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John, the “polite Zionists” like ADL will not be silent in the face of antisemitism.
In a vile, conspiracy-laden attack on the mainstream US Jewish community, a senior executive of CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) warned about “the polite Zionists,” a group that according to her includes “the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Federations, Hillel and ‘Zionist synagogues.’”
In a recent speech that came to light just last week, Zahra Billoo, head of the San Francisco office of CAIR, blamed ADL and these other Jewish institutions for a variety of America’s ills, and claimed that “Islamophobia is a well-funded conspiracy, a well-funded project” by Jewish communal organizations.
She spun a vast conspiracy, claiming that Jewish organizations support poverty, homelessness and police brutality, that they are Islamophobic and attack Muslims. Billoo instructed her audience that any Jew or Jewish organization that supports the right to exist for the world’s only Jewish state or that supports the “laughable” goal of a two-state solution is an integral part of the “Islamophobia industry.” These Jews and their organizations, she went on to say, repeatedly, will always betray the Muslim community, and are bent on dehumanizing and silencing
Muslims. Billoo explained that Zionists — meaning the majority of Jews — want to dehumanize Muslims precisely because Muslims fight for Black Lives Matter, care for the environment, fight against homelessness and poverty, for police accountability and for Palestine.
Such claims fly in the face of the work ADL, Federations, synagogues and others have done to fight Islamophobia, to track and expose anti-Muslim extremism, and to foster dialogue and understanding between our communities. They fly in the face of hundreds of years of combined work supporting civil rights and liberties in this and other countries. In reality, ADL’s support
for and partnership with the Muslim community is steadfast and well-documented. This includes partnerships with leading national and local organizations and submission of amicus briefs in appellate courts on a range of issues impacting the Muslim community including the travel ban, freedom of worship, equal protection and more. Let me be clear: claiming that American Jewish organizations exist to subject Americans to poverty, brutality, and hatred is classic conspiratorial antisemitism.
To brazenly refer to the vast majority of American Jews as enemies solely because of their connection to the Jewish homeland, to repeatedly blame Jews for Islamophobia and to unapologetically promote tropes used against Jews for millennia, is offensive. Israel is a meaningful part of the identity of most Jews in America and the world, so demonizing “Zionists” is a clear attack on them. CAIR obviously should reject such hate without hesitation but it has a long and problematic history of anti-Israel rhetoric. Here is an
ADL backgrounder on CAIR.
What You Can Do To Stay Informed and Speak Up With ADL
In these challenging times, we encourage you to stay up to date about antisemitic activity and how ADL and our communities are responding. Two great ways to do that are:
And please, if you experience or witness an incident of antisemitism or extremism, use our incident-reporting form to bring it to ADL’s attention.
| Thank you for being part of the ADL community, |
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| Jonathan Greenblatt |
| CEO and National Director |
| ADL |
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