Here is a superb riposte to the ADL’s smear of AFDI/SIOA, within a larger and likewise excellent expose of how far the ADL has departed from its founding principles. “Anti-Defamation League Has Strayed from Its Charter,” by William A. Levinson in the American Thinker, November 13:
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.
[…] 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….
Indeed.