Redux: The Anti-Defamation League's Defamation & Apologists for White Supremacists

The Anti-Defamation League is one of the most hollow, self-righteous, sanctimonious, bull-$hit organizations in the world.

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It claims as its mandate that it is dedicated to combating prejudice, bigotry and discrimination in America - and that’s what is once did - but since the advent of Zionism it has had one mission: to be an apologist for Israel.

The ADL is solely concerned with being a watchdog for the Israeli government and as part of that going after any and all critics and seeking to impugn their character and imply and if not explicitly state that they are anti-Semites for criticizing Israel in an effort to intimidate any potential future critics and shut down debate in its favor.

Even combating anti-Semitites now takes a backset to the militant Zionist and love affair for the Likud faction that dominates the ADL.

And part of their operation has been in the past to seek to undercut opponents of the Israel lobby. That is why the ADL has recently been in the habit of raising as suspect this or that Muslim or Arab organization. The ADL is proud of the position American Jews have achieve in the United States, a position born out of a marginalized past, which has allowed them to lobby on behalf of Israel.

American Muslims aspire to the same elite position of influence and the ADL is worried about this. Currently they have the floor to themselves and do not want an empowered American Muslim community which would no doubt lobby on behalf of Palestinians and constitute and policy rival.

So the ADL - using BS-language and seeking to pretend it is not prejudiced - has consistently been trying to portray this or that Muslim group as unworthy in order to marginalize them. And recently they joined the disgusting right-wing bandwagon:

It’s happened: the Anti-Defamation League has overplayed its hand (in this case, neoconservative Islamophobia) in such a glaring manner that it is being condemned at every quarter– a statement from the group opposing the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in New York. The statement openly abandons civil rights, standing for no principle at all except majoritarian intolerance:

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

MJ Rosenberg says that ADL has joined the bigots. Joshua Holland at AlterNet: “I guess the once-important ADL is admitting that it’s an organization dedicated not to combatting hatred and bigotry, but simply another organ pushing far-right, Islamophobic conspiracy theories.” Krugman at the Times has also landed on the ADL: “One thing I thought Jews were supposed to understand is that they need to be advocates of universal rights, not just rights for their particular group.”

The Economist blog nails it:

IN LIGHT of the Anti-Defamation League’s recent statement opposing the construction of an Islamic centre near Ground Zero, they ought to no longer claim that their organisation fights “all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and supports civil rights for all.” More accurate would be saying that the ADL fights some forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals except when it comes to Muslim Americans exercising their right to worship, and supports civil rights for all except when such support would bother some people.

Read that statement and tell me if you’ve ever seen anything so lily-livered and equivocating

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has called on ADL to retract the statement:

“It is shocking that a group claiming to seek ‘justice and fair treatment for all’ would side with those engaged in one of the most egregious Islamophobic smear campaigns in recent memory,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad. “We ask the ADL to reconsider and retract this ill-considered and divisive statement. With its shameful statement, the ADL is exploiting and fueling the rising level of anti-Islam sentiment in our society.” Awad urged ADL members to contact the Jewish group’s leaders to express their opposition to the statement against the Islamic community center.

Alex Pareene at Salon:

Opposition to the Cordoba House was limited, initially, to right-wing populist kooks like the editorial board of the New York Post, and their rage-columnist Andrew Peyser. Then it went national, as people who know damn well what they’re doing stoked ethnic resentments and encouraged plenty of otherwise decent people to give in to base fears of scary Arabs who want to kill you, all of you, because that is their nature.

It was inevitable that the ADL - growing more desperate on Israel - would forgo any previous restraint in its attacks against Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans and just join the chorus to prevent them from aspiring to build a respectful place for them in America with the inevitable political influence.

Nothing in the name of Israel is ever too much for Zionists. But such people are on the wrong side of history.

The mosque will be built and Muslims in America are going no where.

Redux: Supporters of Israel have long made an unholy-alliance-of-expediency with anti-Semites provided they are pro-Zionist. The state of Israel and American Zionists self-righteously denounce any of their honest critics as anti-Semites (or self-hating Jews), but they embrace right-wing Christian anti-Semites in American and elsewhere and excuse their anti-Semitism simply because these Christian zealots support Israel for their own messianic ends. So they pretend that they are the arbiters of how is a honest critic of not, but then welcome anti-Semites into their fold. This is because support for Zionist trumps over any and all decency.

And for the lousy Anti-Defamation League this means even being nice to anti-Semitic White Supremacists:

With the Cordoba House controversy, the mainstream press has suddenly discovered that the Anti-Defamation League is more than willing to give sanction to bigotry. But the ADL has a long history of allowing cynical political calculations to trump its professed concerns about racism.

In a virtually unknown and unreported event in 1999, the ADL pointedly refused to condemn Richard Quinn, a leading white nationalist publisher who had come under fire for his history of promoting racist screeds before taking a job as a consultant for John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. Though the ADL initially expressed concern about Quinn’s role on the McCain campaign, it backed off for reasons that appeared to relate to the calculated “pro-Israel” line of Quinn’s magazine. [...]

Within neo-Confederate circles, and by extension within the paleoconservative movement, Israel is a generally unpopular cause. Thus the Southern Partisan stood out in its roaring defense of the Jewish State’s value to the United States.

Ed Sebesta, one of the country’s leading researchers on the neo-Confederate movement, suggested to me that the Southern Partisan’s unusual pro-Israel bent helped explain why Quinn was able to marshall the ADL as his ally. “One of the leading figures in the neo-Confederate movement is Frank Conner whose book, ‘The South Under Siege: 1830-2000,’ has chapters of anti-Jewish writing. It is representative of neo-Confederate thinking. Frank Conner is a figure respected in the Sons of Confederate Veterans [the nation's largest neo-Confederate group] and was the author of multiple articles for the Sons of Confederate Veterans educational foundation publication, ‘Southern Mercury.’ What is interesting is that the paleoconservatives and neo-Confederates are very critical of Israel. But the Southern Partisan was always the publication of Richard Quinn, a Republican party consultant who needed to earn a living. So its position on Israel is anomalous relative to the neo-Confederate movement.”

The ADL’s refusal to condemn Quinn was a telling episode. Foxman and company may have been willing to ignore all the racist propaganda Quinn and his associates promoted (the Partisan ran a glowing review of the pornographic anti-immigrant tract, “Camp of the Saints,” in the same issue in which it defended Quinn) because the magazine maintained a strict “pro-Israel” line. There is hardly any other explanation for the ADL’s strange silence. In contrast, the Southern Poverty Law Center has repeatedly taken on the Southern Partisan and the figures behind it. The SPLC is able to take a sincere and principled stance against bigotry because, unlike the ADL, it does not have a foreign policy.

This is the depth of low and desperation for support that embodies Israel's apologists.