Far from acting in the interests of civil liberties, Jonathan Greenblatt as head of the A&ADL has placed it at the forefront of a campaign to sensor free thought that is deemed "hateful".
Earlier this week a group of well-meaning "progressive" feminist pro-Israel activists known as Zioness released a statement in condemnation of Starbucks for their decision to dump the Aiding and Abetting Defamation League from their mandatory "sensitivity training" that is to occur on May 29 in response to an incident from last month when two black men were arrested for refusing to leave a store location in Philadelphia. I appreciate the work of the people at Zioness, mostly ladies in their mid twenties, and I will refrain from attacking them personally in this article in order to demonstrate that I still have some respect for them notwithstanding their decision to throw their hats into this pathetic display of cultural behaviour control.
The Jackie Presser-dent
A few years ago I read an account by Allen V. Friedman, a local Ohio union organizer and mob associate that had sustained his more nefarious businesses over the years by using union locals as a front. Friedman, who wrote a tell-all book called Power and Greed: Inside the Teamsters' Empire of Corruption, was near the end of his life and was possibly trying to embellish his legacy having been muscled out of the union by rivals like eventual Teamsters' national president Jackie Presser. What is more important than the details of Friedman and Presser's racketeering, gambling, and contract rigging operations is the fact that in that wild period from the 1950s through the '80s, union organizing would forever be tainted as a sector more concerned with control of the workers than it is of their workers.
Minority advocacy has long ago entered the Teamsters' phase. How many alphabet soup organizations are needed in the United States, a nation whose culture is successfully marketed and admired the world over, in order to wag their fingers at the plebs over transgressions of their new invented and utterly ridiculous etiquette? One of the most egregious cases of a "civil rights" organization acting as the thought police was the decision by the Southern Poverty Law Center to label Pakistani British radio host and liberal Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz an Islamophobe. Also on the list was Somali-born ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman abused by her family who underwent female genital mutilation. Neither of these individuals was an activist against Muslims but rather against Islamic fundamentalism, and it took over two years of threatening legal action against the SPLC for them to remove them from their list.
One of the many compilations of parody memes of CNN that were created in response to the #CNNblackmail controversy. This incident is one of many that show that the organization has a clumsy approach to reacting to modern social media issues.
Similarly, during the summer of 2017 the Anti-Defamation League, or as I prefer to call them the Aiding and Abetting Defamation League (A&ADL) decided to add to the national discourse by helping CNN, a multinational media corporation, track down an internet troll that had allegedly created a GIF meme showing Donald Trump beating up WWE founder Vince McMahon with the CNN logo superimposed on McMahon's head. They alleged that this person was also known to share bigoted memes about blacks, Jews, Mexicans and others. However, rather than mitigating the problem CNN's threat to expose ("dox") this person unless he would apologize and vow to refrain from sharing or creating such images and videos again was appropriately interpreted by the public for what it was: Conditional blackmail in exchange for silence.
Grand Inquisitor Jonathan Torquemada Greenblatt
The puritanical zeal of Torquemada, here portrayed in a Judge Dredd comic, is the perfect metaphor ironically for the modern day A&ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt.
Like the Teamsters and other movements that were once formed to be a collective voice for an abused public, the A&ADL has mutated into a vicious attack dog for their corporate donor base. Rather than empowering the powerless, Greenblatt acts as a modern day reincarnation of Tomás de Torquemada, the fanatical Spanish priest that as Grand Inquisitor held back the social development of Spain during the 15th century under Ferdinand and Isabella. Those that believe that this accusation in and of itself is anti-Semitic should bear in mind a few quick facts about me that otherwise should be irrelevant:
- I am a practicing Jew.
- I served in the IDF during the 2nd Intifada.
- I have worked over the past few months to expose the flagrant hatred of the A&ADL's chimera Louis Farrakhan by producing the #FarrakhanFeminism video series and articles. In this series I expose Min. Farrakhan's abiding hate not only towards Jews but towards Koreans, Arabs, white people, and women.
Unlike Jonathan Greenblatt and the A&ADL, my intent in exposing Farrakhan is not to silence him, but to illustrate how a society of free thought and access to information (i.e. uncensored) helps expose the stupidity of those that he would have banned. What is the method of Greenblatt and his minions?
- Well, apparently the arbitrary restriction of words like "globalist" as racist or anti-Semitic is the answer.
- Endorsing the Women's March in January 2017 in an official press release statement in endorsement of a demonstration against incoming President Trump, only to subsequently be forced to confront that group when most of their national organization are revealed to be blatantly hostile to Jews.
- Having organization functionaries Twitter brigade dissenting Jewish journalists like Seth Mandel of the New York Post when they dare to personally criticize Jonathan Greenblatt. Mandel's wife Bethany, herself a journalist with The Federalist was ironically a member of an ADL-organized task force aimed at combating internet online harassment of Jews.
What's so tragic is that all of this is for naught. The A&ADL will be no more effective in policing free speech today by condemning the word "globalist" than Catholic League leader Bill Donohue was when he bulldozed Sinead O'Connor albums in response to her tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II.
To embrace free thought, dump the alphabet soup
It's a source of great irritation when the activists at Zioness, rather than attempt to break the paradigm of traditional activism as expressed by the A&ADL and its lost mission, instead seek to sustain it. This is as if IBM in the 1980s had decided to prop up the typewriter industry. One of the Zioness activists has been actively discussing the recent Kanye West controversy of rejecting the Democratic Party favourably. Like her, I am enthralled by his decision to stand up for free though, not just to embrace the left-right Dem-GOP binary.
Unfortunately, the same person is dead set on being an instrument of the A&ADL on maintaining its corporate relationships as exhibited by the Starbucks controversy. Yet in the minds of a significant portion of Americans - and yes that includes Jews like me - Starbucks has never been a corporation that expressed our beliefs and values. Some of us are not latté sipping cosmopolitan yuppies. Or, by contrast, many of us see its business model of changing the small coffee shop atmosphere into a gigantic corporate conglomerate as the equivalent of a punk rock band selling out and going corporate.
Here's a better course of action as far as the Starbucks controversy: Let the Women's March go ahead and bungle their role in this idiotic saga just like they do everything else. Just earlier this week, the group's Rhode Island chapter (which realistically can't be too big), disaffiliated in response to Tamika Mallory's embrace of #FarrakhanFeminism. The A&ADL's ridiculous attempt to keep pace with progressives is futile due to their corporate connections, and outright members of that movement see through their posturing and recognize that they cannot claim to be against the police while also relying on them.
So, once again with all due respect to the Zioness movement, if you want to do something for anyone don't support Torquemada Greenblatt. If anything, you should help yourselves by helping him. The next time you are invited to his event, please transmit to him this message on behalf of me, and numerous others:
"With all of your power and connections you could be helping alleviate poverty, raising money for medical research, or something else that would benefit society like other Jewish business leaders. Instead you choose to chase trucker-hat wearing trolls committing pranks on the internet. Who appointed you God? Go away; you're an embarrassment, and I'll represent myself."
