[Peace-discuss] "Anti-Defamation League"

[C. G. Estabrook]

[With reference to our recent discussion of co-sponsorship, I'm taking
the liberty of sending around a column of mine that appeared in the
Octopus in March of 2000. Regards, Carl]

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NEWS FROM NEPTUNE: THOUGHT CRIME

Recently a representative from the self-styled "Anti-Defamation League"
(ADL) was in town, speaking in support of "hate-crime" laws.  These laws
are generally unconstitutional and ineffective for their announced
purposes, although agitation for them does tend to advance the unannounced
agendas of their promoters.

Hate-crime laws increase the penalty for crimes -- or even change then
from misdemeanors to felonies -- on the basis of ideas (typically racist
ideas) understood to be the motivations for the crimes.  Such ideas may be
reprehensible, but it's important to see that if they were simply
expressed as opinions, they would be the sort of speech protected by the
First Amendment.  Hate-crime laws, by treating some crimes more seriously
on the basis of the opinions of the perpetrators, criminalize ideas -- and
the First Amendment prohibits the government from doing that.

Of course governments always want to be able to suppress some ideas, and
both liberals and conservatives in the U.S. regularly attempt to do so
when in power.  The famous observation, that free speech does not include
"falsely shouting fire in a theatre," came from the liberal Supreme Court
justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as he upheld the legality of the Wilson
administration's jailing of those who spoke against America's entry into
the First World War.  Opposition to the country's wars is regularly taken
to be a hate-crime in itself, a manifestation of disloyalty or treasonous
sympathy for the country's enemies.  When the government tried to suppress
dissent against the Vietnam War by trying some activists on charges of
promoting demonstrations in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic convention, the
late Abbie Hoffman said that he was being prosecuted for "crossing state
lines in an illegal state of mind."

Hate-crime laws are ostensibly designed to reduce racism, but instead they
seem in practice simply to be adding to the mechanisms available to
government for the social control of poorer economic groups, within which
people of color are disproportionally represented.  (The percentage of
black men imprisoned in the U.S. is now four times greater than it was in
South Africa under apartheid.)  The promoters of hate-crime laws say that
such laws will help to protect African-Americans against violent white
racists, but according to the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime
Victimization Survey for 1997, blacks are twice as likely to be prosecuted
for hate-crimes as whites.  That's perhaps not surprising in a country
that has more prisoners than any other country in the world, and almost
70% of them people of color.

That the Anti-Defamation League should be promoting hate-crime laws is
hardly surprising, however, given that there are some opinions it
particularly wants to suppress.  It has passed from being a civil rights
organization to being a propaganda organization for the state of Israel,
and it wants to equate criticism of Israeli policies with the racism that
hate-crime laws are supposed to counter.  It has of course long been the
case that defenders of Israel have tried to take advantage of revulsion
against racism in general and against anti-Jewish sentiments in particular
to insist that any opposition to Israel is racism.  "One of the chief
tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world," wrote the Israeli diplomat
Abba Eban, "is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and
anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all."

As one commentator put it ten years ago, "The ADL has virtually abandoned
its earlier role as a civil rights organization, becoming one of the main
pillars of Israeli propaganda in the U.S., as the Israeli press casually
describes it, engaged in surveillance, blacklisting, compilation of
FBI-style files circulated to adherents for the purpose of defamation,
angry public responses to criticism of Israeli actions, and so on. These
efforts, buttressed by insinuations of anti-Semitism or direct
accusations, are intended to deflect or undermine opposition to Israeli
policies, including Israel's refusal, with U.S. support, to move towards a
general political settlement. The ADL was condemned by the Middle East
Studies Association after circulation of an ADL blacklist to campus Jewish
leaders, stamped 'confidential'."

For more than thirty years the U.S. has used Israel as its principal
client and regional enforcer in the Middle East at a cost of billions of
dollars a year, vastly more than the U.S. gives to any other country in
the world.  It's clear what the U.S. wants for its money, and the ADL
supports that arrangement.  A former director of the ADL admitted that
old-fashioned anti-Semitism was on the decline in America, but that "the
real anti-Semitism" was found among "peacemakers of Vietnam vintage,
transmuters of swords into plowshares" who condemn American military
intervention and "snipe at American defense budgets."  He saw it as a
danger to Israel that "nowadays war is getting a bad name and peace too
favorable a press."

For all its apparent concern about racism in general, the ADL has a
peculiar notion of where the real dangers come from. Its fact-finding
director, Irwin Suall, told journalists in conversations in the early and
mid-1980's that the chief domestic danger to American Jews was the
American left -- especially black leftists -- who were backed by the
Soviet Union.  Of course, the ADL is in a bit of a logical cleft stick:
with ostensibly anti-racist campaigns it seeks to promote the interests of
a state founded on racism.  Israel, unlike any other country in the world,
says it is not the country of its inhabitants but of a group defined by
race -- the Jewish people world-wide.

This winter a federal judge issued a permanent injunction forbidding the
ADL to engage in illegal information gathering.  The judge told the
officers of the organization that they must provide an annual statement
for the next four years, explaining the steps taken to remain in
compliance with the order.  A news report explained, "The order resulted
from a suit that claimed the ADL had illegally spied on several
Arab-American groups as well as numerous activist organizations including
Greenpeace, the United Farm Workers Union, ACT-UP, and the American Indian
Movement.  More than eight hundred groups and individuals claimed the ADL
had carried out 'surveillance and gathered data on the lawful activists of
private persons and organizations involved in the civil rights and social
justice struggles'."

In 1993 the San Francisco Police Department discovered that the ADL was
providing information on Americans and American organizations to the spy
agencies of Israel ("Mossad") and Israel's ally, apartheid South Africa.
The ADL targeted presumed enemies of Israel, including House Armed
Services Committee Chairman Ron Dellums, former Congressman Pete
McCloskey, Los Angeles Times correspondent Scott Kraft, the board of
directors of public television station KQED, the Rainbow Coalition, a
number of labor unions, as well as other journalists, academics, and
members of Congress.  The police raided the ADL offices and confiscated
surveillance files -- some of which had been purloined from the police
themselves.  It has been pointed out that the way in which the ADL
obtained the police files -- and the fact that they sold them to foreign
governments -- were both felonies. But in spite of the ADL's motivations,
it's unlikely that it will be charged with a hate-crime...

We should not pay much attention to so disingenuous and discredited a
group -- particularly when they try to sell us a bill of goods called
"hate-crimes."

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