The Jewish Lobby In The U.S.

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A Dutch Documentary (with English subtitles) about the Israel lobby in the US.

For many years now the American foreign policy has been characterized by the strong tie between the United States and Israel. Does the United States in fact keep Israel on its feet? And how long will it continue to do so? In March 2006 the American political scientists John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Steve Walt (Harvard) published the controversial article 'The Israel Lobby and US foreign policy'. In it they state that it is not, or no longer, expedient for the US to support and protect present-day Israel. The documentary sheds light on both parties involved in the discussion: those who wish to maintain the strong tie between the US and Israel, and those who were critical of it and not infrequently became 'victims' of the lobby. The question arises to what extend the pro-Israel lobby ultimately determines the military and political importance of Israel itself. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (Colin Powell's former chief-of-staff) explains how the lobby's influence affects the decision-making structure in the White House.
With political scientist John Mearsheimer, neocon Richard Perle, lobby organization AIPAC, televangelist John Hagee, historian Tony Judt, Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Democrat Earl Hilliard, Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy and investigative journalist Michael Massing.

(Marije Meerman, VPRO Backlight 2007).

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The New Thought Police

The Israel Lobby and Traumatic Memory

By LAWRENCE SWAIM

Edward Snowden speaks of an electronic “architecture of oppression,” based on the mania of our national security state to control the communications of humankind at large. But there are other systems of control—emotional and cultural rather than digital—whose mechanisms of control are no less capable of being abused. The most effective of these are the overlapping systems of influence and control set up by the Israel Lobby. This is a generic term referring to disparate people and institutions that believe that Americans should not be allowed to publicly criticize the government of Israel, even when it does bad things; and it is with that intent in mind that they conduct extensive policing of public discussion of anything having to do with Israel.

The Lobby consists mainly of the leadership of three important organizations—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; the Lobby’s most well-known public figures are Abraham Foxman, Director of the ADL, and Alan Dershowitz, an American attorney, professor lawyer and political commentator. They are backed up by an even larger contingent of rightwing Christian evangelicals, the largest and most active constituency in the Republican Party, many of whom believe that a religious war would bring about the Second Coming of Christ. All of the above-mentioned people have one thing in common: they attack American critics of the Israeli state, usually by calling them anti-Semites or self-hating Jews, often trying to ruin their reputations or drive them from their jobs.

In Congress the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) does pretty much the same thing, with one major difference: they have at their disposal immense amounts of money. Currently an actual majority of elected officials receive money from AIPAC to vote as the current government of Israel wants them to, at least on issues having to do with the Middle East. There’s nothing illegal about it—it’s called ‘bundling,’ and is basically a form of legal bribery. But one must say that it’s rather odd, not to mention unprecedented, that the Prime Minister of a foreign country would participate in the distribution of money through his proxies to the US Congress, so that its members vote as he wants them to. From the point of view of American sovereignty, not to mention political morality, it’s an astonishing situation.

But why do people and organizations in the Israel Lobby behave in this manner, and why do so many supposedly free Americans follow their dictates? Why do they cooperate in suppressing criticism of the Israeli state, when everybody knows that self-criticism and robust debate are necessary to the health of the state, any state? Why do so many people who say they love Israel embrace doctrines that ensure Israel’s eventual destruction?  And why do so many people feel constrained to think, speak and act according to the dictates of a Lobby that is often irrational? They do so because attitudes toward Israel are deeply intertwined with ongoing efforts to suppress traumatic memory of the Nazi Holocaust, and likewise to suppress the gnawing awareness of the systemic evil that drove it.  That is both troubling and dangerous, because you cannot suppress that kind of trauma (by which I mean the traumatic memory associated with the Holocaust), you can only manage it. And you can only manage it by deconstructing the aggression internalized along with the trauma. And that means accepting the ghastly but universal capacity of all human beings for evil.

Some institutions, especially the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, actually encourage and seek to enhance traumatic memory associated with the Holocaust, insisting that identification with Holocaust victims should be the basis of Jewish identity, rather than identifying with those who tried to stop the Holocaust. In my book The Death of Judeo-Christianity: Religious Aggression and Systemic Evil in the Modern World, I call attention to the extreme danger of this approach: “To live in the same world in which the Holocaust occurred, the Wiesenthal Center is saying, you must accept it both as history’s biggest crime and the most important determinant of Jewish identity. But that is a mistaken strategy, because it gives too much power to the Holocaust. You cannot base identity on the Holocaust without internalizing itsaggression, because you cannot take in one without the other.”[i] This creates a trauma bond, which bonds the victim not to the aggressor, but to his aggression. This is why so many victims appear to imitate and act out the kind of aggression with which they were once victimized; the abused child grows up to be an abuser.

It is this internalization of Holocaust aggression that one meets at every point in the Israel Lobby, and in the people who follow its cultural and political dictates, even when those dictates are disastrous for Israel. Managing traumatic memory of the Holocaust also means managing the internalized aggression that inevitably accompanies it. That is not to say that all people who uncritically support the Israeli state are affected by multigenerational trauma, nor are all the Christians and Jews who obediently do its bidding. The trauma associated with the Nazi Holocaust often affects people who have no connection whatsoever to Europe, or the historical period when the Holocaust occurred; and that is, for the most part, because the Holocaust confronts people with the problem of systemic evil in a way they cannot ignore or avoid. Modern people are so unused to confronting the omnipresence of evil that even trying to do so can be traumatizing, because modernity has no philosophy, no theology, and no detailed explanation whatsoever, that can explain why aggression and evil are so powerful in human affairs. And while institutional religion tries to identify evil, it can’t stop it, and often makes it worse.

Acknowledging the existence of evil often leads people to realize—including a great many that are horrified by it—that evil can be more powerful than good, and usually is. This realization is by itself quite disorienting, because it goes against what enlightened people have believed for the last three centuries. It is not based on mere philosophical speculations, but arises as the result of excruciating psychological upheavals in which people discover that the world they knew before, no longer exists. This process creates an anxiety so profound that the only way some people can suppress it is to create an imaginary system in which delusions replace unpredictable realities, and the reactions of other people must be endlessly manipulated through a kind of emotional totalitarianism. (That is, the manipulation of negative emotions—especially fear, guilt, aggression and shame—can be used to make people avoid taboo subjects, and in so doing encourage them to suppress thoughts about them.)

This is a big part of the cultural system that the Israel Lobby has set up, but there is another component to it, one that is hidden. At a very deep level uncritical supporters of the Israeli state suffer from a gnawing fear that Israel is not the perfect place that the Lobby says it is; and to control their suppressed fears, they must strive to control what everybody else thinks and feels about it, often by ritually punishing unrepentant American critics of Israel in conspicuous, public and sometimes surreal ways.

That brings up the phenomenon of ex post facto scapegoating, an expedient widely practiced by visionaries when their shimmering dreams turn into nightmares; consider, for example, the pathologies associated with Stalinism. Why were there show trials, assassinations, people sent by the thousands to the gulag? Because Communism could not deliver on its promises: therefore scapegoats had to be blamed and punished. In the case of Israel, the ideals of generations of liberals, social democrats and socialists toward a Jewish state have been mainly abandoned; so someone, or some group of people, must be blamed and punished for this failure. Thus the suppressed fury at Israel’s moral collapse is seamlessly displaced onto the critics who document that same collapse. This may partially explain the over-the-top, buffoonish nature of the accusations hurled by the Israel Lobby at those who criticize the current government of Israel: that such critics are secret crypto-fascists; that they long for the destruction of Israel; that they are planning another Holocaust; and so forth.

If you’re still wondering why people in the Israel Lobby behave as they do, consider also the following dynamics from the point of view of a Holocaust survivor, or someone who lost family members in the Holocaust. Where was God at the moment of greatest peril to his people, when 10,000 Jews were being murdered every day in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau? God was not there for his people when they needed him—no, God was nowhere to be found. Likewise the secular faith in liberal, social democratic and progressive ideas embraced by secular Jews since the Enlightenment: all of them made not the slightest difference once the Endloesung, the Final Solution, was in place. The result was a largely unconscious loss of faith in God, in liberal democracy, and in any solution to political problems except military force. Many survivors ended up believing—unconsciously more than consciously—that those who survive in this world do so only by hurting others.

This led to a process in which worship of the Israeli state slowly replaced a Torah-based God, not to mention a secular belief in progressive political solutions. People who increasingly saw God as little more than a ancient metaphor could now worship something far more concrete: the Israeli state’s victorious army, its active diplomatic corps, its vast propaganda initiatives, not to mention its Shin Bet interrogation centers and 200-400 nuclear weapons—all the furnishings of a successful theocratic state! And instead of feeling close to a mainly absent and intangible God, they could now experience tumultuous feelings of religious nationalism, the strongest and most dangerous force on the planet. Indeed, this constitutes the real secular religion of Israel, and many of its uncritical supporters in the US: the worship of religious nationalism in the service of state power, in the form of the Israeli state.

Yet religious nationalism feels like God, because it is so powerful—and considering what Jews have gone through in the past, certainly Jews need power to protect themselves. But what the Israeli Jews have done to the Palestinians, and what they continue to do to them, is the wrongkind of power. They have embraced a form of systemic evil, the addictive nature of which they are only now beginning to comprehend. The Israeli political class has internalized the aggression of the European anti-Semites, aided by the almost daily references to the Holocaust by Israeli media and rightwing politicians, the social outcome being that they now hate the Palestinians in much the same way as the Christians in Europe once hated them.

But if Jews struggle with aggression that they cannot acknowledge, so do Christians wrestle with a shame that dare not speak its name. After all, it was Christians who carried out the Holocaust, which was but the final act in a thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism. If Christians thought too much about this last fact, it might occur to some of them that Christianity has been, and is, by its own standards, a failed religion. Thus the built-in incentive to declare the Israeli project a smashing success: along with enough unacknowledged guilt to cause the Christians to give the Israelis whatever they want—for along with the guilt is a generalized fear of being publicly vilified as anti-Semites, which Zionists quickly learned to do to get what they wanted. Thus anything having to do with Israel/Palestine is hedged about with elaborate taboos, for Christians as well as Jews, to the extent that people dare not talk publicly, or even think privately, about the moral and political implications of impunity for Israel’s crimes and misdemeanors.

All of which should help us understand why Israel must be represented as perfect by the Israel Lobby, and why, according to the Lobby, it must never be criticized. The Nazi Holocaust must be morally repudiated, and its traumatic memory suppressed—but not in a way that would require anybody to make any changes or do anything; so only a Holy State, a perfect state, an exalted and utopian state thousands of miles away (that is to say, an imaginary state) can in that quick and efficient manner redeem the shame of Christians, and help to suppress the anger and internalized aggression of Jews. If the Nazi madness was pure evil, the Israeli state must now be perceived as wholly and perfectly good; only the most transcendent and eternally perfect State could help people repress the traumatic memory of the six million dead in Europe, and in so doing suppress all thought of the human evil in the present moment. (Because if the Holy State is perfect, Christians and Jews that support it are likewise perfect, and need not make any changes or do anything.) The result of this malignant, self-exculpatory fantasy is a wholly dysfunctional system in which legislators are paid to sign off on proclamations they don’t really believe, Christians and Jews are obligated to do obeisance to flagrantly mediocre leaders, and intellectuals are browbeat into pretending that they love Israel when most of them secretly wish that the state of Israel and its power-hungry supporters would go away.

Of course, it isn’t as though Western civilization has not seen fanatical, power-obsessed lobbies before. As George Orwell documented in the 1940s, the intellectual classes of Britain and Europe were obsessed for a time by the Soviet Union, which Orwell understood to be a covert form of power worship. But the Communists in the US were never strong institutionally, being confined mainly to a small following among creative intellectuals and a handful of trade unionists. The Israel Lobby, on the other hand, possesses enormous wealth from its billionaire donors, and its influence is very strong at every level of institutional life in America—furthermore, its evangelical followers constitute the most dynamic constituency in the Republican Party. The conviction that Israel cannot be criticized isn’t just the fancy of a few highly-paid fanatics in the Israel Lobby, although they define fanaticism in our time; they are also supported by what seems to be a majority of the American people.

But the fact that irrational and immoral beliefs and behavior have a great following doesn’t make those beliefs and behaviors right. The traumas of the 20^th century have driven millions of intelligent, capable people into active psychological pathologies, which they experience as ideological realities. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not about politics, nor religion, nor even geo-politics. It is about pathology; and ultimately it is about systemic evil. The evil of the Holocaust, like the traumatic memory it generates, is by definition a wound that will never heal; it cannot be suppressed, but only acknowledged and managed. And the only way to really manage it is to deconstruct the trauma bond—the emotional bondage to aggression as the supreme arbiter of history—at its heart.

In the meantime, the real state of Israel (not the fantasy that people are supposed to believe in) keeps moving to the right, the politicians of American and Israel continue to lie about what is really happening, and the use of targeted assassinations, mass internment, torture and collective punishment of Palestinians continues. What the state of Israel really needs is what every state needs, which is educated critics denouncing what is wrong about it and supporting what is right, and working to confront injustices and correct them. But the message of the Israel Lobby, like so much American cultural and political expression, is not about reality, but about an apocalyptic idea of perfection that itsapparatchiki must ram down everybody’s throat in order to suppress their own trauma—in this case, the traumatic memory of humanity’s worst crime, and their own creeping doubts about the real nature of the Holy State begotten by it.

Lawrence Swaim is the Executive Director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation, a civil rights organization that opposes Islamophobia and advocates religious liberty for all. His latest book, Trauma Bond: An Inquiry into the Nature of Evil, was published in March by Psyche Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishers, Ltd.

Notes. 

[i] Lawrence Swaim, The Death of Judeo-Christianity: Religious Aggression and Systemic Evil in the Modern World  (Winchester UK and Washington DC: Circle Books, John Hunt Publishing, Ltd., 2013), 169.

The Strange History Of The Anti-Defamation League

By Jeffrey Blankfort

“[T]he Anti-Defamation League for many years has maintained a very important, confidential investigative coverage of Arab activities and propaganda….Our information, in addition to being essential for our own operations, has been of great value and service to both the United States State Department and the Israeli government. All data have been made available to both countries with full knowledge to each that we were the source.” –  Letter from Benjamin R. Epstein, National Director, Anti-Defamation League to Saul Joftes, Executive Secretary, B’nai B’rith, July 7, 1961.

Those were the days when snooping usually meant digging through garbage cans, checking other people’s mailboxes, and primitive phone tapping. How the Anti-Defamation League is doing it today one can only imagine.

Over the last three days of April, the ADL celebrated its 100th anniversary in Washington DC in high style with Vice President Joe Biden the featured speaker at its Centennial Gala dinner on April 30 and Attorney General Eric Holder doing the obligatory genuflecting the day before.

Standing next to the ADL’s ubiquitous current national director, Abe Foxman, Biden told the one thousand paying guests, “You have become the conscience of this country, no matter what the issue. You have been a pillar of the Jewish community, but you reach out and you have reached out your embrace for all communities.”

For hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals the ADL’s embrace has been too close for comfort and “unconscionable” would be a term more befitting the organization’s activities. What is definitely in order is a reminder that this year also marks the 20th anniversary of the exposure of a nation-wide spying operation run by the ADL that went back at least five decades.

In January, 1993, San Francisco newspapers reported that the city’s police department had raided the ADL’s Northern California office and discovered it was keeping files on more than 600 largely liberal civic organizations and over 10,000 individuals whose interests and activities included but also went far beyond those of the Arab-American community.

After examining the sequestered files, San Francisco police inspector Ron Roth, estimated that 75% of the information had been illegally obtained and by November, District Attorney Arlo Smith appeared to be on the verge of indicting the ADL for numerous violations of state and city codes.

The appearance was deceiving. With an eye on being elected California’s attorney general the following year, Smith realized, too late as it turned out, that he would need the financial and political clout of San Francisco’s influential Jewish community that had helped to propel him to his job as the city’s DA. So he threw in the towel mere hours before ADL officials would be called to testify before a grand jury.

In an agreement reached a week earlier but issued Nov. 15, 1993, just before the filing deadline, Smith’s office released a statement explaining his reasoning: “The SFDA and Defendants agree that litigation concerning Defendant’s activities would involve disputed issues of fact and law and that such litigation would be expensive and time-consuming both to the SFDA and Defendants.”

That all litigation involves “disputed issues of fact and law” apparently did not occur to Smith. His dropping of the case, however, made little impression on his erstwhile Jewish backers.

They made it known that they would not forgive him for not only opening the investigation into the ADL’s spying operations but making available to whoever in the public would pay the copying fees, 704 pages of documents that revealed in considerable detail the extent of the ADL’s nation-wide spying operations. (See the Israel Lobby Archive, www.irmep.org/ila)

In exchange for being let off the hook and while admitting no wrong-doing, the ADL agreed that it would no longer do, at least in California, what it was shown to have been doing, i.e., soliciting and/or obtaining non-public information on individuals and organizations from government sources.

In addition, it would “create a Hate Crimes Reward Fund,” in the amount of $25,000, which would “provide monetary rewards for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of the perpetrators of hate crimes.” (The latter seems to be a fetish of the ADL which, incredibly, has just been allowed to trademark the statement, “Imagine a world without hate.”)

What was an important concession by the city, from the ADL’s standpoint, was that its files seized by the SFPD would remain closed to the public and would not be opened without the ADL being given an opportunity to voice its objections.

In California, the ADL’s secret spying and file keeping was mainly the provenance of Roy Bullock, a beefy San Francisco weight-lifter, who went by the code name, “Cal,” and reported to the ADL’s chief spymaster in New York, the now deceased Irwin Suall.

To keep the relationship out of public as well as government eyes, Bullock was paid through a cut-out in Beverly Hills, Bruce Hochman, a lawyer and member of the ADL’s board, also now deceased.

As late as July 19, 1992, Suall had described Bullock as “our Number One fact finder” whose assignments included, in addition to his duties in California, attending and monitoring conferences and conventions of Arab-Americans across the country.

He was, in fact, doing the kind of work that former ADL director Ben Epstein described in the quote at the beginning of this article. At the time, Bullock was receiving close to $25,000 a year for monitoring what he and the ADL considered “antidemocratic” organizations and individuals and he had been doing it for 40 years.

It wasn’t Bullock’s only income, to be sure. He was also an “art dealer” and this provided an explanation for his turning up at Arab-American conferences across the country as I later learned. He “just happened” to be in this or that city at the same time, buying art.

A month after the SFPD had confiscated Bullock’s files, the ADL was still trying to avoid being linked with him, even within the organization. On February 25, 1993, a cover letter for “talking points” to its regional directors referred to Bullock as “an individual who is alleged to have a relationship with the ADL.”

To the public, when its ties to Bullock could no longer be denied, he was described simply as a private contractor and that the files he kept were for his own use. When this attempted cover-up quickly fell apart, he was put directly on the ADL payroll and provided with an attorney.

Bullock had divided the organizations and individuals on which he was keeping tabs into two categories to which he assigned the names, Pinko and Right, the latter made up largely of neo-Nazis and skinheads, the groups usually associated by the public as ADL’s main targets. When questioned by Inspector Roth, Bullock defined “Pinko” as “left wing.”

Among the 647 organizations he so designated were the NAACP, ACLU, Asian Law Caucus, Centro Legal de la Raza, Irish Northern Aid, Japanese-American Citizens League, the National Indian Treaty Council, Earth Island Institute and 20 trade union locals plus the San Francisco Labor Council. Jewish organizations that had taken positions critical of Israeli policies also found their way into his “Pinko” section.

On finding its name on the list, the Asian-Law Caucus quickly notified the ADL that it was withdrawing from a joint event previously planned with the Jewish defense organization. Rather than apologizing, the ADL was defiant, responding with a letter that placed the onus on the Asian Law Caucus for the cancellation.

In a letter addressed to the director of the Asian Law Caucus, dated April 29. 1953, the ADL’s regional director, Elliot Bien, wrote that he was “dismayed on a number of levels when I learned that the Asian Law Caucus felt it necessary to pull out of this program on short notice as a protest of some sort against the ADL…. [T]hat the pullout was completely unjustified and unfair….”

The ADL was and remains more sensitive to Black-Jewish relations. Jews have been heavily involved with the NAACP since its inception in 1909. That they have also been the major source of its funding has been viewed by many observers in the post civil rights era as designed to keep the organization from taking political positions that would offend the Jewish establishment, such as expressing sympathy with the Palestinian cause or criticizing Israel’s arms sales to South Africa.

This was typified by the attitude of long-time NAACP Director Roy Wilkins, widely characterized as an “Uncle Tom” by black activists, who withdrew the NAACP from the National Black Political Convention in 1972, taking exception to a resolution that condemned Israel for “expansionist policies and forceful occupation of the sovereign territories of another state.”

On May 5, 1993, the ADL’s New York headquarters sent a letter to its regional offices, noting that “Abe Foxman wrote newly installed NAACP Director Benjamin Chavis, assuring him that the ADL had never targeted the NAACP for investigation” and recommended that if they had not already done so, the directors should reach out to “local branches of the NAACP” and “do so now.”

“You may note,” the letter went on, “that the news story in which the NAACP was named, cited names in Bullock’s files as ours. [T]he ADL has never targeted nor would it ever target for investigation any individual or organization on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.” The letter ignored the fact that a year earlier, the ADL had issued a 50-page “ADL Research Report, entitled “The Anti-Semitism of Black Demagogues and Extremists.”

Heading the list were Min. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, Illinois Congressman Gus Savage, Rev. Al Sharpton, Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael), poet Amiri Baraka, and rappers Ice Cube and Professor Griff and Public Enemy. Certain black newspapers and radio stations that didn’t feel beholden to the Jewish community also came in for their lumps.

Chavis, with a long history of civil rights activity, was no Roy Wilkins. In an effort to revive what had become a moribund organization and make it more representative of the black community, he sought to involve some of those condemned in the ADL’s booklet, but it was his reaching out to Farrakhan that set off the alarm bells at ADL headquarters and put him at odds with Foxman.

It also caused the NAACP’s major Jewish funders to put away their check books until Chavis, who became caught up in an unrelated personnel matter, tendered his resignation.

Given Foxman and the ADL’s obsession with what it considers to be “black anti-Semitism,” which includes, for example, speaking about the prominent role of Jews in the African slave trade or comparisons of Israel with apartheid South Africa, it was logical that Bullock would an eye on the NAACP and other African-American as well as black African organizations. He was nothing if not thorough, keeping multiple files on the African National Congress and 47 other anti-apartheid organizations.

Bullock also was found to have 77 files on 58 Arab-American organizations besides the thousands of individuals who belonged to those organizations. His modus operandi in infiltrating Arab-American and anti-apartheid organizations, was to pretend he was sympathetic to their respective causes. He succeeded in not only becoming a member of the local chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee but, because of his size and weight, he would be in charge of “security” at all its events.

Bullock was assisted in his endeavors by a San Francisco policeman and former CIA contractor in El Salvador, Tom Gerard, who would take down the license plate numbers of people attending Palestinian and Arab-American events and provide Bullock with their names, addresses, and personal information, all of which was illegal. What made this easy for Gerard was that he was the SFPD’s “official liaison” to the Arab community.

What was particularly embarrassing for the ADL was the release of information that Bullock and Gerard, who had also provided information directly to ADL officials, were also being paid by South African intelligence agents to supply information on the activities of the Bay Area’s anti-Apartheid organizations and South African exiles affiliated with the ANC and other black African organizations.

In one of his depositions, Bullock acknowledged that doing this required no additional work since he was already spying on the anti-apartheid movement for the ADL. Foxman, on his part, had openly condemned the African National Congress as a “terrorist” organization that supported the PLO.

One individual the South African agents were particularly interested in was Chris Hani, the man who was expected to succeed Nelson Mandela as the country’s president. Hani was assassinated in South Africa shortly after a speaking tour in California during which he was trailed by Bullock who prepared a lengthy report on it for the South African government, a copy of which was found in his files.

Foxman, though unapologetic, was anxious to neutralize public discussion of the close ties that existed between Israel and South Africa, particularly the Jewish state’s arms sales to the apartheid regime. Thanks, however, to the willingness of the anti-apartheid movement and the Congressional Black Caucus to bury the issue, he ended up having little to worry about.

While Bullock had, at times, infiltrated neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, none of which posed tangible threats to the American Jews, their images in the organization’s mailings were useful in frightening Jewish donors into contributing to the ADL’s $60 million dollar budget and paying Foxman’s salary which in 2009 amounted to $563,024. The main focus of the ADL was on Palestinians and Arab-Americans and their solidarity groups.

One of the targets Bullock “befriended” was Palestinian-American Alex Odeh, the head of the Orange County chapter of the ADC who would be killed by a terrorist bomb when he opened the door to his Santa Ana office on October 11, 1985.

In Bullock’s files, police found a key to Odeh’s office as well as the floor plan. Although Bullock has not been linked to the unresolved murder, the fact that an ADL spy was in possession of such items is something that Foxman obviously would not want advertised.

There were two law suits filed against the ADL over the 1993 revelations but only one proved to be headache from the ADL’s perspective. This was a class action suit filed on April 14, 1993, by former congressman, Paul “Pete” McCloskey, himself a victim of pro-Israel witch hunters, on behalf of 17 individuals who believed they had been spied upon because of their work on behalf of justice for the Palestinians and/or their active opposition to South African apartheid.

A second suit was filed by a group of targeted organizations, among them the Labor Committee on the Middle East (LCOME) which Labor activist Steve Zeltzer and I co-founded in 1987. That suit, over which the organizations seemed to have little say, was settled by their lawyer in 1999 after the ADL, admitting no wrong doing, agreed to destroy its files, to get out of the spying business, and contribute $50,000 to police departments for racial sensitivity training. Steve and I did not think that an adequate response to the seriousness of the ADL’s transgressions and LCOME refused to be a party to that settlement.

By February, 2002, when the ADL elected to settle McCloskey’s suit out of court, there would be only three individuals remaining in the class: Zeltzer, Anne Poirer, and myself. In addition to our involvement in anti-apartheid activities, Steve and I had launched the Labor Committee on the Middle East in 1987, whose founding meetings at Zeltzer’s home, Bullock had attended. Anne had been a long time anti-apartheid activist.

Our suit charged the ADL with violating a narrow privacy provision of California state law,1798.53, which holds that “Any person, other than an employee of the state or of a local government agency…..who intentionally discloses information, not otherwise public, which they know or should reasonably know was obtained from personal information maintained by a state agency or from ‘records’

… maintained by a federal government agency, shall be subject to a civil action, for invasion of privacy, by the individual to whom the information pertains.”

In this instance, the 9th District Court of California had determined that information on Zeltzer and me had been provided to the governments of Israel and South Africa and that information on Annie Poirier had been given to South Africa.

Over nearly a decade of court appearances and status conferences, what we insisted upon, above all else, and what prevented an earlier settlement, was that under no circumstances would we sign a confidentiality agreement that would forbid us speaking or writing about the suit.

We felt we needed to be free to talk about what we had learned along the way about the ADL’s spying activities, information that the ADL, understandably, preferred to be kept secret.

Until the very last moment, the Friday afternoon before the Monday when the case would have gone to trial, the ADL had balked at making that concession. In the end they gave in. In addition, they agreed to pay a modest cash settlement to the three of us plus McCloskey’s legal expenses. He had taken our case pro bono.

What was, perhaps, the most revealing moment in the legal battle took place in McCloskey’s Redwood City office during the ADL’s questioning of former Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky. McCloskey had brought Ostrovsky down from Canada to provide whatever information he might have that would link the ADL to Israel and assist us in our case.

When Ostrovsky left the Mossad, he took with him a number of documents, some of which were the source his “By Way of Deception,” a record of his time with the Israeli spy agency.

As Ostrovsky took his seat next to McCloskey, he faced the usual battery of attorneys representing the ADL and Bullock. The atmosphere, however, was very different. Throughout the many court appearances and the taking of depositions, the ADL’s lawyers had been cordial, if not friendly, to us, even though we were on opposite sides.

This would not be the case with Ostrovsky. It is not an exaggeration to say that their eyes were gleaming with hatred. They made no effort to conceal their hostility to a person they obviously viewed as a traitor to Israel which, at that moment, they clearly viewed as their client as much as was the ADL.

That this was more than conjecture on my part was soon revealed when David Goldstein, the lead attorney, demanded that Ostrovsky turn over to him, in the name of the ADL, all the documents he had taken from the Mossad. Ostrovsky, quite naturally, refused. Later the ADL’s lawyers inveighed upon a judge, without success, to force him to comply with their demand.

Thanks to our refusal to sign the confidentiality agreement, you can read about that on CounterPunch
 

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When the reports of the ADL spying first appeared in the media, there were those who thought the respected Jewish defense organization had simply made a mistake in its zeal to protect Israel and that the spying operation was an anomaly.

Nothing can be further from the truth. But let’s begin at the beginning.

The ADL was formed by B’nai B’rith in 1913 to serve as the leading Jewish defense agency in the wake of the conviction of Leo Frank, an officer of the National Pencil Co. in Atlanta, Georgia for the murder of 13 year old Mary Phagan, a shop floor worker at the pencil factory. It was a verdict that many believed to be a miscarriage of justice, which was compounded by Frank being kidnapped from a prison hospital two years later and lynched. He is the only American Jew known to have suffered that fate.

By 1937, the Anti-Defamation League had embarked on another occupation, keeping files and spying on what it considered to be communist or pro-communist organizations and individuals.

In that year, a 1947 Congressional hearing revealed, it had begun providing information on the recently formed National Lawyers Guild and on individuals applying for federal civil service jobs and some who had not applied for jobs, to the original House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by the notorious racist Rep. Martin Dies, which came to be referred to simply as the Dies Committee.

Newly declassified FBI files obtained by IRmep’s Grant Smith reveal that on August 8, 1940, the ADL offered a confidential list of hundreds of undercover ADL investigators to FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. ADL offered the contact list as a resource for FBI informants and additional undercover agents.

Some members of the list, such as Abraham Feinberg, would later be investigated by the FBI as agents of a foreign government and for quashing investigations targeting illegal arms-smuggling from the US to Israel.

Feinberg would become later well known in as the man who delivered an envelope filled with a large amount of cash to Harry Truman–$ 2 million JFK told Gore Vidal– that enabled him to launch the whistle stop campaign that led to his victory in the 1948 presidential elections. Truman had earned Feinberg’s largesse by recognizing Israel minutes after David Ben-Gurion declared the state into existence.

During the anti-communist witch hunts that marked the beginning of the Cold War, the ADL assisted and acted as a go-between for both the Congressional committees and members or former members of the Communist Party who chose to inform on their one-time comrades, friends, and family members.

With the arrival of Israel, the ADL began to redirect its tasks. Arab delegations to the United Nations and Arab-American organizations became its targets. In the letter cited at the beginning of this article, the ADL’s Ben Epstein wrote B’nai B’rith’s Saul Joftes that “we have maintained an information-gathering operation since 1948 relating to activities emanating from the Arab Consular Offices, Arab United Nations Delegations, Arab Information Center, Arab Refugee Office and the Organization of Arab Students.”

In 1969 the ADL infiltrated the 18th annual National Convention the Organization of Arab Students. ADL operatives posed as reporters while strategizing on how to gain control of the OAS’s national headquarters and neutralize its chapters.

After receiving its report, the FBI briefly considered investigating the ADL as an Israeli foreign agent. The ADL effort was ultimately successful to the degree that OAS chapters became less political in the ensuing decades and began serving more as campus clubs with a cultural focus.

In November, 1983, in response to widespread criticism of Israel over its invasion and occupation of Lebanon the previous year, the ADL’s New England office put out a 49 page mimeographed booklet containing the names of individuals and organizations that the league classified as “pro-Arab propagandists.”

It was not intended for the general public, but for Jewish students on college campuses to help them counter these “propagandists” who were trying “to sway Americans from their historically strong support for Israel.” Moreover, the booklet claimed, “many of these propagandists use their anti-Zionism as a guise for their deeply felt anti-Semitism.”

The booklet, with each page stamped “CONFIDENTIAL,” was prepared by Jordan Millstein, the ADL’s local campus coordinator and was sent out with a cover letter from Leonard Zakim, the Executive Director of its New England Office.

“Should you need more information on these individual groups or any others,” wrote Zakim, “please call us. Also, if you have any knowledge of any individuals or groups not listed in the booklet, please pass the information on to us so that we can have a more complete and useful listing.”

One can imagine the outrage had a Palestinian or Arab-American group put out a similar publication containing a list of individuals and organizations that they accused of putting Israel’s interests before those of the United States.

Among the individuals on the ADL list were Professors Edward Said of Columbia, Michael Hudson of Georgetown, Lawrence Michalak of UC Berkeley, Wahlid Khaladi of Harvard, Naseer Aruri of Southeastern U., Israel Shahak of Hebrew University who “contends that Israel practices ‘apartheid’ against Palestinian Arabs,” former Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota, and our lawyer, Pete McCloskey, who served 16 years in Congress, from 1967 to 1983, the year the booklet was published.

The publication came to the attention of the 1400 member Middle East Studies Association the following November which passed a resolution calling on the league to disown the document

When that story was finally reported In the NY Times on Jan.25, two months later, Jeffrey Ross, the ADL’s director of campus affairs, claimed it had been an “unfortunate incident” and would not be repeated.

He said that Millstein, the author, was an “overly zealous student volunteer” who no longer worked for the league. Zakim acknowledged “the document had been careless” as the Times characterized it and that “he would not have written a cover letter for it if he had considered the matter thoroughly.”

In 2002, three years after his death from cancer in 1999, the bridge that serves as the northern entrance and exit from Boston was named the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge after Zakim and the American colonists who fought the British in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Despite the ADL having promised to get out of the business of illegally obtaining information on its enemies in exchange for not being prosecuted back in 1993, there is no evidence, twenty years later that it has.

What it has done is strengthen its ties with police across the country through its LEARN program (Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network) in which it trains police in dealing with “extremist groups” and “hate crimes.”

As for Bullock, I have heard of no recent citing but I have a hunch that somewhere in the country the aging agent is still going through other people’s garbage cans, peeking in their mailboxes and infiltrating a new generation of “Pinko” organizations for the ADL. If you look for his image on Google you will find three of them, all right next to photos of Abe Foxman.

How The Anti-Defamation League Fuels Islamophobia

By Elly Bulkin and Donna Nevel
Courtesy Of "AlterNet"

The Anti-Defamation League bills itself, and is typically seen by many in the mainstream Jewish community and beyond, as the "nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency.”[1] In fact, the ADL’s conduct over the years is at odds with this one-dimensional view of the group as a long-time champion of civil liberties. The ADL mission statement, for instance, describes it as a group that “fights all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all."[2] Yet, a record going back decades shows something very different, including a shift “from civil rights monitoring to espionage and intelligence gathering.”[3] Mistrust of the ADL among those concerned about civil and human rights has deep roots.

In the 1970s, the ADL, which had been tracking neo-Nazis and other right-wing U.S. groups, began to also focus on critics of Israeli policies.[4] Since the 1970s, the ADL and its chapters have issued numerous publications toexpose alleged “Arab propaganda” on university campuses and to silence and intimidate Arab Americans and others who did not share their perspective on Israel.[5] Branding any criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitism,” ADL publications like Pro-Arab Propaganda in America: Vehicles and Voices, a Handbook (1983) effectively developed a “blacklist” of faculty, staff, and campus groups.[6] The Middle East Studies Association singled out “the New England Regional Office of the ADL for circulating a document on college campuses ‘listing factually inaccurate and unsubstantiated assertions that defame specific students, teachers, and researchers as 'pro Arab propagandists.’"[7]

Front-page investigative reports in the San Francisco Examiner during the winter and spring of 1993 revealed that the ADL had been carrying out surveillance of almost 10,000 people and 950 organizations.[8] The Examiner reported that the ADL particularly targeted Arab Americans and Arab American organizations and also spied on such groups as the ACLU, ACT UP, Artists Against Apartheid, Americans for Peace Now, Asian Law Caucus, Greenpeace, NAACP, New Jewish Agenda, and the United Farm Workers, as well as three current or past members of Congress.[9] The FBI had also found that the ADL had been sending surveillance information on U.S. anti-apartheid groups to South Africa (which was an ally of Israel).[10]

The San Francisco Examiner exposé revealed that the ADL’s domestic spying involved a San Francisco police officer and a “full-time salaried undercover investigator,” who had been working for the ADL for 32 years.[11] Running “a public/private spying ring,” the ADL received aid from local police andfederal agencies.[12] The Examiner reported that “FBI documents released through the Freedom of Information Act show that special agents in charge of FBI field offices throughout the nation were explicitly ordered by Bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C. during the 1980s to cooperate with the ADL.”[13] Six years after the filing of a class action suit coordinated by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the ADL was fined in 1999 and “under the permanent injunction issued by Federal Judge Richard Paez . . . [was] permanently enjoined from engaging in any further illegal spying against Arab-American and other civil rights groups.”[14] As Nabeel Abraham has written in “Anti-Arab Racism and Violence in the United States,” “The overall effect of the ADL’s practices is to reinforce the image of Arabs as terrorists and security threats, thereby creating a climate of fear, suspicion, and hostility toward Arab-Americans and others who espouse critical views of Israel, possibly leading to death threats and bodily harm.”[15]

*****

The ADL’s anti-Arab, staunchly pro-Israel mindset, which was behind decades of illegal spying, enabled it to easily incorporate an anti-Muslim worldview that has become increasingly pervasive after 9/11.[16] This has been a period of growing popularity for the “clash of civilizations theory,” which characterizes the causes of conflict in the post-Cold War world as fundamental “cultural” differences between Islamic and Western civilizations, rather than history, politics, imperialism, neo-colonialism, struggles over natural resources, or other factors.[17] Further, the Islamophobic belief that all Muslims were responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that all Muslims, as well as Arabs and South Asians, should be targeted provides a dominant U.S. narrative that brands all members of these groups as “terrorists,” “potential terrorists,” or “terrorist-sympathizers.”[18] Like others within and outside the Jewish community, the ADL views the U.S. focus on the domestic and global “war on terror” as integral to ensuring Israeli security and maintaining the United States’ “special” relationship with Israel.

During the post-9/11 period, the ADL engaged in a number of actions that targeted Muslims and Arabs. It also marked a time when the ADL, with allies like Daniel Pipes’ Freedom Forum, was busily labeling mainstream Muslimcommunity groups as “terrorist sympathizers” and trying to exclude them from the public sphere.[19] Although the ADL was rebuffed, it brought pressure to prevent representatives from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the country’s largest Muslim civil liberties group, from speaking at the November 2001 Florida Commission on Human Relations annual conference, “Day of Dialogue Across Ethnic, Cultural and Religious Lines,” and then, around a month later, at a public hearing of the State of California Select Committee on Hate Crimes. [20]

In 2003, an ADL press release praised President George W. Bush for appointing Daniel Pipes to the board of the United States Institute for Peace.[21] Pipes believes that “militant Islam” is “infiltrating America” and supports studentmonitoring of professors for their views on the Arab-Israeli conflict. [22] While the ADL commented on Pipes’ “important approach and perspective,” Muslim and Arab American leaders characterized his appointment as “a slap in the face for Islam” and described him as “a bigot” who “promotes fear and hatred of many communities, not just Arabs and Muslims." [23] As a result of strong oppositionto Pipes by Senator Edward Kennedy and other Senate Judiciary Committee members, President Bush had to resort to a recess appointment of Pipes.[24]

Another attack on Islam and the Muslim community took place in 2004, when theADL, along with the American Jewish Congress and the Zionist Organization of America, charged that Muslim students at the University of California Irvine who planned to wear Shahadas, green Arabic-covered stoles, at graduation were expressing hate and glorifying suicide bombers.[25] By the time the three Jewish groups had bothered to get an accurate translation of the Arabic, “The O’Reilly Factor” and others had already repeated the charges as fact. On one side the stole contained the Shahada or Muslim declaration of faith (“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet”), while the other side said, “Oh, God, increase my knowledge.”

The ADL apologized, but insisted that it remained “deeply troubled” by a garment that, it said, “has been closely associated with Palestinian terrorists.”[26] The American Jewish Congress did not respond, and the Zionist Organization of America saw no need to apologize, afterwards calling for action against “this outrageous and immoral conduct” that, according to them, exhibited insensitivity to “what many find as offensive.” In an article that was otherwise sympathetic to the students, the Jewish Daily Forward headline, “Muslim Students Get Apology in a Tiff Over ‘Shahada’ Scarf” minimized the impact on the students, their families and their community.[27]

*****

In the past decade, the ADL has been on the anti-Muslim side of three high-profile Islamophobic campaigns: the multi-year initiative to block the building of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center; an anti-Muslim smear campaign targeting educator Debbie Almontaser and the Khalil Gibran International Academy, the country’s first English-Arabic dual language public school; and Park51, the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan. Members of what Center for American Progress researchers have called “theIslamophobia network in America” played a role in instigating each of these local campaigns—fear-mongering, providing misinformation, and using the right-wing media and blogosphere to foment or sustain a high level of anti-Islam sentiment.[28] And each received some measure of support from members of the local Jewish establishment, including the ADL.

The Boston mosque controversy took five years to play out. Instigated in 2002 by William Sapers, who had done work with the ADL, opposition to the mosque construction was subsequently backed by Charles Jacobs of the David Project, Citizens for Peace and Tolerance, and other hardline pro-Israel groups and individuals, including Steven Emerson, who has claimed that Islam “sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.”[29] After the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) broke ground in 2002, the right-wingBoston Herald—using information provided mostly by Emerson—charged the ISB with having connections to “radical Islamic” groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.[30]Newspaper coverage included an incendiary picture of the planned mosque next to one of Osama bin Laden.[31]

The opponents also recruited someone to file a suit against the Islamic Society of Boston (ultimately dismissed as “without merit”), and the Islamic Society filed a suit alleging a conspiracy “to libel the ISB, its leadership and to prevent the Muslim community from establishing a place of worship.”[32] The Boston Jewish establishment characterized the conflict not as libel or conspiracy against Muslims, but as a “free speech” right to raise concerns about links to “Islamic terrorism.”[33] Although the ISB community expressed willingness to be part of multiple mediation efforts initiated by both Jewish and interfaith groups, the mosque opponents refused.

The ADL’s public role in this controversy appeared at first to be limited. Itcriticized as anti-Semitic statements made by an ISB trustee and condemned the Islamic Society of Boston for its failure to promptly renounce anti-Semitism and “terrorism.”[34] Subsequently, the Islamic Society of Boston distanced itself from the trustee’s statements, and the trustee apologized for them to a group of religious and lay leaders, including a representative of the David Project.[35]

The ADL, as it later did with Park 51, gave cover and credibility to the right-wing anti-Muslim forces. It did not publicly criticize the ways in which the anti-mosque camp used an alarmist, anti-Muslim media campaign to capitalize on the prevailing post-9/11 narrative that links Muslims with “terrorism.” Nor did it express public reservations about anti-mosque advocates who are prominent anti-Muslim ideologues, including Steven Emerson, a researcher with a history of erroneous and virulently anti-Muslim findings, and Robert Spencer, who spoke out against the mosque at a Newton synagogue (and whom the ADL has since identified as co-founding an organization with a “conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda”).[36]

Like other local mainstream Jewish groups, the ADL failed to publicly place in a larger context the litany of accusations that right-wing Jewish groups and individuals brought against the Islamic Society of Boston and its leaders. Placing it in just such a context, Cecilie Surasky of Jewish Voice for Peace maintained that the anti-mosque forces were engaged in a “fishing expedition for ways to block the mosque in Boston [that] crossed a line from citizen’s advocacy to profoundly shameful efforts at preventing a group from practicing their religion.”[37]

Subpoenaed emails released in 2007 indicated that the ADL seems to have played more of a role than had been apparent from its public positions.[38] The emails revealed that the David Project and others “had worked actively to initiate the lawsuit [against the mosque] and news stories as part of their ‘strategies to attack the mosque.’"[39] Furthermore, in a 2004 email that proposed reaching out to the ADL, mosque opponent Steve Cohen stated that the ADL was "much more concerned and knowledgeable about this matter than their public statements would indicate. But, being associated with various ecumenical [read: interfaith] efforts, they are reluctant to be the lightning rod on this issue.”[40] In 2007, when the emails became public, the Islamic Society of Boston identified Robert Leikind, the executive director of the ADL (New England Region), as among those who “collaborated” with The David Project, Emerson, and others in the campaign against the mosque.[41]

Despite opponents’ attempts to stop the mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center opened in 2007 under the management of the Muslim American Society.[42]

Also in 2007, the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) in New York City was about to open. In the spring of 2007, members of the country’s Islamophobia network initiated media and internet attacks on the school and its founding principal, Debbie Almontaser, an Arab American and observant Muslim who was widely respected as an educator and bridge-builder. Frank Gaffney, for example, who views mosques as “Trojan horses” in Muslim attempts to promote “sedition” and impose “Sharia Law” on the United States, claimed that, if opened, the school would be an Islamist “beachhead in Brooklyn.” [43] Opposition to the school by Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller and other anti-Muslim ideologues gathered limited support. But, in August 2007, the group that the anti-KGIA forces formed, the Stop the Madrassa Coalition, found “the ultimate pretext to ignite a media firestorm” by trying to connect Almontaser to “Intifada NYC” T-shirts made by an Arab youth organization that used space in an office of a group on whose board she served.[44]

Attacks on the school and Almontaser intensified after a New York Post reporter asked Almontaser “about the origin of the word ‘intifada.’” Almontaser respondedthat “the Arabic root word from which the word intifada originates means ‘shake off’ and that it has evolved over time to have different meanings for different people, but certainly for many, given its association with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict during which thousands have died, it is associated with violence.”[45] The New York Post mischaracterized and sensationalized her comment in a headline thatread: “City Principal Is ‘Revolting.’”[46]

At this point, some Jewish groups, including the ADL, which had been supportive of Almontaser in the face of early opposition to the school, changed their position, despite knowing full well that virulent Islamophobes and tabloid journalists were distorting her views. Though Abraham Foxman, ADL's national director, for instance, believed that Almontaser could “absolutely” continue work with the ADL, because “she continues to be an important person in interfaith relations,” he blamed her for the dispute and viewed her removal as principal as appropriate. “She gave herself a body blow,” Foxman said, “making her unacceptable as principal of Khalil Gibran.”[47] Foxman thereby threw the weight of the ADL behind the New York City political powers who forced her resignation—Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein—and did not challenge the blatant Islamophobic attacks on Almontaser that Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, and other anti-Muslim ideologues spearheaded.

In March 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission completely vindicated Almontaser. The EEOC concluded that the New York City Department of Education (DOE) "succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on DOE as an employer.”[48] The EEOC found that DOE had discriminated against Almontaser on the basis of her “race, religion and national origin.”[49] The ADL remained silent.

Although the ADL played a relatively small role in the Khalil Gibran controversy, it caused a great stir within the Jewish community when, in 2010, Foxman criticized the proposal for Park51 on the grounds that it would be in the vicinity of Ground Zero. Foxman argued that, though the planners had the right to locate a mosque and community center there, it was insensitive for them to do so.[50] He perpetuated the Islamophobic assumption that, because a small number of Muslims attacked the World Trade Center, all Muslims were responsible--a type of collective guilt never assumed about other religions. Commenting on this premise, Jon Moscow of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice noted, “We don’t hear anyone saying that there should be a ‘church-free’ area around the Oklahoma City Federal Building because Timothy McVeigh claimed to be acting as a Christian.”[51]

Jews who were opposed to the ADL position offered multiple critiques of it. Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak of JewsOnFirst.com, a First Amendment group, and a board member of the Progressive Jewish Alliance, pointed out the irony of Jewish leaders supporting the concept of an “Islam-free zone.”[52] In a statement put out by Jews Against Islamophobia, Rebecca Vilkomerson, director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said, “As Islamophobia rises in the U.S. and becomes the racism that dares to speak its name, it is terribly disappointing to see that organizations that were supposedly founded to promote tolerance and civil rights are failing to stand up for the rights of Muslim Americans."[53]

But, despite such critiques, the ADL position had a broad impact. Within the mainstream Jewish community, this position, along with the anti-Muslim statements of some other Jewish groups, had a chilling effect on those wanting to express public support for Park51. At the December 2010 Rabbis for Human Rights conference, Rabbi Joy Levitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Center (JCC) of Manhattan, alluded to the ADL and referred more generally to having heard “comments of ‘fear, ignorance, xenophobia’ from members of the Jewish community when her support for the Cordoba House [Park51] was publicized.” “Jewish leaders,” Rabbi Levitt said, “made this a more complicated issue than it needed to be. [They] made it very difficult for the rest of the community’—less-prominent individuals who support the Islamic center—‘to speak out.”[54]

In the larger political world, the ADL position legitimized and fueled Islamophobia. Mainstream critiques of the ADL position came, for example, from the Union of Reform Judaism, whose then-president Rabbi Eric Yoffie said:

. . .the effect of [the ADL’s position] . . . was to open the floodgates and lend weight and legitimacy to those whose primary concern was not Ground Zero or the victims' families but, instead, inciting hatred against American Muslims. . . Most of what we've witnessed in recent weeks has nothing whatever to do with location-specific issues related to the World Trade Center site. Most of what we've witnessed is an orgy of hatred against Muslims and a concerted effort to exclude a group of our fellow citizens from our neighborhoods and to limit their ability to worship as they choose in America.[55]

The ADL did not apologize for how it had helped legitimize virulent anti-Muslim sentiment and action. However, it did release a statement in late August that condemned the Park51 opponents primarily responsible for amping up Islamophobia.[56] And five and a half weeks after announcing its position on Park51 and being roundly criticized by some other mainstream Jewish organizations, the ADL announced the creation of a new group that it had initiated and sponsored, the Interfaith Coalition on Mosques (ICOM). “Concerned with a disturbing rise in discrimination against Muslims trying to legally build or expand their houses of worship—mosques—across the United States,” the ICOMstatement of purpose reads, “interfaith and religious leaders have formed a coalition to assist those Muslim communities confronting opposition.”[57]

A connection between Park51 and the ICOM announcement was impossible to ignore. “Conspicuously absent from the group’s statement of purpose...” noted anarticle in the Jerusalem Post, “is any mention of New York City.”[58] As onereport in the U.S. Jewish press noted, the ADL “established [ICOM], conspicuously, after its wrongheaded stance” on Park51.[59] The timing of the announcement led Foxman to acknowledge that it did “give the impression that the group is paying penance for its opposition to the New York Islamic center.”[60] It also (conveniently) gave him the opportunity to trumpet the ADL’s “commitment” to Muslims’ religious liberty and explain once again his opposition to Park51.[61]

In the past couple of years, the ADL has backed mosque construction inCalifornia, Georgia and Tennessee, and condemned anti-Muslim hate speech and various acts of individual violence against Muslim American institutions andindividuals.[62] It has also opposed the state anti-Sharia laws that are part of a nationwide Islamophobic smear campaign to promote the baseless accusation that Muslims plan to take over the U.S. legal system.[63] In 2011, the ADLcondemned the “significant level of anti-Muslim bigotry [that] has surfaced in a variety of public forums over the past year” and issued “backgrounders” on DavidYerushalmi, “the driving force’ behind anti-Sharia efforts in the United States.”[64] It subsequently posted backgrounders on other members of the national Islamophobia network, such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s Stop Islamization of America.[65] However, the ADL did not acknowledge its own anti-Muslim role at the University of California at Irvine, in Boston and New York City, and in several decades of spying on Arab Americans and progressive activists.

*****

While we can locate articles about the ADL speaking out against Islamophobia, we don’t have the same sort of records to document its silent complicity. But, for a group like the ADL that sees itself as committed to “civil rights for all,” the public battles it avoids—not just those it undertakes—can be instructive. The ADL, which is headquartered in New York City, has been noticeably silent about the New York City Police Department's attacks on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.

The NYPD is part of the broad U.S. counter-terrorism effort, characterized by pervasive civil liberties violations and driven by a “war on terror,” in which the U.S. government views Israel as its invaluable ally. The ADL’s failure to speak out against NYPD civil liberties abuses is totally consistent with the organization’s strong support for both Israeli and U.S. policies, as well as with its long-standing anti-Muslim and anti-Arab history. Further, the ADL has long-standing ties to the NYPD (as well as federal agencies) through ADL anti-terrorism training programs, including training in Israel and instruction in both Israel and the United States by Israeli security forces that routinely view Arabs and Muslims as the enemy.[66]

Three examples of the NYPD’S infringement on the civil rights of Muslims are particularly salient.

In 2007, the NYPD issued Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,which laid out several unsound, dangerous anti-Muslim assumptions that motivated NYPD actions and policies and served as a template for other law enforcement agencies.[67] Speciously linking Islam and terror, this report provides the theoretical foundation for the NYPD’s development of a four-stage post-9/11 “theory of radicalization” that views acts like “giving up cigarettes, drinking, gambling,” as well as opposition to U.S. policies and actions, as precursors to a Muslim man’s “self-designation” as a “holy warrior.”[68] The Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition, created in the wake of the report, and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Justice (New York University) and the Center for Constitutional Rights expressed “serious civil liberties concerns” about the type of approach to “homegrown terrorism” taken by the NYPD.[69] But not the ADL.

Similarly, news about Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s appearance in The Third Jihad (2009), a rabidly Islamophobic propaganda film, and its showing to nearly 1,500 officers at NYPD training sessions led to widespread community outrage.[70] Before the public learned the truth, the NYPD claimed that the film had been “mistakenly screened ‘a couple of times’” and that Kelly had not been specially interviewed but appeared only in old film clips.[71] The Brennan Center engaged in a “nine-month legal battle” for access to NYPD information about the extent ofThe Third Jihad showings.[72] Unlike other local civil liberties groups, the ADL neither condemned Kelly and the NYPD nor spoke out about the need for honesty and transparency.

In 2011-2012, a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press articles found that the CIA had enlisted the help of the NYPD in order to target Muslims because of their religion, not because of indicators of criminal activity—infiltrating about 250 mosques in New York. [73] The NYPD went far beyond legitimate law enforcement interests to targeting people in several Northeast states just because they were Muslims.[74] As the public learned more details, a broadcoalition of Muslim American and other community and civil rights groups criticized NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and called for his resignation.[75] Anger at the spying initiative and The Third Jihad was heightened by an aggressive stop-and-frisk policy that targeted residents of color. The ADL did not join the many civil rights groups that condemned the NYPD’s actions.

Instead, the ADL had cast its lot with the NYPD. It was not deterred by the 2011 AP revelations about the NYPD surveillance operations.[76] Even after this information had become widely known, the ADL gave Thomas Galati, commanding officer of the Intelligence Division, an award for “outstanding achievements in combatting terrorism, extremism, and injustice.”[77] In June 2012, Galati gave a deposition that made clear that, rather than having an outstanding track record as chief of this Division, the NYPD’s more than six years of spying on the Muslim American community “never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.”[78] The ADL made no public comment on the fundamental injustice of a spying program that targets people based on religion, as well as on linguistic and geographical profiling.

While others expressed outrage at the NYPD’s spying on the Muslim community and its religious, ethnic, and racial profiling, the ADL stood up for Muslims only in limited ways, like condemning the more outwardly rabid Muslim ideologues, such as Geller, Spencer and Yerushalmi. It was obviously unwilling to challenge the NYPD and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who fully backed both the commissioner and his approach to information-gathering and profiling.

*****

The ADL spent decades compiling dossiers, collaborating with local police and the FBI, and engaging in illegal surveillance of Palestinians, other Arabs, and groups and individuals who did not share its pro-Israel politics and worldview.  More recently, it has (at times) backed Muslims’ religious freedom and condemned anti-Muslim hate speech. But it has also continued to target Muslims and Arabs, been on the anti-Muslim side of Islamophobic campaigns, and failed to challenge the NYPD’s aggressive and discriminatory surveillance of the Muslim community. Informed by its support for the domestic and global “war on terror” and right-wing Israeli policies, the ADL continues, with appalling frequency, to abandon its stated mission—to protect “civil rights for all.”

Research by Elly Bulkin. Read the authors' previous articles: "How the Jewish Establishment's Litmus Test on Israel Fuels Anti-Muslim Bigotry" and "Follow the Money: From Islamophobia to Israel Right or Wrong."

NOTES

[1] ADL, “About the Anti-Defamation League,” http://www.adl.org/about.asp(accessed Feb. 25, 2012).

[2] ADL, “About the Anti-Defamation League.”

[3] Peter Schey of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, lead counsel in the suit against the ADL, paraphrased in Michael Gillespie, “Los Angeles Court Hands Down Final Judgment in Anti-Defamation League Illegal Surveillance Case,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1999, http://washreport.net/component/content/article/181-1999-december/9255-los-angeles-court-hands-down-final-judgment-in-anti-defamation-league-illegal-surveillance-case.html (accessed Dec. 22, 2011).

[4] Dennis King & Chip Berlet, “ADLgate,” Tikkun Magazine, July/August 1993,http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/jul1993_berlet/print (accessed Feb. 25, 2012).

[5] Susan M. Akram & Kevin R. Johnson, “Race, Civil Rights, and Immigration Law after September 11, 2001: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims,” New York University Annual Survey of American Law 58 (2002), 304,http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv3/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__annual_survey_of_american_law/documents/documents/ecm_pro_065053.pdf; Joel Beinin, “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East,” in Beshara Doumani, Academic Freedom After September 11 (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2006), 249. Also available athttp://www.stanford.edu/~beinin/New_McCarthyism.html (both accessed Feb. 25, 2012).

[6] Akram & Johnson, “Race, Civil Rights, and Immigration Law after September 11, 2001,” 304; and Beinin, “The New McCarthyism.”

[7] Phebe Marr, “MESA Condemns Blacklisting,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 17, 1984, 8http://www.wrmea.com/component/content/article/72/450-mesa-condemns-blacklisting.html (accessed Feb. 25, 2012).

[8] Abdeen Jabara, “The Anti-Defamation League: Civil Rights and Wrongs,” Covert Action Quarterly 45 (Summer 1993), 28-33,http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0058244.html(accessed December 22, 2011); King & Berlet, “ADLgate”; Akram & Johnson, “Race, Civil Rights, and Immigration Law after September 11, 2001,” 306-307.

[9] Jabara, “The Anti-Defamation League: Civil Rights and Wrongs”; King & Berlet, “ADLgate”; Akram & Johnson, “Race, Civil Rights, and Immigration Law after September 11, 2001,” 306-307.

[10] Jabara, “The Anti-Defamation League: Civil Rights and Wrongs”; King & Berlet, “ADLgate.”

[11] Quote from Jabara, “The Anti-Defamation League: Civil Rights and Wrongs.” Also see King & Berlet, “ADLgate.”

[12] King & Berlet, “ADLgate.”

[13] Examiner Staff Report, “Anti-Defamation League: A History of Collecting Data,” San Francisco Examiner, April 1, 1993, cited in Jabara, “The Anti-Defamation League: Civil Rights and Wrongs.”

[14] Quote from Hussein Ibish of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), in Michael Gillespie, “Los Angeles Court Hands Down Final Judgment in Anti-Defamation League Illegal Surveillance Case.”

[15] Nabeel Abraham, “Anti-Arab Racism and Violence in the United States,” in The Development of Arab-American Identity, ed. Ernest Nasseph McCarus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 187; cited in Akram & Johnson, “Race, Civil Rights, and Immigration Law after September 11, 2001,” 308.

According to a 2005 Los Angeles Times article on the seven Palestinians and one Kenyan who would become known as the Los Angeles 8:

After the arrests in 1987, Anti-Defamation League officials claimed that the investigation had been triggered by information developed by their organization. They would back away from this boast a few years later, however, in the wake of embarrassing disclosures that ADL operatives in several cities, including Los Angeles, had kept thousands of covert files on people they deemed worthy of extra vigilance. Indeed, ADL files on [defendants] Hamide and Shehadeh did turn up. (Peter H. King, “18 Years Waiting for a Gavel to Fall,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2005, http://articles.latimes.com/print/2005/jun/29/world/fg-laeight29[accessed Dec. 22, 2011]).

The government case against the Los Angeles 8 did not conclude until 2007, when the government dropped charges. The presiding judge held that "’the attenuation of these proceedings is a festering wound on the body of these respondents [Khader M. Hamide and Michel I. Shehadeh] and an embarrassment to the rule of law’ and . . . [found] that ‘the government has failed to carry its burden of proving respondents deportable based on clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence.’” (“The L.A. 8 Decision,” n.d., Progressive Jewish Alliance Policy Statement, http://www.pjalliance.org/article.aspx?ID=354&CID=9[accessed December 22, 2011]). Although the government brought no criminal charges against the defendants, they did indict six for visa violations and charged the two permanent residents, on the basis of their association with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with distributing materials that supported “world communism” and the overthrow of the U.S. government (Akram & Johnson, “Race, Civil Rights, and Immigration Law after September 11, 2001,” 317-321). The Progressive Jewish Alliance noted that the defendants had engaged in “activities that would clearly be constitutionally protected if undertaken by U.S. citizens” (“The L.A. 8 Decision,” Progressive Jewish Alliance Policy Statement).

[16] For a discussion of a shift from “the emphasis . . . on the PLO and the conflation of Arabs with terrorism” to a focus on “Islamic terrorism,” see Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2012), 121. Also Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 307-309.

[17] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Free Press, 1996); and Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer, 1993): 22-28. As Edward Said has noted, between the 1993 essay and the 1996 book, Huntington’s work lost its question mark. (Said, “The Myth of ‘The Clash of Civilizations,’” Media Education Foundation Transcript, 1998, 2.http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/404/transcript_404.pdf [accessed Dec. 3, 2011]).

[18] See, for example, Sunaina Maira, “Islamophobia and the War on Terror: Youth, Citizenship, and Dissent,” in Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, eds. John L. Esposito & Ibrahim Kalin (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 122; and Mehdi Semati, “Islamophobia, Culture and Race in the Age of Empire,” Cultural Studies 24, No. 2 (2010), 257, 265-266,http://web.me.com/msemati/Dr._Mehdi_Semati_website/Research_files/Islamophobia,%20Culture%20and%20Race%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Empire.pdf(accessed Feb. 10, 2012) . As Nadine Naber has maintained about the post-9/11 period: “the arbitrary, open-ended scope of the domestic ‘war on terror’ emerged through the association between a wide range of signifiers such as particular names (e.g., Mohammed), dark skin, particular forms of dress (e.g., a headscarf or a beard) and particular nations of origin (e.g., Iraq or Pakistan) as signifiers of an imagined ‘Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim' enemy. In this sense, the category ‘Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim’ operated as a constructed category that lumps together several incongruous subcategories (such as Arabs and Iranians, including Christians, Jews and Muslims, and all Muslims from Muslim-majority countries, as well as persons who are perceived to be Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim, such as South Asians, including Sikhs and Hindus). Persons perceived to be ‘Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim’ were targeted by harassment or violence based on the assumption ‘they’ embody a potential for terrorism and are thus threats to U.S. national security and deserving of discipline and punishment.” See Nadine Naber, “’Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!’: Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11,” The Scholar and the Feminist Online 6, no. 3 (Summer 2008),http://barnard.edu/sfonline/immigration/naber_01.htm (accessed Dec. 2, 2011); also the later version of Naber’s article (with the same title) in Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, eds. Amaney Jamal & Nadine Naber (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 278-279.

[19] Solomon Moore, “Fiery Words, Disputed Meanings,” Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2001, http://articles.latimes.com/print/2001/nov/03/local/me-65250; CAIR, “CAIR Says ADL Seeks to Hinder Legal Rights of U.S. Muslims,” press release, August 17, 2007; reprinted in The American Muslim, August 17, 2007,http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/cair_says_adl_seeks_to_hinder_legal_rights_of_us_muslims; ADL, “ADL Responds to Open Letter from CAIR, Releases Photo of Group's Leader Speaking Next to Hezbollah Flag,” press release, August 30, 2007,http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Teror_92/5122_92.htm; CAIR, “CAIR: ADL Gets ‘Deceptive’ in Smear Campaign,” press release, August 31, 2007,http://www.cair.com/PressCenter/ArticleDetails/tabid/165/ArticleID/22958/mid1/777/currPage/107/Default.aspx; Cecilie Surasky, “Islamic Rights Group CAIR Says ‘ADL Seeks to Hinder Legal Rights of U.S. Muslims,’" Jewish Voice for Peace, August 26, 2007,http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2007/08/23/islamic-rights-group-cair-says-adl-seeks-to-hinder-legal-rights-of-us-muslims/ (all accessed Dec. 10, 2012).

[20] Delinda C. Hanley, “ADL and AJC Demand Muslim Panelists Be Excluded,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2002, 82,http://www.wrmea.com/component/content/article/236/3995-muslim-american-activism.html; Aleza Goldsmith, “ADL Says Muslim Group in Area Forum Has Terror Ties,” jweekly, December 14, 2001,http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/16922/adl-says-muslim-group-in-area-forum-has-terror-ties/; CAIR, “CAIR Says ADL Seeks to Hinder Legal Rights of U.S. Muslims.” See also Neil MacFarquhar, “Scrutiny Increases for a Group Advocating for Muslims in U.S.,” New York Times, March 14, 2007,http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/washington/14cair.html?pagewanted=all; CAIR, “Top Internet Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories about CAIR,” March 2012,http://www.cair.com/AboutUs/MisinformationandConspiracyTheoriesAboutCAIR.aspx(all accessed May 30, 2012).

[21] ADL, “ADL Commends President Bush for Daniel Pipes Appointment to the U.S. Institute of Peace,” press release, August 25, 2003,http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Mise_00/4342_00.htm (accessed May 30, 2012).

[22] Quote by Pipes on “militant Islam” from Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matt Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, & Faiz Shakir, Fear Inc., The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, August 2011, Center for American Progress, 42,http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2011/08/pdf/islamophobia.pdf; information on monitoring professors is from Campus Watch, “About Campus Watch,” http://www.campus-watch.org/about.php (both accessed Sept. 2, 2011).

[23] ADL, “ADL Commends President Bush for Daniel Pipes Appointment to the U.S. Institute of Peace.” Helal Omeira & Arsalan Iftikhar, “Pipes Nomination a Slap in the Face for Islam,” San Franciso Chronicle, May 11, 2003,http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views03/0511-02.htm; quote from Hussein Ibish of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee from Katrin Dauenhauer, “War of Words over Bush's 'Peace' Appointment,” Asia Times Online, August 19, 2003,http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EH19Ak04.html. Also Muslim Public Affairs Council, “Wide Coalition of Americans Call Press Conference Asking President Bush to Withdraw Pipes Nomination, “ press release, August 14, 2003,http://www.mpac.org/programs/interfaith/wide-coalition-of-americans-call-press-conference-asking-president-bush-to-withdraw-pipes-nomination.php (both accessed May 30, 2012).

[24] Suzanne Goldenberg, “Bush Appoints Anti-Muslim to Peace Role,” The Guardian (London), August 22, 2003,http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/23/usa.suzannegoldenberg/print(accessed May 30, 2012).

[25] Information and quotations in his paragraph are from Ori Nir, “Muslim Students Get Apology in a Tiff Over ‘Shahada’ Scarf,” Jewish Daily Forward, July 2, 2004, http://www.forward.com/articles/4934/. See also Stanley Allison, “A Political Yet Peaceful Graduation at UC Irvine,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2004, http://articles.latimes.com/print/2004/jun/20/local/me-ucigrad20; and Shahed Amanullah, “The Panic over Graduation Stoles,” altmuslim, June 23, 2004,http://www.patheos.com/blogs/altmuslim/2004/06/the_panic_over_muslim_graduation_stoles/(all accessed Dec. 22, 2011).

[26] Nir, “Muslim Students Get Apology in a Tiff Over ‘Shahada’ Scarf.”

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ali et al., Fear Inc.

[29] Dean Barrett, “The Islamists Are Coming! And They’ve Got Lawyers with Them,” The Weekly Standard, June 11, 2007,http://www.investigativeproject.org/211/the-islamists-are-coming; Emerson quote, originally in a March 1995 article in Jewish Monthly, from John F. Sugg, “Steven Emerson's Crusade: Why Is a Journalist Pushing Questionable Stories from Behind the Scenes?” FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, January/February 1999, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1443; Islamic Society of Boston “Damning Evidence against the David Project,” press release, Scoop Independent News, May 9, 2007, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0705/S00149.htm (all accessed Jan. 3, 2012).

[30] Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers, Maggie Mulvihill & Kevin Wisniewski, “Radical Islam: Outspoken Cleric, Jailed Activist Tied to New Hub Mosque,” Boston Herald, October 28, 2003, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1009964/posts; and Wells, Meyers, Mulvihill & Wisniewski, “Under Suspicion: Hub Mosque Leader Tied to Radical Groups,” Boston Herald, October 29, 2003, http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1010353/posts (both accessed Dec. 30, 2011).

[31] “Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center—Timeline,” The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, n.d.,http://pluralism.org/files/wrgb/islam/ISBCC_Controversy_Timeline.pdf; Islamic Society of Boston et al. v. Boston Herald et al. n1, Superior Court of Massachusetts at Suffolk, July 20, 2006 Mass. Super LEXIS 391,http://www.lexisone.com/lx1/caselaw/freecaselaw?action=OCLGetCaseDetail&format=FULL&sourceID=bdihja&searchTerm=eLWS.KKOa.aadj.ebDb&searchFlag=y&l1loc=FCLOW(both accessed December 30, 2011; court document now only available with a subscription). See also Jane Lampman, “Battle Waged in Boston over New Mosque,” Christian Science Monitor, January 5, 2006,http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0105/p13s01-lire.html; and Lampman, “Boston Mosque Rises above the Fray,” Christian Science Monitor, July 12, 2007,http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0712/p13s03-lire.html (both accessed Jan. 3, 2012).

[32] Quotes from Islamic Society of Boston, “Confronting Intolerance” (accessed Sept. 23, 2011; no longer available online). See Islamic Society of Boston, “Damning Evidence against the David Project.” Also Jane Lampman, “Boston Mosque Rises above the Fray.”

[33] Mark Jurkowitz, “Trial and Terror,” Boston Phoenix, December 10, 2005,http://bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/dont_quote_me/multi-page/documents/05096810.asp (accessed Oct. 15, 2012).

[34] Andrea Estes, “Islamic Society Urged to Respond: Group Still Quiet on Anti-Semitism Issue,” Boston Globe, October 7, 2004,http://www.unitedjerusalem.org/index2.asp?id=499145&Date=10/7/2004(accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

[35] Lampman, “Boston Mosque Rises above the Fray”; Estes, Islamic Society Urged to Respond: Group Still Quiet on Anti-Semitism Issue”; “Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center—Timeline.”; Martin Felsen, “Rosh Hashonah Dvar—Sept. 2007,” September 13, 2007,http://circleboston.org/sites/www.circleboston.org/files/Felsen%20dvar%202007.pdf(accessed Oct. 12, 2012).

[36] Ali et al, Fear, Inc., 50-51; Martin Solomon, “Spencer Talk on the Mosque—The Day After,” February 4, 2005, Solomonia,http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archives/005380.shtml; and ADL, “Backgrounder: Stop Islamization of America,” March 2011 (posted September 19, 2012),http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/pamela-geller-stop-islamization-of-america.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_1 (all accessed Oct. 15, 2012).

[37] Cecilie Surasky, “Campaign to Stop Mosque in Boston: The Islamic Society of Boston Drops Defamation Lawsuit Against Opponents of Mosque, Construction to Proceed,” MuzzleWatch, June 4, 2007,http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2007/06/04/campaign-to-stop-mosque-in-bostonthe-islamic-society-of-boston-drops-lawsuit-construction-will-proce/ (accessed Oct.15, 2012).

[38] The Islamic Society of Boston twice subpoenaed ADL documents. The David Project, “The Islamic Society of Boston, ‘Promoter of Interfaith Dialog,’ Subpoenas the Anti-Defamation League,” press release, February 19, 2007,http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archives/010079.shtml; also Daniel Pipes, “The Islamic Society of Boston & the Politicians' Red Faces,” Middle East Forum, October 29, 2003, updated December 29, 2008,http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2003/10/the-islamic-society-of-boston-the (both accessed Oct. 15, 2012).

[39] Lampman, “Boston Mosque Rises above the Fray.”

[40] Islamic Society of Boston, “Damning Evidence against the David Project,” Steve Cohen, email to Josh Katzen, Jack Fainberg, & Evan Slavitt, May 18, 2004.

[41] Islamic Society of Boston, “Damning Evidence against the David Project.”

[42] Surasky, “Campaign to Stop Mosque in Boston: The Islamic Society of Boston Drops Defamation Lawsuit Against Opponents of Mosque, Construction to Proceed.”

[43] Initial Gaffney quotes from Ali et al, Fear Inc., 33. “Beachhead” quote is from Frank. J. Gaffney, Jr., “War of Ideas’ Homefront [on Khalil Gibran Academy],” Washington Times, July 24, 2007. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/jul/24/war-of-ideas-homefront/.  See also Gaffney, “Stop the Madrassa,” Washington Times, Aug. 14, 2007,http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/aug/14/stop-the-madrassa/ (both accessed March 8, 2012).

[44] Debbie Almontaser & Donna Nevel, “The Story of Khalil Gibran International Academy: Racism and a Campaign of Resistance,” Monthly Review 63:03, July-August 2011, http://monthlyreview.org/2011/07/01/khalil-0gibran-international-academy (accessed March 19, 2012).

[45] Almontaser & Nevel, “The Story of Khalil Gibran International Academy.”

[46] Chuck Bennett & Jana Winter, “City Principal Is ‘Revolting,’” New York Post, August 6, 2007,http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/item_UerzwvF7fcSQY8YOP1ln4K(accessed March 19, 2012).

[47] Foxman quote from Larry Cohler-Esses, “Jewish Shootout over Arab School,” New York Jewish Week, August 17, 2007,http://www.thejewishweek.com/features/jewish_shootout_over_arab_school(accessed March 8, 2012).

[48] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Debbie Almontaser v. New York City Department of Education and New Visions for Public Schools, EEOC Charge No. 520-2008-02337, March 9, 2010, 7,http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/EEOC_Determination.pdf(accessed March 19, 2012).

[49] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Almontaser v. New York City Department of Education and New Visions for Public Schools, 8.

[50] Although the ADL’s main objection was to the location of Park51, Foxman offered another critique. He characterized as “legitimate” “questions [that] have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values.” ADL, “Statement on Islamic Community Center Near Ground Zero,” press release, July 28, 2010,http://www.adl.org/PresRele/CvlRt_32/5820_32.htm (accessed Dec. 28, 2011).

[51] Jon Moscow quoted in a press statement put out by four groups, American Jews for a Just Peace, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Jews Say No!, “Park51 Supporters to Protest at Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance: Say Intolerant Leaders Fuel Islamophobia,” Sept. 14, 2010, authors’ personal papers.

[52] Rabbi Beliak quoted in James D. Besser, “Mosque Conflict Seen Sharpening Jewish Divisions,” New York Jewish Week, September 15, 2010,http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/national/mosque_conflict_seen_sharpening_jewish_divisions(accessed Dec. 26, 2011).

[53] Rebecca Vilkomerson quoted in press statement put out by four groups, American Jews for a Just Peace, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Jews Say No!, “Park51 Supporters to Protest at Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance: Say Intolerant Leaders Fuel Islamophobia,” September 15, 2010 (authors’ personal papers). Almost immediately after this protest, the 4 groups formed Jews Against Islamophobia (JAI). Three of these groups (except for American Jews for a Just Peace, which is based in Philadelphia) have continued to be part of JAI.

[54] Rabbi Levitt Quoted in Steve Lipman, “Rabbis for Human Rights Hosts Cordoba House Founder,” New York Jewish Week, Dec. 7, 2010,http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_york/rabbis_human_rights_host_cordoba_house_founder(accessed Jan. 3, 2012).

[55] “Comments by Rabbi Eric H. Joffie to the URJ Executive Committee Regarding Cordoba Center Community Center and Mosque,” Union of Reform Judaism, September 14, 2010, http://urj.org/about/union/leadership/yoffie/?syspage=article&item_id=49481&printable= (accessed Jan. 3, 2012).

[56] Abraham H. Foxman, “Exploiting the Mosque Controversy,” ADL press release (originally published in the Huffington Post, August 27, 2010),http://www.adl.org/ADL_Opinions/Civil_Rights/20100827-Op-ed+Huffington+Post.htm (accessed Jan. 15, 2012); ADL, “Backgrounder: Stop Islamization of America (SIOA).

[57] Interfaith Coalition on Mosques (ICOM), “Statement of Purpose,” ADL press release, September 7, 2010.http://www.adl.org/main_interfaith/ICOM_Statement_of_Purpose.htm (accessed Jan. 3, 2012).

[58] Jordana Horn, “ADL Starts Interfaith Coalition to Help U.S. Muslims,” Jerusalem Post, September 14, 2010,http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=188076 (accessed Dec. 10, 2012).

[59] J.J. Goldberg, “Mosque Madness: ADL Strikes Back, AJC Catches Up,” Jewish Daily Forward, September 12, 2010, http://blogs.forward.com/jj-goldberg/131160/mosque-madness-adl-strikes-back-ajc-catches-up/; Marc Tracy, “Zionists on Both Sides of Tenn. Mosque Debate,” Tablet, November 10, 2010,http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/50081/zionists-on-both-sides-of-tenn-mosque-debate (both accessed Dec. 10, 2012).

[60] Dan Gilgoff, “Opponent of NYC Islamic Center Becomes Advocate for Mosques Nationwide,” CNN Belief Blog, January 28, 2011,http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/24/opponent-of-ny-islamic-center-becomes-advocate-for-mosques-nationwide/ (accessed Dec. 10, 2012).

[61] Marc Tracy, “Zionists on Both Sides of Tenn. Mosque Debate”; Adam Chandler, “Prominent Park51 Opponent: Stop Anti-Muslim Bigotry,” Huffington Post, October 14, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-chandler/prominent-park51-opponent_b_761527.html (accessed Dec. 10, 2012).

[62] ADL, “Interfaith Coalition Urges Temecula, CA City Council to Reject Bigotry, Approve Mosque,” press release, January 20, 2011,http://www.adl.org/PresRele/CvlRt_32/5966_32.htm; ADL, “Interfaith Coalition Acts in Support of Georgia Mosque,” press release, March 8, 2011,http://www.adl.org/PresRele/CvlRt_32/5992_32.htm; ADL, “ICOM Acts Against Lawsuit Intended to Stop Tennessee Mosque,” press release, September 27, 2010, http://www.adl.org/PresRele/CvlRt_32/5857_32.htm (all accessed Oct. 2, 2012). See also ADL, “ADL Welcomes Law Enforcement's Hate Crime Investigation in Brutal Beating and Tragic Death of Iraqi Immigrant,” press release, March 26, 2012, http://www.adl.org/PresRele/HatCr_51/6280_51.htm; and ADL, “ADL Commends Law Enforcement in Tracking Down Florida Mosque Bombing Suspect,” press release, May 5, 2011,http://www.adl.org/PresRele/HatCr_51/6032_51.htm (both accessed Oct. 2, 2012).

[63] Abraham H. Foxman, “Shout Down the Sharia Myth Makers,” JTA, August 10, 2011, http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/08/10/3088943/; “ADL, “ADL Applauds Federal Appeals Court Decision Rejecting Oklahoma Anti-Sharia Amendment,” press release, January 11, 2012.http://www.adl.org/PresRele/DiRaB_41/6217_41.htm (both accessed October 3, 2012). Also see American Civil Liberties Union, Nothing to Fear: Debunking the Mythical “Sharia Threat” to Our Judicial System: A Report of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, 2011, 5,http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Nothing_To_Fear_Report_FINAL_MAY_2011.pdf(accessed Dec. 12, 2011).

[64] ADL, “Anti-Muslim Sentiment ‘Significant,’” press release, March 29, 2011,http://www.jta.org/news/article-print/2011/03/29/3086618/adl-anti-muslim-sentiment-significant?TB_iframe=true&width=750&height=500); also ADL, “David Yerushalmi: A Driving Force Behind Anti-Sharia Efforts in the U.S.,” January 13, 2012, http://www.adl.org/main_Interfaith/david_yerushalmi.htm (both accessed Oct. 3, 2012).

[65] ADL, “Backgrounder: Stop Islamization of America, Pamela Geller,” September 19, 2012, http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/pamela-geller-stop-islamization-of-america.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_2; ADL, “Backgrounder: Stop Islamization of America, Robert Spencer,” September 19, 2012, http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/pamela-geller-stop-islamization-of-america.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_3; ADL, “Backgrounder: Stop Islamization of America: Pamela Geller & Robert Spencer Join Forces,” September 19, 2012, http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/pamela-geller-stop-islamization-of-america.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_4 (all accessed Oct. 3, 2012).

[66] ADL, “Senior Law Enforcement Personnel Attend ADL Anti-Terrorism Course,” June 1, 2005,http://www.adl.org/learn/adl_law_enforcement/atsmay_60105.htm?LEARN_Cat=Training&LEARN_SubCat=Training_News (accessed Oct. 3, 2012).

[67] Mitchell D. Silber & Arvin Bhatt, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, New York City Police Department, 2007,http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_information/NYPD_Report-Radicalization_in_the_West.pdf; Sahar F. Aziz, “Caught in a Preventive Dragnet: Selective Counterterrorism in a Post-9/11 America,” Gonzaga Law Review, Vol. 47:2 (2011/2012), 482, http://gonzagalawreview.org/files/2012/04/Aziz-final.pdf(both accessed Dec. 2, 2012).

[68] Quotes from Silber & Bhatt, Radicalization in the West, 33, 38, 45, 32.

[69] Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition, CountertERRORism Policy: MACLC’s Critique of the NYPD’s Report on Homegrown Radicalism, 2008, 4,http://maclcnypdcritique.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/counterterrorism-policy-final-paper3.pdf; ACLU, “Coalition Memo to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Regarding ‘Homegrown Terrorism,’” May 7, 2008, http://www.aclu.org/national-security/coalition-memo-senate-committee-homeland-security-and-governmental-affairs-regardi. See also Faiza Patel, Rethinking Radicalization, Brennan Center for Justice, March 8, 2011, 1http://brennan.3cdn.net/f737600b433d98d25e_6pm6beukt.pdf (all accessed Dec. 2, 2012).

[70] Tom Robbins, “NYPD Cops’ Training Included an Anti-Muslim Horror Flick,” The Village Voice, January 19, 2011,http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/2337684/. Michael Powell, “In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims,” New York Times, January 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/nyregion/in-police-training-a-dark-film-on-us-muslims.html?pagewanted=all); and J.J. Goldberg, “Islamophobic Film and Its Jewish Backers,” Jewish Daily Forward, February 2, 2012,http://forward.com/articles/150677/islamophobic-film-and-its-jewish-backers/ (all accessed Feb. 3, 2012).

[71] Tom Robbins, “NYPD Cops’ Training Included an Anti-Muslim Horror Flick.”

[72] Ibid.

[73] Adam Goldman & Matt Apuzzo, “With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas,” Denver Post, August 24, 2011,http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_18747455 (accessed Dec. 13, 2011).

[74] Chris Hawley, “NYPD Monitored Muslim Students All Over the Northeast,” Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 2012,http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0220/New-York-Police-Department-monitored-Muslim-students-all-over-the-Northeast (accessed February 21, 2012). See numerous publications of the Brennan Center for Justice, such as Faiza Patel & Andrew Sullivan, A Proposal for an NYPD Inspector General, Brennan Center for Justice, 2012,http://brennan.3cdn.net/f18d017c1e832538b5_j4m6i2f06.pdf; Brennan Center for Justice, “City Council Members, Civil Rights Advocates Press Conference Puts Spotlight on NYPD Operations,” press release, October 6, 2011,http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/city_council_members_civil_rights_advocates_press_conference_puts_spotlight/; Faiza Patel & Michael Price, “Unchecked NYPD Operations In Need Of Oversight,” October 6, 2011,http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/unchecked_nypd_operations_in_need_of_oversight/(all accessed Oct. 15, 2012).

[75] Ryan Devereaux, “Rally Calls for NYPD Commissioner to Quit over Anti-Muslim Training Film,” The Guardian (London), January 26, 2012,http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/26/nypd-commissioner-kelly-anti-muslim-film/print (accessed February 23, 2012). For opposition to the NYPD surveillance program in the Jewish community, see, for example, Shoulder to Shoulder, “Local and National Religious Leaders Ask Mayor Bloomberg to Investigate NYPD Surveillance and Training Practices,” press release, March 13, 2012,http://www.shouldertoshouldercampaign.org/media/local_and_national_religious_leaders_ask_mayor_bloomberg_to_investigate_nypd_surveillance_and_training_practices.html; and Rachel Kahn-Troster & Marjorie Dove Kent, “Stop Spying on Muslims,” Jewish Daily Forward, Oct. 9, 2012, http://forward.com/articles/163754/stop-spying-on-muslims/(both accessed Dec. 10, 2012). The authors are executive directors, respectively, of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. See also Alex Kane, “The Jewish Establishment Goes to Bat for Ray Kelly and the NYPD,” Mondoweiss, March 21, 2012,http://mondoweiss.net/2012/03/the-jewish-establishment-goes-to-bat-for-ray-kelly-and-the-nypd.html (accessed March 22, 2012).

[76] The following AP articles were published prior to the ADL’s giving the award to Galati: Matt Apuzzo & Adam Goldman, “With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas”; Matt Apuzzo & Adam Goldman, “Inside the Spy Unit that NYPD Says Doesn’t Exist,” August 31, 2011, http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2011/Inside-the-spy-unit-that-NYPD-says-doesnt-exist; Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan & Matt Apuzzo, “NYPD Eyed US Citizens in Intel Effort,” Sept. 22, 2011, http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2011/Inside-the-spy-unit-that-NYPD-says-doesnt-exist; Chris Hawley & Matt Apuzzo, “NYPD Infiltration of Colleges Raises Privacy Fears,” October 11, 2011,http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2011/NYPD-infiltration-of-colleges-raises-privacy-fears ; Adam Goldman & Matt Apuzzo, “What’s the CIA Doing at NYPD? Depends Whom You Ask,” October 17, 2011,http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2011/Whats-the-CIA-doing-at-NYPD-Depends-whom-you-ask; Matt Apuzzo & Adam Goldman, “NYPD Keeps Files on Muslims Who Change Their Names,” October 26, 2011,http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2011/NYPD-keeps-files-on-Muslims-who-change-their-names. A list of all of the AP articles in this Pulitzer Prize-winning series, including articles written after the ADL’s award to Galati, is available at “AP Probe into NYPD Intelligence Operations,”http://www.ap.org/Index/AP-In-The-News/NYPD (all accessed Sept. 30, 2012).

[77] ADL, “ADL Honors NYPD Intelligence Chief for Courage and Dedication,” press release, Nov. 7, 2011, http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Mise_00/6156_00.htm(accessed Oct. 1, 2012). Also Kane, “The Jewish Establishment Goes to Bat for Ray Kelly and the NYPD.”

[78] Adam Goldman & Matt Apuzzo, “NYPD: Muslim Spying Led to No Leads, Terror Cases,” New York Daily News, Aug. 21, 2012,http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-08-21/news/33307378_1_muslim-student-groups-demographics-unit-terror-cases (accessed September 30, 2012). Goldman & Apuzzo, “NYPD: Muslim Spying Led to No Leads, Terror Cases.” In his testimony, Galati explained that the NYPD thought it legitimate to collect information, for example, on speakers of Urdu (the language of 15 million Pakistanis and 60 million Indians) or someone from South Lebanon, because, he said, “that may be an indicator of possibility that that is a sympathizer of Hezbollah because Southern Lebanon is dominated by Hezbollah.”