Fire Foxman
Denying the Armenian Genocide should be the last atrocity perpetrated by the ADL chief.
by Joey Kurtzman,
July 9, 2007
Abdullah Gul needed a favour. It was February 5 of this year, and the Turkish foreign minister was fighting a push in the U.S. House of Representatives to recognize the Turkish murder of one million Armenians during World War I. In past years the House had placated Turkey by dropping similar resolutions. But now, with the American-Turkish alliance weakened by the Iraq war, the resolution had found renewed support. Gul summoned representatives from the Anti-Defamation League and several other Jewish-American organizations to his room at the Willard Hotel in Washington. There he asked them, in essence, to perpetuate Turkey’s denial of genocide.
Abraham Foxman’s ADL acquiesced, and in so doing, performed the pièce de résistance of Foxman’s highly effective, if unintentional, decades-long campaign to demoralize Jewish America and send young Jews scurrying for the communal exit doors. The ADL chief is a danger to the future of the community, and it is a scandal that he remains at the head of a major Jewish organization. Foxman must go. And the organization he has done so much to shape must either change or go with him.
Getting by with a little help from his friends:The Turkish foreign minister
Soon after the meeting with Gul, the ADL joined three other American Jewish organizations—the American Jewish Committee, B'nai Brith International, and the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs—to deliver to Congress a written plea from the Jews of Turkey that the U.S. not recognize the Armenian Genocide. Turkish Jews are more vulnerable now than at any time in recent history as they struggle to reassert their place in a society polarized by the competing visions of Turkey’s Islamists and secular nationalists, so it is hardly surprising that they would parrot their government’s denialist claims. By dutifully passing their letter to Congress, the Jewish American groups cynically exploited a small, frightened Jewish minority.
Worse was to come.
“I don't think congressional action will help reconcile the issue. The resolution takes a position; it comes to a judgment,”said Foxman in a statement issued to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history, nor should the U.S. Congress."Foxman‘s statement is in every way that matters equivalent to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that he takes no position on the historicity of the Jewish Holocaust, but only hopes to see the matter resolved by dispassionate study. Throughout the Congressional saga surrounding the resolutions, virtually no one other than Turkish lobbyists had explained their opposition by challenging the nearly undisputed consensus among historians that a genocide did indeed take place.
It is a scandal of unprecedented proportion when one of the most prominent figures in our community, a man who claims to speak on our behalf, publicly challenges the historicity of another community’s genocide. Foxman’s ADL no longer represents the interests of the Jewish community. In fact, it seems the only interests it represents are its own.
Crushing the heads of antisemites everywhere: Foxman demonstrates the Hand of Power
What’s surprising is how unabashedly forthright Abraham Foxman has become about what motivates him and his institution. In October of 2005, Foxman addressed a classroom of Jewish students at New York University. Young heads nodded and brows furrowed as Foxman riled them with his customary rhetoric: Isn’t it anti-Semitic for pro-Palestinian groups to seek divestment only from Israel, ignoring the far greater crimes of regimes like Sudan or North Korea? How do we describe this sort of selective flagellation of the world's only Jewish state, if not as anti-Semitism?
"What if the campus Free Tibet club campaigned for divestment from China? Would that be anti-Chinese bigotry?"
asked Asaf Shtull-Trauring, a 20-year-old student and conscientious objector from the Israeli army.
Of course not, answered Foxman, but it was preposterous to compare the two conflicts, what with the Jews' experience of two millennia of murderous persecution. Shtull-Trauring responded with two questions: Did Foxman mean that selective treatment is okay so long as it's not directed at Jews? And where did the Anti-Defamation League get off telling Jewish university students which opinions about Israel were acceptable and which verboten?
The dialogue spiraled into a confrontation. Shtull-Trauring says Foxman, frustrated and under attack, placed his cards on the table, angrily retorting: “I don’t represent you nor the Jewish community! I represent the donors.”
Foxman’s outburst was surprising not because of its content, but because of its candor. Foxman needn’t bother himself with the trifling concerns of American Jews who happen not to be multimillionaire philanthropists. If he makes the Jewish community less appealing to young Jews, if his theatrics turn us off and turn us away, that’s all beside the point. Foxman’s job is to keep the millionaire benefactors happy: the rest of us can go jump in the Kinneret.
Back when the ADL was useful: Leo Frank, with wife Lucille, at his trial
Without a meaningful mission to pursue, the ADL has resorted to scaremongering to fill its coffers and justify its existence. These efforts have grown increasingly bizarre and damaging. For example, the ADL website surveys the vast changes in Jewish-American life over the past century and offers the grandiose judgment that they
“are due, in large measure, to the efforts of the League and its allies.”Yet Foxman also claims that today the Jewish people face as great a threat to their safety and security as they did in the 1930s. In other words, the ADL takes credit for the vast improvements in the circumstances of American Jewry, and then denies that those changes have taken place. It is still 1939. It will always be 1939.
When the ADL was born, in the early 20th century, institutional discrimination against American Jews was commonplace at every level of society. Populist politicians employed the most vulgar anti-Semitic language, and “restricted” hotels and country clubs reassured patrons that Jews would be stopped at the front door. In 1915, 31-year-old factory manager Leo Frank was lynched in Marietta, Georgia after he was accused of raping a Christian girl. But today, American Jews are successful and well-integrated. And unlike in Weimar Germany, where we were accepted only so long as we obscured our Jewishness behind the accoutrements of gentile culture, in America we are accepted even as we celebrate what sets us apart.
Such a reality, however, doesn’t serve the fundraising interests of the ADL. The ADL’s jihad against Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was typical of the organization’s destructive, self-interested efforts. Foxman, as you might remember, fanned fears it would inspire Chmielniki-style pogroms. Yet not a single documented act of violence against Jews resulted from the film, nor even a single verbal assault. A study conducted by Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles indicated some anger among Christians toward Jews—but because of the reaction to the film, rather than its contents. Thanks to the ADL, our strong and self-confident community was made to appear silly and paranoid before the world.
The Passion fiasco was hardly the ADL's only effort to alienate and insult American Christians. In November 2005, Foxman delivered a widely publicized speech in which he warned that American Christian organizations were engaged in an insidious campaign to “Christianize” America. It’s a shocking allegation: firstly, because Jewish interfaith groups have developed very strong ties with precisely such organizations in the past decade; and secondly, because conservative Jewish groups have been just as aggressive in their efforts to breach the wall between church and state. While Christian groups can’t get the ornaments of Christianity placed in government buildings, Chabad has succeeded in publicly erecting enormous, gaudy menorahs throughout the country.
As Mel Gibson movies go, it's no What Women Want: A scene from The Passion
In this environment, where the push for more religion in public life unites religious conservatives across all faiths, why would Foxman single out Christians? Again, the answer is simple: Fund-raising. Such headline-grabbing proclamations add a historically evocative Christian dimension to the terrifying nightmare-world in which the ADL encourages its benefactors to live.
The ADL can libel American Christians in general without fear of legal consequence, but when it goes on to identify specific “antisemites” it leaves itself more vulnerable. Time after time, Americans who resented being named-and-shamed as antisemites have sued the ADL for libel. In 2000, Colorado residents Dorothy and William Quigley received a ten million dollar verdict against the ADL, which, according to Federal judge Edward Nottingham, “had labeled a…neighborhood feud as an antisemitic event.” Nottingham concluded that the ADL had not properly investigated the case nor considered the consequences of its accusations. But what the ADL lost in libel fees, it gained in bogus credibility. Baseless accusations of antisemitism contribute to a paranoid fundraising atmosphere that makes Foxman’s ADL seem utterly necessary; maybe the Quigleys weren’t antisemites, but that doesn’t mean your neighbors aren’t Hitlerists in disguise. Still, such bullying by the ADL has an inevitable chilling effect: Jewish community leaders, even those who take exception to the ADL's techniques, fear speaking out lest the ADL accuse them of some crime against the Jewish people. Like all bullies, the ADL is widely disliked, but less widely spoken out against.
Ultimately, it is the seductive appeal of the ADL's dark visions that most threaten us. American Jewry enjoys privileges undreamed of in Jewish history: we are a more accepted, more integral part of our country than any Jewish community ever has been. We have entered unprecedented territory in Jewish history, and the enticements and possibilities of this new era should be setting our souls alight.
TAGS: Abdullah Gul Abe Foxman ADL Armenian Genocide Funding Judaism Mel Gibson The Passion Of The Christ Turkey
Joey Kurtzman is senior editor at Jewry. He was an on-air contributor to Ireland's political and cultural radio program, The Wide Angle, and he's currently working to turn the Jewry series "Letters to Ahmadinejad" into a book. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Kendra, and their diabetic dog, Maddie
- School:
- University College Dublin
- Interests:
- Getting my learn on, Ethnic strife, Vegetarianism, Famine Relief
I feel ashamed after reading
I feel ashamed after reading that. I have Armenian friends, I feel like I should apologize to them or forward them this piece. As for Foxman, Jewry should start a campaign to retire Abe and his bad hairdye.
agnostic on Foxman
but not on this:
"(ADL) It has long since stopped advocating against intolerance, bigotry, and hatred and instead has been a major promoter of Jewish ethnocentrism and exceptionalism. The result has been to give credence to those who espouse some of the worst forms of racism and chauvinism."
There is nothign wrong with ethnocentrism if it doesn't blind us to the ethnocentric claims of other ethnos.
As for exceptionalism, if the Jewish people are not an exception in this world then the word has no meaning.
However, neither ethnocentrism nor exceptionalism should in itself he held responsible for "some of the worst forms of racism and chauvinism."
Most groups are ethnocentric including the Armenians yet they are not held responsible for racism.
funny how I never heard of this until now
Considering that this conference between ADL and Turkish minister took place early this year. Just curious--what are your sources for this info?
Joey
"The result has been to give credence to those who espouse some of the worst forms of racism and chauvinism."
Can you give some examples of the worst kind of racism that Foxman gave credence to?
Questions Answers
Zbird, the meeting was reported in a number of places, though not nearly as widely as it should have been. It's cited here at The Forward, here by the LA Times (that's a Nexis link...I can't find it at the moment on the Times site itself, but here's the text), here in the New York Sun. I also had an off-the-record conversation with a Jewish-American leader with intimate knowledge of the meeting and the players involved.
Apter, I didn't actually write that quote, it's from the first comment in this thread, by Moshe Pipik.
BTW, Asaf Shtull-Trauring has asked me to note that he doesn't actually support divestment.
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