August 2, 2010
The Daily Beast
Hateful Ground Zero Hypocrisy
Peter Beinart
The other day, when the Anti-Defamation League came out against
building a mosque near Ground Zero, I think I heard a sound--the
sound of chickens coming home to roost.
The ADL calls itself "the nation's premier civil rights/human
relations agency." Coming from an explicitly Jewish organization,
that's an audacious claim. But it's an inspiring one, too. The ADL
was born in 1913, after a Georgia jury falsely convicted a Jewish
factory owner named Leo Frank of murdering a Christian employee. The
men who defamed, and later lynched, Frank were anti-Semites. But
they were not only anti-Semites. Three months after Frank's murder,
some of his tormenters met on Georgia's Stone Mountain to refound
the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that would now dedicate itself not
merely to terrorizing African-Americans, but to terrorizing
Catholics and Jews as well.
What if white victims of African-American crime protested the
building of a black church in their neighborhood? Or gentile victims
of Bernie Madoff protested the building of a synagogue?
Against this backdrop, the founders of the ADL made their
organization a kind of mirror image of the Klan. If the Klan saw
anti-Semitism as one component of the struggle to maintain white,
Protestant supremacy, the ADL would make its opposition to
anti-Semitism one component of the struggle against white,
Protestant supremacy. If bigotry was indivisible, anti-bigotry would
be indivisible too. "The immediate object of the League is to stop,
by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to
law, the defamation of the Jewish people," declared the ADL's
charter. "Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair
treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust
and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body
of citizens."
For much of the 20th century, the ADL lived this mission well. It
opposed Joe McCarthy, lobbied for civil rights, and denounced the
anti-Catholic bigots who insinuated that John F. Kennedy would take
orders from Rome. Then came the creation of the state of Israel. For
the ADL, Israel posed a conundrum: the conundrum of Jewish power. In
the United States, it was relatively easy to oppose all forms of
discrimination while still serving particular Jewish interests,
since Jews--by virtue of their place in society--were bigotry's
victims but rarely its main perpetrators. But Israel was different.
While Israel's Jews certainly suffered from Arab bigotry and
violence, the Jewish state also perpetrated a great deal of bigotry
and violence itself, especially after 1967, when it made itself
occupier of millions of Palestinians to whom it denied the vote.
Had the ADL genuinely tried to apply its universalistic mandate to
the Jewish state, it would have become something like the
Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) or B'Tselem (full
disclosure: I'm on B'Tselem's American board): Israeli human rights
organizations that struggle against all forms of bigotry, and thus
end up spending a lot of time defending Muslims and Christian
Palestinians against discrimination by Jews. But the ADL hasn't done
that. Instead it has become, in essence, two organizations. In the
United States, it still links the struggle against anti-Semitism to
the struggle against bigotry against non-Jews. In Israel, by
contrast, it largely pretends that government-sponsored bigotry
against non-Jews does not exist. When Arizona passes a law that
encourages police to harass Latinos, the ADL expresses outrage. But
when Israel builds 170 kilometers of roads in the West Bank for the
convenience of Jewish settlers, from which Palestinians are wholly
or partially banned, the ADL takes out advertisements declaring,
"The Problem Isn't Settlements."
For a long time now, the ADL seems to have assumed that it could
exempt Israel from the principles in its charter and yet remain just
as faithful to that charter inside the United States. But now the
chickens are coming back home to America to roost. The ADL's
rationale for opposing the Ground Zero mosque is that "building an
Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause
some victims more pain--unnecessarily--and that is not right." Huh?
What if white victims of African-American crime protested the
building of a black church in their neighborhood? Or gentile victims
of Bernie Madoff protested the building of a synagogue? Would the
ADL for one second suggest that sensitivity toward people victimized
by members of a certain religion or race justifies discriminating
against other, completely innocent, members of that religion or
race? Of course not. But when it comes to Muslims, the standards are
different. They are different in Israel, and now, it is clear, they
are different in the United States, too.
Indifference to the rights and dignity of Palestinians is a cancer
eating away at the moral pretensions of the American Jewish
establishment. Last Friday, in the case of the ADL, we learned just
how far that cancer has spread.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is
associate professor of journalism and political science at City
University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America
Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American
Hubris, is now available from HarperCollins.