A few weeks ago i actually did a bit of a deep dive on the ADL website myself on this topic because i always really respected the ADL for their work and i wanted to know what they had to say about the situation. It honestly was pretty confused about the way they talked about it. Saying anti zionism is basically the same as anti semitism.
I spend hours just reading through their stuff and it felt like there was no discussion possible. You’re either fully behind israel or you’re anti semitic.
I think i found one single instance of them saying that there are legitimate instances where being critical of the israeli government is justified. But everything else felt more like propaganda than information.
Not gonna lie. It made me really sad that such an amazing organization is so wrong on this topic. Because they really do great work on all other topics including anti semitism. But the situation of israel-palestine is not one of them.
Having stakes in a conflict really tints your perspective even for those respectable organizations… That’s annoying.
I noticed the same with aljazeera. They are regarded as really good neutral journalists on a whole list of topics. I honestly didn’t expect a very foreign news organization to have such nuanced takes, but they consistently made a better job in their reporting than a lot of US or EU journalists. But when it came to something they are involved in, you can see their neutral reporting slowly decay - it’s sad to watch.
That’s how propaganda stations like that work, they say what they want about things that don’t negatively affect Qatar or Iran so that they’re more effective in pushing things that their paymaster want pushed.
It’s truly sad because the ADL has done some just quite frankly fantastic work over the years. That they’ve fallen so far it’s just tragic really.
It’s not really surprising their strategy though. This has been a common tactic for revisionist Zionist groups. Finding a way to label other Jews as not really Jews so then they can feel free to attack attack them. It’s been used to murder many prominent Jewish activists over the years. Hell it’s what allowed them to murder a prime minister.
I said this in another thread- I used to feel like the ADL had my back. Now I feel like they’re like some other crazy pro-Israel Jews who decided that any Jew like myself who is also not pro-Israel are antisemites.
They seem like they’re a pro-Zionist organization instead of an pro-Israel lobby these days. Seems like there’s been an internal focus shift. Maybe it was always going to be this way, but they’ve moved the window.
They should be neither.
They should be focused on one thing, actual antisemitism. Not criticism of Israel’s policies, not criticism of Israel’s actions, actual hate against Jews because they are Jews.
top Jewish civil rights orgApartheid Defense League
