Anti-Defamation League is defaming Judaism

OPINION:

If you’d like to know the Anti-Defamation League’s position on any issue, check with the Democratic National Committee. Under former Obama official Jonathan Greenblatt, the group rarely deviates from the left’s agenda.

The latest example is its pronouncement that “reproductive freedom is a Jewish value.” Yehuda Levin, an Orthodox rabbi who ran for mayor of New York on the right-to-life ticket, called this “blasphemous and dishonest.”

You might say the ADL is defaming Judaism. 

The Torah admonishes us to “choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.” At the time of Roe v. Wade, the distinguished Talmudist Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik warned: “If you kill a fetus, a time will come when even infants will be killed.” This was prophetic. The reproductive freedom the ADL champions now includes what amounts to infanticide.

But this is far from the only betrayal of the ADL’s historic mission. During the 2020 riots, it changed its definition of racism to keep up with the times. 

Where it once correctly defined racism as a belief that “one race is superior or inferior to another,” now its website claims that racism is “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”

This reflects the left’s insistence that only caucasians can be racist, so that, if a Black man drives a car into a Christmas parade specifically to kill white people, it might be murder, but it can’t be racist.

While it opposes the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, the ADL supports Black Lives Matter, which supports BDS. BLM is rabidly anti-Israel across the board.

There’s rarely a cutting-edge issue where the ADL diverges from the left. In 2016, Isi Leibler, former vice president of the World Jewish Congress, explained that under Mr. Greenblatt, the ADL’s “outlook is not only liberal but effectively represents an echo chamber for leftwing liberal politics.”

In 2016, the ADL said it was “disappointed” by delays in implementing the Affordable Care Act. Apparently, state-run health care is another Jewish value.

Even though former President Donald Trump was the most pro-Israel president since Ronald Reagan (he didn’t just talk about moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, but actually did it), the ADL was stridently anti-Trump. It was particularly scathing in its denunciation of Trump-era immigration policies, including the temporary ban on immigration from terrorist-friendly countries.

The ADL supports so-called transgender rights, including biological boys competing on girls’ sports teams, notwithstanding their pronounced physical advantages. It also supports LGBTQ+ on everything, including same-sex marriage. This blatantly contradicts Jewish law (see Leviticus 20:13).

The ADL finds antisemitism in the strangest places and ignores it in others where it actually exists. 

In a 2018 report, it cautioned that criticism of George Soros was based in part on anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. 

So, if you’re upset that the billionaire leftist spent $40 million to elect 75 social-justice prosecutors (according to a report by the Law Enforcement Defense Fund), you’re probably a closet antisemite. Putting hardened criminals back on the streets must be yet another “Jewish value.” Whatever happened to “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue?”

When a Muslim gunman took hostages at a Texas synagogue, in order to secure the release of a convicted terrorist (known as Madam Al-Qaeda), the ADL worried that it might provoke another wave of “Islamophobia.” As all know, Islam could hardly be more well-disposed toward Jews. Those anti-Jewish verses in the Quran were probably inserted by a white supremacist.

The ADL invariably finds antisemitism on the right, but rarely on the left. 

Americans for Peace and Tolerance notes that the ADL’s 2021 “Murder and Extremism Report “elevates the threat from white supremacists while playing down the threat from non-white Jew-haters.” So the real threat I face as a Jew isn’t Minister Louis Farrakhan and his goose-stepping Nation of Islam, but a dude in the Ozarks with bad teeth, who believes in Zionist conspiracy theories.

According to the New York Police Department, between February 2021 and February 2022, attacks on Jews in the city rose 409%. Americans for Peace and Tolerance adds: “When surveillance images of the attacks exist, the perpetrators are very often black, or, in cases from just after Israel’s war with Hamas’ last year (2021), largely Muslim.” 

Under Mr. Greenblatt, the ADL has abandoned its mission to fight antisemitism and become the Court Jew of the Democratic Party. Its positions are as kosher as scallops wrapped in bacon.

• Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist.