Is there a conspiracy to discredit the ADL?

An 800-word letter was sent last week to leading ADL activists by ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt, to counter what he said was an “organized, concerted effort” to delegitimize the group.  

As someone who has been criticizing the organization for the past dozen years, I must counter Greenblatt’s charges. Not only is there nothing organized about the criticism, but the charges against the group are nog meant to delegitimize the group but to get it to return to its original mission.

According to its website, “The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 ‘to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.’ Now the nation’s premier civil rights/human relations agency, ADL fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all.” (emphasis added)

Greenblatt listed the supposed myths and charges against the group, among them, that the ADL does not support Israel; that it no longer combats anti-Semitism; that it supports the movement to boycott Israel, and that Greenblatt is a Democratic operative.

Actually, those are not the real complaints about the ADL. There is one basic charge against the ADL, and the charge was raised way before Greenblatt became its leader. That is that the Anti-Defamation League cares more about Democratic Party politics than its stated mission. This began in the term of Greenblatt’s predecessor, Abe Foxman, who made Democratic Party politics ADL’s primary concern.

In 2011 ADL led an effort asking Jews not to criticize President Obama’s anti-Israel policies. It asked Jews to pledge not to make Israel a wedge issue in the 2012 campaign. The real purpose of their effort was to isolate Jewish groups that wished to point out the failings of President Obama’s policy towards Israel — because ADL had a vested interest in ensuring that Jews continued to vote Democratic and re-elect President Obama. They feared losing access to the White House.

In 2007, ADL joined the Democratic Party in criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the laws against partial birth abortion. The criticism against ADL in this matter was not over support or opposition to partial birth abortion, but whether or not it is an issue for the ADL.

At the end of 2010, President Obama was trying to sell the much criticized “Start Treaty.” At the time, John Podhoretz said the proposed treaty creates “a parallelism between American strength and Russian strength that is a very, very bad precedent in terms of how we ourselves think about American power.” Many others criticized the treaty as one-sided in favor of Russia, but the ADL stepped outside its mission.

In a letter sent to all members of the Senate, it urged Senators to put aside reservations about the treaty or its protocol in the interest of the greater goal of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. No Kidding! He wanted the Senate to believe that! More likely Foxman was trying to show himself a leader of the progressive movement.

The ADL issued a White Paper promoting the progressive negative spin against the Tea Party movement and refusing to acknowledge the blatant anti-Semitism in Occupy Wall Street until a campaign by Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com embarrassed them into making a statement.

When Prime Minister Netanyahu scheduled his March 2015 speech to Congress, Foxman again took the Democratic side, telling the Forward that Netanyahu should stay home.

When President Obama tried to sell his Iran deal with words that William Daroff Senior, vice president for public policy and director of the Washington office of the Jewish Federations of North America, said echoed the false anti-Semitic canard that Jews pushed America into Iraq War, the ADL was silent. When the president criticized Israel for allowing Jews to purchase homes in East Jerusalem (in a land deal between two individuals), basically saying that there were places in the world were Jews were not allowed to live, the ADL was silent at this anti-Semitic criticism. 

Then there are the two most recent examples, with the ADL’s false charges of anti-Semitism against Stephen Bannon, and its protection of Keith Ellison against valid charges that he is anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. The ADL criticized Republican Bannon, who has a history of supporting Jewish causes, and protected Democrat Ellison, who has a history of Anti-Semitism and opposing the Jewish state. Greenblatt backed off both positions after he received overwhelming criticism.

Whether or not the reason behind the ADL’s stance on Ellison and Bannon had anything to do with their party affiliations cannot be proven, however it does follow an ADL trend. In his letter, Greenblatt says that criticism of the ADL is part of a larger U.S. trend.

“Much of this campaign reflects wider trends of our time: the dangerous polarization in the U.S., Israel and within our community fed by the dogma that if you are not 100 percent with me you are the enemy, as well as the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ where agenda-driven half-truths are presented as fact, reinforcing these hardened positions,” said Greenblatt’s email, one of whose recipients posted the contents on Facebook.”

Again, I disagree with Greenblatt. Criticism of the ADL has nothing to do with the polarization of America or “fake news.” The criticism is based on what the ADL claims in its mission statement: that it is an organization fighting defamation and for the civil rights of all people, versus what it turns out to be in practice — a one-sided political organization.

Jeff Dunetz is a columnist for The Jewish Star.