This #DroptheADL webinar, co-sponsored with Jewish Voice for Peace, took place on Friday, April 8, 2022 at 12 PM PT.
…
Join us to discuss the ways the ADL has — since its inception — undermined racial and social justice movements and communities, and how we can participate in #DroptheADL organizing in our schools and communities.
About our speakers:
Robin D.G. Kelley has spent decades as an activist and scholar exploring the history of social movements in the U.S. and internationally. Among his many published essays and books are Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination and Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. Prof. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA.
Lara Kiswani is the executive director of the Arab Resource & Organizing Center and a faculty member in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.
Emmaia Gelman is an American Studies scholar and NYU lecturer writing a political history of the ADL, and a queer antiracist in NYC.
Lesley Williams is a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Action board and is an activist and educator against racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism.
Transcript
LESLEY WILLIAMS, DROP THE ADL/JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE:
Hello, everybody and welcome. I’m really thrilled to have all of you here for our webinar. I’d like to welcome you on behalf of Jewish Voice for Peace and the DropTheADL coalition.
My name is Lesley Williams and I’m a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Action Board and I’ve been working with the drop the ADL coalition as well. So just a couple of things to get us started. We realized this is a very short introduction to a complicated topic and because we only have an hour we’re not going to have time to take live questions today. But we are very interested in what your concerns and questions about the Anti-Defamation League are. So we invite you as you have questions that you would like us at some point to address possibly in in another webinar to feel free to go ahead and put those into the chat. We also just want to emphasize that we’re all here because we are dedicated to world liberation of all marginalized peoples, including Palestinians, and we ask that everyone who is a part of this webinar, be respectful and mindful that and that you enter into the spirit of this webinar in a spirit of learning and in a spirit of share liberation.We also ask, of course that people stay unmuted when they are not speaking. So now I am going to get into it and give you a little bit more about the purpose and origins of the webinar and then introduce you to our fabulous panelists.
So the purpose of the webinar is, over the years many of us who’ve been working on behalf of immigrant rights, black freedom and anti racism gender rights have found ourselves in conflict with and often attacked and undermined by the Anti-Defamation League. And to outsiders and even to many progressives, this seems counterintuitive. Why would we be in conflict with an organization which claims to be America’s premier civil rights organization? But it’s due to this fundamental misunderstanding of the ADLs mission, versus what it actually does, hat we felt it was crucial to expose the many ways in which the Anti-Defamation League has been not merely problematic but actively hostile to our movements. In light of the ideals history of targeting a wide range of social justice movements dropped. The ADL is asking that all organizations which value the rights of marginalized people reconsider their relationships with the ADL. I’d like to acknowledge that our work challenging the ADL builds on that many earlier activist for racial and gender justice, SNCC, the National Lawyers Guild, AROC many Arab and Iranian activists and student groups. Most recently Tamika Mallory criticized Starbucks for bringing the Anti-Defamation League into anti bias training in Philadelphia.
Our decision to form drop the ADL came out largely of our work with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. We felt it was important to understand the connections between the ADL its history and its determination to attack and undermine BDS. And we realized that we can’t effectively do BDO work without addressing the ADL.
We have three fantastic speakers for you today, in addition to myself. They’ll be discussing the ADL, its history and its roles in education, its roles and militarism and repression of the LGBTQ community and of marginalized people of color, and I would like to introduce them now.
First, I’d like to introduce Robin DG Kelley. Professor Kelley is distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash endowed chair in US history at UCLA and we’re very fortunate to have him join us today. Next, I’d like to introduce Lara Kiswani. Lara is the executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and a faculty member in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. And finally, I would like to introduce Emmaia Gelman, who is an American Studies scholar writing a political history of the Anti-Defamation League and a queer anti-racist in New York who has worked with Jews Against the Occupation, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in New York and ACT UP. I’m delighted to have all them with us and we were going to have a very fulfilling afternoon. I’m going to just give a very brief overview of what the Anti-Defamation League actually does currently, and then I’m going to turn it over to Emmaia who’s going to start with some historical context.
So the Anti-Defamation League was established in 1913 to combat antisemitic stereotypes about Eastern European Jews, but it has gradually expanded its reach to include anti bias training and
“anti extremism” as it defines it. But it’s important to remember that this has always had a strong focus on defending Israel. It’s a huge organization there are 25 regional offices in the United States Government Relations office in Washington DC and an office in Israel, and it currently has assets of over $221 million. So the major mission and focus with the ADL, according to their own website is hatred and extremism, as they define it. They have a glossary in a database of hate symbols and hate groups, but it’s notable that their definition of Extremis group often includes black Latin and Arab liberation groups. They’re very involved in legal actions. They file amicus curiae briefs, they advocate for legislation, particularly model hate crimes legislation, but they’ve often supported anti-free speech legislation like the Antisemitism Awareness Act and the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. They’re probably best known for their community anti-bias education programs like the Shine A Light on Antisemitism program, the World of Difference program for schools, Words to Action and No Place for Hate. They have kind of become the Ghostbusters for schools and communities once they’ve experienced a hate crime. You don’t know where else to turn and so you turn to the ADL. But as in the movie, the Anti-Defamation League often leaves a bigger mess when it leaves someone started.
They’re also involved in international affairs, tracking and surveilling antisemitism worldwide, and have presented themselves as an advisor an expert on antisemitism for the United Nations, pushing a definition of antisemitism that centers around anti Israel activity. They also have what they call the Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, which is often used by media whenever they need a quote or a statistic about antisemitism. But it’s notable that their definition of antisemitic incidents can include something like student Palestinian students chanting pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist chants that for them is one of the examples other antisemitic incidents. So throughout, you notice there is a heavy emphasis on Israel, in fact, on their website, in their list of values, their number two value is we stand up for the Jewish state of Israel. And they frequently use antisemitic anti Israel and anti Zionist interchangeably as though they are synonymous. Finally, they are very involved in police exchanges where they bring U.S. police to Israel to understand the advantages of Israeli policing methods and surveillance, which is something I’ll talk about later in the program. But now I would like to turn to Emmaia, who’s going to give us some additional background and context on the history of the the ADL and its history of cooptation and colonial white supremacist. mindset. So Emmaia, take it away.
07:50
EMMAIA GELMAN, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY:
Thanks, Leslie. Hi, everyone. I am a researcher and I’ve spent the last eight years researching the history of the ADL. It’s always a challenge because the ADL has been in operation for over 100 years. And there’s so little studying that has been done of it, which is, I think telling in and of itself. I just want to be clear as we talk about this that because there’s so little investigation and consideration of the ADL that’s been done, that this process of undoing what we know about it is a difficult one — in the same way that unlearning white supremacy can be a difficult a difficult process or unlearning Zionism is a difficult process. So if it feels big, I just encourage us to take it in bites and be gentle with ourselves and and accept that it’s a big task.
The ADL draws strength from being perceived as a progressive organization. Even though we know that its claims every every claim that it makes being a progressive organization is rebuked by a contradiction of the same. So it claims that it’s an anti bias organization, but in fact, we also know it’s Islamophobic. It attacks Muslim community organizations and leaders – like it attacks CAIR, it attacks Linda Sarsour… Actually, Linda Sarsour was just, partly through the work of the Anti-Defamation League, cancelled from a corporate diversity event at GEICO. The white-led Anti-Defamation League and the white CEO — I did look it up – the white CEO of GEICO decided together, I guess, that she was the wrong Arab woman to lead their diversity event. The ADL has attacked Ilhan Omar, it led the push against the Park 51 mosque and yet it claims that it’s an anti Islamophobia organization, it’s full of contradictions that it claims it support. It supports black-led civil rights organizing, and it even signed the Jewish organizational letter declaring Black Lives Matter the new civil rights movement, but it also attacks the aims of black-led movements. It supports militarized policing and the hyper funding of police departments at the same time as black-led movements are calling for defunding and abolition. And it claims among other things, that it’s pro queer and supports queer rights, but it attacks and smears queer organizations who take up anti racism, and it supports astroturf queer organizations. We won’t go into the details because of time but you can read about some of that and the primer that’s on droptheadl.org.
So the question is, how did this confusion happen and how does this sort of cooptation of the idea of being a progressive organization happen? So to do that, we’ll dig a little bit into the history. I want to say that the ADL has not always been mistaken for a progressive organization. It started out in 1913 as an organization of the German Jewish community. So just to rewind a little bit: when we think about American Jewry, the story that we often think about is the emigration that happened from the 1880s to the 1920s Russian Jews immigrating to the US and joining unions and doing labor activism. There were also Jews already here, and they were more wealthy and assimilated. They were part of what’s called the German wave of Jewish emigration. They were part of the settler class: they were engaged in state building and in business. And they were concerned about this new wave of sort of rowdy immigrants and their politics, their leftist politics, and also they were poor — the Russian Jews who emigrated were poor — and they were anti czarist. They were opposed to state power and violence, and they were organizing. And as happens in many immigrant communities, the more powerful and elite immigrants that were here before them organized to control them to discipline them. That’s the sort of history of where the Anti-Defamation League, and actually also the American Jewish Committee, comes from.
That project of being organized to discipline an immigrant community — and not only to discipline them but also to really be aligned with the state, and to be aligned with capital and policing — that’s where the Anti-Defamation League comes from. I actually wrote a little article about it, which is in Jewish Currents and maybe someone can drop that link in the chat.
The Anti-Defamation League’s politics have stayed really consistent since then, even though things have changed. I mean, we wouldn’t pretend that it has stayed the same. Much of Russian Jewry, that wave of immigrants, has been brought on board. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t make the claim that everything has stayed the same and remains divided by waves of immigrants. But the Anti-Defamation League on the whole has retained that position. It became an anti-communist organization, and was very concerned with preserving the arrangements of power, preserving the idea of order. The idea that there was a vibrant Jewish left was very disturbing to the Anti-Defamation League, and as it became more and more powerful and central in the 50s, [the ADL] also set out to destroy the Jewish left. One of the most famous instances of that is that, in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were prosecuted in the early 1950s as communist spies, the Anti-Defamation League absolutely denied that their prosecution was fueled by antisemitism. In fact, the judge who sentenced them to death was a member of the Anti-Defamation League’s National Civil Rights Committee. That work of sort of destroying the Jewish left is actually something you know, for from our present perspective that Jewish Voice for Peace is involved in resisting and rebuilding right now.
I want to talk about how the ADL came to be perceived as progressive after that moment, and how [being perceived as progressive] became such a powerful tool that now the ADL coops progressive language and claims to be part of progressive movements, even though its aims really don’t change.
In the 50s, the ADL points a lot towards civil rights movement work. We often see on the ADL’s website that they’ll have a photo of an ADL leader on a civil rights march or with Martin Luther King. The ADL did selectively support civil rights movement work and it did do a lot of important litigation. I don’t want to diminish that work, but I also think it’s important to understand that when things are really terrible, it’s easy to intervene in ways that that make a change, but don’t make too deep a change. That work came to a close — as the Black Power movement shifted the terms of the civil rights movement, the Anti-Defamation League kind of split off from the civil rights movement. We don’t really hear that part of the story.
In the 1980s, and the 90s, though, that is where the Anti-Defamation League really secured its reputation as a progressive organization, because it moved into the area of anti bias education and hate crimes legislation. There’s a lot of critique of hate crimes law now; about the way that hate crimes law, rather than following on from the Civil Rights Movement and securing and securing people’s rights to safety to anti racism that hate crimes law instead. individualizes acts of violence and distracts from structural violence. That it empowers police. That in practice, it turns out to criminalize people of color and queer people, and that hate crimes laws tend to equalize kinds of violence that the anti racist movements would like to treat differently. For example, hate crimes law would treat a white supremacist attack on a black owned store as motivated by the same kind of hate, for example, as if a black teenager attacked, for example, a white gentrifiers store. Because [the ADL] was the architect of hate crimes legislation in the 80s and in the 90s – and because we have a fairly low bar for understanding how anti-racism works in the United States — hate crimes law allowed the Anti-Defamation League to become associated with anti-racism [broadly.] And similarly, because the Anti-Defamation League became the main propagator of anti bias education throughout the country, it has become identified as an expert in that area.
[The ADL] immediately began to use both hate crimes and anti bias education to promote Islamophobia and weaponized antisemitism. It was involved in the repression of Arab American politics. (If you want to read about that, I’ve written about that in an article in the Boston Review, which hopefully also can go into the chat.) Once the Anti-Defamation League is able to promote itself and claim to be an anti racist organization, then it can do other work. If it can claim to be an anti racist organization, a white-led, pro police, anti racist organization, then it can attack anti racist movements that are trying to actually shift power by calling them racist. And that’s where we end up seeing the Anti-Defamation League in conflict with, and attacking, anti racist movements in the way that we that we’ve come to understand them actually as a threat to our movements. So it can get a corporation like GEICO to cancel its Middle East North African heritage event. It can continue to claim that, in supporting the militarization of police, it’s supporting solutions to racism. It can claim that, in demanding US aid to Israel in the name of opposing antisemitism, that it’s that it’s actually supporting justice instead of covering up colonial and racist and Islamophobic violence against Palestinians.
So that’s sort of the cooptation angle on the Anti-Defamation League, and whenever we criticize it, it changes shape to sort of to to absorb that criticism. And when I come back, we’ll talk a little bit about how exactly it has responded to the work of DropTheADL, and how it’s changed shape to do that.
19:24
LESLEY WILLIAMS:
All right, thank you so much, Emmaia. That was terrific. So I’d like to pass it on now to Robin, who is going to talk a little bit more about the specifics of attacks on movements, move liberation movements for people of color. Thank you, Robin.
19:40
ROBIN DG KELLEY:
That was a great, great introduction Emmaia. I really encourage everyone to read, read the articles because they are quite insightful. And clearly, we have a sense of how the ADL has kind of masqueraded as a civil rights and social justice organization on and off. Let me talk a little bit about its relationship to black movements, to Islamophobia and some other things.
The ADL has consistently attacked Black organizations and individuals who dare to criticize Israeli policies or Zionism in general, and especially after 1967. Let me give some context. So there’s a context for the ADL, of course, is a vaunted kind of Black-Jewish Alliance. There are many, many different Black-Jewish alliances, but the one I’m referring to is the one that is most pronounced, that is a liberal alliance. Since 1948, and especially since 1967, it has become a quid pro quo. That is to say, in exchange for Jewish support for a civil rights organization, you must pledge blind loyalty and fealty to Israel.
After 1967 there was a backlash against organizations like SNCC. There was the threat of withdrawn financial support from groups like CORE and NAACP, and certainly the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And there’s some work — I’ve written about Dr. King as well as others, and Michelle Alexander has wonderful piece in The New York Times. King in some ways, felt silenced in many ways by Zionist forces in which compelled him not to speak out Israel’s occupation of Palestine after 67. To go forward, the ADL has — this is all documented — spied on close to 700 social justice organizations including the NAACP, the ACLU, Asian Law Caucus, Centro Legal, Legal de la Raza, the National Indian Treaty Council, Earth Island Institute, at least 58 Arab American organizations, lots of trade union councils across the country, not to mention Central American solidarity groups and the anti apartheid movement. And I’m not talking about the 60s I’m talking about the 90s. In 2002, it settled lawsuit and paid out about $170,000 to three plaintiffs, revealing that it had actually spied on several social justice organizations in the Bay Area during Palestine Solidarity work, but also doing anti apartheid work. And this is very important because the ADL provided intelligence to the apartheid regime in South Africa, including intelligence on the African National Congress, which the ADL labeled a terrorist organization. Remember, Israel was one of South Africa’s closest allies, along with the United States, of course. So the ADL essentially worked for the apartheid government as Israel’s US proxy.
In addition more recently, the ADL advised on enforcement — this is post the Charlottesville white supremacist rallies – [it] advised law enforcement agencies to infiltrate in film anti racist protesters. The ADL has consistently supported judicial decisions not to indict police officers who have killed unarmed black people, most famously Eric Garner, Michael Brown… And then turned around and attack protesters for being being violent.
Now a lot of our conversation, I think is in some ways stimulated by this secret document that was released from June 9, 2020 memo on these law enforcement exchanges. And before I say much more, let me just remind us who authored this document. George Selim is a conservative Republican Arab American who spent many years essentially spying on Muslim communities. He was the first director of the Office for Community Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security. He also led the Countering Violent Extremism Task Force, which I’ll say a little bit more about in a second. He’s spent four years and National Security Council staff as a Director for Community Partnerships. In other words, he was involved in counterinsurgency work directed specifically at the Arab American Muslim populations, communities. Meanwhile, his co author, Greg Airy was an FBI agent. So these are the people that ADL brought on to advance its agenda around this law enforcement partnership. He was an FBI agent for 22 years. He was the Section Chief of Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, Special Agent in Charge of New York office Intelligence Division. He knew of these junkets because he attended several ADL seminars. He worked with organizations involved in law enforcement issues. And he was hired literally a week before George Floyd’s murder.
I say that because when we think about what the document claims these junkets are not really doing, they’re claiming, “oh, well, no, these junkets are trainings on police tactics”, implying that they’re just sort of like Kumbaya, soul-searching or soul-baring gatherings, on how to root out hate make police better. But this is simply not true.
What these trainings have done — and the ADL basically designed, supported and backed it — is focused on counterinsurgency tactics directed at black brown, Arab indigenous communities, gathering intelligence, teaching deployment of so-called “non lethal weapons” against local populations or “less than lethal” weapons, in this case against protesters [and as] crowd control. They promote the militarization of the police, which means not just weapons, but tactics. They have, of course, consistently attacked Black Lives Matter even as its attempt to [claim BLM] as allies in their counterfeit anti racist trainings.
So you remember August 2016, the Movement for Black Lives released a Vision for Black Lives. The policy demands for black power, freedom and justice — and the ADL was among the first to attack the organization in the document, because it called Israel an apartheid state, and characterized the ongoing war in Gaza in the West Bank as genocide.
Last thing I want to get to is just this question of Islamophobia, which is an important current in the ADLs campaigns, and its defense of Israel. As Lesley pointed out, Israel is central in its agenda; the defense of Israel. And this is why they support the Countering Violent Extremism and promote funding and expanding the strategy of surveillance and repression. This directly directed mainly at Arab and Muslim communities. Its history of supporting the “war on terror” is pretty well known. Spying on Arab and Muslim communities, portraying Arab Americans as foreign agents directly attacking the Palestinian movement, is all well known. They had no issues claiming Palestinians should not have a right to return since they pose a demographic threat to Israel. And finally, we shouldn’t be surprised by any of this since they receive money from right wing foundations that promote Islamophobia, settler colonialism, in the name of Israeli security and so forth.
So finally, just in closing, we have to come to grips with the fact that we can’t make a better ADL, the ADL cannot be reformed. It is not a civil rights organization, and hasn’t been one for half a century if not longer. If you want to know about its limits, one of the great essays to read is Donna Nevel’s, a wonderful piece in Common Dreams, “the ADL is not as a friend to social justice movements” which clearly shows the ADL – in its attack on Amnesty International’s careful report on Israel calling it antisemitic – is not really concerned about the civil or human rights of Palestinians. And so we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that this leaked document that’s in circulation now suggests a change of heart or new direction. The memo is quite clear. The ADL is worried about losing money and legitimacy. They believe that these exchanges are good, which they described as having built bonds created trust and help to deepen ADL relationships with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies leaders. And they confess – and this is the take away — that the only reason that these former law enforcement figures both at the federal level who are running this division, and the reason they out this this memo, the reason why the ADL pulled back from these junkets before the memo was released, was because of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Deadly Exchange campaign. That’s the only reason they stopped the program quietly in 2019, not 2020. So the rest of the documents really hilarious you can read about it. I mean, it’s a good laugh, but in the end, organizing matters. JVP has pushed a true civil rights agenda and true agenda for justice and for an end to state violence. And there’s no reason to believe that the ADL is anything but an arm of state violence.
30:38
All right, thank you so much, Robin. That was some fantastic history for all of us. So now I’d like to turn it over to Lara Kiswani of AROC. Lara, go ahead.
30:50
LARA KISWANI, ARAB RESOURCE & ORGANIZING CENTER:
Thank you so much Leslie, and everyone. It’s great to be in this conversation and excited to see what we’re going to build out of it.
When we say that the ADL is not a civil rights organization, I can tell you firsthand how that is the case for the Arab community. AROC has a long history, in our movements here in the San Francisco Bay area, and a long history of resistance to political repression and infiltration. We evolved out of the local chapter of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC.) From the late 80s to 2006 AROC was ADC San Francisco. As Robin mentioned, ADL spied on and infiltrated several social justice organizations, including ADC San Francisco. In 1993, the SF District Attorney investigated the ADL for this, and found that they had been collecting information on nearly 10,000 activists and infiltrated organizations in seven different cities, including San Francisco. The ADL infiltrator was a regular volunteer for ADC San Francisco, and often worked on security for ADC. This was at the same time that Alex Odeh, the West Coast Regional Director of ADC, was murdered by a bomb planted on his on his office door in Southern California.
So again, the ADL targeted organizations both fighting South African apartheid and US racism, and their spying and infiltration was done in an attempt to aid and abet an apartheid state of South Africa and settler colonialism of the State of Israel, with the aim of crushing movements here and in Palestine. And this came at a time when the states were also using similar tactics up to and including mass killings and assassinations. So to put it plainly, ADL was a supporter of apartheid then is a supporter of apartheid now full stop.
So fast forward to 2015 through 2018, ADL worked with the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, and for three years blocked AROC, my organization, from providing the only culturally relevant education and weekly programming for Arab youth in the city of San Francisco, simply because of “AROC’s position on Israel.” The ADL and JCRC then pressured San Francisco Unified School District to halt our successful campaigns implement an Arabic language pathway program as a second language in K through 12 schools, causing a three year delay in its rollout. So what we learn here is that even the notion of working class Arab and Muslim communities gaining power and representation and a public school program teaching the Arabic language is a problem for the ADL. Right? And today we see ADLs undermining of public education extending to the all out assault on ethnic studies program and K through 12 schools.
So after educators won a major victory here in California to usher in a process to develop a state approved curriculum for K through 12 schools to teach ethnic studies — a discipline as we all know that was created to center the voices of indigenous and racialized communities, in examining the history, the legacy and ongoing resistance to us racism, colonial conquest and enslavement, and importantly, to empower teachers and communities in their classrooms and in their public education system — the ADL helped lead a campaign to whitewash and gut the entire curriculum and target and smear its writers. As a result, all the original writers of the curriculum, actual ethnic studies, practitioners and scholars condemned the revisions and demanded their names be removed from the final document, which has found its way on collecting dust on shelves of most teachers who take education seriously.
The ADL campaign, which coalesced with other right wing organizations such as the Hindu American foundation, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Stand With Us advocated removing any mention of Arab American Studies and Palestine altogether, removing mention of capitalism and stripping it of its guiding principles. The changes to the curriculum abandoned ethnic studies, principles and pedagogy in favor of a potpourri of disjointed lesson plans. The critical edge of ethnic studies the analysis and critique of race and power were all sanitized. All mention of Palestine was erased. Amongst their objections was the mere mention of a seated Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, in the list of significant figures for students to learn about. Furthermore, during this time, ADL was involved in organizing decision makers in California, including Governor Newsom, to block the institutionalization of ethnic studies in K through 12 schools by vetoing a bill that would have made it a high school requirement.
Their campaign also advocated for adding a definition, and adopting a definition within ethnic studies, that equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. For two years our multiracial coalition of grassroots movements, with support of California Teachers Association, one of the largest teachers unions in the country, worked to defend California’s 6 million students — close to 80% of them youth of color — to fight for a curriculum reflecting their own experiences and histories. And last March, with the support of ADL, the California Department of Education approved a sanitized, gutted, “all lives matter” a curriculum. So what started out as an attack on Palestine became a full fledged assault on the pedagogy and framework of Ethnic Studies.
As they attempted to crush our movements, right, we fortified alliances and we built out the movement in this new front as we understand it in the struggle for ethnic studies. As part of that we launched the national Liberated Ethnic Studies Coalition to resource, strategize, coordinate, and advance local ethnic studies efforts across the country. In this process, we have heard from hundreds of administrators, educators, community organizations, speaking to what they are facing, school by school, class by class district by district. ADL along with other pro Israel interest Groups were named as the force behind the attacks on their work and attempts to undermine ethnic studies programs as we speak.
So what is ADL’s true commitment and allegiance? It’s to apartheid, it’s to racism. It’s not just about their reactionary and racist ideas about their understanding of public education, or their assumed authority even to dictate what ethnic studies is. It’s a reflection of their pro apartheid mission in ideology. As ethnic studies leader and writer of the original curriculum Theresa Montaño said, “what is so sad is that in a state where 76% of the students are of color, predominantly white right wing interest groups can still determine that California students can’t learn their history”, right? And this is all happening at the same time that the Trump is right is attacking so called critical race theory. And sure they’re using it to rile up their base. They have a commitment to white supremacist ideology that includes historical revisionism. But this is also a political program about dismantling public education all together, and crushing our social movements and unions in defense of that.
So when we think of the attacks on ethnic studies, we need to think about them in related terms. ADL is interested in attacking ethnic studies is an ideological interest. They are very committed and seeking to ban any mention of Palestine. They want to ban teaching and discovery of the history of Arab people in the region. They also have a political interest and apartheid, they have a political interest in banning and criminalizing our movements against apartheid and settler colonialism. So this finds them and natural alignment with other right wing and white supremacist forces behind the attack on anti racist curriculum across the country. And the attack on ethnic studies is in fact an attack on the ability of teachers to do their job; of community members to be involved; and whatever democratic process we have left over our public institutions. It’s an attack on the future of education and an attack on multiracial movements for justice, including an attack on self determination.
So ADL’s record speaks for itself and we’ve spoken about it today and we will continue to speak about it, from their long history of disrupting social justice organization, their ongoing alignment with the far right and attacking ethnic studies to the recent attempts to suppress a moderate Amnesty International report on Israel human rights violations. ADL is not a civil rights organization. It is a pro Israel apartheid interest group. It is aimed at undermining efforts in solidarity with Palestine in the United States, and therefore by extension, undermining broader racial and social justice movements. And it is incumbent on all of us today to strengthen our movements by ensuring we not only defend against the assault led by ADL, but also raise awareness about their political agenda. And in order for our people, our communities, our movements to be protected, we have to drop the ADL all together. Thank you.
39:58
LESLEY WILLAMS:
Thank you, Lara. That was wonderful. Thank you so much. I’m going to wrap up by talking a little bit more specifically about the ADLs role in policing, which Robin and Emmaia and Lara have all alluded to so as we see, the ADL has had a very long history of supporting law enforcement and militarism, over freedom movements and dissenters. For the past 20 years, the Anti-Defamation League has been the largest non governmental provider in the United States for law enforcement training on hate crimes, extremism and terrorism. So let me just say that again: the ADL, which we have just heard about, we’ve heard about it’s problematic history is the largest non governmental provider for law enforcement training on these on these issues. If you look at their website, they talk about how these pioneered flagship law enforcement training programs including the Advanced Training School a three day course on domestic and international extremism and terrorism, their National Counter Terrorism seminars, intensive counterterrorism training programs in Israel for key American law enforcement leaders — but as we’ve seen, their definitions of extremism and terrorism are highly biased, particularly against movements of color. As Robin was saying, and also Lara was saying, when they are talking about the dangers of extremism, they’re almost always talking about the dangers of extremism from Black and brown people.
ADL investigates the “increasingly dangerous domestic terror threat posed by Muslim extremists, publishing reports on the role that a growing number of American citizens, motivated by radical interpretations of Islam. have played in criminal plots to attack Americans and abroad”, and they also talk about how they “share actionable intelligence with law enforcement.” In other words, the ADL is leading the effort to spy on Muslim communities and report that to law enforcement agencies.
So some of the examples of the effects of this involvement with surveillance and militarization of communities of color:
In 2016 after training with Israel, the Baltimore Police Department was found guilty by the Department of Justice for widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement, and a culture of retaliation. And Amnesty International stated have these trainings with Israel put Baltimore police and other law and other US law enforcement employees in the hands of military security and police systems that have racked up documented human rights violations for years. In a police training exchange in Israel, the Boston Police Commissioner visited Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where he learned about Israel’s passenger screening process which includes racial and ethnic profiling of passengers. Shortly after Boston’s Logan Airport became the first American airport to pioneer the Israeli inspired screening passengers by observation technique. Years later, this technique not only came under fire for being ineffective and wasteful, but for facilitating discriminatory racial profiling and airports around the country.
Robin’s already alluded to the ADLs hiring of George Selim, who ran the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism program. CVE essentially encourages Muslims to spy on their own communities for the government; to seek out people who seem to be likely to be radicalized, using extremely prejudicial stereotypical descriptions of who might be a dangerous radicalized person. So if you know a young person who’s suddenly become more interested in reading the Koran, if you know a young person who’s suddenly been growing their beard, this “might be a sign that they could be a radicalized terrorist and perhaps you should report them.” This is the kind of surveillance and you’re encouraging distrust within Muslim communities that the Anti-Defamation League has supported. And that George Selim, who is now a program director for the ADL was really in charge of developing. It just strikes me is really galling that this is an organization that on the one hand, claims that it fights against anti Muslim bigotry, but also sponsors programs like CVE. Robin also mentioned Greg Airy, Greg Airy used to be one of the supervisors of the Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp, but he was hired to enhance the ADLs relationship with law enforcement. So someone who was in charge of essentially torturing prisoners in Guantanamo is in charge of the relationship with law enforcement agencies.
Not only is the ADL working with police and encouraging these repressive, abusive policies, they also given awards to police for oppressive and abusive policies. So for example, shortly after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, the ADL director in St. Louis gave the St. Louis Police Department an award for “their innovative understanding of law enforcement’s role as the protector of the people of St. Louis.” She actually said that the people impacted by the police, that is African American people. really needed to engage more with the police — and that after all, it was the police “who were in danger” and “were the ones getting shot in the streets.” And the ADL has also honored Ray Kelly, the new the New York City Police Department Commissioner, who introduced stop and frisk policing, and also the Los Angeles Police Department commissioner who modeled some of his racial profiling policies on what he had seen at Israeli airports. The ADL has also honored the former Director of Central Intelligence and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the former US homeland security director Michael Chertoff, former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh. So it’s very clear that the ADL is extremely enthusiastic and supportive of policing, and surveillance of communities of color.
They’ve often promoted actually bringing more militarization into local communities. So for example, during the first Intifada, the Anti-Defamation League William and Naomi Gorewitz Institute on Terrorism and Extremism created a video to train police officers about how to respond to as hate crimes, suggesting that one example of hate violence was when police officers were attacked by Black teenagers throwing rocks at them. So this was an example of hate crimes that the police needed to learn how to respond to. The ADL also wrote a brochure called Protecting your Jewish Institutions: Security Strategies for a Dangerous World, in which they encouraged synagogues to bring SWAT teams into their communities. They said that “if you’re local if your local police department has a SWAT unit, consider having a SWAT officer map your institution and your neighborhoods, determine what information would be helpful in the unlikely event that a SWAT team is deployed. If appropriate, consider volunteering your site to serve as a location for SWAT or bomb squad training.” So actually encouraging people to bring SWAT teams into communities.
In response to this activity, Jewish Voice for Peace with the support of many many other organizations such as Amnesty International, the American Friends Service Committee, the Chicago religious leadership, the National Lawyers Guild, started a campaign called Ending the Deadly Exchange. The campaign works with local groups working for racial justice in the demilitarization and defunding of the police. I’m basing much of this data on research from the organization Researching the American Israeli Alliance. The coalitions have been organizing since 2017, to pressure city and campus legislators to prohibit us law enforcement exchanges with Israel. So for example, in 2018, Durham, North Carolina became the first city in the United States to prohibit such police exchanges. And later that year, local coalitions in Northampton, Massachusetts and in Vermont also have organized to stop the police chief and the state police commissioners from participating in planned ADL police exchanges. In 2020, a student referendum demanded that Tufts University bann campus security from participating in police exchanges. And the coalitions are also making exciting inroads on this in New York City, New Orleans and Seattle.
Now, Robin mentioned a little while ago that recently there was a memo that was leaked from George Saleem and Greg Aires to Jonathan Greenblatt talking about the fact that the media was beginning to have a perception problem because of their clear support of the police over Black and brown and marginalized people. As Robin said, during the massive black-led uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, the memo finally admitted these contradictions between the long support of law enforcement and it’s a legit claim to work for civil rights. And the ADL admitted what they what we’ve known all along: that their trips are helping to militarize the police. But of course, they are not really concerned about stopping the trips or stopping what they’re doing. They’re concerned about the perception. They’re concerned that they’re going to be seen as in league with the police. And so they were discussing in the memo, should they discontinue these trips, or should they simply scale back the trips? What they said in the memo was that they were recommending discontinuing the trips. It does not seem like they have actually decided to discontinue the trips. And more recently, the ADL has announced that they are still firmly committed to the police, that the ADL is proud of its decades of work with law enforcement, and are likely to expand their educational law enforcement programs.
So it seems pretty clear that the ADL has made a choice and that choice is to stand with law enforcement, with militarization, and supporting Israel against black Latin, Arab, Muslim and LGBT communities. In fact, in 2020, around the same time that this memo was released, the ADL hired a private investigator, a private investigating firm to track and survey Occupation Free DC and Jewish Voice for Peace’s Washington DC chapter, because those two groups were working to end the DC police’s participation with the ADL in its US and Israel police training exchanges. So as recently as 2020, they were still organizing surveillance against our movements.
So, close out because we’ve only got a few minutes left (first of all, let me point out that this presentation is being recorded and we will be posting it on the Drop The ADL website)
We want you to understand how all of these issues we we’ve talked about work together. And here’s a really good example. In 2018 in New Orleans, there was a coalition of over 20 organizations immigrants, Black Lives Matter supporters, LGBTQ supporters, Jews, Muslims, who were organized to pass a resolution — a human rights screening — that would end any city contracts with any organizations that violate human civil or labor rights. It had passed, it was about to go into effect. But the Anti-Defamation League along with some other Zionist groups very quickly organized to have the resolution overturned. And so unfortunately, they were successful. They mobilize their bases, and they called on the city council of New Orleans to reverse its decision. So this really for me underlines the real danger, the ADLs mindset that any anti racist libationary organizing will always, always be sacrificed to their true mission, which is supporting militarism and Zionism and a right wing agenda. And that is why we feel it is so important. For all of you to know what the ADL actually is.
Obviously this is far too short of time to go into everything and all the questions that you might have. So we’re glad to see that people are posting questions in the chat. We also want to make sure that you know about our primer on Dropping the ADL. So if you go to the website, drop the adl.org, which I believe has been dropped into the chat a couple of times, you can see many, many specific examples of all the things that we’ve been talking about during the webinar. This is something that we’re really offering to all of you who are concerned about this concern about these attacks on progressive and progressive organizations and marginalized people. You can use it if someone wants to bring the ADL into your school into your place of worship into your workplace. This is a tool you can use to point out why the ADL is not at all the sort of partner you should be using if you truly care about anti racism, if you truly care about the interest of people of color, of LGBTQ people of immigrants. There will be opposite there are other opportunities for getting involved in our work with Drop the ADL those are also available on the landing page. And we also are giving people an opportunity to promote any other ongoing or upcoming campaigns related to the ADL and dropping the ADL.
But there is one action that you can take right now, which is to take the pledge so we do have on the drop the ADL site, there is a place where you can actually fill out a pledge that says that you individually agree that you will not work with the ADL. And there’s also places on that website for organizations, schools, houses of worship workplaces, to take the pledge to not work with the ADL. But we also feel that it’s really important for individuals and for all of you. There’s 142 people on this call to take that pledge as well. So I think that is really the main thing that we wanted you to know about.
I’d like to take a second now to thank our three fantastic panelists, Emmaia Gelman, for her incredible work. I mean, she’s been working on this for years and years researching, exposing everything that the ADL does. To Robin Kelley for his amazing work on the intersection between opposing and crushing the work of people of color and the ADL, and Lara Kiswani for all of her wonderful work at AROC, also standing up to the ADL, and just the incredible courage that all three of our panelists have demonstrated as they’ve continued to do this work.
We’d also like to give a shout out to many people behind the scenes through JVP and through the Drop the ADL Coalition who have been scrambling around to place links in the chat for you who’ve been managing the conversation and who’ve been doing everything behind the scenes to make this flow as smoothly as it did. So a final shout out thank you so much for attending. Please share the information when the recording is is uploaded, please share it and join us and making sure that we are all working together to defend and protect all of our all of our communities. And that we are truly working for liberation for all thank you so much for joining us.
#DropTheADL 