“Ultimately, the ADL is pouring salt into the wounded relationship between Europe and Jews.”
by Matt Parrott
The ADL’s raison d’etre is to be alarmed about anti-Semitism. That’s where they receive their donations. That’s where they get their volunteers. They have a very real interest in finding anti-Semitism – or manufacturing anti-Semitism, if necessary. The ADL, one of the plentitude of organizations that devotes time and money to educate people about the Holocaust, has devised a fundraising perpetual motion device. They educate Europeans and Americans about the horrors of the Holocaust – to the point that even compassionate and tolerant people believe that enough is enough. They then perform surveys that show nearly a majority of Europeans believe Jews talk too much about the Holocaust.
This finding alarms elderly Jewish donors, who donate more money to the ADL, so that they may further “educate” Europeans and Americans about the Holocaust, ad nauseum.
The ADL doesn’t consider the possibility that Jewish organizations could be excessively harping on the Holocaust. They’re entirely intolerant of any dissent, as their recent report “Attitudes Toward Jews and the Middle East in Five European Countries” demonstrates. Even the most benign criticism of Israeli foreign policy or Jewish organizations is interpreted as “anti-Semitism”. While there are real “haters” that couch their bigotry against Jews in these terms, there are also critical and skeptical people who are not bigots. It doesn’t matter. Either you wish to learn more about the Holocaust or you’re an evil bigot.Europeans who entertain the proposition that Jews might be more loyal to Israel than their host country are harboring a “classical anti-Semitic canard”, according to the ADL. Perhaps, and the ADL refuses to entertian this notion, the proposition is true. If I were religiously and ethnically Jewish, I would feel a greater loyalty and affinity for my religious and ethnic homeland than a nation in which I was a religious and ethnic minority. Perhaps these Europeans were projecting their own nationalist sentiment on Jews. If I were to find myself living in Israel, I would continue to have an affinity for American culture and my American kin. Are we to assume that Jews are somehow immune to human nature, that they prefer some other kind to their own kind? I wouldn’t even wish that to be true if it could be.
Not quite half of Europeans answer that “American Jews control America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy”. The fact is, American Jews have disproportionately influenced the philosophy, and politics of American neoconservative foreign policy. Well over half of the intellectuals and policy-makers who are associated with American neoconservatism and the aggressive post-9/11 foreign policy are Jewish. American Jews are around 3% of the American population but are the majority of people behind America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy. The ADL could argue that Jews are prominent among the opposition, too, or that these Jews are working in the combined interests of Israel and America (strategic partners).
The ADL refrains from discussion and sticks to the knee-jerk “point and sputter” label of “anti-Semitism” that frighten the donors into spilling their pockets.
http://globalpolitician.com/articledes.asp?ID=2806&cid=10&sid=50