Under the guise of fighting hate speech, the ADL has a long history of wielding its moral authority to attack Arabs, blacks, and queers.

May 23, 2019

Read at Boston Review

Excerpt:

…Perhaps the most effective aspect of the ADL’s victory was to virtually displace from education those anti-racist organizations, local and national, that sought to discuss racism and white supremacy in terms of state power and dispossession. The ADL had labeled black-generated anti-racist education projects “extremist” and “anti-Semitic” in previous decades when they identified the state as playing a role in white supremacy. That analysis still struggles for oxygen in U.S. political culture. The ADL’s continued role as an authority on white supremacist groups in the present points to its consolidation of control, and its sidelining of the black-led groups contending for that space in the late ’80s. It is worth noting that anti-racist organizations from California to New York are still fighting with local school boards and universities over “A World of Difference” and other ADL curricula—and that Anti-Semitism Awareness Act proposed this year aims to empower the federal Department of Education to characterize Palestinian human rights demands as violations of American Jews’ civil rights.

In the same period, Arab American political groups were organizing as a U.S. constituency. Their organizing had been galvanized in the late ’60s and early ’70s by the Six Day War and by the FBI’s Operation Boulder, the first War on Terror–style program of surveillance, interrogation, and deportation of Arabs and Iranians in the United States (1972–1975.) By the mid-1980s, several national Arab political organizations were working to carve out an Arab representational politics. Among them, the Arab American Institute had brought Arab issues and voters to the national electoral sphere in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Rainbow Coalition, and American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee was conducting anti-defamation work along much the same lines as the ADL…