ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE HAS STRAYED FROM ITS CHARTER
By William A. Levinson
American Thinker
Nov 13 2011
The Anti-Defamation League’s original charter is simple,
straightforward, and honorable:
The immediate object of the League is to stop, by appeals to reason
and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation
of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and
fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to
unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or
body of citizens.
Nowhere does this call for the ADL to shield Barack Obama from the
consequences of his policies toward Israel and other allies of the
United States. The “National Pledge for Unity on Israel,” which the
ADL cosponsored with the American Jewish Committee, is but the most
recent example of how this organization has lost touch with the very
reason for its existence.
U.S.-Israel friendship should never be used as a political wedge
issue. At a time when Israel is confronting new dangers and challenges
in a fast changing Middle East, the United States must continue to
project to the world the solid support of the American people and
their elected representatives for Israel’s rights and quest for peace
and security. U.S. leadership in the efforts to achieve an agreement
resolving the conflict that results in two states–the Jewish state
of Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in peaceful
coexistence–is more critical than ever.
The fact that “President Obama today [May 19] backed pre-1967 borders
as the basis for negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians
on the contours of an eventual peace deal” encourages terroristic
violence ranging from the slaughter of the Fogel family to acts
of war including the launch of Grad rockets against Israel. The
statement that the pre-1967 borders are the basis for negotiations
tells the Palestinians openly that they can kill as many civilians
as they want, fire as many rockets and mortar shells as they want,
and break as many truces as they want without the prospect of having
land concessions taken off the table forever.
The Arabs’ provocation or initiation of three wars while Israel was
inside its 1967 borders proves meanwhile that Israel’s “occupation”
of Gaza, Samaria, and Judea is not and never was the root cause of the
region’s violence. This Palestinian video that declares Tel Aviv part
of “Palestine” reinforces this obvious conclusion. The deluded idea
that Israel’s surrender of any of this territory will bring peace
therefore underscores the disconnection from reality of those that
promote it, including the ADL, as shown above. This should indeed be
a 2012 campaign issue that, especially in combination with similar
behavior toward the United Kingdom, underscores Mr. Obama’s lack of
fitness for his job.
The infamous Zimmerman Telegram of the First World War encouraged
Mexico to attack the United States only if the U.S. attacked Germany
first. The U.K. was in contrast not threatening to attack the United
States when Mr. Obama said that it and Argentina should negotiate
the future of the Falkland Islands. This could conceivably encourage
Argentina’s next Leopoldo Galtieri to start another war with the
United Kingdom. Mr. Obama’s encouragement of totalitarian aggression
is therefore in no way limited to Palestinian terrorists.
The ADL, meanwhile, demolished its credibility years before its cynical
“National Pledge for Unity on Israel,” aka “Give Barack Obama a pass
for stripping terroristic violence of meaningful consequences.”
Abraham Foxman had this to say in 2007 about Turkey’s genocide of
about 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War: “The Turks and
Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn’t
be the arbiter of that history, nor should the U.S. Congress.”
Foxman did not go so far as to deny that Armenians had been murdered,
but he has nonetheless turned the ADL into an organization where the
words “Never Again” are a meaningless slogan. This was so repulsive
that ADL Director Andrew Tarsy refused to support Foxman and was
fired as a result. Two ADL board members then resigned in disgust.
The ADL has also become a facilitator and enabler of the very
hate-mongers it claims to oppose. Mr. Foxman issued this joint
statement on hate symbols with Al Sharpton, thus legitimizing this
prominent racist and anti-Semite. The actions of Mr. Sharpton and his
National Action Network at Freddy’s Fashion Mart speak for themselves,
as do Mr. Sharpton’s statements about the Crown Heights riots and
his role in the Tawana Brawley scandal. ADL then went even farther
by attacking as “Islamophobic” people and organizations that expose
anti-Semitism and similar hate-related activities against Christians
under color of Islam.
The organization [Stop Islamization of America, SIOA], led by Robert
Spencer and Pamela Geller, warns of the encroachment of Shari’a, or
Islamic law, and encourages Muslims to leave what it describes as the
“falsity of Islam.”
Adherents of this ideological Islamophobia view Islam as an existential
threat to the world, and especially to the “West.”
A phobia is an irrational fear of an imaginary danger. Does the ADL
contend that this video, which calls for the annihilation of Jews and
proclaims that Islam will rule the word, was produced by people who
do not call themselves Muslims? Is the woman who calls for Jews to
“go back to the ovens” in this video (3:20) an actress instead of
a person who calls herself a Muslim? Are these people who call for
the bombing of Denmark and the taking of Danish women as war booty
movie extras and not militant Muslims? Is this Islamic cleric who
called women who do not wear hijabs “uncovered meat” whom any man is
free to rape a figment of Spencer’s, Geller’s, and our imaginations
and therefore a phobia? Will the ADL treat this massacre of Coptic
Christians as an issue like the Armenian genocide, in which “Egyptians
and Copts will have to revisit their past”? Does the ADL deny that
a self-appointed sharia court (aka lynch mob) in Spain sentenced
a woman to death for “adultery,” or that Islamic supremacists are
trying to carve out sharia-compliant zones in Europe? From where we
sit, the ADL’s condemnation of SIOA makes it a moral accomplice and
accessory to all these outrages.
The ADL has also strayed from its charter by joining the American
Jewish Committee and other groups in an attack on the Second Amendment,
with the explicit statement that there is no individual right to
possess firearms. This puts the ADL and the others squarely on the
side of dictators and racists whose first priority is to disarm those
they might wish to exterminate or lynch later. This underscores the
ADL’s appalling judgment even in the absence of the other issues,
because taking either side in a controversy unrelated to its basic
charter simply alienates people who might otherwise support it.
The ADL was once a fine organization, and it can become one again —
but until it changes its current orientation and behavior drastically,
it does not deserve the support of any American.
William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business
management including content on organizational psychology, as well
as manufacturing productivity and quality.