Robert Inlakesh says the pushback against the ADL is a rebuke to the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by U.S. universities, companies, governments, political parties and lawmakers.
ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in 2017. (Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Robert Inlakesh
MintPress News
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has long been regarded as a trustworthy source on anti-Semitism by Western corporate media.
Its reports have often been central to discussions about the rise of attacks against Jewish people. However, the ADL now faces significant backlash for its brazen conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Wikipedia has added the New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to a list of banned and partially banned sources due to its conflation of anti-Jewish hate crimes and anti-Israel critiques.
After editors voted it “unreliable” as a source of information, the ADL now finds itself alongside sources like Newsmax and Occupy Democrats. This development places the ADL, considered part of the vast network of groups that form the Israel Lobby, in the category of unreliable information sources.
“ADL no longer appears to adhere to a serious, mainstream, and intellectually cogent definition of antisemitism. Instead, it has succumbed to the shameless politicization of the very subject it was originally esteemed for being reliable on,” said Wikipedia editor Iskandar 323.
The labeling of the ADL as unreliable is a major blow to the narrative pushed by Western media since December. This narrative cited the NGO’s reported data on an unprecedented spike in anti-Semitic incidents following Oct. 7.
The ADL claimed that anti-Semitic incidents rose by 360 percent after the beginning of the war on Gaza and that 140 percent more incidents occurred in 2023 compared to the previous year.
Sign reading, “Divest from zionist genocide” at George Washington University in Washington on April 28, 2024. (Fuzheado, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
However, the ADL has admitted to changing its definition of what constitutes an anti-Semitic incident. This new definition now includes pro-Palestinian protests that featured “anti-Zionist chants and slogans.” According to The Forward, these accounted for around 1,317 of the total incidents reported.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO, has also repeatedly come under fire for his comments regarding anti-war student protests across the United States. During an interview with MSNBC, he claimed that “Iran has their military proxies like Hezbollah, and Iran has their campus proxies like these groups like SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] and JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace].”
In response to this, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) protested the platforming of Greenblatt. Deputy Executive Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell stated,
“Falsely claiming that Jewish and Palestinian student organizations are literal proxies of the Iranian government is a dangerous and defamatory slander that has no place on MSNBC or any other television network.”
Edward Ahmed Mitchell. (Twitter/X)
Mitchell also addressed other comments by Greenblatt, who describes the ADL as a civil rights group. He asserted, “No civil rights leader would ever equate Jewish and Palestinian college students with Hezbollah, analogize the Nazi swastika to the Palestinian keffiyeh, or question whether Hamas sympathizers were writing MSNBC scripts.”
In January, an ADL staff revolt occurred after CEO Jonathan Greenblatt praised Elon Musk, who had seemingly endorsed the anti-Semitic theory that minority communities are responsible for anti-Semitism and that Jewish people are to blame. Greenblatt also sparked controversy when a leaked call revealed him stating that “we have a major TikTok problem” and generational issues in garnering public support for Israel.
The subsequent targeting of TikTok by the U.S. Congress, involving politicians receiving donations from Israel Lobby groups, suggested that anti-Israeli content was a factor in the legislative push to ban the app.
The pushback from Wikipedia against the ADL and its definition of anti-war activists protesting Zionism is a rebuke of the controversial definition of anti-Semitism put forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
This IHRA definition, now adopted by hundreds of universities, companies, governments, political parties, and the U.S. House of Representatives, includes examples of criticism of Israel and Zionism.
Thus, the conflation between criticism of Israel and hatred of Jewish people is not just an ADL problem, as the pro-Israeli group could argue that it is following this widely accepted definition.
Feature photo | Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks during 2023 National Action Network (NAN) Triumph Awards at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York on October 16, 2023. Lev Radin | AP
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show “Palestine Files.” Director of “Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe.” Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47
This article is from MPN.news is an award winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Regarding the distinction between anti-semitism and anti-zionism, I agree in principal. However, in practice on the street level, there are a whole lot of anti-zionists who are sloppy with their rhetoric and very clearly lapse into anti-semitism. Also, the protests/vandalism at people’s homes crosses the line between anti-zionism and anti-semitism. When you are target a particular Jew, that’s not anti-zionism and it’s not protest. It’s intimidation meant to silence or create fear in an ideological enemy.
hXXps://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/12/nyregion/anti-zionist-graffiti-jewish-museum-officials.html
This action by Wikipedia is by itself a reason t donate to the platform. I’m very glad I have.
With the passing of my son I’m afraid I’ve fallen behind in my efforts to keep up with the flow of discussions of new developments here. I’m working to get myself centered.
Great to see the responses here.. Especially those of Drew Hunkins.
It’s a mistake to presume that there’s some kind of official institutional process at work when decisions like this are made on Wikipedia. There is not. The decision of what constitutes a citable source and what doesn’t is made by whatever group of accounts happen to be posting on the appropriate discussion board at the time it’s being discussed–and without question that often includes interest groups masquerading as private editors.
Wikipedia also hardly needs your money and it hasn’t for some time now. It has all the money it needs to run the encyclopedia and then a lot more. And the Wikimedia Foundation has been misusing donations for close to a decade now, regularly spending money on things that directly contradict the rules of Wikipedia, such as paying for “editor boot camps” in opposition to the traditional policies against paid editing.
Well I’m glad Wikipedia is on the ball with this. I just wish they were as vigilant with other postings that offer misinformation, incorrect facts and other falsehoods. I still wouldn’t use them as credible reference source on any information I want to validate.
This is important news. Funny I didn’t notice it in the MSM. Maybe I just missed it?
How is it important that arguably the most poltically biased and unreliable site on the internet (Wikipedia) has branded another organization as unreliable? Wikipedia is a cesspool. There is a reason that every high school teacher and college professor in the world won’t accept citations from it.
hxxps://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically-biased
Even it’s own founder despises what it has become.
hxxps://www.itnews.com.au/news/wikipedia-broken-beyond-repair-says-co-founder-78127
It’s laughable to think of Wikipedia as an arbiter of factual reliability.
The nonjewish communities mentioned in the Balfour Declaration were the majority of Palestine for a thousand years. It was absurd Zionism was ever thought to be sustainable.
“ADL no longer appears to adhere to a serious, mainstream, and intellectually cogent definition of antisemitism. Instead, it has succumbed to the shameless politicization of the very subject it was originally esteemed for being reliable on,” said Wikipedia editor Iskandar 323…. is:
ISRAEL HOLDING AN INVESTIGATION OF ITSELF !!!!
ADL does not have a TikTok problem. The ADL has a TRUTH problem.
Thank you, Consortium News, for this terrific article exposing the ADL.
Not everyone knows that in 2007 Armenian Americans, principled Jews, and others got a dozen cities in Massachusetts to throw out the ADL’s so-called “No Place for Hate” program.
It came about because the ADL was denying/diminishing the Armenian Genocide and had long worked with Israel & Turkey to defeat Armenian Genocide resolutions in the US Congress.
I would be too eager to. Here for such a policy decision by Wikipedia when the website itself routinely smears independent journalists such as the intrepid muckrakers of the Grayzone as “conspiracy theorists”.
The ADL also finds its reputation on Wikipedia alongside sources like Consortium News and Grayzone. The Wikipedia self-governing process and source-vetting process are both broken at a fundamental level. I would frankly read this more as a reflection of ADL being overwhelmed on Wikipedia by other interest groups, rather than anything necessarily reflecting a shift in public opinion. This is still saying something, because Israel’s public relations/cyberwarfare employees have been waging long entrenched battles on Wikipedia for ages.
Exactly
I’m no fan of the ADL’s tactic of conflating anti-zionism with anti-semitism, but them being slammed by Wikipedia as an unreliable purveyor of misinformation puts them in pretty good company. Wikipedia is a major source of misinformation itself.
Wow! Very surprising and possibly short lived in light of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger’s pro-Zionist leanings.
The ADL needs to bring Abraham Foxman back.
Wiki is already biased in certain areas and in certain ways. Ergo, for Wiki to call out the ADL for inappropriate conduct is saying something.
No kidding there’s a “TikTok problem” — reality is radical at times, young people are starting to see through the ruse of obfuscatory opacity the pro-Israel zealots are expert at producing. The Baby Boomers only had network TV and some giant corporate newspapers to rely on, that world of conformity is dissipating and it scares the daylights out of Greenblatts ill.
Not true “Baby Boomers only had…” City newspapers still had real labor sections, not just tiny asides in the biz section. There were well circulated labor union newsletters and magazines, which civil rights, women’s liberation, and nascent gay and lesbian rights organizations also had. All written articulately and with verifiable sources, unlike many of the badly spelled and abbreviated single sentence ignorant personal opinions that all too often pass for communications now.
The lesson learned by the pol and econ elites during the Vietnam war, seen live by Boomers (both protesters and draftees) plus their parents and grandparents, was not to allow TV and print journalists to show the grisly truth ever again. So yes, a definite advantage to having cell phones–instant documentation.
The generation before the Boomers had FDR’s end run around corporate newspapers with the radio broadcasts of his Fireside chats. Plus an active rank and file Dem party that won elections by direct communications and active efforts like doorbelling. (True through the mid-’70s.) Similar activists with the NDP in Canada and a real Labour party in Britain.
The generation before them had people like my logger grandfather, a Wobbly (I.W.W.–if you don’t know, look it up. Another advantage of the current era, although it does require knowing which sources are reliable.) Consider Eugene Debs, a whistlestop orator, democratic socialist, and labor organizer whom ordinary people somehow found out about. As did the Populists of the same era–a farmer-labor coalition.
All of these movements scared the plutocrats of their eras, too.
I’m referring to what the typical Baby Boomer had in general. What you’re referring to are excellent publications/sources but they were pretty much read by people in the know, not necessarily the average Baby Boomer in Peoria.
Conversely, TikTok, Twitter(X), and other online sources reach a much broader audience.
The sources and outlets you mentioned aren’t scaring the plutocrats like the current social media wave, which is exactly why the ADL and other national security state rulers are desperately trying to cancel or censor them.
I was one of those “typical and in general.” 28 years a blue collar worker. Contrary to what intellectual elitists want to believe some of us can read, write, and think. In them olden days, the majority of us–we the people–had the time and energy to read local newspapers. We weren’t so overworked and underpaid as today. Most actually knew who their representatives in Congress and in state legislatures were. Plus there wasn’t the great disconnect between government and average voters because until the late ’70s the Dem party was still run by New Dealers. And the Republicans had many progressives in office.
Read again the examples I listed. How do you think all of that happened?! It wasn’t upper middle class professionals sitting in their parlors amused by New Yorker cartoons. And contrary to what leftist wanna-be vanguards want to believe, we the working class are capable of somehow finding out the truth, of figuring out what we need, and of organizing ourselves. We ARE “people in the know!” Harry Bridges, Cesar Chavez, and Fannie Lou Hamer certainly weren’t from the better classes. We appreciate expertise and academic support, but we also know that isn’t enough.