The ADL has got to go

Editor’s Note: The following article first appeared in Mitchell Plitnick’s Substack newsletter, Cutting Through, on June 8, 2025. Read more of Cutting Through, and subscribe, here.

As private citizens, even in our numbers, we are often limited in what we can accomplish, especially in the short term. This is especially true in the fight for Palestinian rights, where we not only confront massive economic and political power, but also a geostrategic map that doesn’t favor our cause. Perhaps most daunting of all, we have to contend with a public that is woefully misinformed but holds a significant and vocal minority which, whether out of hate or ignorance enthusiastically supports the most heinous and repulsive Israeli attacks on innocent Palestinians.

We can be most effective in the realm of public opinion. We rally, we march, we protest, we sit in, we block traffic. These activities have had an effect, even if that effect has grown at a maddeningly slow pace, while we watch more and more children die.

For years, outside of government offices, the main target has quite correctly been the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). There have been some real effects, as a few more politicians—again, not nearly enough—have realized that they can stand against AIPAC. The organization has become a symbol for corruption and the manipulation of campaign finance to enact unpopular legislation and policy. Those efforts need to continue.

But there is another threat that is clear, present, and, like AIPAC, starts by threatening the movement for Palestinian rights but is, in fact, threatening civil liberties, and the lives of many Arab, Jewish, progressive, and non-white Americans.

Unlike AIPAC, which has always made it abundantly clear that they act in the interest of the state of Israel, this group is a true wolf in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be a civil rights and anti-hate organization while, in fact, being exactly the opposite. That group is, of course, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Open bigotry and alliance with the far right

To see what the ADL really is, one need look no further than its unapologetic, racist, Islamophobic, and, yes, antisemitic CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. On June 6, Greenblatt shed his disguise once and for all, in an openly racist rant to a national meeting of Republican Attorneys Generals.

“…you have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what’s happening on the left,” Greenblatt said Friday, according to audio released by The Forward reporter, Jacob Kornbluh.

“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,” Greenblatt added.

The Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements are defined as “nihilistic” by Greenblatt. In using that terminology, he makes clear his opposition to economic reform and to movements that seek to address the massive inequality in the world, both within Western countries and between the Global North and South.

Black Lives Matter also is nihilistic for Greenblatt, making clear his opposition to racial justice and equality, to the idea that a debt might be owed to people historically wronged by racism, slavery, genocide, and apartheid. Surely, of course, redress for Jews suffering from genocidal bigotry is not so nihilistic as it is for non-Jewish Black people. It’s unambiguous racism.

It goes without saying that the Palestinian cause would be his main target. His particular choice of label is interesting, though. Greenblatt collectively labels the group of people who support Palestinian rights, “From the River to the Sea,” a phrase routinely used by Israeli leaders to refer not to any Palestinian vision but to the Israeli goal of “Greater Israel.”

Sometimes they use different words, but it is actually Israelis who express this desire as a genocidal concept publicly. Palestinians have called for equality and democracy in all of what was Palestine under the British Mandate. Despite the facts on the ground, some Palestinians still call for a state on the West Bank and Gaza, separate from Israel.

But Greenblatt’s willfully misleading use of the term is meant to apply to the entire Palestinian rights movement. Further, he claims that the call is not for equality, but for the expulsion or even mass killing of Israeli Jews, a claim which is simply false. From the river to the sea” is nothing more or less than a call for freedom for ALL the people who live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Greenblatt knows his audience, and he knows exactly how they will understand Occupy, BLM, and any group supporting Palestinian rights: through an extreme and racist lens. More than that, his choice to describe them all as nihilists echoes the far-right talking point that groups all anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, and pro-LGBTQI movements as opponents of western values.

While it is certainly a defensible point that such movements are anti-Western if one understands European/Western culture as colonialist, racist, oligarchical, and patriarchal, that is not where Greenblatt is taking this, obviously.

Greenblatt makes this clear, saying “They’re not just opposed to Jews, although they are. They’re opposed to the West, they’re opposed to capitalism, they’re opposed to America.” This is exactly what the far right is saying about everyone from the moderate middle to the activist left. (It should also be noted that it is false. Jews are disproportionately represented in the Palestinian rights movement, Occupy, BLM, and many other social justice movements, and are some of the proudest Jews you will find, often wearing their Judaism quite prominently. It is absurd to label any of Occupy, BLM, or the Palestinian rights movement as “opposed to Jews.” On the other hand, some supporters of the Palestinians are otherwise rather conservative people, though on campus, to be sure, it is overwhelmingly a progressive bunch. While the media like to portray this as left vs right, it’s a false and over-simplified picture.)

Greenblatt is painting all of these movements—and particularly the movement for Palestinian rights—as a dangerous threat, as potentially violent. By characterizing them as nihilists, he is evoking an image of “brown hoards” with their white allies marauding the people he is speaking to and their families.

That’s no exaggeration. Later in his speech, Greenblatt said, “You have people hiding their faces behind scarves and keffiyehs like they’re in ISIS, storming libraries, vandalizing buildings and literally – I’m not exaggerating – terrorizing their classmates,” he said.

He doubled down on the racism and white supremacy, saying “…the founding fathers didn’t want al-Qaeda right (sic) running rampant on our streets,” and describing campus opponents of Israel’s genocide “frothing at the mouth, looking like they just came out of Mosul.”

A key audience

One might be tempted to downplay this as mere racist ramblings. But bear in mind to who Greenblatt was speaking.

This was a gathering of Republican attorneys general. He wasn’t just promoting racism to a random crowd of listeners, which would be horrifying enough. Knowing he was speaking to a roomful of people well-known to be on the far-right, to despise civil liberties, to embrace racist views, and to act to persecute protesters, and people of color, Greenblatt was orienting his audience toward dreadful action.

He advocated for making masks illegal at protests. He implied that people wore these masks so they could break laws, rather than what they are: a response to the loathsome practice of harassment and doxxing that pro-Israel groups have engaged in since the very beginning of the protest movement. He doesn’t care that others might be risking their education or even their continued residence in this country due to illegal immigration operations. He mocked Mahmoud Khalil who remains in federal custody for no reason other than objecting to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Greenblatt is trying to activate the attorneys general to take action, not in defense of Jews, but in defense of the American support for Israel’s genocide, a policy that is unpopular and becoming increasingly so.

But really, what he is trying to do is set these attorneys general to persecute Americans and legal residents here for exercising their right to speak, their right to oppose their countries partnership in a particularly brutal and ugly genocide.

He is trying to do it by activating racism and extreme nationalism, much like Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir are doing in Israel to great success. Also, like them, he is trying to intimidate Jews in America from speaking out, realizing how powerful it is for Palestinians to have Jews standing up for them and screaming “Not In My Name” for the world to hear.

Jonathan Greenblatt is as racist, as Islamophobic, as nationalistic, and, yes, as antisemitic as any figure of hate in this country, be they leading the Proud Boys, the Klan, or the White House.

He must be opposed. More than that, the ADL, with its long history of racist activities such as spying on activists who worked against apartheid in South Africa, on anti-racist and anti-war activists in the U.S. for the U.S. and South African governments. These were activities that had no direct relationship to Israel and, indeed, had to be kept secret, first and foremost from ADL’s own supporters, many of whom would have been angry at such actions. Yet activities like them have long been a part of ADL’s operations and continue to this day.

Both the Council on Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) came out with strong statements condemning Greenblatt.

CAIR stated: “We strongly condemn ADL Director Jonathan Greenblatt’s unhinged, racist rant attacking Black, Arab and Muslim Americans during a speech to Republican attorneys general. Although Mr. Greenblatt’s vile remarks are nothing new for the ADL, it is long past time for this organization to fire him and stop smearing Black, Palestinian and Muslim activists in a transparent attempt to protect the genocidal Israeli government from legitimate criticism.”

MPAC was just as direct: “Mr. Greenblatt’s comparison of peaceful student protesters to members of ISIS and al-Qaeda is not only inflammatory—it represents a categorical misapplication of the legal framework surrounding the First Amendment and a dangerous invitation to suppress protected speech under the guise of national security…This is merely the latest example of how the ADL, a purported civil rights organization, throws academic freedom and 1st Amendment rights under the bus using debunked, discredited, and discriminatory social science based on harmful stereotypes of Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians. The ADL cannot, in good conscience, continue to be seen as a credible partner on civil rights, hate, and religious freedom. We ask members of the interfaith community, civil rights organizations, and religious freedom groups to join us in publicly condemning Mr. Greenblatt’s egregious statements. This is not the first time he has made egregious remarks about students on campus and will not be the last.”

Indeed, MPAC is quite correct. Any group that is honestly opposed to antisemitism, to Islamophobia, to the Trump agenda, and that supports democracy, human and civil rights cannot accept the ADL as partner or a legitimate actor of any kind. This MUST start with Jewish groups, and we all need to condemn this vile racist and this group that pretends to defend us while harming us and other innocents.

But it must continue with any group dedicated to fighting hate. Institutions like the Southern Poverty Law Center cannot retain their own legitimacy if they work in any kind of partnership with the ADL, as they have until now.

Racism cannot be tolerated, and it is particularly pernicious when it uses the fight against antisemitism as a shield for its tidal flow of bile. If you believe that democracy is important, that human rights are important, and that our principles should not be sacrificed to support a genocidal and apartheid regime in Israel, then you must join the fight against the ADL with as much dedication as the one against AIPAC.