According to an interesting New York Times profile of Abraham Foxman published on January 14, the director of the Anti-Defamation League is a domineering bully who over the years has driven out all potential rivals and successors. When the journalist asked Foxman whom else in the $50-million-a-year organization he should talk to, he couldn’t think of anyone—not even Kenneth Jacobson, the ADL’s deputy national director and Foxman’s alter-ego.
For all its myriad activities, the author concluded, the ADL “is a one-man Sanhedrin doling out opprobrium or absolution for those who speak ill of Israel or the Jews.” The list is long. It includes Mearsheimer and Walt, of course, and anyone supportive of their views—notably Tony Judt, whose Polish Consulate affair prompted him to say of Foxman, “Pollution like him swirls around in the gutters of every democracy.” Foxman is an anachronism, the New York Times concluded, whose harping on Jewish insecurity and readiness to gevaltize is an embarrassment to many younger, confident but less affiliated Jews.
It is unfortunate that the New York Times refrained from dealing with other, no less interesting aspects of Foxman’s long career—notably the fact that, under Foxman, the ADL has been repeatedly investigated for spying on dozens of organizations and obtaining confidential information on private individuals through illegal means, or that it has pursued bloody-minded vendettas against those individuals that many Jews regards as counterproductive and embarrassing.
But the main problem with Foxman is that he reflects a mindset and promotes an ideology that is deeply detrimental to the struggle against Jihad. Like CAIR, the ADL also resorts to deception in billing itself as a human rights group that provides “programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.” What it does in practice has very little to do with its stated objective. It has a radical political program and social engineering agenda that goes way beyond “fighting discrimination.” It insists on America’s total demographic and cultural transformation into something that it is not, even when that transformation is manifestly detrimental to the interests of the Jewish community itself.
ADL’s immigration policy illustrates the point. For decades ADL has been advocating more or less unrestricted Third World immigration into the United States, on the grounds that a restrictive policy was inherently discriminatory and that a more diverse population would make the Jews more secure. In November 1965 it hailed the abolition of national origins quota system and stressed the “educational role” it played in helping to bring this change about. For the ensuing four decades it became strident in equating any advocacy of immigration control with “discrimination.”
But as many American Jews now realize, ADL’s agenda was driven by its leftist ideological blinkers, not by its concern for the community. As Stephen Steinlight, former Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, wrote soon after 9-11, the Jewish community “should stop letting the thought police of the more extreme incarnations of multiculturalism squelch it”:
We cannot consider the inevitable consequences of current trends—not least among them diminished Jewish political power—with detachment. Our present privilege, success, and power do not inure us from the effect of historical processes, and history has not come to an end, even in America. But if we hope to persuade the organized Jewish community to adopt a new stance of enlightened self-interest with regard to the immigration debate, a debate that will surely become increasingly bitter, fractious, and politicized in the crudest partisan ways in the days ahead we have little choice. Of equal urgency, and inextricably linked to that debate, is the mission of finding ways to strengthen national unity and social cohesion in America by resuscitating patriotic assimilation under demanding, historically unprecedented circumstances.
That Jewish groups should defend an uncritical immigration and visa policy that allows for the open-ended entry of Muslim fundamentalists to America—Steinlight went on, obviously alluding to the ADL—and then deny government agencies the means of keeping track of them, is self-defeating to the point of being suicidal. Major components of the current open-ended approach to immigration must be re-thought, he concluded, “before we will have become complicit, through action or inaction, in a fait accompli that may have dire implications for Jews and for America.”
What he means is that, these days, real anti-Semitism doesn’t come from those who talk about the Jewish role in promoting liberal immigration policies. It comes from Arabs and other Third World immigrants—including, significantly, a growing segment of Aztlan nationalists—whose presence in this country is the fruit of those very policies. They may yet make the position of the Jewish community in America far less secure than it would have been if they had not come here in the first place. That much should be obvious; but what Steinlight understands, Abraham Foxman will never admit.
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Perhaps the darkest side of ADL is its contribution to the campaign to establish “hate crimes” motivated “by reason of the race, color, religion or national origin of another person.” In April 1990 the Congress passed, and President Bush signed the bill. This awful law has prompted the rise of a veritable industry of special-rights advocates, attorneys, and assorted hate-mongers who continuously prompt their constituents to report “crimes.” They have made America seriously less pleasant than it had been before. The “culture” of victimology and the obsessive imposition of the agenda of gender, race, and sexual orientation on the rest of us was the predictable result. If the ADL and CAIR had their way, we’d have more of the same, much more. Their demands for additional sweeping legislation to limit the freedom of speech in America are crafted in different phrases but are identical in substance.
Prima facie CAIR and the ADL look pretty much like two sides of the same coin, like Commies and Nazis, or one-world liberals and neocons. They both share a vision of America as an unpleasant—nay, outright evil place. They hate the real, historical America with passion and want to metamorphosize her in line with their peculiar world outlooks. Their desired outcomes and the methods they’d like to apply are somewhat different, but the goal is the same: CAIR’s and ADL’s partnership of hate is a revolutionary project that aims to destroy the vestiges of America’s Christian faith and tradition, to make Americans feel guilty about who they are and ashamed of their history, culture, and ancestors.
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The only service Foxman and his organization may have done to America at this critical moment in our history was to prompt a bold response from those Jewish intellectuals who realize the need for national unity and social cohesion by resuscitating patriotic assimilation, or who understand that preservation of Christianity is essential not only for the moral survival of Jews as a community but, in due course, for their physical survival as individuals. While it is too much to expect that realization will dawn on the current ADL leadership, we can hope the disparity between that organization’s self-anointed mission and the genuine interests of the community it claims to champion will be increasingly evident to the detriment of the former.
http://inverted-world.com/index.php/news/news/abraham_foxman_jihads_friend/
Topic: Abraham Foxman, Jihad’s Friend (Read 2003 times)