The ADL's Radical Boss Must Go

 The latest numbers show that only 1 of the 118 thugs arrested for assaulting Jews in New York City since 2018 was sentenced to actual prison time. While attacks on Jews tripled, the ADL is promoting police defunding in its curriculum. The lesson’s only mention of crime proposes that it can be fought through police defunding by “investing more money in education, health care.”

Another high school lesson plan claims that evidence of privilege is parents telling a child “to find a police officer if I need help”. The numerous Jewish children assaulted by thugs in New York needed a police officer, not because they were ‘privileged’, but because they were beaten while the ADL treated their attackers as the victims threatened by a “school-to-prison pipeline”.

And so the antisemitic violence continues through the complicity of the ADL.

The ADL’s lesson plans promote the racist hate group Black Lives Matter, despite its support for BDS, and the Women’s March, despite the overt antisemitism of its leadership at the time,

The latest outrage over critical race theory materials in the ADL’s curriculum isn’t shocking.

Two years ago, CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote a post defending BLM’s antisemitism and celebrating the “clarion call of ‘Black Lives Matter'” which in Los Angeles and a number of other communities were followed by pogroms against Jewish synagogues and businesses.  Last year he authored another op-ed opposing “divisive concept” legislation to keep hate out of schools. That’s understandable since many of the ADL’s teaching materials foster such extremism.

That racist concepts such as ‘white privilege’ and ‘intersectionality’ are harmful not only to all Americans, but to Jews in particular, inculcating antisemitism as a progressive value, does not trouble Greenblatt or the ADL who care nothing about the consequences of leftist antisemitism.

Much of this is the responsibility of Jinnie Spiegler, the ADL’s curriculum director, whose Twitter account is a steady stream of leftist derangement, but has nothing to say about Jews or antisemitism. Her philosophy can be summarized with the headline of one of her op-eds, “Forget Kindness. Schools Need to Foster Social Justice”.

“The first step is to facilitate students’ learning about the issues in a rigorous and complex way, and then to get them involved in action, advocacy and/or activism,” she has insisted.

Spiegler promotes antisemitic figures like AOC, Cori Bush, and Ilhan Omar.

The ADL has announced that it’s reexamining some of its hateful lesson plans, not because it’s truly sorry, but because it knows they run afoul of some of those “divisive concept” laws.

A variety of Jewish leaders whose organizations are actually fighting antisemitism, including Morton Klein of the ZOA, as well as Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser of the Jewish Leadership Project have called for ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt to step down or be fired.

“The only thing ADL’s board and donors should be reviewing in the wake of this expose is the continued employment of Greenblatt. If the ADL really wants to demonstrate that it is rejecting CRT and the anti-Semitism that comes with it, then Greenblatt has got to go,” Jonathan Tobin, Editor-in-Chief of JNS, wrote in a recent editorial.

Greenblatt and his hires have spent the years in power building antisemitism into the ADL until the organization has become a stronghold of the antisemitic and anti-Israel element of the Left. All of this was accomplished under the false flag of fighting antisemitism. Even now the ADL keeps promoting antisemitism while claiming to be in the business of fighting antisemitism.

In August, the ADL announced the fellows for its inaugural Center for Antisemitism Research Fellowship, to identify “new approaches to combating antisemitism in society.”

One of its fellows, Michael Zanger-Tishler, has called for protesting Birthright Israel to “change Israeli policy toward the Palestinians” and his work has accused Israel of “constructing Palestinian criminality”.

Another, Sara Yael Hirschhorn, tweeted that, “the Palestinian case shares some common features with South Africa—population transfer/ethnic cleansing”, and falsely claimed that Israel is guilty of “daily violations of human rights.”

Hirschhorn has cultivated a career of bashing Israel with New York Times op-eds like, “Israeli Terrorists, Born in the U.S.A.” Her book, “City on a Hilltop”, attacking Jews living in their historical homeland in Judea and Samaria, was featured, along with the author, at a Foundation for Middle East Peace event. FMEP, a part of the Arab Lobby, accuses Israel of “apartheid”.

Her new book, “New Day in Babylon and Jerusalem: Zionism, Jewish Power, and Identity Politics”, already being promoted by the ADL, will discuss how “how the Six Day War and its aftermath transformed Zionism from a national liberation movement of the Jewish people to a colonialist enterprise in the Middle East in international eyes”.

Michael Boxer of Brandeis, has dismissed the reality of leftist campus antisemitism. “When I tell people the communal freak-out over antisemitism on campus is overblown, I’m usually told by people who haven’t set foot on any campus in decades that I don’t understand the climate today. Much Jewish communal discourse can be summarized by ‘ok boomer,’: he sneered.

He also argued that, “The American Jewish community’s fear that BDS permeates college campuses is almost entirely overblown.”

This is the level of contempt that the ADL has for the Jewish community and for its stated mission of fighting antisemitism. It’s a contempt that is a product of the Greenblatt era.

It can end when the Greenblatt era and everyone he hired are finally shown the door.

CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, an Obama administration veteran, has transformed the ADL, much as his counterparts have transformed the ACLU and other civil rights groups, from their original mission into another generic component of the national leftist network. And that network is venomously hostile toward Jews and aimed at the destruction of the Jewish State.

Under Greenblatt, the ADL has become a threat to Jews. Either he must go or it must go.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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