Middle East In Focus

Follows the audio · click any line to jump

1. Report and click Sustainer's Circle or call 818-985-2711.
2. Thank you so much for your donation to KPFK, radio powered by the people.
3. KPFK 90.7 FM, Los Angeles.
4. Welcome to Middle East in Focus. I'm Estee Chandler.
5. The Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, is a major U.S. political organization.
6. Yet for decades, its politics have gone largely unexamined.
7. While the ADL is widely portrayed as a defender against anti-Semitism and racism,
8. its history shows that it's better understood as a proponent of the racial state and U.S. empire.
9. From stripping Eastern European Jewish immigrants of their distinct cultural and perceived racial markers so they could assimilate into the American white mainstream, to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Asian groups, the ADL has long pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism.
10. And even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.
11. That history foreshadowed the ADL's work from the 1980s to the present in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the war on terror, the anti-Semitism scare, and anti-Palestinian racism.
12. In her new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, Amaya Gelman presents the ADL's history through its conflicts with the social justice movements, illuminating the organization's outsized role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten U.S. empire.
13. With us today to discuss the first ever history of the Anti-Defamation League and its determined
14. century-long alliance with Western Empire is Amaya Gelman. Amaya Gelman is the founding director
15. of the Institute for Critical Study of Zionism. She has taught social and cultural analysis at
16. New York University, and Social Sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing appears in Jewish
17. Currents, Boston Review, and The Forward, among other publications. It is my pleasure to welcome
18. Amaya Galman back to Middle East in Focus. Thanks so much, Estee. It's great to be here.
19. Amaya, I want to congratulate you on your new book. I'm sure that I'm not the only person who
20. has been eagerly awaiting a biography of the ADL, especially following their blatant and
21. intentional muddying over these past several years of the public's understanding of what
22. is actually anti-Semitic and what is not. When I heard you were soon to release a book on this
23. topic, it honestly felt like those summer days to me as a young person perusing the aisles of my
24. beloved childhood bookstore, Dutton's, for hours and then suddenly seeing a book that
25. I didn't know existed but was exactly what I wanted.
26. I also love that you open the book in the introduction with the 1993 news reports about the police raid on the ADL offices here in Los Angeles and in San Francisco after the FBI found the ADL had been spying on civil rights groups and anti organizations including the Arab American Anti Committee
27. I wonder if you can start by talking about the multiple hats the ADL has chosen to wear, each independently appropriate, but together they grossly violate the bounds of ethics due to conflicts of interest.
28. Well, we often think of like a community-based organization or a non-governmental organization as coming into an issue from a position of representing people, like that it's something that people have put together and it's speaking on behalf of people's interests.
29. And that is how the ADL has been perceived and why it's so often invited into spaces where community voices are being heard. Like, even when it speaks to the press about what it claims are Jewish issues, like the press is receiving the ADL as if it's a community organization, and it's not. And that's part of the game.
30. It does absolutely wear so many hats. It was founded as intended to be sort of a spokesperson for what it called Jewish interests. But what it really was a spokesperson for was upper class and white identified and capitalist identified Jewish interests.
31. And it was speaking against the masses of Jews who had immigrated to the United States who were poor and working class, who were leftists and social justice agitators. So it was already a sort of spokesperson for a particular kind of Jewishness and a particular vision of Jewishness that was white and capitalist.
32. But it also then became an education organization. It became an anti-communist education organization, quite specifically, teaching about sort of how it laid out good citizenship, like don't discriminate, don't be a Nazi, also don't be a communist, in a way that was very overtly repressive of the left and overtly denounced leftists of all flavors, Jewish, Black, other, and really didn't like cross-racial organizing as it took place on the left.
33. And then it became a media organization producing television segments and distributing them for free to news channels, which, of course, is an impossible invitation to refuse.
34. It became an Israel advocate, became Zionist in about the mid-50s.
35. And, of course, that's always been a massive fundraiser and a legislative advocate, right?
36. It's hard to know where the list ends.
37. It's true. You need an entire hat rack.
38. Do you think that those immigrant Jews in the early days understood that the ADL was actually working against them?
39. Oh, yeah, sure they did. Some of the saltiest journalism on the ADL comes from Jewish currents, or it was called Jewish Life at the time. In the 50s, actually, the editors of Jewish Life really like raked the ADL over the coals, talked about its conservatism, its elitism, its partnerships with like the repressive apparatus of state. Absolutely.
40. Absolutely. And even before that, in the time that we think of as kind of like the
41. ferment of like Jewish social justice organizing and labor organizing following that period
42. of immigration, so let's say the teens, the 19-teens to the 1930s, there was a very clear
43. division not only between the ADL and Jewish leftist groups but the whole Jewish what they would call the Jewish establishment right So that was American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Federations and the ADL They were sort of the upper class It was a class division right
44. It was what we would very clearly recognize as a class division. They were on the sides of the
45. business owners and the sort of barons of greed and the overseers. And other Jewish organizations
46. were in the trenches of labor organizing and opposing the specific efforts of upper-class
47. Jews to control lower-class Jews. It was just, it was sort of common conversation. And the ADL,
48. you know, its focus was on Jews until about the 50s. It was primarily like an effort to discipline
49. Jews until the Cold War, and then it turned its attention to a whole range of other people,
50. Black people, leftists, people working against colonialism in other contexts.
51. Right. So obviously their conservative viewpoints, as you say, naturally led them towards a more grassroots, I'm sorry, grass tops strategy with their leaders developing relationships and keeping proximity with people of power, with wealth, with political power in legal circles.
52. and, as you say, in news and entertainment media.
53. Can you discuss broadly the role the ADL played in that post-World War II establishment?
54. Following World War II, the ADL turns its attention to education.
55. And the reason for that was that if you can just sort of envision the post-war period,
56. there's been this enormously traumatic and cataclysmic event in the United States,
57. but also people are looking at the world and thinking like, how did this happen?
58. How did Nazism happen? They're looking at the impacts of colonization in Africa and Asia with
59. a new eye, like understanding it as destructive and seeing that race and racism is part of it.
60. And so in order to kind of envision a new world and hopefully prevent war from happening, which they failed miserably, the idea was that people have to abandon racism. People have to begin to treat each other with love and respect.
61. And it was kind of an undeveloped idea, I guess, at that time in sort of citizen making, right? So we understand racism now as being the product of states and capital and systems. But the sort of prevalent approach at the time was like people should stop judging each other on the basis of the color of their skin. This is where we get the color of our skin, right? As if that's the sort of entire content of race and racism.
62. It's not that people didn't understand colonialism.
63. There were many people on the left.
64. The Black Sociology Movement had been talking about how race was so central to colonialism for a long time, but it wasn't part of popular culture.
65. And the Anti-Defamation League became a sort of citizen educator teaching people like, here's three children.
66. They're all American.
67. They should all be treated the same.
68. a very colorblind sort of liberal and limited version of what we might now just call anti-bias
69. and they packaged this for schools as well there was a lot of effort to treat racism as kind of a
70. psychology a psychological problem that could be fixed by just sort of like telling a different
71. story to students and so there was lots of like you know here's your puerto rican neighbor
72. It always centered white children and whiteness as the norm and it always presented the idea that other people could be integrated because they would essentially become normative They would become white essentially and that the color of their skin didn prevent them from doing that which these are ideas we now understand to be extremely racist
73. Right. Just want to clarify. But packaged along with that was an anti-communist line that said,
74. And if a communist tries to tell you that capitalism produces inequality and that the way that we can actually achieve racial equality and self-determination is by sharing, they're trying to trick you. They're trying to trick you into supporting the Soviet Union and becoming a totalitarian.
75. So these two things were very, very closely entwined. And anytime there was any effort by anti-racist movements or, you know, community groups to say, like, actually, we want to do things differently, the ADL would then come in and accuse them of being communists and extremists. And that sounds like 50s stuff. It was 50s stuff. ADL has continued to do that to the present. And actually, in the 80s, it became really, really explicit in a way that might surprise people to see.
76. Yeah, and they say that history rhymes, and it feels like all that is certainly rhyming today. So more weight towards the prescience of your book. In chapter three, you trace the ADL's, quote, negotiation of crises in its relationship to the civic religion of civil rights, end quote.
77. And this is as the organization's advocacy for Israel is becoming an increasing area of their focus. And they are doing that advocacy, making arguments, using the civil rights movement as their analogy and rationale for Zionism. Can you talk about how they made that argument at that time?
78. Sure. And it's not just the ADL and not just Zionists who have used the civil rights movement as their kind of lodestar for explaining why something should make sense or should be granted or should be fixed.
79. The civil rights movement became, as the historian Taylor Branch described it, I think, a new civic religion and Martin Luther King, a new founding father. And it's not because the United States government suddenly realized that it was white supremacists. That's still pending.
80. It was because the idea of racial progress and the idea that the United States was intrinsically egalitarian became a sort of rationale of the state. Like, why should the United States be the world leader in the Cold War? Why should countries side with the United States and not align with the Soviet Union?
81. Why is it right for the United States to intervene in Vietnam, right?
82. It's because the United States is a moral exemplar of democracy and civil rights is at the heart of it.
83. And it had actually started at the beginning of the Cold War when the U.S. was trying to make its case for why nations should align with it and not with the Soviet Union.
84. And people abroad would point to the United States and be like, actually, it's quite racist.
85. Like, actually, you're not a moral leader.
86. And so adopting civil rights and the idea of egalitarianism became a Cold War strategy. And this is, you know, I didn't interpret this. This is writing from historians like Gerald Horn and Mary Dujak. And it's an undercounted part of our thinking about how the civil rights movement works.
87. So from that point on, whenever there has been a kind of push for rights or a call to recognize where rights haven't been fulfilled, the civil rights movement and frankly, Blackness becomes a kind of reference.
88. point for that, that people point to and say like, you know, oh, well, women should have rights like
89. Black people. Gay people should have rights like Black people. And of course, anytime an idea is
90. powerful, power tries to co-opt it. So Zionism also used the same kind of set of analogies and
91. references. This is a liberation movement. Jews are like Black people. Jews have been marginalized
92. in the way that Black people have been. And this is the way that we're going to pursue Jewish civil
93. rights. It was a pretty clunky and simplistic analogy. And it was broken in the late 60s,
94. when Black liberation organizations, including SNCC, just said, like, wait a minute, we see that
95. there's something else going on here. And actually, this is a colonization project. And actually,
96. its targets are Palestinians. Right. You write about those seeming contradictions and shifts
97. that the ADL made at that time, for instance, in that civil rights era of the last century,
98. because I believe we're in a new civil rights era now, advocating for housing subsidies to overcome
99. inequities of residential segregation, while at the same time smearing Black and brown communities
100. in Brooklyn as unreasonable and racist for seeking to educate their children outside of the mainstream
101. white-dominated framework of public education. Can you talk more about the suppression of Black
102. power that Jesse Jackson was referring to back in 1979 when he famously remarked on the limits
103. of solidarity saying, quote, when there wasn't much decency in society, many Jews were willing
104. to share decency. The conflict began when we started our quest for power, end quote.
105. The ADL's reputation as a civil rights organization is founded on these moments of
106. participation that it did have. So when it pursued legislation and, you know, court cases to try and
107. do away with housing and employment discrimination. And, you know, it did sort of enter into civil
108. rights in various ways and places. It always stopped short of challenging capitalism and the
109. state, and it really refused measures that tried to redistribute resources that had been sort of
110. hoarded through white privilege. So, for example, it opposed affirmative action, really breaking
111. with like the entire rest of the civil rights establishment, also the American Jewish Committee
112. opposed affirmative action. Then they called it reverse discrimination. And the argument was kind
113. of like, well, we already experienced discrimination and now we're white. And now you're going to tell
114. us that because we're white, we can't have this thing. So it was sort of both a charge of reverse
115. discrimination against whiteness and also kind of playing the, you know, the previous victim, I guess.
116. The ADL's work in the late 1960s kind of shifted.
117. It began to see the rise of Black power and identify it as extremist.
118. Again, extremism in the ADL's view is anything that challenges capitalism, anything that embraces Marxism or aspects of Marxism.
119. Marxism. And the Black Power movement began to develop ideas about the importance of creating
120. alternative institutions because the white supremacist institutions of the United States
121. could never provide they couldn provide equality but they also couldn provide self because they would always require Blackness to be sort of measured against white norms So in the late 60s one
122. such project that happened was in Ocean Hall, Brownsville, neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
123. The schools were in terrible segregated and kind of abandoned condition. Black and Puerto
124. Rican students were really not getting an education. Teachers had decided that they
125. couldn't be taught. The schools were under-resourced. They were going to school in split
126. shifts. I'm just going to interject here on myself and say we don't know enough about this,
127. and I really encourage people to listen to the podcast called School Colors that came out a
128. couple years ago from the Brooklyn Movement Center, which has interviews with people who are
129. students and some teachers, I think, at the time. It's a really beautiful podcast. This is an
130. incredibly important moment in U.S. history because this is the moment where the idea that
131. white ethnics, as we call them, are really still oppressed groups and are oppressed by Black
132. liberation really starts to crystallize. So that's my side note. Go ahead and listen to the School
133. Callers podcast about the Ocean Hill Brownsville school experiment. Also sounds prescient right now.
134. Exactly. There's so much that continues to sort of surface. We're still in the Cold War,
135. You know, like we heard we just heard Marco Rubio talk at the Munich Security Conference about defending Western civilization. These things have not gone away. In the late 60s, the ADL entered into this sort of New York City conflict.
136. What happened was that the schools were, a set of those schools that were in such bad shape were turned over through protest. Parents won this concession, were turned over to Black and Puerto Rican parents for their management to try and turn them around.
137. And in the course of that, something like 19 teachers were identified as like really not going along with this. And they were transferred out, not fired, but transferred out. And most of those teachers were Jewish because many, if not most, white teachers were Jewish at the time, right? That's another sort of pathway that immigrant history has taken various communities.
138. and the united federation of teachers which was the union did not want to allow that to happen
139. because they felt it was an interference in their authority and so the leader of the uft
140. whose name was al shanker who was another like very dyed in the wool um i would say
141. neoconservative he's sort of celebrated as a liberal but in fact quite neoconservative and also
142. sort of budding Zionist at the time, decided to make it into an anti-Semitism issue,
143. an anti-Semitism scare. The story goes that the UFT made a copy of a leaflet. Now, did that
144. leaflet, was that anti-Semitic leaflet from the community or not? Nobody knows, but they made
145. 60,000 copies of it, which is certainly a way to amplify something, and distributed and declared
146. the entire experiment essentially anti-Semitic and, you know, radical and steeped in this sort of
147. anti-American-ness of what they were trying to portray Black power as sort of extremist and
148. anti-American. And the ADL initially didn't join in and then really like sort of noticed that
149. this was a huge opportunity and in 1969 declared a crisis of Black anti-Semitism,
150. issued what you might recognize from today like a sort of preliminary report identifying this problem never produced another report The preliminary report was not really available No one has seen it or a few people have seen it And declared that there a new kind of anti that drew on old conceptions of Jewishness as kind of insurgent and conspiratorial but was now a leftist antagonism toward Jews that sort of saw Jews as part of the power structure which was true right
151. and in opposing the power structure was opposing Jewish interests.
152. Now, there were many, many Jews at the time who said this is bananas,
153. including like leaders of the reform movement,
154. the director of the ACLU who's Jewish and whose kids went to the school.
155. I mean, the construction of an anti-Semitism scare
156. always has to erase the Jews who say this is not actually a thing.
157. And they did that at the time.
158. And that became the basis for a much larger project that the ADL continued through the 70s of declaring the entire left to be anti-Semitic because it was challenging state authority.
159. Rhyming once again.
160. the ADL's more nefarious and even illegal activities to understand the job of discrediting
161. them as a liberal anti-hate organization defending against anti-Semitism in a similar way that
162. AIPAC is now being widely considered based on their deeds.
163. I'm struggling with how to even begin to enter this question because it's so big
164. it is really big but I also feel like that's why I was so excited about your book
165. because I feel like these are these two organizations one of them in the shadows
166. which is now being brought out of the shadows but the ADL that's been so misunderstood by much of
167. society. And you have so meticulously drawn out these different stories and threads and things
168. that they've done in the past that make it all make sense to us. And it's clear that there's a
169. big problem that they're seen in a way as this liberal entity speaking for all Jews. And you're
170. actually giving us the history of how they'd never been that.
171. the ADL's multiple strands of work I think are part of the problem so it you know works on one
172. hand in areas like rights and on the other hand it's working with you know other governments or
173. with the U.S. government on various projects and we just it's hard to get a picture of the whole
174. thing at once so the spying scandal was kind of a rupture in the in the PR and the sort of
175. suppression of the story of one side of what the ADL was doing. The brief story is that in 1993,
176. the FBI raided the ADL's offices and they were looking for FBI files that they thought were in
177. there And the reason they thought were in there was because the ADL had published FBI information unauthorized in some of its materials its sort of reports on the Nation of Islam What they found was a much much more extensive set of documents that indicated that the ADL had
178. been spying on and infiltrating organizations and also that it had acquired police files from the
179. counterculture sort of anti-political surveillance unit in the San Francisco Police Department
180. that were also supposed to have been destroyed because that unit was declared unconstitutional.
181. There are a couple of pieces in this. One is that the ADL was spying on organizations,
182. and for 30 years, right? The files show that they had been doing this for 30 years,
183. at least, which tracks to the beginning of when the ADL became concerned about counterculture
184. and the idea that the left was on the rise.
185. The groups that were in the ADL's files were,
186. there were white supremacist groups,
187. which is what people usually think
188. that the ADL is paying attention to.
189. There was a whole section
190. on South African anti-apartheid support groups.
191. And there were, and other groups like,
192. you know, Irish Republican groups
193. and lots of organizations that were,
194. supporting leftist movements and leftist governments in Central and South America,
195. in the Philippines, and then also lots of organizations in the United States, which
196. the ADL had identified as PINCO. It was just their spied shorthand. And then lots of organizations
197. that you wouldn't think the ADL would be spying on, like the ACLU was in there.
198. The breadth of the surveillance really shows how much the ADL conceived of the left as a threat. It really had a strong map of how the left was sort of organizing to build power and to support efforts abroad to challenge U.S. domination in other places.
199. But it also had an interesting twist, which is the organizations that were in the ADL's files mapped very closely onto the places and the issues that were of concern to the CIA at the time.
200. And not only the CIA, but also the AFL-CIO, the labor sort of centralized labor organizations had at the time a very conservative anti-communist director who was who had created a bunch of institutes within the AFL-CIO to do sort of soft power, like imperialist organizing in those places.
201. So there was a free trade union institute, which provided supposedly sort of technical support to more conservative and capitalist unions that could counteract the effects of leftist unions in various places.
202. There were a couple of institutes that worked in different parts of the world.
203. And their projects were targeting the same things that the ADL's spying files were targeting.
204. And it turns out that the ADL's director of spying, fact-finding as it's called, was a longtime comrade of and like a lifelong comrade of the leaders of other organizations that were doing that work with the AFL-CIO and were working in other areas of government.
205. Now, I'm not going to spin a conspiracy theory at all.
206. I think that comrades who work together in one area of politics often.
207. go off into other organizations and continue to work together. What it tells us, though,
208. is that the ADL's work is part of the neoconservative ecosystem. And it's not,
209. it's not just, it doesn't just happen to agree, right? It's actually integrated through personnel,
210. through projects, with the infrastructure of repression that sees the left and Marxism
211. and popular movements as a danger to the state.
212. Now, that's a long explanation,
213. but it's a super weird and interesting turn of events
214. because you don't think of the ADL
215. as part of a larger political structure, right?
216. We think of it as a Jewish organization.
217. But actually, this was a group of people
218. who came out of, they had been in the Socialist Party.
219. As often happens, there was a split
220. where a group of much more right-wing leaders actually split off.
221. And then the ADL became part of an ecosystem of organizations that came out of that split.
222. Right. As they are seen as an organization combating anti-Semitism,
223. they later become the Zionist Organization in Defense of Israel.
224. They're also seen as a broad-based human rights organization
225. and an organization with information sharing arrangements with law enforcement that now
226. comes down on them because they know them and they know, as you say, when they see something
227. that they're putting out that they're not supposed to have or share.
228. Coming to you from the studios of KPFK in Los Angeles, this is Middle East in Focus.
229. I'm Esty Chandler. So happy to be joined today by Amaya Gelman, director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and author of the first ever history of the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State.
230. Amaya, importantly, you write about the ADL playing a major role in the U.S. defining of popular understandings of hate, which have been adopted throughout the West, but which focus on, as you were saying, policing hate rather than addressing the root causes of racist, gendered, and often anti-queer violence disseminated from within the U.S.
231. public institutions, including education, law enforcement, and others, which have had extremely
232. negative impacts on civil rights and human rights. Can you talk about that negative role that the
233. ADL has played in the fight against structural racism and bigotry for decades, including
234. how they have steered public discourse away from conversations about anti-Arab racism during
235. debates about hate crime legislation and how they built their national anti-bias education empire.
236. Well, we talked at the beginning about how the ADL is sort of known for
237. changing what the definition of antisemitism is, right? Kind of curating a definition of
238. antisemitism that serves its own purposes. Before it did that, it curated a definition of race and
239. racism that served its own purposes. And I want to emphasize again, like, it's not alone in doing
240. this It not like the ADL is sort of uniquely you know conspiratorial and evil but it but it is unique in its role And also it unique in that we don recognize it as that kind of organization So and it very
241. powerful now, right? So, it matters a lot to unpack this. So, we were talking also about the
242. civil rights movement and how the ADL's participation in the civil rights movement was always limited
243. to what it called actually responsible civil rights organizing, by which it means
244. organizations and civil rights demands that don't challenge capitalism, don't challenge the state,
245. always sort of see the state as like the, if only we could just make the state be more like the
246. state, then it will be better. And so when it entered into the sphere of hate crimes policy,
247. and I'll tell the story of how that happened, the kinds of conversations about what the problem was
248. that was being addressed, like we have racial violence, we have racism, like what is that
249. problem? The ADL had already begun to sort of define that problem in a way that meant that
250. the solutions would not actually, you know, undo racism. So if you think, if your conception of
251. racism is that it's a psychological phenomenon in which, you know, one person looks at another
252. person and says, I don't like you, then your solution is going to be like, well, talk to that
253. person and, you know, try and get them to not do that. But in fact, racism is a system, right? So
254. having the individual conversation doesn't actually shift racism. It just, in fact, sucks up the
255. resources that we have for talking about racism and makes us not use them for larger solutions.
256. In the late 60s, early 70s, no, sorry, rather in the late 70s, early 80s, there was an escalating crisis of racist violence and also anti-queer violence, anti-immigrant violence in the United States.
257. and we know that that violence is always constant so what makes that what makes it an escalation in
258. this time was there was a like a real spike in the way that white nationalists primarily were
259. enacting this violence there were sniper shootings um against like targeting black people on a on a
260. market street there were arsons there were um you know efforts to burn people out of their homes
261. There are lots of sort of, I would call them spectacular incidents to try and get people to be afraid.
262. And it was also the Reagan era.
263. 1980 was the Reagan era.
264. And the Department of Justice refused to take any action declaring that unless somebody was, you know, harmed on their way to enact a civil right like voting, that this violence did not fall under their jurisdiction.
265. It wasn't a federal violation of anything. And local police departments also were often racist and disinterested. So the question is, like, how do you intervene in this, right? Here's this crisis of violence that's hitting us everywhere, and we urgently need to stop it.
266. So there was a call actually from Black communities to do something, to create some additional law to intervene and to make it like more of a, like to require action, essentially. And queer organizations also were seeing anti-queer violence and wanted the same thing.
267. So these became the basis for hate crimes laws that were at the state level that called for some kind of enforcement when there was a racially motivated or hate motivated crime The ADL had been separately trying to get small incidents small like what they called
268. religious vandalism, to be elevated to a higher level of crime.
269. So that might be something like writing a swastika on the wall of a synagogue or something.
270. And they were not successful.
271. They weren't successful partly because I think, you know, many of the things that they were talking about were already crimes.
272. And also because it really wasn't a crisis.
273. And that was actually their effort.
274. Their intention was to heighten concern about those kinds of things.
275. But when the push came for hate crimes laws to address anti-Black violence, for example, and anti-immigrant violence, the ADL was positioned to merge those two things to say like, oh, well, we'll have anti-hate legislation.
276. and it will address this wave of anti-Black violence and anti-immigrant violence.
277. And also it will address what we're saying is anti-Jewish violence,
278. which is actually not escalated, but we want it to be the subject of attention.
279. The ADL had the relationships with, you know, with legislators.
280. It was a white organization, so it had that level of sort of credibility going for it.
281. And it had the experience of writing bills and passing legislation.
282. So in its 1981 audit on anti-Semitic incidents, it included a piece of model legislation, model state legislation. It helped pass legislation in the first couple of states, so Washington and Oregon, and then it helped propagate that state legislation across the United States, hate crimes legislation, responding to the urgency and the demand of Black and immigrant communities.
283. and also sort of doing this more conservative work.
284. Queer organizations petitioned the ADL to include
285. and account for anti-gay violence for a long time unsuccessfully.
286. Why? Because the ADL is a conservative organization.
287. And what it said was, you know, anti-gay violence is not,
288. opposing anti-gay violence is not an American value,
289. and therefore we're not going to include it in this.
290. And that didn't shift until the ADL in the late 80s,
291. the very late 80s realized that the queer community had built a lot of political power and that could
292. be leveraged by including queers the last thing i'll say is that the problem with hate uh hate
293. crimes legislation is that it um became sort of a replacement for anti-racist um and you know
294. anti-homophobic change like actual change so if you it's very easy for a conservative politician
295. to say, sure, I support hate crimes policy, that we should prosecute people more, we should expand
296. policing more. And that's my way of showing that I care about my Black constituents. But you know,
297. you want to like redirect tax dollars? No way, right? And so it became a way for conservatives,
298. including the ADL, to posit themselves as supporting the interests of communities of color
299. and displaced other efforts. And that's just a continuation of what the ADL had done all along.
300. I know you want to talk about how they use that against Arab political organizing, but I'll pause for a second there.
301. Okay. Well, you also go into great detail in the book about the ADL's role in producing ideas about rights and enforcement infrastructure that has enormously impacted U.S. politics and human rights globally as they inject themselves into the war on terror.
302. So can you describe the role that the ADL has played and the negative impacts that part of the work has caused societies It actually it doesn start with hate crimes but I start there In this sort of moment where the ADL is talking about
303. hate crimes and racist violence,
304. there's also enormous anti-Arab violence
305. being carried out largely by Zionist groups
306. like the Jewish Defense League,
307. who are devoted to sort of using violence to do their work.
308. And the ADL's position and the American Jewish Committee's position is that that's not racist violence because it's Zionist violence against, that's targeting Arabs for their politics, right, supposedly.
309. So the ADL's definition of hate crimes is that it has to be irrational.
310. It has to be like, you know, tied to race only. And if there's a reason for it, like that Zionists are trying to stop Palestinian liberation, then suddenly it's political violence and it doesn't fall into that category anymore.
311. that sort of refusal to include Arab and Arab American people in this kind of family of like
312. who's going to be protected by anti-racist measures also has a huge impact on the development
313. of Arab American politics so at that time in the 80s Arab American organizing political organizing
314. was ramping up the you know the way political organizing works like you work with a candidate
315. You try and help them get elected. You meet with them. You talk about policy. And all of those efforts, every time Arab American groups did that, they would be attacked. And whoever they were talking to would be attacked, the politicians that they were talking to, for supposedly like taking oil money and for being sort of a foreign political insurgency and eventually for the idea that they were promoting terrorism.
316. Now, the ADL had been attacking Arab organizing since the 40s, even before the State of Israel was created, using any way to smear them. So, you know, when the ADL was talking about how communists were like a threat and insurgent into the United States, it would call the Arab community.
317. about white supremacists and, you know, Christian nativists being a threat, it would say that the
318. Arab representatives were in league with white supremacists. So it's any tool to do that.
319. In the 70s, the ADL and other Zionist organizations attacked Arab and Iranian
320. students as potential insurgent threats. In the 80s, they attacked the Arab or political
321. organizing infrastructure as oil money and insurgent. And then in the 90s, it was the ADL's
322. sort of interjection and influence and advocacy around anti-terror laws that placed anti-Palestinian
323. legislation and restriction at the center of the U.S. discussion about terror, how to regulate,
324. How to, you know, how to pass laws against what it was calling terror and how to conceive of threats to the state, not as political objections to what's going on, but rather as crimes, irrational, irrational crimes that threaten, you know, the world order.
325. So, Darrell Lee, who's a legal scholar, has written a pretty great history of how the first anti-terror law in the United States was created. I won't try and summarize the whole thing, but...
326. It was in response to the Oklahoma City bombing of the federal building, which was carried out by white groups targeting the federal government.
327. And in the course of that, there was sort of a push to create terrorism laws, anti-terrorism laws, which failed. And the push failed, except that in the course of that, the ADL lobbied to have anti-terror laws that sort of noted and applied to Palestinian resistance.
328. Wow. And in the last decade or so, probably the most employed strategy of the Israel lobby writ large has been the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
329. And the tool they built to institutionalize that conflation has been the IHRA or International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.
330. Can you talk about the ADL's role in the deployment of the IHRA definition and the weaponization of antisemitism or more specifically the accusation of antisemitism?
331. The IIHRA working definition of anti-Semitism is a text that comes out of a sort of international body. And the text offers a definition of anti-Semitism and then several working examples.
332. And it's actually the examples that are the tools that the ADL and other Zionist organizations have used to do this work.
333. The examples, which were not actually adopted by the International Committee, but sort of appended to them as like sort of for discussion or whatever, say things like, you can't, it is anti-Semitic to talk about what Israel, what the state of Israel is doing in comparison to what Nazis did.
334. But you're not you're simply not allowed to say here's what Nazis did and here's what the Israeli state is doing, because that is itself anti-Semitic. You can't talk about the State of Israel or the Israeli colonization project as a racist endeavor, despite the reams of historical like direct direct claims by the people who were doing it that they were doing it as a racist endeavor.
335. And so these sorts of examples have been used to claim that essentially any opposition to Zionism, to the Israeli state, to the genocide constitutes anti-Semitism.
336. And the ADL, of course, has gone further, as has its lawfare partner, the Brandeis Center, making the claim that not only are these critiques anti-Semitic, but they're also terrorists. So these two things are so closely knitted together.
337. Like when we accept the discourse of anti-Semitism that says we're not allowed to criticize Israel unless we're, you know, irrational, like evil haters, we're also feeding this, feeding the possibility of calling that kind of critique terrorism because that's where we are right now.
338. um so the anti-defamation league sort of picked that up and and ran with it from go uh and it has
339. had an anti-semitism awareness act or something like it um on its sort of legislative agenda
340. since i think at least since 2016 i think um it hasn't passed at the federal level it's never
341. succeeded at the federal level uh as legislation which is often the case with Zionist policies They don succeed necessarily in democratic spaces And so the tactic then is to take them to not democratic
342. spaces and pass them there. So the IRA definition has been put into practice through executive
343. order. It's been adopted through policy by the Department of Education, which now has to,
344. when it thinks about, when it takes on civil rights complaints, it has to use the IRA definition as
345. part of its consideration. The ADL has lobbied universities, which are, you know, sort of
346. controlled by a president and a bunch of donors generally to enact the IRA definition and literally
347. to criminalize the violation of the IRA definition by making it policeable. And in fact, that's part
348. of the case that was made for the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia, which the ADL
349. celebrated. So the IRA definition, you know, it's just a few words and it's not even totally
350. official, but it's actually become an incredible lever for criminalizing and trying to shut down
351. movements against genocide. It has also been the basis for the ADL's sort of hyped up reporting
352. on anti-Semitic incidents, which has always been cooked up. Like, I want to be clear,
353. it started in 1979. It was never accurate. It's like, it was never scrutinized until about 2021
354. by investigative journalists, but it was never, never good data, never a good way to collect or
355. present data. But now the IRA definition has allowed for the claim that anti-Semitic incidents
356. have spiked, you know, like exponentially, which becomes a driver for things like legislation to
357. send weapons to the state of Israel as it's committing a genocide. So the effects are quite
358. material, like catastrophically material. And as you say, attempts to criminalize things like,
359. if you could talk about the ADL's use of the term anti-Semitic terrorism to call on university
360. presidents to urgently investigate whether chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine
361. or other pro-Palestine organizations who call for an end to Israeli colonization,
362. the ADL had long declared as anti-Semitic,
363. and they want to investigate whether they're in fact violating these anti-terror laws.
364. The concept of anti-Semitic terrorism is such a product of the moment, right?
365. But it has its roots in the 50s or even before. The ADL has always claimed from its position as a sort of upper class and capitalist and white organization that Jewishness is the same as Americanness.
366. like literally that the interests of Jews and the values of Jews and Jewish ways of being
367. are intricately and intimately bound up in Americanism, which it is constructing absolutely
368. as like capitalism, colonialism, imperialism. It's such an incredible erasure, even at that
369. beginning point of Jews who are not in the West, right? Like Jews who have other trajectories,
370. Jews who disagree with the US to the founding politics, Jews who are not in support of colonialism.
371. But that conflation of Jews and the United States starts so early and it's used to, in
372. fact the ADL founder Sigmund Livingston declared Jewish communist apostates literally apostates in the context of the American sort of land of liberty That refusal that sort of sloughing off of other
373. forms of Jewishness now becomes a way of saying anybody who opposes what we say is Jewishness,
374. which is the state, right, is not only anti-Semitic, but also a terrorist. I mean,
375. And it's an unbelievably tightly woven web.
376. And it basically what it says is that Jewishness is an ideology.
377. It's a right wing ideology.
378. And those who don't share it are a sort of in this using the language of the war on terror sort of radicalized.
379. Right.
380. Those who don't share this right wing ideology are radicalized and therefore a potential threat.
381. You know, and then it's like a threat to what?
382. You have to conceive of like what it is that they're valuing to the Western order, to U.S. domination, to the war machine. It's like the most anti-Semitic thing I've ever heard in my life. But it's also, it's not funny. It's like, it really is incredibly dangerous.
383. Exactly.
384. Of course, it's dangerous to people who are outside of the world of Jews. Like, it's dangerous to Palestinians. It's dangerous to activists. We just saw in Prairieland people sentenced to 30 to 70 years, 30 to 100 years for ideology, right, for perceived ideology. So it's no joke.
385. Very scary. So in our last few minutes, I want to bring us to the present. Well, sort of present. Within a few months of October 7, 2023, you write, quote, the imperative to stand against hate, to extend protections not to Jews, but to Zionist Jews and the Israeli state had become an open-ended demand for securitization.
386. Can you discuss the role that Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL played in creating this perceived crisis of anti-Semitism to combat American college and university students rising up in dissent against the genocide of Palestinians as they had before in 1970 against the war in Vietnam?
387. Yeah, I want to be super, super clear, as I know you already know, that this is not about Jews or Jewish students or Jewish safety. The way that the ADL has instrumentalized the idea of Jews is like it's a fictional version of Jews. Nothing about it is real. These are ghosts.
388. What this is, is an effort to look at where power is arising from, where the power to
389. make change and to challenge the claims of the imperial state that it's good or safe
390. or whatever, to go to the places where those things are being challenged and shut it down.
391. And how do you shut things down in a country that claims to be a liberal democracy?
392. You say these things are illiberal and anti-democratic.
393. Now, we could have a whole conversation about whether a liberal democracy is actually a place of safety and rights.
394. But the idea of Jews in this case gets instrumentalized and invoked as a way to say that policing is needed.
395. And not only policing of like the actual protests, but policing like withdrawing the rights of professors to teach classes on subjects that create people who know how politics works and can question it.
396. or preventing the university from being a place where people can develop their ability to get jobs that are not right jobs that don make them servants of the right So the effort was to shut down universities because they were serving as a platform for all kinds of anti and liberatory thought even though they themselves are not such liberatory institutions and to use Jews to do it Amaya thank you so much for taking time to speak with us today
397. I think that people are really going to be embracing of this very important book you've written.
398. Thank you so much for hosting me.
399. As the histories Amaya writes about in the Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State
400. intersects cultural studies, critical race, ethnic studies, and political and communal history,
401. She highlights the crucial importance of analyzing the Anti-Defamation League as an institution that has been key to producing the liberal racial state and the U.S.-led global order of rights.
402. Once again, I want to thank our guest, Amaya Gelman, founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism,
403. and author of the first ever ADO History, the Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State.
404. Our theme song is the overture from Summer Night's Dream by Marsha Khalife from the studios of KPFK in Los Angeles.
405. I'm SD Chandler thanking you for taking this hour to put the Middle East in focus.
406. Thank you.
407. you're invited to tune in to the QR code with your hosts,
408. Ramses jaw and Q ward.
409. The Q and the QR code goes by the name of Q ward.
410. The voice you just heard is the R and the QR code.
411. He goes by the name Ramses jaw every Monday through Thursday at 6.
412. AM.
413. Be sure to join us next time as we share our news with our voice from our
414. perspective.
415. And until then,
416. it's one thing to love.
417. public radio, but it's a special thing to support it. Consider this. If you've got a car you don't
418. need anymore, or you've got one that is simply too expensive to repair, arrange to donate it to KPFK.
419. It's easy for you, pickup is free, and it could be worth hundreds of dollars in support. Thanks
420. in advance and here is how to get started. Go to kpfk.org slash cars or call 877-573-5288.
421. That is 1-877-KPFKAUTO and learn more.
422. Hi, this is Robbie Krieger from The Doors,
423. and you are listening to Fiercely Independent, KPFK, 90.7 FM,
424. Los Angeles, 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara,
425. and For the World at WWW.
426. www.kpfk.org. Support free speech and free speech.