October 17, 2010

ADL from skulduggery to stupidity and back again

It's a bit of old news now that the self-styled Anti-Defamation League has produced a list of "top 10 anti-Israel groups in America" but this article on the Daily Beast site sets out some examples of what the author calls the ADL's skulduggery so it's a bit useful in spite of the author's own concern that Israel's supporters might be "smeared" as anti-Israel:
In the 1980s, at a time when Israel maintained close ties with South Africa, the ADL went on the attack against Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. As Sasha Polakow-Suransky reported in his recent book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, ADL National Director Nathan Perlmutter co-authored an article implying that the ANC was “totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel and anti-American.” The ADL sent spies into the American anti-apartheid movement, as well as other movements critical of right-wing American foreign policy. Eventually, the organization was surveilling much of the American left. In 1993, a California police raid on the offices of the ADL and one of its investigators yielded files on Greenpeace, the NAACP, Act Up, New Jewish Agenda, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and several Democratic politicians, among hundreds of others. The ADL eventually settled a class-action lawsuit brought by several of its targets.
Links to the ADL's hitlist are all broken so it may be that the ADL has pulled the list but when you consider the ADL's past support for apartheid in South Africa, it's a bit rich when it and its kindred groups and individuals get so apoplectic whenever Israel is understatedly denounced as an apartheid state.

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