soviet atrocities are promoted, acknowledged and memorialized, Lithuanian atrocities are laundered, protected, and enforced through criminal law. And the state that has never punished a single perpetrator of the murder of Jews constructed a seventeen-month criminal case over a Facebook post by a Jew.

The absurdity compounds when one examines what Lithuania’s own institutions have done to the historical record. Congressman Brad Sherman wrote in 2019, 2021, and again in 2026 demanding that Lithuania stop misusing U.S. documents to claim Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis—the acting prime minister of Lithuania’s Nazi-aligned Provisional Government in 1941—had been “completely exonerated,” calling it a “misstatement of facts” and a “misuse of U.S. Congressional documents.” Lithuania did not correct the falsehood. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre dismissed Sherman’s intervention as merely “the opinion of a politician.” Three letters across seven years. No correction. A state that shrugs at congressional correction over a Holocaust-linked fraud yet mobilizes prosecutors over a Jew’s historical criticism has disclosed its priorities with precision.

The problem extends beyond courts. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre’s museum glorifies perpetrators of the Holocaust. The building’s exterior walls display engraved honors to men who participated in the murder of Jews. Inside, the exhibits focus overwhelmingly on Soviet-era Lithuanian suffering while offering visitors virtually nothing about the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. It is, in function, a museum that glorifies the Holocaust — even if foreign visitors are not made aware of what they are glorifying. Lithuanians know. Noreika, the man responsible for the murder of perhaps 14,500 Jews, is glorified both inside and outside the museum. His granddaughter, Silvia Foti, published her findings in Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare. A state that engraves the names of murderers of Jews on the walls of its national museum, shapes visitor experience around the omission of Jewish destruction, and then criminally prosecutes a Jewish citizen who posts about that destruction on Facebook, has answered the question for every American considering a visit: what protects you from becoming the next Fridman?

All of this takes place in a state that benefits from massive Western support. Lithuania is not a broke state improvising under collapse. It is a heavily supported Western ally that chose to mobilize investigators, prosecutors, specialists, document handlers, court staff, and a 220-page criminal file—and to impose travel restrictions—against a Jewish citizen over a Facebook post about the Holocaust. Two hundred and twenty pages. Not for violence. Not for espionage. Not for organized crime. Not for the murder of Lithuanian Jews, for which Lithuania has never punished a single Lithuanian through its own courts. For a Facebook post. That is not law enforcement. It is bureaucratic overreach on a scale that exposes state priorities with unusual clarity: Lithuania was willing to spend substantial public resources not to punish atrocity, but to police Holocaust criticism. If this is how Lithuania chooses to deploy taxpayer resources and Western aid, the United States and the European Union should reevaluate whether their taxpayers’ money is underwriting a reliable democratic ally or a state apparatus willing to spend public resources enforcing historical censorship.

The Brazaitis fraud showed Lithuania willing to misappropriate American governmental credibility to sanitize its own record. The Fridman prosecution shows Lithuania willing to use its own criminal machinery to defend that sanitized canon. Dillon Hosier, CEO of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, has raised this directly: “What exactly are we defending in Lithuania?” Together these cases produce a simple conclusion: Lithuania has a reliability problem. It does not merely distort its own past. When truth threatens the canon, it misuses foreign legitimacy, ignores correction, and prosecutes the critic.

The U.S. State Department maintains a four-level travel advisory system. Level 4—“Do Not Travel”—is currently reserved for countries like North Korea, Syria, and Iran. Lithuania is not a war zone. But it is now a country where an American academic, journalist, student, Jewish tourist, or ordinary traveler can face criminal prosecution for posting criticism on social media. The State Department should add Lithuania to its Level 4 travel advisory list on the specific ground that visitors face a demonstrated risk of arrest and criminal prosecution for speech—including social media content—that contradicts the state’s protected narrative. Until Lithuania dismisses the Fridman case, rescinds the coercive measures already imposed, corrects the frauds it has been caught maintaining, and demonstrates that official narrative is not enforced through criminal law, Americans should assume the state is not a trustworthy referee of its own history. If this is the standard now operating inside a NATO and EU member state, Washington and Brussels should ask whether continued support is being extended to a reliable ally—or to a state that has turned historical vanity into legal risk for visitors, scholars, and Jews. Americans should not need to consult a Lithuanian criminal defense lawyer before posting on Facebook.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)