ADL 
Tue Aug 10, 2010 at 10:06:19 AM EDT
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More than a week has passed since the Anti-Defamation League made national news by coming out against the placement of a mosque and community center near ground zero in lower Manhattan. Since then, the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 9-0 to allow a building to be torn down so that the new center could be build. This was the last real procedural hurdle the project needed to overcome. Now it just needs to raise the $100 million it will take to put up the ambitious JCC-like building. The ADL released their statement on a Friday, which is usually the time to make an announcement you feel you have to make but aren’t particularly proud of. If you are hoping for press coverage, just about any other day is better. But it doesn’t always work. If the ADL was hoping to quietly weigh in, without many people noticing, they failed spectacularly. Their statement was among the top stories in the days that followed. Opponents of the project were heartened to have the venerable ADL on their side, enjoying the credibility it provided to a campaign that was propelled significantly by anti-Muslim sentiment and political posturing for electoral gain. Supporters were… I think “ outraged” captures their prevailing reaction. It was heartening to know that many Jews were among the outraged. But was what perhaps more important was their acute need to express their outrage as Jews. Because the ADL is one of the highest profile Jewish organizations in the United States, its decision to oppose the center near ground zero was seen by many as representing the views of American Jews. This was true despite the fact that many Jewish organizations, including the local chapter of the ADL, the JCRC, the JCC, had made public statements in support months earlier. Paul Krugman, Michael Bloomberg, Alan Dershowitz, Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey Goldberg, Peter Beinart, Jonathan Chait, and many others all weighed in knowing that their voices were even more urgent because they are Jews. Jewish organizations and communal leaders also felt pressure to make their views on the subject known once the ADL had weighed in. So we owe the ADL a small debt of gratitude. Too often
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Fri May 07, 2010 at 10:02:32 AM EDT
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Good to see the ADL speaking out on this, although, as the not-so-thoughtful comments after the story demonstrate, calling for civility is rarely enough to acheive civility. Voters, finanicial supporters, and viewers need to demonstrate that they will reject leaders who engage in, as Foxman says,
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Wed Apr 15, 2009 at 16:27:50 PM EDT
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Well, it's tax day, a non-event made more interesting each year by protesters or activists. This year, the big push is a Boston Tea Party-esque series of protests called, despite the sexual connotations, tea bagging. I won't get into how all of this got started; The Progress Report has a good summary. Their point is to protest Obama's future tax increases on the highest income earners and to generally bemoan the impending socialist state. For the most part, the protests are attracting the kinds of far-right wackos we haven't heard much from since the Clinton years. But the imagery and the rhetoric being used is pretty disgusting. For anyone with any knowledge of antisemitism, much is familiar here, starting with focus on bloodsucking elites. Dana Houle at DailyKos has an interesting post that connects the dots between Timothy McVeigh, far-right antisemitism, and Glenn Beck of Fox News. Glenn Beck has emerged as the lead provocateur and promoter of the tea bagging protests. He is also likes to compare the Obama administration with... you guessed it! The Nazis! This video is particularly creepy. So is this one. The former video include Nazis on the march, then a giant image of Ben Bernake as Big Brother. The latter, about bloodsucking, includes an image of Barney Frank (D-MA) with fangs. I am not the type to see antisemitism around every corner. But I'd say a few lines have been crossed here; at least enough to warrant some kind of statement. Although it has been in fashion among those who track antisemitism to point to the left, the folks who do the most damage - particularly in this country - are on the right. So, why has this story gotten no attention from either the ADL or the Jewish press? JTA has eight articles about antisemitism in April alone, yet nothing about tea-bagging, or Glenn Beck. It's been two years since the ADL even mentioned Glenn Beck, when he was criticized for another Nazi analogy. What is it exactly that makes Durban II so important and tea-bagging so unimportant? Update: Will this photo from the teabagging protests catch anyone's attention?
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