Jonathan Greenblatt has turned the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from a credible Jewish civil rights organization into a partisan attack machine that undermines civil rights and encourages further division and hatred within American society.
This week, Greenblatt is calling for Fox News host Tucker Carlson to be fired over his remarks on immigration. It is Greenblatt, rather, who ought to be fired before he does further damage to the Jewish community and the country itself.
Greenblatt has accused Carlson of backing a “white supremacist” conspiracy theory called “replacement” because he noted that Democrats are lenient towards illegal immigration partly because they hope new arrivals, when granted citizenship, will vote for their party and reduce the relative strength of the Republican electorate.
Those are facts, which Democrats admit theselves.
The conspiracy theory, to which Carlson did not subscribe, is that this “replacement” is orchestrated by Jews.
According to Greenblatt, the fact that white supremacists have grafted their antisemitism onto the immigration debate, as they do with every other debate, is reason enough to consider Carlson guilty by association.
Greenblatt is now demanding that Fox fire Carlson. Curiously, he has not demanded that MSNBC fire Al Sharpton, who has a long history of association with actual, violent antisemitism. In fact, Greenblatt is happy to appear on Sharpton’s program, without a word of criticism.
If guilt is determined by association, then the ADL, under Greenblatt, is an antisemitic organization.
Last year, the ADL joined a list of left-wing groups in a statement insisting that the Black Lives Matter movement be “led by and for Black people.”
The statement said nothing about antisemitic attacks during Black Lives Matter protests. Moreover, the ADL’s co-signatories included groups like the so-called Jewish Voice for Peace, which the ADL itself identifies as an antisemitic group.
Far from promoting the rights of Jews, or other Americans, the ADL is leading a campaign to suppress them. Last year, the ADL pushed a campaign called “Stop the Hate,” which encouraged advertisers to boycott Facebook until it rejected political ads that the ADL and its radical partners did not like.
The boycott campaign — timed to coincide with the 2020 presidential election — bolstered the increasing censorship by social media giants, who have suppressed free speech and distorted debate.
Ironically, the ADL rejects boycotts of Israel, noting that the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS) effort is not based on the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but simply seeks to delegitimize Israel. In the same way, under Greenblatt, a former Obama administration official, the ADL seeks to delegitimize conservative points of view.
In so doing, Greenblatt has taken a grave risk: he is pitting the Jewish community against the rights and interests of the rest of the American people.
The recklessness of Greenblatt’s approach was exposed on Monday evening, when Carlson pointed out that the ADL website includes a defense of Israel’s right to secure its border and defend its Jewish majority against “a possible influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.”
If Israel can control immigration for what the ADL admits are political and demographic reasons, why can’t Americans stop an influx of migrants that will tip border states, and the country, to one party, forever?
Greenblatt has undermined the case for Israel, and the fight against antisemitism, through his extreme partisanship. The ADL has long been a liberal organization, but it was “liberal” in the best sense of the term, meaning that it stood for tolerance and individual liberty.
Under Greenblatt, the ADL has become an illiberal attack group, pushing for censorship and stoking hate and division among Americans. It is Greenblatt who should be fired, so that the ADL can restore its political independence.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new novel, Joubert Park, tells the story of a Jewish family in South Africa at the dawn of the apartheid era. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, recounts the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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