For many years, the liberal media have portrayed the Anti-Defamation League as some kind of nonpartisan group fighting anti-Semitism and other “hate crimes,” and not as a left-wing group. But on Tuesday’s Morning Edition, NPR reported that the Left can’t ally any more with the ADL, because it’s supportive of Israel. ADL may have marched with Martin Luther King, but today’s “civil rights activists” in Black Lives Matters identify with Palestinians, not American Jews. Ferguson was....an intifada?
The ADL is trying to be as left-wing as it can, but they’re being rejected, as NPR elaborated. Forget the Jews and blacks marching together in Selma. Today's Jews apparently stand for Israeli apartheid and Zionist oppression:
TOM GJELTEN: The Anti-Defamation League's new president, Jonathan Greenblatt, wants the ADL now to move its civil rights work forward.
JONATHAN GREENBLATT: There's questions like mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, economic opportunity. We need to integrate what's happening with the Latino community, the LGBT community because when we fight for the rights of others, it strengthens America -- makes America a better place.
GJELTEN: There's just one complication. For more and more civil rights activists these days, solidarity with Palestinians is taking precedence over solidarity with American Jews.
MIKE McBRIDE: Many of our experiences of police repression and brutality seem to mirror that of many international peoples, including Palestine.
GJELTEN: Pastor Mike McBride is a prominent African-American pastor from Berkeley, Calif., who became involved with the Black Lives Matter movement after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
McBRIDE: When we were in Ferguson and we were being terrorized by the law enforcement and military apparatus, it was Palestinian young people who started to tweet us on how to survive and deal with the terror we were experiencing.
GJELTEN: McBride and other Black Lives Matter activists recently traveled to the Middle East to meet with Palestinians. He says they came away feeling they had overlapping experiences.
NPR thinks there’s nothing questionable in charges of police “repression” and “terror” while “civil rights activists” were burning down businesses.
Gjelten continued by noting that pro-Palestinian gay activists also disrupted a meeting in Chicago of the National LGBTQ Task Force. “A delegation from Israel was at the meeting. And the protesters used the occasion to condemn the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.”
GJELTEN: Alliance-building is clearly getting more challenging. The ADL's Greenblatt supports LGBT rights and Black Lives Matter. But the perceived intersection of those movements with the Palestinian cause has made his advocacy work more difficult....
The new landscape of political activism was evident in Ferguson, Mo., in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting. Activists from the Black Lives Matter movement, energized and angry, bitterly attacked the ADL over its connection with Israel. The ADL director in St. Louis, Karen Aroesty, came away from that experience realizing that activists today have different expectations of their allies.
KAREN AROESTY: New anti-racism activists aren't impressed at all by -- we marched with you in Selma. It doesn't go anywhere.
Gjelten didn’t really dwell on how BLM activists can accuse Jews of being terrorists, even the local Reform rabbi protesting in Ferguson, as Moment magazine reported:
Susan Talve, the Reform rabbi of the only synagogue inside St. Louis city limits, was a visible presence during the protests in Ferguson; on the anniversary of Brown’s death, she was arrested while participating in a demonstration. Despite her long history of fighting for racial justice, she became a focal point of criticism because of her activities relating to Israel. Although Talve is critical of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, she has connections with the pro-Israel lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose representatives she hosted at her synagogue and under whose auspices she has traveled to Israel. These affiliations make Talve a member of a particular political demographic activists have dubbed “PEPs,” or “Progressive Except for Palestine.”
In November, that criticism came to a head when Hands Up United circulated a photo of Talve on social media with the hashtag “#realterrorist,” calling her “a supporter of Genocide [sic] and international apartheid.” Days later, in an open letter, St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace accused Talve of bringing “Zionist oppression into this beautiful movement” and “demonizing Palestinians and whitewashing Israel…turning what should be safe spaces for all people of color into contradictory ones, drawing wedges where there were none.”
[Hat tip: Jarrett]
