Another deceptive ‘Antisemitism Audit’ from the ADL

Critics of the Anti-Defamation League have long argued that the organization has been problematic from its very inception.

They point out that the group has sold itself as a civil rights organization primarily dedicated to combating antisemitism, but its actual record has consistently contradicted that mission.

“Even though the ADL is integrated into community work on a range of issues, it has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence. More disturbing, it has often conducted those attacks under the banner of ‘civil rights’, explains an open letter from the Drop the ADL campaign in 2020. “This largely unpublicized history has come increasingly to light as activists work to make sense of the ADL’s role in condemning the Movement for Black Lives, Palestinian rights organizing, and Congressional Representative Ilhan Omar, among others.”

A 2020 In These Times piece by Sarah Lazare and Adam Johnson details some of this history:

In 2017, the ADL accused the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a grassroots Black Lives Matter organization founded in 2014, of anti-Semitism, a form of hate speech, because M4BL’s platform read, in part, “The U.S. justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.” It follows that if the M4BL were to post this statement on social media, it’s likely the ADL would view it as hate speech and demand Facebook take it down. If the ADL views the foundational documents of the M4BL as including hate speech, how can the ADL possibly assert itself as a moral authority in this moment? Has the ADL’s position changed since 2017, or does the ADL still to this day consider the M4BL’s platform anti-Semitic?
The ADL smearing Black activists who oppose Israel isn’t new. In the 1960s, the ADL harshly criticized the Black-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers for their criticisms of Israel, equating these “negro extremists” with the KKK and American Nazi Party. The ADL also worked with the Israeli government in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s to spy on Arab groups, as well as leftwing anti-South African apartheid activists.

Despite this reality, the ADL used to at least pretend that its main function wasn’t pro-Israel advocacy. Just a few years ago, its website still conceded that anti-Zionism “isn’t always necessarily antisemitic.”

That’s never been the opinion of CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who has been running the group since 2015.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” he declared in November 2021. “Denying the right of Jews — alone among all peoples of the world — to have a homeland is antisemitism. Singling out just the Jewish state for condemnation while ignoring others, is prejudice.”

“Anti-Zionism as an ideology is rooted in rage,” he told the ADL’s annual leadership summit in 2022. “It is predicated on one concept: the negation of another people, a concept as alien to the modern discourse as white supremacy. It requires a willful denial of even a superficial history of Judaism and the vast history of the Jewish people. And, when an idea is born out of such shocking intolerance, it leads to, well, shocking acts.”

The group’s website was quietly changed to reflect this public strategy.

“Anti-Zionism is antisemitic, in intent or effect, as it invokes anti-Jewish tropes; is used to disenfranchise, demonize, disparage, or punish all Jews and/or those who feel a connection to Israel; exploits Jewish trauma by invoking the Holocaust in order to position Jews as akin to Nazis; or renders Jews less worthy of nationhood and self-determination than other peoples,” reads the most recent, edited version.

The ADL releases an audit of antisemitic incidents every year.

The 2022 audit claimed that antisemitic incidents had increased by 500% over the past decade. That staggering number was embraced by the mainstream media without pushback, and Greenblatt did his usual cable news tour to talk about the findings.

When we see hardened anti-Zionists activists on college campuses openly, aggressively, and almost gleefully intimidating Jewish students, something is fundamentally broken in our society,” Greenblatt told PBS Newshour host Geoff Bennett.

“I too was struck by reading this report about the 41% increase of antisemitic activity reported on college and university campuses,” Bennett replied. “And doing more reading about it what I learned is that Jewish students often say that harassment is often compounded when criticism of Israel arises. Tell me more about that.”

Bennett presumably didn’t read an explanation of the audit’s methodology, which effectively reveals that any pro-Palestine act can be interpreted as antisemitic.

“Public statements of opposition to Zionism, which are often antisemitic, are included in the Audit when it can be determined that they had a negative impact on one or more Jewish individuals or identifiable, localized groups of Jews,” it explains. “This is most commonly the case on college campuses, where studies have shown that vociferous opposition to Israel and Zionism can have a chilling effect on Jewish student life and compound on pressures felt by Jewish students added to the incidents accounted for in this Audit.”

The group’s 2023 audit brought more dire news. Antisemitic “harassment, vandalism and assault” had allegedly gone up by 140% since the 2022 numbers were released. Again, the media dutifully shared the numbers without any further context.

Shane Burley and Naomi Bennet dissected the report in detail at Jewish Currents at the time. Here’s a relevent part of their analysis:

“Our assessment of incidents diverged from the ADL’s most often when it came to analyzing pro-Palestine demonstrations. The ADL says that antisemitic incidents revolving around Israel or Zionism accounted for 3,162 incidents—about 36% of the total—and that 1,352 of these (about 15% of the total) involve the use of specific slogans that the ADL considers inherently antisemitic. The audit mentions the use of the phrase “from the river to the sea”—usually as part of the protest slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—as an example of antisemitism more than 600 times. “Respect existence or expect resistance” is listed as a form of antisemitic harassment in 21 separate incidents, and the slogan “when people are occupied, resistance is justified” is flagged 35 times. In all previous years, the ADL did not include pro-Palestine protests in its audits, but the group says in the audit that it has employed “new methodology” since October 7th that identifies language that expresses “opposition to Zionism” or is “perceived as supporting terrorism or attacks on Jews, Israelis or Zionists” as antisemitism. If signs or slogans using such language appear at a rally, the ADL includes the rally in its audit. This characterization assumes that all references to an occupied people’s resistance against their occupiers can only be motivated by ethnic hatred. (People may disagree about what constitutes legitimate ”resistance,” particularly in the context of armed militancy, but such debates have surfaced across history in varied political contexts. Militancy does not inherently reflect antisemitism.) In doing so, it inflates both the total number of antisemitic incidents and the share of them attributed to the Palestine movement.”

Now, the ADL is out with its audit for 2024. They’re claiming 9,354 antisemitic incidents took place in the United States last year. That’s a 5% increase from 2023, a 344% increase over the past five years, and an 893% increase over the past 10 years. It’s the highest number since they began compiling the data 46 years ago.

You don’t have to dig into the group’s methodology to understand this report. The audit’s Executive Summary clearly states that 58% of incidents are connected to Israel or Zionism.

Chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” referencing the intifada, or holding a sign that criticizes Zionists, is liable to get you on the incident report, so it’s not surprising that the ADL is claiming antisemitism has jumped by 84% across college campuses.

The Boston-area group Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff put out a statement on the audit, pointing out that many of the local “incidents” were not antisemitic.

“In Somerville, MA, for example, the ADL records 5 acts of ‘antisemitic hate’ in 2024,” it reads. “Their records reveal that none involved active hate or antagonism directed toward Jewish people, but rather signs or slogans at political protests referring to Palestinian resistance, liberation, or criticism of Zionism in the context of mounting deaths in Gaza.”

“The problem could not be more stark,” the group continues. “Somerville is the same city where masked federal agents shackled and detained Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk on the street outside her home for writing an op-ed critical of Israel. Rather than correct the record, the ADL doubles down on the very conflation of legitimate political speech with antisemitism that provides the pretext for Öztürk’s ongoing detention. Stoking panic about protest signs and slogans that criticize Israel or call for Palestinian equality further normalizes the fraught narratives that the Trump administration now wields against our communities. It also minimizes the alarming incidents of real harassment and violence against Jews that the ADL elsewhere records.”

These are valid concerns, but it’s safe to say that the ADL could not possibly care less.

During his annual audit tour, Greenblatt made a stop at CNN, where he sounded the usual alarms to absolutely no pushback from anchor Dana Bash. However, she did ask Greenblatt what the ADL is doing to pressure the White House into giving students due process after being scooped up off the street by ICE, perhaps confusing her guest as someone extremely concerned about such a thing.

This was Greenblatt’s response:

“Look, at the ADL, it’s our job to protect the Jewish people. We’re not sort of public defenders for some of the Hamasniks on these college campuses, and I don’t want to be and I think I really need to say that.
“You take Mahmoud Khalil, who is one of the ringleaders at Columbia. Based on his conduct, we thought he was a very problematic individual. I don’t know if he lied on his visa application or anything like that. But on his conduct, not his speech, the challenge comes when the administration doesn’t substantiate or clarify the specific of the charges.”
“So that’s where this due process thing comes into the works. Now again, it’s not my job at the ADL to find due process for of these young people.”

To call this criticism of the administration “tepid” is probably overselling it. I am reminded of the recent interview with Biden’s antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt, where she said she doesn’t oppose Trump’s unconstitutional crackdown on students, she just wishes it “would be done more deftly.”

The reality is that pro-Israel advocates like Greenblatt have been pushing for Palestine activists to be targeted for years and now they have administration that is carrying out their vision.

Democratic races

Last week, I spoke with Democratic consultant and activist Peter Feld about the declining support for Israel among Democratic voters and whether that could ever translate into a shift in the actual party.

The discussion was prompted by a recent Pew poll that shows 53% of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 42% in 2022.

“The harsh repression we see now is a direct inverse of these bad polling numbers for Israel,” said Feld. “The more people are deported, fired, have their grants canceled, have their events canceled, the more universities crack down on student protesters to impress Donald Trump or Elise Stefanik, the more it’s driving people away from Israel and towards a more sympathetic view towards Palestinians.”

Feld doesn’t believe we will see much of a shift among lawmakers until someone clearly loses an election by supporting Israel too much. He points to the NYC mayoral race, where BDS-supporter Zohran Mamdani is currently polling behind disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo, as a potential bellwether:

I would also say that the 59% to 21% sympathy for Palestine over Israel seen among Democrats nationwide in that Gallup Poll is probably not too far from the reality in New York, even though people think New York has different dynamics because there are so many engaged constituencies for Israel and for Palestine.
I think Cuomo’s attempt to Israelize the election is going to backfire. This could actually help give Mamdani the further strength to overtake him. If that happens, I think it’s going to set the table for some of the primaries next year.

Shortly after I spoke with Feld, Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky announced her retirement, leaving the state’s 9th district wide open.

A number of Democrats are expected to launch campaigns for the seat, but 26-year-old journalist Kat Abughazaleh is already in the race.

Abughazaleh is Palestinian and announced her candidacy in front of a wall with a keffiyeh hanging on it. Her grandparents fled to Kuwait during the Nakba.

“I love when conservatives are like ‘she has a palestinian flag in her bio… of course’ and it’s like,,, yes? I am palestinian?? I am very sorry for this inconvenience,” tweeted Abughazaleh in 2022.

Her candidacy is already worrying pro-Israel advocates. The Algemeiner Journal published a post documenting some of her online criticisms of Israel:

On Instagram, Abughazaleh posted a painting depicting a woman wearing a keffiyeh wrapped around her head, captioned: “Collective liberation includes palestinian liberation. freedom for all means freedom for palestinians [sic].” She has also posted another photo of herself standing next to street art reading “Free Palestine” and wrote a caption saying “from the river to the sea” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In the 17 months following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, Abughazaleh has launched numerous tirades condemning the Jewish state. She has slammed Israel’s war efforts in Gaza on X/Twitter, condemning Jerusalem for supposedly practicing “far-right militant ethnonationalism.” She has praised journalists in Gaza for “documenting their own genocide.”

Terrifying stuff.

A few days after the Feld interview ran, Michigan State Rep. Donavan McKinney announced that he was mounting a primary challenge against Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Detroit) in the state’s 13th Congressional District.

McKinney is a progressive backed by the Justice Democrats. Here’s the foreign policy section of his campaign website:

The Pentagon has the largest budget of any federal government agency. As a result we spent nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars every year to line the pockets of corporate defense contractors, and to wage endless wars abroad. You know what doesn’t cost a trillion dollars? Leading with diplomacy, our nation’s greatest foreign policy asset — not bombs and weapons.
In Congress, I will oppose the bottomless and unconditional funding of weapons and bombs because we cannot keep funding human rights violations and war crimes with our taxpayer dollars. Instead, those dollars can be better spent here at home on urgent needs in our communities — from aging infrastructure to housing to ensuring our veterans get the job opportunities and healthcare they have earned.

You might recall that Thanedar found himself a target of AIPAC years ago, after making the mistake of backing a resolution referring to Israel as an apartheid state while he was a state representative. The group’s intervention was enough to scare the multimillionaire straight. He visited the country on an AIPAC junket and returned to explain how he was a new man.

His about-face on the issue got him expelled from DSA, but he falsely claimed that he had left the organization over its response to the October 7 attack.

“My visit to Israel in August fully opened my eyes to the constant danger ordinary Israelis face every day,” he said in a statement. “Surrounded by adversaries, Israelis live in a state of constant alert and terror. The anti-Israeli rally in Time Square this past Sunday promoted by the NYC-DSA, where the bloodthirsty crowd cheered hatred, bigotry, and murder, sickened me and made me decide to renounce my membership in DSA. We must unequivocally stand with Israel and fight all terrorism and antisemitism across the globe without hesitation.”

Shortly after McKinney announced his primary challenge, Thanedar launched seven articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.