THE ADL TOOK $1.75 MILLION FROM A FUNDER OF ALT-LEFT ANTI-SEMITISM, NOW IT’S IGNORING ALT-LEFT HATE
Why won’t the ADL fight alt-Left anti-Semitism? Follow the money.
January 18, 2019
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
On February 2017, Juan Thompson, a former reporter for the alt-left hate site, The Intercept, phoned in a bomb threat to the ADL. The phone threat targeting the ADL’s headquarters was one of a number of threats that the disgraced activist and journalist had made to a variety of Jewish organizations.
On November 2017, the ADL tweeted its gratitude to the Omidyar Network, the foundation behind The Interceptfor donating $250,000 in seed money to set up a Silicon Valley center for fighting online hate.
Another $1.5 million would be provided by Omidyar to fund the Center on Technology and Society.
After being targeted for harassment by one of The Intercept’s failed bigots, the ADL responded by getting into bed with his employer, a leading financier of alt-left anti-Semitism on the internet.
Thompson’s hateful threats against Jewish institutions have been downplayed as the side effects of stalking an ex-girlfriend, but this glib dismissal doesn’t address his choice to terrorize Jewish institutions or how the hateful culture of the alt-left hate site he had worked for had contributed to his bigotry.
The ADL has chosen to ignore the subject and most alt-left anti-Semitism on the internet.
"Fifty years ago, extremists were hiding behind hoods and burning crosses. Today, they're hiding behind avatars and burning up Twitter. I'm grateful to Omidyar Network for its generous support an thankful that the board members are sharing their expertise to help us put a stop to online hate," Jonathan Greenblatt, the Obama vet who now heads the ADL, cheered.
Implicit in Greenblatt’s reference to hoods and burning crosses, was that the ADL and its new Center on Technology and Society would be targeting online hate from the alt-right, not the alt-left. Greenblatt’s tweet thanking a funder of alt-left anti-Semitism for its support, mentioned hate, not anti-Semitism.
And there was good reason for that.
Omidyar’s The Intercept is on the front lines of whitewashing and defending alt-left anti-Semitism. When CNN ended its relationship with Marc Lamont Hill, after his defense of Muslim violence against Jews, The Intercept’sGlenn Greenwald defended Hill and claimed that he had been the victim of “right-wing defenders of Israel” who had “somehow construed as… anti-semitic” his defense of killing Jews.
Greenwald obviously doesn’t believe that killing Jewish men, women and children in order to ethnically cleanse them from a region and establish an Islamic state under which non-Muslims would have few legal rights is anti-Semitic as he had previously also defended Hamas and Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah and Hamas,” Greenwald had said, “are devoted to protecting their citizens against the state of Israel. And yet it is criminal in the United States to do anything that is deemed to be support for Hezbollah and Hamas.”
The Intercept has a history of reporting on Israel that is little better than Hamas propaganda.
During a past conflict with Hamas, The Intercept ran a Greenwald rant claiming that, “’militants’ in Gaza are often nothing more than residents who take up arms to defend their homes against an invading and occupying army.” A non-Greenwald Intercept article declared, “Gazans have the right to invade Israel.”
But The Intercept doesn’t just limit itself to supporting the murder of Jews in Israel by anti-Semitic religious and racial supremacists, a foul habit that the left justifies as anti-Zionism, not anti-Semitism.
The Intercept has defended anti-Semitism by Corbynites in the British Labour Party, attempted to provide cover for the anti-Semitic leadership of the Women’s March, and Keith Ellison’s past support for Farrakhan. Shaun King, who has written for The Intercept, has defended Farrakhan and attacked Jewish critics in his own movementwho objected to the anti-Semitism of Farrakhan and Tamika Mallory.
Much of this hate took place online, and especially on social media, with little response from the ADL.
The ADL’s funding by the Omidyar Network may help explain why it has been so militant in the fight against alt-right anti-Semitism, and yet so completely absent in resisting alt-left anti-Semitism.
The ADL could have argued that it took Omidyar’s money, despite his problematic funding of online hate, and intended to put it to good use. But the Persian Silicon Valley billionaire is far too savvy to just hand out cash. The seven figure grant, after a bomb threat aimed at the ADL by one of his former people, might have been seen as a public relations stunt. But Pierre Omidyar always has an agenda.
Omidyar’s money set up the Center on Technology and Society, using the ADL brand to provide cover for a deeply disturbing program for potentially automating online censorship. And the board of tech experts named by the ADL’s Greenblatt includes at least one figure with anti-Semitic connections.
The Center on Technology and Society is supposed to provide guidelines to online companies for cracking down on hate. And yet the board of tech experts includes Eli Pariser, the board president of MoveOn and a co-founder of Avaaz, radical left-wing groups with their own histories of anti-Semitism. Both organizations are notorious for their Soros backing, their hostility to Israel and friendliness to hate.
Avaaz has promoted BDS and teamed up with JVP, an anti-Israel hate group that hosted a murderous terrorist, an anti-Israel activist who claimed that Jews drank Christian blood and republished a bizarre claim that “the Zionists who created Israel and still run it are descended from the Khazars.”
Including an Avaaz figure on its board puts the ADL at two degrees of separation from the ugliest forms of anti-Semitism, at one degree of separation from support for anti-Semitic violence and at zero degrees of separation from BDS and other anti-Israel activism that whitewash violence against Jews.
Meanwhile the pre-Greenblatt ADL had objected to MoveOn’s increasingly anti-Semitic campaign against Senator Lieberman. It even dispatched a letter to Eli Pariser, who now sits on the CTS board, about comments on its forum referring to him as “Jew Lieberman”. That might be dismissed as old news, except that in 2015, MoveOn had campaigned against Senator Schumer on the Iran Deal by accusing him of neo-conservative sympathies and declaring, "Our country doesn’t need another Joe Lieberman in the Senate."
What did Schumer have in common with Lieberman? They’re both obviously Jewish. The “our country” line had a pro-Iran alt-left group trying to hurl a dual loyalty accusation while wrapped in the flag.
Two years after issuing an anti-Semitic dog whistle aimed at a top Jewish Democrat for being insufficiently pro-Iran, MoveOn got a seat at the table in deciding what is online hate.
The tech advisory board members for ADL’s CTS lean to the left. That’s not surprising. And while there are anti-Israel voices, such as Eli Pariser and Craig Newmark, who has prominently backed the anti-Israel NIF, it’s hard to find any equally strong pro-Israel voices. And that raises serious questions about CTS’ agenda and credibility especially as it seeks to automate online censorship.
At the heart of CTS is an alliance with the UC Berkeley’s D-Lab to automate recognition of hate speech using machine learning. Considering UC Berkeley’s problems with anti-Semitism, it’s an odd choice to have its faculty and students put in charge of determining what hate speech is. Let alone allowing its algorithms to be potentially used to automatically flag and censor speech they disagree with it.
Especially as the censorship of pro-Israel activists on social media continues to be a growing concern. And anti-Semitic tweets, as well as comments on DailyKos and the Huffington Post, along with other alt-left sites, are not receiving the same scrutiny that CTS’ Online Hate Index is aiming to the right.
The Greenblatt ADL has been all too eager to rush into alliances with the anti-Israel network to pay attention to the concerns of Jewish community activists. Even while the ADL has denounced Canary Mission, the Jewish civil rights group which has turned up anti-Semitism on social media, including the recent case of Lara Kollab, an anti-Israel doctor who threatened to poison Jews, through investigative research, it’s quite comfortable with wholesale machine learning censorship overseen by the Left.
While Canary Mission has highlighted anti-Semitism on social media by anti-Israel activists, the ADL’s Online Hate Index appears to have little interest in addressing alt-left anti-Semitism. And includes the involvement of figures whose organizations have become notorious hubs of alt-left anti-Semitism.
As online hate by the alt-left continues to grow, the ADL has not only failed to fight it, it ignored it and minimized it while making common cause with the funders and leaders of the anti-Semitic alt-left.
THE TROUBLING INFLUENCE OF THE ‘JIHADIST PSYCHOPATH’
Jamie Glazov's new book explains our civilization's "insanity" - the burning desire to believe what is factually untrue.
January 18, 2019
[Jamie Glazov will be speaking at Beverly Hills Hotel on Feb. 6 about his new book: Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us. Register HERE. Order the book HERE.]
Reprinted from Jewish News Syndicate.
Why are the views of radical Islam accepted by Western left-wing audiences? Jamie Glazov answers that question in his riveting new book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us.
What has happened to the West—to the values of freedom and equality for all—questioning our moral values to the point that we have come to accept the delectable lie that Islam is a religion of peace? We witness Islamic terror, but choose to believe what we are told: It isn’t Islam. Islam is a religion of peace. If Islam is such a peaceful religion, why must we be reminded of it over and over again?
Glazov explains this “insanity”—this desire to believe what is factually untrue. He takes us on a journey through the lens of psychology and the mental condition known as “psychopathy.” He begins in the Garden of Eden with the Serpent, the original psychopath, who beguiles Eve with his pretense of good will.
May I suggest that Glazov’s “psychopathy” explanation regarding the acceptance of radical Islam is the same psychopathy that traps those who accept the idea that Israel is a pariah state.
Let me explain this term: psychopathy. One of my professors explained the “good and bad” of psychopathy. Like all “conditions,” it runs on a continuum. At one end is someone who has little empathy for others, though particularly harmful; someone who doesn’t worry about hurting feelings, most probably because he has few. And as a CEO, this person would be a great. He focuses on his end game. Then there is the other end of the continuum. And I have no doubt that most of you, if not all, have experienced the machinations of a psychopath in a relationship (or know someone who has).
In that relationship, there is one partner who always takes the blame for anything negative. She knows if only she had said this and not that, or done that and not this, then everything would be fine. She comes to believe that everything bad is her fault, never his. That she is the victimizer and not the victim is the goal of a true psychopath. That she takes on the role of victimizer, voluntarily, is the indication of a great psychopath.
Glazov takes this example into the world. We, the recipients of the Judeo/Christian ethic that calls on us to treat all people with equal respect, that all life is sacred, and that we have free will to make those choices are apologizing for our values in order to accommodate and include a value system that is diametrically opposed to ours, despite the statements made by world leaders. Islam is not compatible with the West. Here we are turning ourselves into the victimizers of 1.8 billion Muslims who remind us after every terror attack that Islam is a religion of peace, and that we must be careful not to allow ourselves to attack Muslims in any way. It’s not their fault that there are Islamic terrorists. It is ours. We, the West, are the oppressors. This is psychopathy at work.
Glazov shows us different faces of submission. He provides a litany of experts in psychopathy and a similar number of examples of jihadist psychopathic behaviors. He shares the stories of those who have had the courage to stand up to Islamic terrorism, and how in return, these people have been ostracized by those who should thank them for their courage to speak. Most impressive and important to me is Glazov’s revelations about former President Barack Obama; how he singlehandedly attempted to transform the nation’s perception of radical Islam from a terrorist ideology to a religion of peace by removing all references to Islamic terrorism in all government communications. He was not the first president to declare Islam a religion of peace. Former President George W. Bush introduced the term following 9/11. But Obama brought people into his administration who diligently promoted awareness of Islamophobia, which is universally defined as the irrational fear of Islam. If fear of Islam is irrational, then those who question it must also be irrational. However, the notion of a post-9/11 backlash against Muslims was a myth. The result of the obsession with Islamophobia is the silencing of dissenters.
Glazov is reaching out to the millions of people who have come to believe that Islam is not the problem; we are. I suggest that many readers will see themselves in this book, having fallen victim to the declarations of the psychopathic jihadists. And once you do—once you realize how you have been tricked into believing that Islam is the religion of peace—you will no longer be frightened into silence. You will develop the courage needed to stand up and say, “Enough.” You will act to protect and defend Western civilization described by the late George Jonas as “the best and most humane form of civilization developed by mankind,” and that we must not let it “perish by default.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: “Greater is the one who fought and won than one, fearing confrontation, takes the path of least resistance and submits.”
ISLAMIST BARACK OBAMA
*
“Of
course, one of the main reasons the nation is now “divided, resentful and angry” is because
race-baiting, Islamist, class warrior Barack Hussein Obama was
president for eight long years." MATTHEW VADUM
*
"But the Obamas are the center of the most delusional
cult of personality that the media has yet spawned. And so we get bizarre
pieces like these." MONICA SHOWALTER
*
"Along with Obama, Pelosi and
Schumer are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the
eight years of that administration." PATRICIA McCARTHY
No comments:
Post a Comment