The Anti-Defamation League has been in the news again. When, two years ago, the Southern Poverty
Law Center (sic) was hit by a series of scandals concerning such matters as its
dubious fundraising, amassed wealth, and deliciously ironic allegations of racial
discrimination and sexual harassment leading to the firing of its founder
Morris Dees and the resignation of its president Richard Levin, I hoped that
some similar fate would befall the ADL.
Sadly, this hope failed to materialize.
Indeed, it might be said that in this period in which the SPLC’s
reputation has sunk to an all-time low, the ADL’s influence has soared to new
heights. Due, presumably, to its new
director’s connections to Silicon Valley, the ADL has been working alongside
Big Tech to censor online speech and purge the internet of opinions of which it
disapproves, a campaign that has turned into a blitzkrieg of thought
suppression in the course of the last year.
It has now declared war on Tucker Carlson, the most popular talk show host
on FOX News, basically for being the only mainstream television news persona
with the stones to speak the unvarnished truth about immigration.
The Anti-Defamation League is decades older than the SPLC
and is, to the best of my knowledge, the very first organization of this type
to have been founded. Whereas most
self-appointed, full-time, anti-racist watchdogs sprung up after World War II,
during and after the American Civil Rights Movement, in order to capitalize on
that era’s wave of popular sentiment against racism, the ADL predates the First
World War going all the way back to 1913.
While it is popular among some of the ADL’s foremost critics on the
right today to maintain that the organization started well but got sidetracked
during the tenure of its current director who had been a special assistant to
Barack Obama, in reality the organization started out bad and became worse.
The ADL started out operating under the Chicago branch of
the B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant), a fraternal philanthropic organization
that could roughly be said to be the equivalent for Jews of what the Knights of
Columbus are for Roman Catholics. Its
founders were two Chicago lawyers, Adolf Kraus who was the president of the
order at the time, and Sigmund Livingston who became the first president of the
ADL. Its stated purpose was to combat
the defamation of the Jewish people in particular, and ultimately “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”. This, as good and noble as
it sounds, was a mere façade. Apart from
the fact that the ADL has never seemed to have any qualms about lying about
(defaming) its enemies, thus making a mockery of its own name, throughout its
history it has blurred the distinction between unfair and unjust words and acts
towards Jews qua Jews and justifiable
criticism of the same, just as it has blurred the distinction between criticism
of Jews qua Jews whether unfair or
justifiable and criticism of individuals who are Jewish on the basis of their
words and deeds as individuals. It has
also been susceptible to the charge of promoting Christophobia, which, of
course, contradicts the second part of its purpose statement.
With regards to the first of these points, consider the
incident that sparked the founding of the ADL in the first place. Earlier in 1913, Leo Frank, the factory
supervisor of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia was convicted of
murdering 13 year old Mary Phagan, an employee of the factory who had been
found raped and strangled in its basement.
Frank was the president of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and the
story became the subject of contentious discussion throughout the United
States. Powerful Jewish individuals in
the American northeast such as Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and Albert Lasker, the
Chicago based advertising baron (he had just become the head of Lord and Thomas
which became Foote, Cone & Belding) , became convinced, or at least took
the public position, that Frank was innocent and was being railroaded for
anti-Semitic reasons. The founders of
the ADL were of the same persuasion and today their interpretation of these
events is taken as established in the history books. It is curious though, that fabricated
evidence at the site of the murder pointed to the black nightwatchman Newt
Less, and the man whom the supporters of Frank’s innocence maintain was the
real culprit, the janitor James Conley whose testimony to being Frank’s
accomplice helped convict him, was also black.
For the ADL’s interpretation of the incident to be correct, it would
require that in the city of Atlanta, Georgia at the height of Jim Crow,
anti-Semitism so trumped anti-black prejudice that a white man was framed for
the rape and murder of a 13 year old white girl by a black man, because the white
man was of the Jewish faith. The story
did not end with Frank’s conviction. He
appealed, with Lasker covering much of his legal fees, and eventually his
sentence was commuted from death to life imprisonment. About two years after his original conviction
he was kidnapped from prison and lynched to death near Phagan’s home town. An ugly ending to the story for sure, but it
reinforces the point. How likely is it
that in the Georgia of 1915 a white man would be lynched for a crime of this
nature perpetrated by a black man?
I have given much detail about the Frank case because of its
instrumentality in the founding of the ADL but it is hardly an isolated
incident. In 1982 the ADL hosted a posh
luncheon ceremony in which the legendary sharp-tongued comedian and actress
Joan Rivers in an unusually teary-eyed and sentimental performance for her presented
the “Torch of Liberty” award on their behalf to one Morris B. “Moe” Dalitz. A few
years later they would name him “Philanthropist of the Year”. Dalitz,
who had made a fortune in bootlegging and illegal gambling during the
Prohibition era, had taken his ill-gotten gains and invested them in legal
casinos in Las Vegas, where he later expanded his legitimate business interests
into a more general property development, earning himself the nickname “Mr. Las
Vegas”. In the post-World War II era he
carefully constructed for himself the image of a reformed gangster turned
legitimate businessman which he fiercely defended, famously suing Penthouse magazine in the 1970s for an
article that maintained that a country club and spa resort that he had built
near San Diego was built with mob money and serviced a mob clientele. Dalitz dropped the suit after the magazine
published a letter of apology, although by Rolling
Stone’s 1976
account of the case the defendants appeared to have been winning the suit. A more serious allegation was that beneath
his veneer of legitimacy he was the head of operations for the Las Vegas branch
of the activities of his life-long friend Meyer Lansky. Lansky, who died the year after Dalitz
received the award from the ADL, was the co-founder, with his best friend Benjamin
“Bugsy” Siegel whom he later had killed, of Murder Inc., and who went on with Charles
“Lucky” Luciano to build the National Crime Syndicate. He was
the biggest mobster in the United States for half of the twentieth century and
his criminal empire stretched around the globe.
Siegel had run Lansky’s Las
Vegas operations until his murder in 1947, and Dalitz, who began investing in
Las Vegas casinos around that same time, was widely believed to have been his
successor. Indeed, there have been allegations that the
ADL itself basically functioned as a public relations firm for Lansky and while
the ADL never honoured Lansky, who lacked a respectable public image, the way
it did Dalitz, and Lansky does not seem to have directly donated to the ADL in
his own name (many of his most prominent associates, Dalitz among them, however
were substantial donors), there is plenty of circumstantial grounds for believing
these allegations to be not entirely false.
At any rate, the ADL had always been quick to make charges of
anti-Semitism against those who concentrated on Lansky, Siegel, Dalitz, etc. in
exposing organized crime.
With regards to the second point, the ADL’s promotion of
Christophobia, this has been evident throughout the history of the organization
but became especially prominent during the directorship of Abraham H. Foxman,
who succeeded Nathan Perlmutter in that role in 1987 and continued as director
until his retirement in 2015. In 1999,
Foxman attacked the Rev. Jerry Falwell for saying that the Antichrist would be
a Jewish male. Regardless of whether
one agrees with Falwell’s understanding of Bible prophecy or not, this was
hardly an anti-Semitic statement but a logical implication of the very idea of
the Antichrist – the devil’s counterfeit of the true Christ who will arise in
the last days as the ultimate villain of history. A counterfeit is a fake that is intended to
be passed off as the real thing imitates.
Therefore it has to be as close to the real thing as possible. Thus, that the ultimate counterfeit of the
Messiah would have to be Jewish, can be logically deduced not only from
Christian theology, which correctly asserts that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the
true Christ, but from Jewish theology, which denies this truth but certainly
teaches that the awaited Messiah will be Jewish. It does not require the belief that the Jews
are the source of all evil, are the worst evil in the world, or any other such
nonsense, and indeed, obviously contradicts such crudities because it is based
upon the ultimate God-sent Deliverer being Jewish. Foxman, however, betrayed no capacity for
understanding these points.
A few years later Foxman began attacking Mel Gibson over his
film The Passion of the Christ. The attacks began long before the film was
released and before Foxman had even seen it.
Foxman condemned the movie as anti-Semitic because it portrayed the
Gospel accounts of the betrayal, trial, and crucifixion of Christ accurately –
to the point of using the actual tongues of the day with English translations
in subtitles – without altering the story to place 100% of the blame for the
crucifixion on the Roman authorities and excusing the Pharisees, the chief priests,
and the Jerusalem mob. For Foxman,
irrational though this false dichotomy be, it was either place all the blame
for the crucifixion on the Romans and completely exonerate the Jewish leaders
of two millennia ago or place all the blame for the crucifixion on all Jews of
all times including those alive today.
Underlying this irrational point of view was the idea that traditional,
historical, Scriptural Christianity had been discredited by the Holocaust-
despite the obvious fact that the Third Reich was the product of the shift away
from Christianity in Modern German culture - and that therefore Christianity
had to change its beliefs, wherever Jews found them to be offensive, even if
this involved falsifying the facts of history as recorded in Christianity’s
sacred texts of the New Testament. When
groups like the ADL speak of meaningful interfaith dialogue between Christians
and Jews this is precisely what they mean by it – a one-way discussion in which
Jews speak, Christians listen, and then Christians make whatever changes to
their own faith and practice that Jews
demand. Those like Mel Gibson who are
too traditionalist to go along with this nonsense are then vilified and
condemned. When, several years later,
the actor in a state of inebriation went into a tirade against the Jews, Foxman
gloated that he, that is Foxman, had been vindicated in his accusations,
demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect, or of the
simple fact that after years of being subjected to Foxman’s style of abuse,
which included unbelievably arrogant demands that Gibson denounce his own
father (a traditionalist Roman Catholic who rejected Vatican II, pointed to by
ADL types as the prime example of a positive outcome of the kind of interfaith “dialogue”
described above), if anyone was justified it was Gibson in his tirade and not
Foxman by it.
Abe Foxman retired from his official position at the ADL, if
not from his career as America’s foremost equine rump impressionist, six years
ago, but the organization can hardly be said to have improved under the
leadership of his successor, Jonathan Greenblatt, whose previous gigs included
corporate executive and Obama administration advisor, and who looks like someone
who crawls out of his parents’ basement only to do a bad cosplay of Lex Luthor
at comic book conventions. Under
Greenblatt’s leadership the ADL has moved much further to the Left than it was
even under Foxman. Foxman was a liberal,
for sure, but at the beginning of his tenure as National Director the ADL commissioned
Harvey Klehr’s 1988 survey of Communist subversive groups in the United States
published by Transaction as Far Left of
Center: The American Radical Left Today, something that it would be
difficult to imagine the ADL doing under the current leadership. Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Journalist
Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (sic), has done an excellent job of
documenting the ADL’s further-Left shift under Greenblatt at the Center’s
e-zine Frontpagemag, including the ADL’s strange new alliance with the segments
of the Far Left that are rather less than friendly towards either Israel or the
Jews (see here,
here
and here
for examples).
It is Greenblatt who in his capacity as ADL CEO has been writing
letters and giving interviews on CNN, demanding that FOX News fire Tucker
Carlson for having the audacity to use the word “replacement” in criticizing
liberal immigration policy in the United States. “White supremacists”, use that word after all,
and to use a word that “white supremacists” use is to fully embrace and endorse
everything “white supremacists” believe, just as to be in the same room as a “white
supremacist” or breathe the same air as a “white supremacist” is to implicate
yourself in his ideology. Absurd as
that sort of “argument” is, it is what has passed for logic at the ADL for
decades, long before Greenblatt took over.
Anybody who has perused the profiles they have put together of people
they have accused of “racism”, “hate”, etc. over the years, will recognize the
style.
Lachlan Murdoch has, so far, stood by Carlson and refused to
give in to the ADL’s demands. Let us
hope that he continues to do so. There
are not many today who have the courage to withstand the ADL’s bullying and
intimidation tactics for long, just as there are very few willing to speak the
truths that Tucker Carlson has been speaking.
If Murdoch is willing to stand by Carlson for the long haul,
then perhaps it is time for FOX News to go on the offensive, and shine the
light of exposure upon the bullying, lies, and corruption of the ADL.
