Sahar Aziz: ADL Fuels Islamophobia and Betrays Its Civil Rights Mission

https://saharazizlaw.substack.com/p/adl-fuels-islamophobia-and-betrays

ADL Fuels Islamophobia and Betrays Its Civil Rights Mission

by Sarah Aziz, Subscribe on Substack!

For decades, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was mentioned, it was usually in reference to combatting antisemitism. Now the ADL is more accurately cited in the litany of pro-Israeli groups attempting to criminalize Muslim and Palestinian students for seeking an end to the horrific genocide in Gaza.

For over a hundred years, the ADL has described itself as a leading civil rights organization focused on Jewish American communities but also recognizing that the civil rights of Jews are interconnected with those of other minority communities. Indeed, the ADL was among the few non-Black organizations supportive of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

However, the gradual acceptance of Jewish Americans by white Christians into the social construction of “whiteness” starting in the 1970s, after decades of anti-Jewish discrimination, caused a divergence in economic and political interests with racial minority communities that continue to face systemic racism. Of course, that does not mean antisemitism no longer exists, but it is not structural—as it was when Jews were victims of housing segregation, admissions quotas at universities, explicit racial tropes in mainstream media, exclusion from elite law firms, and underrepresentation in elected office.

Simultaneously, the ADL’s increasingly pro-Israeli donor base equated combating antisemitism with censoring critiques of Zionism and defending the state of Israel’s policies. The ADL branded their revised agenda as “The New Antisemitism.”

The ADL’s current priorities differ starkly from those of Jewish communities a century ago whose members were primarily working class, described as a dangerous “Hebrew” race, and intentionally discriminated against in education, housing, and employment.

Instead, the ADL has increasingly become associated with spreading Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. Since the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza in the fall of 2023, the ADL has been deploying its substantial resources to stop student activism and protests on university campuses—with seemingly little regard for the fundamental American right to free speech and political assembly.

Put simply, an established civil rights organization is targeting two of the minority groups most discriminated against today: Palestinians and Muslims. Such targeting goes beyond racist speech into advocacy to harm real people—mirroring the tactics of antisemites in the interwar years of the twentieth century.

Specifically, the ADL is demanding that Congress, university presidents, and executive branch officials deport, expel, and prosecute Palestinian, Muslim, and other minority students because of their belief that the antigenocide, post-Holocaust mantra “Never Again” applies equally to Palestinians. The latest example came last week when ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt “repeatedly compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to Islamist terrorists in comments to Republican attorneys general and said the left harbored the ‘real deal threat’ to Jews.” The head of this purported civil rights organization went on to peddle right-wing conservative propaganda that the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Occupy Wall Street Movement were threats to national security: “There is a throughline from Occupy Wall Street to BLM to ‘defund the police’ to ‘River to the Sea.’ . . . They are the same people, these are the same kind of nihilists.” He reportedly compared campus protesters—largely comprised of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old American college students—to the deadly foreign terrorist organizations ISIS and Al Qaeda at multiple points in his remarks to Republican attorneys general at their annual summer conference.

While it is tempting to dismiss such claims as absurd (and notably devoid of any evidence), Greenblatt’s group libel is in fact quite dangerous. As I explain in The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, calling Muslims and Arabs terrorists is an Islamophobic racial trope—one that has caused substantial physical, economic, and psychological harm to these communities since 9/11.

Muslim women wearing the hijab have been assaulted, harassed, and discriminated against because they are presumed to be terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. Muslim children have been bullied at school by classmates who accuse them of being terrorists, members of Al Qaeda, and a danger to America. Muslim employees have faced hostile work environments across the country by coworkers who accuse them of supporting the September 11 terrorist attacks, sympathizing with Al Qaeda, or being a threat to national security. Hundreds of thousands of Islamophobic incidents over twenty-five years have been documented by scholars, Muslim American groups, government agencies, and civil rights groups.

So when the ADL openly touts racist tropes at a conference of state attorney generals who have the authority to investigate, indict, and prosecute, it is no longer behaving like a civil rights organization. It is in the company of right-wing anti-immigrant groups.

The ADL’s obsession with censoring and criminalizing criticism of Israel, a foreign state, rather than addressing real antisemitism in the United States also threatens the safety of the considerable number of Jewish American students partaking in the pro-Palestine movement.

In turn, a substantial portion of antisemitism incidents in ADL reports are based exclusively on political dissent by students and faculty. Stating that Israel is committing a genocide, that Israel is enacting apartheid, that Israel is a racist state because of its treatment of Palestinians, and that Israel is an illegal occupier all count in the ADL’s inflated numbers purportedly documenting antisemitism.

One can most certainly contest those political statements and positions. But to claim that they are antisemitic when expressed in protests, sit-ins, teach-ins, and university events is more about imposing foreign policy orthodoxy than protecting Jews’ civil rights. And violating that orthodoxy now makes the speaker a terrorist comparable to ISIS and Al Qaeda.

That the ADL has resorted to peddling such racist tropes to call on government lawyers to criminalize dissent demonstrates the threat it poses to the civil rights of Palestinians and Muslims whose families and friends are being bombed, maimed, repeatedly displaced, and intentionally starved in Gaza.

Given its record of opposing white segregationists who followed a similar playbook against Black communities in the 1950s and 1960s, the ADL cannot feign ignorance of the harm it is causing to Muslim and Palestinian communities. Nor can it feign to be a civil rights organization.

Sahar Aziz is distinguished professor at Rutgers Law School. director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights and author of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.

This commentary was originally published in Academe here.