OMG ADL, STFU & GTFO

The Anti Defamation League has chosen to side with totalitarianism.

Yesterday afternoon I got a text from a dear friend with whom I frequently commiserate about the state of our world:

“I wanna fucking beat the shit out of jonathan greenblatt.”

Crass as it may be—and, particularly for any lawyers in the crowd, we are in no way endorsing the beating of Anti Defamation League President Jonathan Greenblatt, and [redacted] was being purely satirical and is actually a pacifist, OK your honor—my friend had excellent reasons for his rage.

This week, as the Trump administration pushes forward with its most unambiguously fascist project to date — the detention and deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holding pro-Palestinian student dissident who, by the White House’s own admission, is not being targeted for having actually committed a crime — the ADL, which Greenblatt has led for more than a decade, released the following statement:

We firmly believe there should be swift and severe consequences for those who provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations, incite violence in support of terrorist activities, or conceal their identities in order to harass and intimidate Jewish individuals and institutions with impunity.

We appreciate the Trump Administration's broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism — and this action further illustrates that resolve by holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions.

Obviously, any deportation action or revocation of a Green Card or visa must be undertaken in alignment with required due process protections. We also hope that this action serves as a deterrent to others who might consider breaking the law on college campuses or anywhere.

There’s a lot to unpack here. The first is “christ almighty, fuck you ADL.”

But the more important question that Greenblatt’s statement raises is: What happens when a deeply flawed but historically significant civil rights institution becomes an enthusiastic cheerleader for the same strain of fascism it’s professed to be fighting against?

The answer, of course, is: nothing good.

Founded as a bulwark against the overt antisemitism of the early 20th century, the ADL had, for years, been held as one of the United State’s most notable civic groups dedicated to fighting bigotry and discrimination. It faced down Henry Ford and his Dearborn Independent, fought against McCarthyism, and was instrumental in helping defang the far-right John Birch Society in the 1960s and 70s. Around the same time, however, the ADL began embracing the burgeoning Evangelical movement, targeting critics of the State of Israel, and generally lumping broad progressive movements and figures into its increasingly incoherent definition of antisemitism. It is that ADL which Greenblatt assumed control of in 2014, and it is that ADL which so thoroughly embarrassed itself this week.

First I suppose, we should congratulate Greenblatt and co. for managing to write a statement so gymnastically adept that it can kiss Donald Trump’s ass while at the exact same time covering its own. That’s no easy feat, and in terms of sheer rhetorical flexibility, it should be noted and commended. The rest, though? Not so much.

At its core, the ADL’s statement has the organization not only boosting the Trump administration’s effort to illegally deport Khalil for his role spearheading last year’s protests at Columbia University, but sees the group legitimizing deportation as a stifling tactic against campus protesters in the future — albeit with a mealy-mouthed caveat for an “alignment with required due process protections” (none of which seem to have been actually followed in Khalil’s case). Given the group’s historical opposition to the McCarthy witch hunts of the 50s, the hypocrisy on display here is pretty grotesque… not that ideological consistency has been Greenblatt’s strong suit to begin with.

The problem, as I see it, is that the ADL is not simply throwing its considerable weight behind something blatantly totalitarian, it’s that it’s doing so in such a way as to create a permission structure for others to do so as well. This is an organization which, in spite of its rightward lurch in the later half of the past century, still enjoys — and capitalizes on — an anachronistic reputation for upholding civil rights and fighting bigotry. Its research is regularly cited and quoted by reputable outlets and figures, despite gaping flaws methodological flaws, and Greenblatt and his staff are frequently invited to appear on various cable news programs and speak at storied cultural institutions. As a whole, the ADL oversees net assents pushing $200 million in value.

It remains, in other words, an enormously powerful, stubbornly well-regarded institution to whom millions of people look for guidance when it comes to issues of bigotry and antisemitism. And it has chosen, in this moment, to celebrate an unambiguous breakdown of civil and constitutional rights on the historically disproven assumption that by siding with fascism it can spare itself from the very consequences it has endorsed. Not only is that shameful, but it’s astonishingly short-sighted and dangerous.

Imagine Martin Niemoller’s iconic “First they came for the….” poem, but instead of not speaking out, he’d actively cheered each successive stanza. That’s what’s happening here, and if the ADL truly thinks they’ll be spared from whatever the Trump administration has planned next, it only goes to prove just how dangerously out of touch they truly are.

So what do you do when an institution like this makes abundantly clear where they stand when it comes to the fascism already at the door? You start by removing whatever goodwill capital they’ve built up over the years. If the ADL wants to be on the side of totalitarianism, then that should be the first and last thing mentioned anytime they come up in conversation. Rob them of that self-affirmed position of moral authority, and they lose the inertia-fed momentum that’s kept them in the public’s (relatively) good graces since their right-wing heel-turn decades ago.

The alternative is to allow their continued perversion of what constitutes bigotry and injustice to remain a public plumb line, and pray that you won’t someday be the one measured against it.