The scourge of antisemitism has been on the rise for several years in the U.S., most recently on college campuses, and perhaps most notoriously at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where 11 Jewish worshippers were slaughtered in 2018. The job of effectively combatting antisemitism was taken up to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). But in recent years, the ADL has been fumbling this important duty and now federal law enforcement has reconsidered it alliance with the group.
Unfortunately, the ADL, under the current leadership of Obama acolyte Jonathan Greenblatt, is little more than a leftwing activist group that often smears political conservatives and makes common cause with anti-American antisemites on the Left, including Black Lives Matter (BLM). The ADL must be reformed from top to bottom, starting with finding a new leader, and decoupling the organization’s efforts from the Left’s social and political agenda.
Many of the groups Greenblatt has aligned the ADL with since taking over in 2014 have been siding with Hamas in its war against Israel, which left Greenblatt and other liberal American Jews in a state of shock. As political commentator and orthodox American Jew, Dennis Prager has pointed out, the ADL likely foments more antisemitism than it defeats, given it engages in its lunacy in the name of the Jewish people. This includes endorsing a litany of leftist tropes such as whites are perpetrators of racism and cannot be the victims of it, wanting a secure American border is xenophobic and racist, and calling for the deplatforming of political conservatives, etc. The ADL under Greenblatt has gone so far as to hire antisemites in its own ranks.
Of course, the ADL now embraces “transgender females”, a.k.a., males, in female locker rooms, bathrooms, and on female sports teams. The organization also fully endorses the horrific practice of “gender affirming care” for minors, which includes puberty blockers, hormone treatment, and surgery, such as double mastectomies. It appears lost on the ADL that trashing the safety and civil rights of women and girls while championing the brutalization of children has more in common with antisemitic and discriminatory practices of the past, including eugenics, than any historical effort to fight hatred and bigotry against Jews or anyone else for that matter.
More recently, the ADL issued a fraudulent report claiming right-wing extremists are responsible for “all [34] identified extremist-related killings” between 2022 and 2024 in the U.S. However, many of the perpetrators in those cases were actually leftwing extremists or held a combination of radical beliefs. For example, Payton Gendron, the armed atheist and racist-Marxist who attacked a supermarket in Buffalo in 2022, targeted and killed 10 black patrons for supposedly overpopulating and harming the environment. Then there is the total exclusion of leftwing attacks, including anti-white racist Audrey Elizabeth Hale who in 2022 shot up the Covenant Catholic School in Tennessee, murdering six people, and Mr. Kimbrady Carriker, an anti-police BLM supporter who wore women’s clothes, who shot and killed five people in Philadelphia in 2023.
Given where the ADL is today, the FBI under the leadership of Kash Patel has now officially cut ties with the group in the fight against violent extremism. The spark that lit the fuse of disassociation was the ADL’s listing Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA as an “extremist group.” This vilification was in line with how other radical leftist organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center have depicted Turning Point. The ADL has since tried to walk back the characterization by calling it “outdated”, but such assertions ring hollow given the ADL’s recent history.
Haters of the Trump Administration will undoubtedly point to criticism of the ADL as its own form of antisemitism. This is nonsense. The truth is not antisemitic and the ADL for too long has tried to shield itself from accountability for its embrace of radicalism by invoking the specter of antisemitism as a defense. Moreover, President Trump and his administration have done more to directly combat antisemitism than any administration in recent memory. This includes confronting the incubators of anti-Americanism and antisemitism that are America’s “elite” universities, such as Harvard, Columbia, UPenn, and others.
Beyond America’s borders, Trump’s steadfast support of Israel as it seeks to finally end the terrorist scourge of Hamas has been no less remarkable. The president has excoriated leftwing leaders in France, the UK, Canada, and Australia, often to their faces and in front of the world, as they recognize a Palestinian state, despite Hamas’s terrorism, refusal to surrender, and free the hostages. While at home, the president has resisted a growing chorus of online rightwing voices that want him to dump Israel as a key ally.
Antisemitism is a deadly and growing problem. To effectively combat it requires a serious organization run by serious people. The modern ADL has no capacity to take on this mission. The ADL and its leadership have surrendered the group’s credibility at the altar of the woke Left’s social justice agenda. It must be rebuilt from the ground up and there’s no time to waste.
