BY SAHAR AZIZ
For many years, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was talked about, it was often in reference to combatting antisemitism. Now the ADL is extra precisely cited within the litany of pro-Israeli teams making an attempt to criminalize Muslim and Palestinian college students for looking for an finish to the horrific genocide in Gaza.
For over 100 years, the ADL has described itself as a number one civil rights group targeted on Jewish American communities but in addition recognizing that the civil rights of Jews are interconnected with these of different minority communities. Certainly, the ADL was among the many few non-Black organizations supportive of the civil rights motion within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties.
Nevertheless, the gradual acceptance of Jewish People by white Christians into the social development of “whiteness” beginning within the Nineteen Seventies, after a long time of anti-Jewish discrimination, brought on a divergence in financial and political pursuits with racial minority communities that proceed to face systemic racism. After all, that doesn’t imply antisemitism now not exists, however it’s not structural—because it was when Jews have been victims of housing segregation, admissions quotas at universities, express racial tropes in mainstream media, exclusion from elite legislation companies, and underrepresentation in elected workplace.
Concurrently, the ADL’s more and more pro-Israeli donor base equated combating antisemitism with censoring critiques of Zionism and defending the state of Israel’s insurance policies. The ADL branded their revised agenda as “The New Antisemitism.”
The ADL’s present priorities differ starkly from these of Jewish communities a century in the past whose members have been primarily working class, described as a harmful “Hebrew” race, and deliberately discriminated towards in schooling, housing, and employment.
As a substitute, the ADL has more and more develop into related to spreading Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. For the reason that begin of Israel’s genocidal marketing campaign in Gaza within the fall of 2023, the ADL has been deploying its substantial sources to cease pupil activism and protests on college campuses—with seemingly little regard for the basic American proper to free speech and political meeting.
Put merely, a longtime civil rights group is focusing on two of the minority teams most discriminated towards right this moment: Palestinians and Muslims. Such focusing on goes past racist speech into advocacy to hurt actual individuals—mirroring the techniques of antisemites within the interwar years of the 20 th century.
Particularly, the ADL is demanding that Congress, college presidents, and govt department officers deport, expel, and prosecute Palestinian, Muslim, and different minority college students due to their perception that the antigenocide, post-Holocaust mantra “By no means Once more” applies equally to Palestinians. The most recent instance got here final week when ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt “repeatedly in contrast pro-Palestinian pupil protesters to Islamist terrorists in feedback to Republican attorneys common and mentioned the left harbored the ‘actual deal menace’ to Jews.” The pinnacle of this purported civil rights group went on to hawk right-wing conservative propaganda that the Black Lives Matter Motion and the Occupy Wall Avenue Motion have been threats to nationwide safety: “There’s a throughline from Occupy Wall Avenue to BLM to ‘defund the police’ to ‘River to the Sea.’ . . . They’re the identical individuals, these are the identical sort of nihilists.” He reportedly in contrast campus protesters—largely comprised of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old American faculty college students—to the lethal international terrorist organizations ISIS and Al Qaeda at a number of factors in his remarks to Republican attorneys common at their annual summer season convention.
Whereas it’s tempting to dismiss such claims as absurd (and notably devoid of any proof), Greenblatt’s group libel is the truth is fairly harmful. As I clarify in The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Spiritual Freedom, calling Muslims and Arabs terrorists is an Islamophobic racial trope—one which has brought on substantial bodily, financial, and psychological hurt to those communities since 9/11.
Muslim ladies carrying the hijab have been assaulted, harassed, and discriminated towards as a result of they’re presumed to be terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. Muslim youngsters have been bullied in school by classmates who accuse them of being terrorists, members of Al Qaeda, and a hazard to America. Muslim workers have confronted hostile work environments throughout the nation by coworkers who accuse them of supporting the September 11 terrorist assaults, sympathizing with Al Qaeda, or being a menace to nationwide safety. Lots of of hundreds of Islamophobic incidents over twenty-five years have been documented by students, Muslim American teams, authorities companies, and civil rights teams.
So when the ADL overtly touts racist tropes at a convention of state lawyer generals who’ve the authority to analyze, indict, and prosecute, it’s now not behaving like a civil rights group. It’s within the firm of right-wing anti-immigrant teams.
The ADL’s obsession with censoring and criminalizing criticism of Israel, a international state, somewhat than addressing actual antisemitism in america additionally threatens the security of the appreciable variety of Jewish American college students partaking within the pro-Palestine motion.
In flip, a considerable portion of antisemitism incidents in ADL reviews are based mostly completely on political dissent by college students and college. Stating that Israel is committing a genocide, that Israel is enacting apartheid, that Israel is a racist state due to its remedy of Palestinians, and that Israel is an unlawful occupier all rely within the ADL’s inflated numbers purportedly documenting antisemitism.
One can most definitely contest these political statements and positions. However to say that they’re antisemitic when expressed in protests, sit-ins, teach-ins, and college occasions is extra about imposing international coverage orthodoxy than defending Jews’ civil rights. And violating that orthodoxy now makes the speaker a terrorist corresponding to ISIS and Al Qaeda.
That the ADL has resorted to peddling such racist tropes to name on authorities legal professionals to criminalize dissent demonstrates the menace it poses to the civil rights of Palestinians and Muslims whose households and associates are being bombed, maimed, repeatedly displaced, and deliberately starved in Gaza.
Given its file of opposing white segregationists who adopted the same playbook towards Black communities within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, the ADL can not feign ignorance of the hurt it’s inflicting to Muslim and Palestinian communities. Nor can it feign to be a civil rights group.
Sahar Aziz is distinguished professor at Rutgers Regulation College. director of the Heart for Safety, Race and Rights and creator of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Spiritual Freedom.
