The ADL: Fabricating a "Campus Antisemitism Crisis" to Manufacture Consent for Genocide

The state of Israel, the U.S. government, and the ADL want us talking about antisemitism so we are not talking about the genocide. We MUST not let them.

Jay Janner/USA Today Network | Credit: via REUTERS

Through years of effort, Zionists have steadily pushed to redefine antisemitism. This redefinition is used as a bludgeon to slander and repress Palestinian people and their liberation movement. One of the key organizations in the U.S. driving this malicious narrative is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a registered non-profit organization founded in 1913.

Despite its self-proclamation as the “world’s leading organization fighting antisemitism and hate in all forms” the ADL has been frequently challenged as a racist hate group masquerading as an organization fighting hate. Yet, most Americans remain ignorant of these critiques, blankly accepting the ADL’s statements at face-value. This facade is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

The ADL functions as an arm of the Israeli state apparatus or “Israel’s attack dog in the U.S.” It creates and proliferates anti-Palestinian racism propaganda and sabotages racial justice movements. The ADL should be delegitimized and dismantled immediately, along with the entire Zionist entity upholding this genocide.

In the past two weeks, college encampment demonstrations erupted across the U.S. (and the world) in protest of Israel’s genocide that has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians and displaced two million more in the world’s first live-streamed genocide.

The CEO of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, stood outside of Columbia University after more than 100 students were arrested by the NYPD and demanded that — based on claims of Jewish safety — the NYPD should return or the National Guard should enter campus to break up the protest.

Since his plea, police have attacked and arrested protestors at campuses across the country including a second mass arrest at Columbia and violent repression at Emory University in Atlanta where police tased a restrained street medic and fired rubber bullets and tear gas. 

The ADL praised the police crackdown on Dartmouth’s encampment, which included the brutal arrest of the former Chair of the Jewish Studies department, who stated that she is now banned from the campus where she has taught for 34 years. Students spotted snipers on the roof at two universities and students, faculty, and community members have been thrown to the ground and arrested by cops in riot gear for protesting against genocide.

The ADL recently issued a letter to university presidents calling for campuses to ensure “close coordination with your security and law enforcement teams”. The letter further states that “law enforcement must be prepared to take action” against protestors. Greenblatt penned an op-ed for CNN echoing this sentiment and spoke at a pro-Israel rally at UCLA just days before a brutal Zionist attack and bloody police crackdown to clear the UCLA encampment.

The ADL is a key figure in the militarization of U.S. police departments, in part by coordinating police training with the Israeli military. As American police continue to escalate violence against campus protesters, the ADL fans the flames of brutal repression.

As student protests grow, high profile Zionist politicians and media representatives lean harder into another one of their tried and true tactics: Smearing Palestine demonstrations as “antisemitic” to manufacture consent for both genocide and repression of protests. Biden added to the wave of condemnations, characterizing the protests as “blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous” warning of an “alarming surge of antisemitism”. 

The presence of a large number of Jewish anti-zionist students and faculty participating in the campus protests is irrelevant to Zionist propagandists who are not interested in reality, just maintaining colonial genocide in Palestine. But with or without Jewish presence, the movement for a free Palestine is just and requires no one to co-sign its validity. 

Palestinians know this propaganda and slander well. They are smeared as antisemitic merely for existing — let alone when fighting for freedom from nearly a century of colonial displacement, occupation, and genocide. Whenever Palestinians resist the system that slaughters them, the identity of their occupiers is thrown in their faces. Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students face aggressive persecution on their campuses and the Department of Education just launched an investigation into “extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment” at Columbia University.

The #DropTheADL campaign has extensively cataloged the numerous ways in which the ADL represses social change movements and targets activists of color, including in the fight for a free Palestine. The campaign’s open letter and primer includes a breakdown of documented incidents in which the ADL has surveilled human and civil rights organizations, repressed campus activism, infiltrated movements, and spied on communities of color, while feeding information to the FBI and Israel.

“Many progressive individuals and organizations partner with the ADL not knowing its ongoing legacy of supporting racist policing, surveillance, colonialism, and the silencing of social justice activism. Misinformation about the ADL’s work, and its credibility in progressive circles, are what allow the ADL to continue harming social justice movements.” — #DropTheADL

The ADL has deep ties with the Washington establishment and police departments across the U.S. — it has lobbied for “anti-terrorism” legislation and ran surveillance operations during the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights movement, South African apartheid protests, and of course, the Palestinian liberation movement. Greenblatt recently called student organizers “campus proxies for Iran” and the ADL submitted a letter alongside other Zionist organizations calling for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to be used to spy on Palestine activists to combat “foreign terrorists and other overseas adversaries”.

The ADL targets campus organizing because Zionists know that young people are always on the forefront of social change movements, and college is where many people in the west come into consciousness about the Palestinian struggle for the first time.

A recently leaked audio of Greenblatt stated, “we really have a TikTok problem” and that the divide on support for Israel is “not left and right, it’s young and old”. Notably, U.S. lawmakers recently banned TikTok, driven by the desire to suppress popular support among young people for the Palestinian solidarity movement. 

Undergirding Greenblatt’s incitement calls against the campus protests is the ADL’s recently released ‘Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents’, accompanied by their go-to PR campaign to “sound the alarm” for a crisis of antisemitism sweeping the nation at unprecedented, skyrocketing rates.

The ADL claims that 2023 was worse than any year they’ve tracked the data. This is such a worn-out P.R. campaign that a decade ago, The Guardian published a piece titled, “Antisemitism Should Not be Waved around Like a Propaganda Tool”, indicting the ADL’s slanted use of data. The piece specifically notes that the ADL was “ringing the alarm” for rising antisemitism while pushing a narrative that blamed Palestinians for the uptick.

For years, the ADL has worked steadfastly to promote the IHRA definition of antisemitism, one that asserts that anti-zionism is antisemitism. While Palestinians are the people most targeted and impacted, as a Jewish anti-zionist myself, this definition deems me antisemitic for my viewpoint on the state of Israel.

This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would amend Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, another dangerous step by Congress toward prosecuting people for Palestinian solidarity. 

The ADL lobbied for the passage of this bill which would change the legal definition of antisemitism in federal civil rights law to include, “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”.

The provided examples of statements considered antisemitic under the new definition include, “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and any comparison between “contemporary Israeli policy” and “that of the Nazis”. The bill would mandate the Department of Education to use the new definition and could withhold federal funding to universities that do not comply.

Anti-zionist Jews reject the IHRA definition of antisemitism out of hand. Palestinians did not choose the identity of their occupiers, and their resistance is anti-colonial, not antisemitic. It is not the fault of Palestinians that the entity ceaselessly slaughtering and occupying them kills in the name of Jews and “Jewish safety”.

Zionists seek to marry all Jewish people to a morally unjustifiable nation state. They attempt to “nazify” the Palestinians, as if colonized people pursuing freedom from brutal occupation is in any way similar to the centuries of European Jewish persecution which culminated in Pogroms and the Holocaust. For example, Greenblatt recently likened keffiyehs to swastikas and Ottawa banned people from entering the legislature building for wearing keffiyehs.

This is the upside-down world imbued with anti-Palestinian racism that Zionists want us to live in as they continue carpet bombing Gaza: We refuse.

The ADL’s studies on antisemitism are useless and dangerous because they insist upon logging Palestinian solidarity sentiments as “antisemitic incidents”. For example, the ADL logs each instance of hearing or seeing “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as an antisemitic incident. The ADL pushes the narrative to the public that there is an epidemic of antisemitism and the Palestinian liberation movement is to blame. Their annual reports are used as fodder to repress Palestine protests and manufacture consent for ongoing genocide. 

As protests heat up and the genocide lingers on, the ADL is working harder than ever to keep Israel’s prime propaganda line alive and well: The erroneous narrative that Jews are unsafe because of the Palestinian liberation movement.

They insult our dead by invoking the memory of the Shoah and Nazi Germany — not where the comparison is justified (in Gaza) but for Jewish people in the west who Zionists claim are “under attack” by Palestinians seeking self-determination from occupation. 

Meanwhile, Palestinians are under actual attack, dodging Israeli snipers, digging their children out from under the rubble of their bombed homes, unearthing mass graves at hospitals, and eating animal feed to stave off man-made famine forced upon them by Israel and the U.S. 

The ADL needs to be abandoned and delegitimized immediately. We need truly anti-racist and anti-zionist organizations to track antisemitism data because the ADL is a wholly unreliable propaganda and surveillance outfit.

The ADL’s actions demonstrate that its allegiance is not to oppressed people, it is to Israel and the Zionist movement. The ADL has cosplayed for too long as a benevolent force when it is actually part of an apparatus of racial violence and movement infiltration. To Zionist organizations, student activists fighting for Palestine are just another obstacle to be removed to maintain the hum of the killing machine. 

Ultimately, the state of Israel, the U.S. government, and organizations like the ADL want us talking about antisemitism so that we are not rising up to resist the holocaust being live-streamed on our screens. They want to draw attention away from Israel’s brutal crimes against humanity by focusing on Zionist feelings rather than Palestinian slaughter. While Palestinians dig their way out of the rubble, the ADL is busy manufacturing consent for genocide.