Anti-Defamation League Has Strayed from Its Charter

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http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/ ... arter.html

November 13, 2011
Anti-Defamation League Has Strayed from Its Charter
By William A. Levinson

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.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/ ... z1djlv7SmC

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April 27, 2012
The ADL Must Be Stopped
By Charles Jacobs & Ilya Feoktistov

The Jewish community's largest "defense" organization, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has adopted a policy, consistent with the progressive agenda, not to speak up much about the global tsunami of Muslim anti-Semitism, but instead to campaign against "Islamophobia." This while FBI statistics show that hate crimes against Jews in America are five times the number of hate crimes against Muslims. The rationale for this policy, as the ADL's chief, Abe Foxman, told the Boston Jewish Advocate, is that "[y]ou can't fight the fight against anti-Semitism without fighting against bigotry. ... You cannot ask people to stand with you unless you are ready to stand with them."

But in cities across America, Foxman's policy has led the ADL to stand with people and organizations whose mission it is to defame and harm Jews. To defend its policy of "outreach," the Anti-Defamation League vigorously defames as "bigots" citizens who question radical Islamists' true aims. This pattern of allying with Muslim anti-Semites to fight "Islamophobia" and then defaming legitimately concerned citizens can be clearly seen in three cases:

1. Detroit Imam Mustapha Elturk spoke at an interfaith event on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at Congregation Shaarey Tzedek, a synagogue with a proud and longstanding pro-Israel reputation. According to locals, the ADL branch in Detroit blessed the invitation -- ignoring reports (available on ADL's own website) that Elturk's group -- the Islamic Organization of North America -- has a history of anti-Semitism.

The ADL has an annual $55M budget; presumably some of it is used to seek out enemies of the Jewish people. But any unfunded but curious citizen could have found on Elturk's own website (it was on his homepage) the following sermon:

If the Zionists don't repent and stop their aggression... they will be rest assured punished by God as he twice punished them here in this world... Who are the Zionists? ... Allah said, "Every time they enter into a covenant, they breach it. {...} People who break their covenant are worse than animals in God's sight."

During this sermon, the imam solicited his congregation for donations to Hamas-affiliated charities in the Gaza Strip, and he praised dead Gaza fighters as martyrs. In other sermons posted on his open site, Elturk defames American democracy, American society, and moderate Muslims -- and he describes in exquisite detail the ways in which Westernized Muslim women will suffer in Hell for their libertine ways.

When some members of the Detroit Jewish community spoke out online against the synagogue's embrace of Imam Elturk, 38 Detroit rabbis -- following Foxman's logic, it would seem -- co-signed a letter (a Jewish fatwa?) condemning the anonymous dissenters for being "uncivil." The president of the local Jewish Community Relations Council came out in favor of silencing the "online demagogues" and, channeling Stalin or Mao, promised to "set appropriate standards for conversation." Daniel Levy, executive board member of Detroit's ADL, defended Elturk's invitation to speak at the synagogue because -- again following Abe Foxman's reasoning -- the Detroit Jews and Mr. Elturk need to be "working together in mutual respect [as] the only way to move forward and not back." He then accused those who disagree with Elturk's invitation of "doing the work of our enemies." Apparently irony is not Mr. Levy's strong suit.

2. In Florida, the ADL is doing the work of CAIR (Committee for American Islamic Relations) -- a group identified by a federal judge as an American front for Hamas. Florida's ADL recently helped CAIR defeat that state's "American Laws for American Courts" law. The ALAC law was meant to prevent judges from taking into account foreign or religious laws, as was the case two years ago in New Jersey when a judge denied a Moroccan woman a restraining order against her estranged husband, who wouldn't stop raping her. The Jersey judge ruled that because they were still married, Islamic law allowed the husband full rights to her body and that the poor woman must submit to rape at his leisure.

After the ADL helped defeat the law, a gleeful Ahmed Bedier, CAIR-Florida director, was caught on tape bragging that "when we go lobbying [against] the bill today, we will be using the talking points of the Anti-Defamation League." (Bedier is close supporter of convicted Islamic Jihad terrorist Sami Al Arian.) Hassan Shibly, CAIR-Tampa's executive director, said that "[o]ur victory tonight is a great example of how the interfaith and civil rights community united can make a positive difference for all Americans." Mr. Shibly is a man who has claimed that Hezb'allah is a legitimate resistance movement. On Facebook -- where he was once "friends" with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad -- Shibly would post messages such as:

How Jews and Christians lost the teachings of their Prophets and how Muslims can avoid falling into the same mistakes.

Niqab [full face veil for women] is Required in Islam!!

The Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazis

Its time Americans WAKE UP to the ATROCITY that is Israel!!

3. In Michigan's Farmington Public Schools district, not far from Dearborn and Detroit, the Islamic Cultural Association of Michigan (ICA) got what seemed to many as an inside deal to purchase an abandoned school in order to build a mosque. (They beat out the bid of a Jewish religious school.) The deal was negotiated when the district's school board was led by former ADL Detroit Director Howard Wallach. The ICA mosque-builders are affiliated with the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) -- which is, according to federal authorities, a Muslim Brotherhood front. They have invited the Jewish anti-Semite Norman Finklestein to lecture to their members.

Last June, at an explosive school board meeting, concerned locals questioned the manner of the sale. They were opposed by speakers, including Dawud Walid, executive director of Detroit's branch of CAIR, who hurled accusations of Islamophobia at anyone who disagreed with the deal. Joining CAIR's Walid in support of the mosque were Betsy Kellman, the Michigan director of the ADL, and Detroit Jewish Community Relations Council executive director Robert Cohen.

Jewish leaders, defending the deal, accused Farmington residents of having "strong anti-Muslim feelings" and "making generalizations about Muslims." They said nothing about the proposed mosque's radical links or its likely animus toward their own Jewish constituents. The next day, CAIR issued a statement thanking both for their support and unfoundedly attacking the pro-Israel group StandWithUs for instigating the opposition.

In a phone interview, Kellman told us she did not know that ICA is linked to NAIT or that NAIT is a Muslim Brotherhood front. (The ADL has an annual budget of over $50M. The facts about NAIT are easily available from public, open sources.) Currently, Kellman chairs an interfaith group that includes -- and thereby legitimates -- CAIR. In 2010, Kellman spoke at a Detroit conference that also featured Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who has called Israel the "enemy of Allah" and prayed for it to be struck down.

Such are the people and organizations that Foxman's policies have this country's largest Jewish defense organization allying with, as it aggressively attempts to silence, intimidate, and smear those who would criticize its actions, or its allies.

Recently, the National Conference on Jewish Affairs (NCJA) called for ADL head Abe Foxman to resign. We concur. The words used by Detroit ADL official Daniel Levy to describe the ADL's critics apply most appropriately to Foxman: he is -- with precious sums of Jewish money meant to protect Jews from their foes -- doing the work of Jews' enemies. This should be stopped.

For more on the ADL's failures: www.charlesjacobs.org

Charles Jacobs is president and Ilya Feoktistov is research director, Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/ ... z1tIYaMZ7N

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Charter... I don't even like that word.