The ADL Was A Farce Long Before It Made Excuses For Elon Musk
“It would be convenient to say that Greenblatt singlehandedly ruined the ADL’s reputation, but it was tarnished long before then. Founded in 1913, the organization’s original intent was “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” By the 1950s, it was cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In more recent decades, the organization has boasted about a relationship with the FBI, and how it provides training to every new special agent. This all aligns neatly with the ADL’s history of undermining Arab-American organizations, as well as black activists and South African anti-apartheid groups when they showed solidarity with Palestine. Read Emmaia Gelman’s Boston Review article from 2019, and it’s clear that Greenblatt is following a well-worn playbook:
‘The ADL’s conception of a leftist threat had already been guiding the organization [politicalresearch.org] for decades; in the 1980s this idea had cohered in neoconservatism. But in civil rights circles, the ADL did not acknowledge its hostility to the left. Instead, it portrayed itself as progressive, and anti-racists to its left as “rogue” and misguided, if not marginal: [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and black liberationists had hijacked real civil rights, New Jewish Agenda were outliers who were really anti-Semites. In the 1980s, according to the ADL’s spy Roy Bullock, the ADL’s anxieties “focused on groups critical of Israeli policies, such as anti-apartheid groups,” which Bullock also categorized more simply as “antidemocratic movements.”’”