For years, the ADL has betrayed Jews and protected our adversaries — all for partisan purposes
Under its current leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL has, among many other things:
• Enthusiastically accepted a non-apology from arch Jew-hater Ilhan Omar for saying that “Israel has hypnotized the world.”
• Declared that the BDS movement is not necessarily anti-Semitic.
• Supported Black Lives Matter, even after its anti-Semitism was made public in the Jewish media.
• Claimed that those who criticize anti-Semitic Critical Race Theory are enabling “extremists [who] are using the opportunity to spread racism, hate and antisemitism.”
• Called for the U.S. to take in Syrian refugees who have been schooled from childhood to hate Jews.
• Apologized for its past opposition to construction of the triumphalist Islamic center near Ground Zero.
One of the ADL’s most unforgivable sins is that it covered up and sought to marginalize the results of its own surveys of global anti-Semitism. The ADL actually hid its most alarming findings from the public and the Jewish community. Here’s how:
Between 2014 and 2017, the ADL conducted three massive polling projects covering 102 countries around the world, 19 countries in Europe, and then the U.S., measuring anti-Jewish attitudes among the respective populations.
What the ADL found was truly shocking: on average, 74% of Middle Eastern, 55% of European, and 34% of American Muslims held hateful opinions of Jews. Muslim societies, the ADL found, are the most anti-Semitic in the world.
Yet, what did the ADL do with this painful truth? It sought to marginalize, dismiss and cover it up. In 2019, during a congressional hearing on “hate crimes,” Mort Klein of the ZOA did what any responsible Jewish leader concerned for Jews’ safety would and cited these key ADL findings in his testimony.
But ADL official Eileen Hershenov, who also testified at that same hearing, mentioned Klein’s citation of the ADL’s polling data and hinted at why the ADL doesn’t do anything about it. She said:
Um, one of the [previous] witnesses [Klein] talked about global — the global attitudes that we look at. That’s non-violent — looking at attitudes — and the ADL does track that. We feel it is incumbent — vulnerable, marginalized — marginalized, ah, communities have bigotry within them.
After spending three years of research and significant sums of Jewish donors’ money on a detailed threat assessment project, the ADL ran away from its own findings.
Why ignore Jew-hatred from minority groups? In general terms, the Jewish establishment has clung to an idealized past reality where classical liberalism included and sheltered the Jews as one minority amongst all others in an imperfect but blessed nation. The ADL, wishing that this framework were still in operation, blinds itself to what everyone but Jewish leaders acknowledges: that this decent liberalism has been defeated in most cultural institutions by a “woke” progressivism which has flipped the game board and defines Jews as part of the “racist oppressor” class.
What is the ADL to do now? It seems the Greenblatt ADL has fully bought into much of the woke mindset. Since American Muslims are not classed as “whites,” and are not neo-Nazis, they have little to fear from the Anti-Defamation League when they go about defaming Jews — or worse.
A recent example: Manhattan’s attorney general, whom the ADL had once honored, let a Muslim terrorist who savagely beat a Jewish man off with a substantially reduced sentence. Even with physical attacks on Jews in New York City up 41% in 2022 — and Muslims responsible for nearly a fifth of such attacks going back to 2018 — the ADL was silent.
Jews do not have the option of letting attacks on us increase another 41% this year. That is why we must forcefully stand up to this betrayal.