In 2017 the Counter Extremism Project was instrumental in getting the video archive of Anwar al-Awlaki taken off YouTube. The incendiary preaching of the American-born jihadist had incited the Fort Hood gunman and the Boston Marathon bombers, among others. Awlaki was killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike, but his poison had lived on posthumously online. “It’s a watershed moment,” Mr. Wallace said at the time, “on the question of whether we’re going to allow the unchecked proliferation of cyberjihad.” Yet Islamic propaganda and Jew-hatred remain disquietingly unchecked.

Ambassador Mark D. Wallace tells the BBC: We all have neighbors. We all have a house next door. What we know now is that extremism and antisemitism can lurk as close as any of our houses next door…This house now stands as a symbol against hate and as a warning that even in the ordinary, evil can lurk.

On Sunday, and by chance, I was among the first journalists allowed inside the house since it was acquired by the international Counter Extremism Project, headed by Mark Wallace, the former US ambassador to the United Nations… “Believe it or not, you are the first person I have talked to that walked in because it was just open,” Wallace said. “This house has been closed off for 80 years to humanity. Remember the poor souls who were marched to Gas Chamber No 1 and Crematory No 1, a football pitch away. They always saw this ordinary house, a paradise to its occupants, but always beyond their reach. It has never been opened since, including for the last 80 years.

The Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel wrote in 2012, “‘Never again’ becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow” and Mark D. Wallace, CEO of the Counter Extremism Project, echoed these words this week. “Eighty years later it is clear that while essential, ‘never forgetting’ is not enough to prevent the hate and antisemitism that right now grips our society,” Wallace said…Inside, “eternal music” composed by Auschwitz inmates and excavated by contemporary musician Franceso Lotoro will play. Next door, at 88A, an education centre will house researchers, a fellowship, and university studies.

The idea behind the project is to create something that doesn’t exist, a global center to fight extremism in the house of one of the historically worst extremists and antisemites that ever existed,” Hans Jakob Schindler, the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, told CNNwall. The NGO’s plans for the house are twofold: to give a new center to their organization and to open this long closed-off house to the public in time for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp on January 27.

As to the house, the plan is for it to open to the public in time for the 80th anniversary commemorations. Work to turn part of the property into a museum and the rest into a workspace will take many months, the Counter Extremism Project says. “Everyone has or can relate to the “house next door.” But today hatred lurks with ubiquity in houses as close to us as next door. House 88 will take up the fight against destructive hatred, and against extremism and antisemitism,” Ambassador Mark D. Wallace said. The first thing members of the Counter Extremism project did was to attach a mezuzah to the front door, as a way of both reclaiming the house and opening it to all.

The house at 88 Legionow Street is imposing and ugly on the outside, but functional and spacious within. With temperatures below freezing and snow thick on the ground, visitors really notice the blast of warm air coming from the radiators when they walk through the door. It is what Nazi mass murderer Rudolf Höss would have felt after a day of ‘work’ just a few hundred feet away at the most notorious factory of death in history… The property is set to be turned into a weapon for good after being bought by the US-based Counter Extremism Project, who will transform it into a key pillar of their bid to combat radicalisation and violence.

Ambassador Mark D. Wallace added that CEP planned to convert the house and the one next door into the base of a new organization called ‘Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization.’ Daniel Libeskind, an American architect, has been commissioned to redesign the property. Libeskind told NYT that he envisages turning the interior of the house into “a void, an abyss,” but will leave the external walls untouched as a UNESCO preservation order protects them. “A house is a house,” said Jacek Purski., who is involved in the project. “But it is in uninteresting, regular houses like this where extremism is happening today…

A mezuzah, a parchment containing biblical verses, has been attached to the front door frame to honor Jewish tradition — and repudiate the fanaticism of its former occupant, the Auschwitz commander…The plan, Ambassador Mark D. Wallace said, is to turn the house, along with the adjacent property, into the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization, a new organization that will work to expand the pledge of “Never Again” from historical memory to current action.