“The ADL has become a fraud,” wrote Jewish-American political activist Charles Jacobs, president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), in 2019 about the Anti-Defamation League. As he and others have documented, the ADL, the “biggest Jewish defense agency” against antisemitism, has in recent decades become the “biggest failure” as leftist biases among American Jews have perverted this core ADL mission.
Jacobs recently reviewed the ADL’s downfall and the need for new Jewish leadership in an APT webinar with his fellow conservative Jews William A. Jacobson and Jonathan S. Tobin. Jacobson, a Cornell University Law School professor, heads the Legal Insurrection Foundation. The political commentator Tobin edits the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS).
The “ADL advocates for the Democratic Party’s agenda items,” Jacobs wrote in 2014, and has made an “awful detour into universalism and partisan politics.” This reflects the historically left-leaning political sentiments of most American Jews. As the conservative Jewish political writer Seth Mandel noted in 2018, the “ADL has long supported abortion rights, which is not a ‘Jewish issue’ in any way.”
These biases have often rubbed conservative Jews the wrong way, such as Herut North America’s United States National Director, Moshe Phillips. In 2013, he rebutted a 2010 smear by then ADL National Director Abraham Foxman of the late conservative talk radio pioneer, Rush Limbaugh, as an anti-Semite. “The ADL does not speak in our name. Abraham Foxman does not speak in our name,” Phillips wrote.
While Foxman had extensively analyzed Islamic antisemitism and its threats to Israel, vitally important for Jews, in his 2003 book, Never Again: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, such views remained exceptional among ADL leaders. As Jacobs observed:
Like failed generals fighting the last war, they focused on Nazis and the political right — and ignored the changed battlefield for as long as they could. They deliberately, out of political consideration, minimized the assaults coming from “progressives” and Islamists.
That modern anti-Israel “animus comes mostly from the ideological left, with which a majority of Jews identify for many reasons, is painful and confusing to many,” Jacobs observed in 2010. He elaborated in 2017:
ADL kept sending those (fundraising) postcards with swastikas found in bathroom stalls in Iowa, and campaigned against Pat Robertson…even though many people now believe that Robertson and Christian evangelicals are Israel’s, and the Jews’, best allies.
An APT study of 1995-2011 ADL press releases offered a “good if not perfect indicator of ADL priorities,” an APT pamphlet noted. In this 15-year period APT “found that only 3 percent of ADL’s press releases focus on Islamic extremism and Arab anti-Semitism,” while merely another five percent of press releases concerned terrorism. “Fighting for causes unrelated to Jewish defense accounts for 31 percent of ADL’s press release output,” APT concluded.
Meanwhile the ADL’s own 2014-1017 extensive studies of antisemitism worldwide revealed that Muslims are by far the most anti-Semitic group globally in comparison to other religions and atheists. In a “cover-up mode” the ADL downplayed its own data, Jacobs observed. The findings were “politically incorrect” for an ADL “anchored in the Left.”
Empirically proven Islamic antisemitism calls into question the open border policies of Jewish groups including the ADL towards Muslim migrants and/or refugees. Jewish leaders “refuse to acknowledge the political and social consequences of the mass influx of Muslim immigrants,” Jacobs has noted. These leaders “fail to understand how promoting tolerance of the intolerant may be lethal,” as when the ADL has ignored Islamic threats to homosexuals in the United States.
By contrast, the ADL has a “pattern of allying with Muslim anti-Semites to fight ‘Islamophobia’ and then defaming legitimately concerned citizens,” Jacobs noted in 2012. Thus ADL branches have actually coordinated with local affiliates of the Hamas-derived Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), something that made him call for Foxman’s resignation. American anti-sharia activist Pamela Geller noted that same year that he had equated her with anti-Semites such as Louis Farrakhan and Patrick Buchannan.
Precisely the opposite, Jewish leaders must demand of Muslims a reevaluation of Islamic anti-Semitic doctrines, Jacobs demanded in a 2010 interview. This would parallel past critical Jewish engagement with Christian antisemitism. As Jacobs noted, the “enormous, life-saving reversals in Christian theological teachings about Jews could not have been achieved without years of intensive Jewish critique of Christian Biblical texts and traditions.”
The dismal state of the ADL and other Jewish organizations prompted APT and its Jewish allies in 2020 to call for new Jewish leadership in America. Yet Jacobs noted in 2010 the reticence of many Jews to risk conflict with powerful Jewish personalities and groups. “In the case of the ADL, I know several prominent Jewish leaders who agree with my criticism 110%, but could not speak out publicly without great risk,” he had said.
Jews desperately need effective defenses against contemporary anti-Semitic dangers. Yet since Jonathan Greenblatt succeeded Foxman as ADL National Director in 2015, Jacob’s concerns have only worsened. Greenblatt, a veteran Democratic political operative has abandoned whatever political impartiality Foxman once showed and turned the ADL into a rigidly leftwing organization, as a concluding article in this series will examine.
Frank Anderson says
I am trying to limit my comments; but this statement forces me, “Precisely the opposite, Jewish leaders must demand of Muslims a reevaluation of Islamic anti-Semitic doctrines, Jacobs demanded in a 2010 interview.”
There is no chance that muslims will “reevaluate doctrines” that are “final, complete, perfect and unchangeable” for 1400 years because some Jewish person, whom they consider lower than dogs and pigs demands it. The utter ignorance of making such a demand should appall anyone reading of it.
Any of 3 books can provide a start for learning what is needed to understand and FEAR islam by non-muslims (those who do not submit). Spencer’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades, for its brevity and organization, Gabriel’s The Unfinished Battle, for the writer’s intimate knowledge and authority, and Warner’s Abridged Koran, for brilliant editing and commentary of the basic document of islam. A few hours can save many years of being deceived and confused by blind leaders.
mortimer says
Many thanks to Frank Anderson for pinpointing the problem: namely, the naivety and culpable ignorance of people like Charles Jacobs who naively suggests that Islam may be ‘REFORMED’ in some way by removing its inherent anti-Semitism. A reform of Islam cannot be done for inherent reasons in Islam!
Now … Jacobs is correct that evangelical Christians who call themselves ‘Christian Zionists’ are the best friends that Israel has ever had. President Trump is a Christian Zionist. The Left has REPEATEDLY shown itself to be enemies of Israel. Any Jews who trust the Left to stop anti-Semitism are delusional.
However much Jacobs now understands LEFTISM as anti-Semitic (good for him, by the way), he doesn’t understand Islam. It is highly codified, it is PERFECT, COMPLETE and ETERNAL and thus UNREFORMABLE. Many Leftist Jews actually think Muslims are going to reform Islam and become Leftists.
Jacobs obviously has not studied Islam enough to realize that Islam’s anti-Semitism comes from Islam’s primary, canonical source texts, from Allah and from Mohammed who are both INFALLIBLE. Thus, any call for ‘reform’ of Islam falls flat and doesn’t even exit the starting gate!
Please, Mr. Jacobs, learn about the JIHAD DOCTRINE, IJTIHAD DOCTRINE and TAQIYYA DOCTRINE.
Mr. Jacobs, Muslims will never ‘RE-EVALUATE’ Islam … if they do that, then they will be forced to LEAVE this anti-intellectual, obscurantist system.
That is what we want Muslims to do … leave Islam … it can’t be fixed.
Frank Anderson says
mortimer, a simple and direct question to ponder: How could the National Socialist German Workers Party be reformed to prevent WWII and the Holocaust? Look at its foundation and leaders. What could any ignorant dilettante do-gooder do to change the dedicated path being taken? Jorge Santayana being shown correct again. Ask Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier. Not to mention FDR’s telegram that was mocked in the Reichstag.
tgusa says
The Jewish reformation of islam. I would say, let me know how that works out, but I already know how that would work out. Every now and then I need a drink or two just so my head wont explode from the stupidity going on out there.
Frank Anderson says
tgusa, I believe there was in the past great wisdom expressed and practiced in the Reform Jewish movement, that started about 200 years ago. As I understand, and welcome correction where in error, the idea is to question everything repeatedly to try to remove as much error and deception as possible from all wisdom in human control. I understand Orthodox. Ultra-Orthodox and Conservative Jews have a real problem with that continuing process of examination and reform. But to my knowledge the community divisions still speak to each other and have never advocated death or maiming as punishment for reform or apostasy.
With that close community experience, why is is so hard to see the contrast with islam where any thought of change or reform is punishable by death?
After about 30 years of connection with the Jewish community, the only answer I have found is deliberate ignorance, because those who refuse to see the reality do not want to admit their own ignorance and failure to protect the community. About half of Germany’s Jews refused to believe Hitler wanted them dead. Now as many as 75 percent of US Jews vote against their own security and that of Israel.
tgusa says
Frank Anderson,
It is a sad state of affairs but the crazies among us have cancelled wisdom. With them, wisdom is discriminatory or some such thing.
James Lincoln says
tgusa says,
“the crazies among us have cancelled wisdom.”
Yes, and along the way they have canceled the *truth* – which leads to wisdom…
Leon Mintz says
You obviously know nothing about Charles Jacobs if you call him “naïve.” You just misinterpreted what he advocated. Charles Jacobs demanded that Jewish “leaders” confronted Islamists instead of cozying to them. One example:
https://americantruthproject.org/islamic-takeover-in-boston/
Frank Anderson says
Mr. Mintz, I wish for Mr. Jacobs better than I found when I dared to question the “religion of peace” lie at a Conservative congregation. I was invited to attend Torah study; but the invitation was “withdrawn” when I challenged the accepted Pollyanna view of islam because the Rabbi did not want to “upset” those attending.
That ended my more than 20 years of what seemed mutually satisfactory presence in the local Jewish community. I will always treasure the friends and what I learned; especially the 2 lessons of the Exodus: 1) God does not want any of His Children [all who call upon Him as Father] to live in any form of tyranny or slavery; 2) No matter how well things start, they change.
The idea that Jews are going to talk muslims out of hating and aspiring to kill worthless, vile Jews is utterly without hope or foundation in any teaching of islam. And, whether you understand or not, whether I am accepted or not, I am a friend to Jews, even those who are not my friends. The Delusion of Reprieve, discovered and coined by a Jewish psychiatrist in the Holocaust is rampant in the US Jewish community today because they refuse to study, understand and confront standard, common, orthodox islam.
Having accepted that “religion of peace” lie for about 7 years out of pure ignorance, It took reading a few books and conversing with knowledgeable people to understand the statement is a lie and cannot change. I suggest you and Mr. Jacobs would benefit by reading any of the books I mention often and doing more reading here. Spencer-Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam; Gabriel-The Unfinished Battle; Warner-The Abridged Koran.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. His first public speech (app August, 1920) as a leader of the German Workers Party, before it was the National Socialist German Workers Party, was about Jews. His Storm Troopers made Jewish life dangerous before he was appointed Chancellor. But HALF of Germany’s Jews did not believe what he was promising. That denial is present now in spite of 1400 years of “final, perfect, complete and unchangeable” islamic teachings, practice and the murder of between 250 and 1000 million people; not to mention the billions enslaved over that time.
No, I haven’t met Mr. Jacobs, and almost certainly neither has friend mortimer, with whom I disagree on some issues. But I have seen the blind, deaf, dumb and ignorant statements such as are attributed to Mr. Jacobs from many other Jews who should know better, but don’t. “There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.” You may find blind leadership both comforting and inspiring. Our host quotes frequently the statement that when the blind lead the blind, both will fall. I do not wish that for you, Mr. Jacobs or anyone else.
juleonly says
I know your feeling but there is one chance. Mohammed said do not write a book…it will be misused. 100 years later Warlords wrote a book as I understand. Its a long shot, but with the changes today in the world and the ‘Normalization’ countries…..perhaps just a little. The world must state that no Supremacist groups can exist in this diverse world. Islam is so Supremacist its like the nazitroops but pretend to be Holy.
Frank Anderson says
j.o., I hope you understand I am not favoring the islamic conquest. I was “invited to leave” a community that I treasured for over 20 years because I dared speak the truth about lslam. I started reading about Germany in military high school right at the start of the Vietnam era. I figured sooner or later we would have problems with the Soviet Union. My study of Germany was for the purpose of trying to see what they did that could be done better. That start is now not quite 60 years ago. The Nazis saw themselves as “holy”.
Honest Ali says
The ADL was always a fraud. The ADL, a branch of B’nai Brith, was created specifically to protect one of B’nai Brith’s presidents, a wealthy murderer who engaged in illegal child labor… and to frame a black man for the murder that the wealthy man committed. And now the ADL is a highly profitable and notorious extortion racket.
BTW Leon Frank confessed to the murder, and was unanimously convicted by a jury with 4 Jewish jurors.
The ADL has always had tight ties to organized crime… Meyer Lansky, Moe Dalitz, Hank Greenspun, etc… And the ADL had tight ties to Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang that murdered people for sport.
The ADL openly denies the Armenian genocide.
Certain people want to pretend that infamous Jewish-American organized crime… Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, Bugsy Siegel… The Cohen Crime Family of Los Angeles… Leo Frank… the Anti Defamation League… all “never existed”, because they think it makes Jews look bad.
But the truth is, that organized crime exists in ALL races and religions.
And the ADL is one of those organized crime organizations whose sole mission is to intimidate and extort.
Rarely says
Just another idiotic conspiracy theory…yet again.
Andrew Harrod says
Sounds like a Nation of Islam member. Keith Ellison would be so pleased.
Infidel says
Honest Ali, you beat me to it. ADL was always an anti-GOP fraud that supported Liberal causes b’cos those weren’t supported by the Christian Right. In fact, a good deal of anti-Semitism on the Right, while not justified, has been caused precisely by groups such as the ADL’s advocacy of Liberal causes in this country, such as abortion, gay marriage and so on
Rarely says
Completely incorrect. ADL absolutely did not, and does not, support any liberal causes “b’cos those weren’t supported by the Christian Right”. It is ludicrous to suggest it.
Also, the Right’s anti-Semitism has NOT been caused by the support of any Liberal causes by Jewish groups. To suggest that is to show absolute ignorance of the nature of anti-Semitism.
gravenimage says
Good posts, Rarely and Andrew Harrod.
Brenrod says
Lol, honest Ali a farakhan black Muslim who believe Jews are termites and a black scientist named Yakub created white folks in a lab
gary fouse says
When I was teaching at UC Irvine, the Orange County ADL was missing in action while we were trying to bring public attention to the anti-Semitic bullying of Jewish students who supported Israel. While we were challenging anti-Semitic speakers sponsored by the Muslim Student Union and Students for Justice in Palestine, the local ADL rep was standing there silent with his thumb up his ass.
Rarely says
Obviously the wrong guy in the wrong position at the wrong time. What a moron.
gravenimage says
Thanks for that grim account, Gary.
gravenimage says
The Anti-Defamation League ‘Has Become A Fraud’ as Leftist Biases Overwhelm Its Core Mission
…………..
Sadly true.
James Lincoln says
gravenimage,
This has also happened with other groups.
For example:
The ACLU is no longer a neutral defender of everyone’s civil liberties. It has morphed into a hyper-partisan, hard-left political advocacy group…
gravenimage says
Yes, James–I have been sad to see this.
Brenrod says
I believe the adl donor list now includes Arab and Muslim orgs.
Rarely says
lol. Where did you dig this up? I suspect you “believe” the World is flat too.
gravenimage says
Never found any indication of this, Benrod. Citations?