The Anti-Defamation League and Hatemongering

Published: Saturday August 18, 2007

Our continual remembering of the Armenian Genocide honors our forebears as it seeks to protect Armenians from new outbursts of anti-Armenian hatred, to prevent Turkey from enjoying the fruits of the crime with impunity, and to ensure that the world learns from the Armenian experience.

Among our most steadfast allies in this remembering are Jews. From Ambassador Henry Morgenthau who intervened and saved lives, to Rafael Lemkin, who spent his life fighting against genocide, to present-day Holocaust and Genocide scholars Israel Charny, Yair Auron, and Yves Ternon, to community leaders like Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, and members of the Senate and House of Representatives, the names of Jews, not surprisingly, figure prominently in what Milan Kundera called "the struggle of memory against forgetting."

If any organization should embrace the cause above and beyond others, it is the Anti-Defamation League. This is a group that understands what Genocide denial means. It understands that pussyfooting around the matter is itself an expression of racial hatred.

It was thus particularly shocking - and deplorable - that the ADL betrayed the principles it espouses and joined the genocide-denier camp. Its national director, Abe Foxman, told the Los Angeles Times, "The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history. And I don't think the U.S. Congress should be the arbiter either." (April 21)

Such a statement coming from an uninformed onlooker might have been written off as naïveté. But from Abe Foxman it is nothing short of Holocaust denial and hatemongering.

As Joey Kurtzman put it in a July 9 article, "Fire Foxman," in Jewcy.com, "Foxman's statement is in every way that matters equivalent to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim that he takes no position on the historicity of the Jewish Holocaust, but only hopes to see the matter resolved by dispassionate study."

"After Auschwitz one would expect that no one any longer has a right to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear," Armenia's foreign minister, Vartan Oskanian, said at the United Nations 28th Special Session, on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. " As an Armenian, I know that a blind eye, a deaf ear and a muted tongue perpetuate the wounds. It is a memory of suffering unrelieved by strong condemnation and unequivocal recognition. The catharsis that the victims deserve, which societies require in order to heal and move forward together, obligates us here at the UN, and in the international community, to be witness, to call things by their name, to remove the veil of obfuscation, of double standards, of political expediency."

Mr. Foxman met with Abdullah Gül, Turkey's foreign minister, in February. We do not know what transpired in that meeting. Did Mr. Gül tell Mr. Foxman that he could not vouch for the safety of Turkey's Jewish minority if American Jews did not oppose the Armenian Genocide resolutions? Did he suggest that Turkey's alliance with Israel and the United States is somehow at stake?

If so, the only reaction worthy of the ADL would have been a strong condemnation of Turkey for making such threats - and never, ever acquiescence.

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The Jewcy.com article expresses the revulsion of many Jewish-Americans at Mr. Foxman's behavior. One participant in the website's online forum wrote, "Foxman is defaming American Jews by representing us as self-centered hypocrites in regards to the Armenian genocide. . . . If Israel's relationship with Turkey is so precarious that calling Turkey to task on a 100 year old atrocity is a deal breaker, then lamentably.... they were never allies."

One of the major initiatives of the ADL is No Place for Hate (NPFH). Hundreds of municipalities and schools nationwide have NPFH chapters, often officially endorsed by city governments and school officials.

Several weeks ago, activist David B. Boyajian penned an article, "No Place for the Anti-Defamation League," in which he urged citizens' groups to meet with NPFH chapters, "present the sad facts to them, and explain the necessity of severing all ties to the ADL." He proceeded to write a letter to the Watertown (Mass.) Tab, in which he urged the local chapter of NPFH to sever ties with the ADL.

The chapter did not, but Watertown's Town Council rose to the occasion and on August 14 voted to rescind its "partnership with the ‘No Place for Hate' co-sponsored by ADL."

Political leaders in Watertown, including members of the City Council and Watertown's representative in the State Assembly deserve credit for their leadership, as does the Armenian National Committee of Eastern Massachusetts for pursuing this matter vigorously.

The ADL should continue to feel the heat from the grassroots for Mr. Foxman's unsustainable position. Meanwhile, we support cooperative efforts to teach the lessons of the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide in Watertown and beyond. While the ADL has discredited itself, the agenda of teaching tolerance remains as important as it ever was.