Part Two can be found HERE. Please note all links to sources etc are at the end of Part Two.
The good reputations of organisations are the product of many years of hard work, often across several or many generations, of those who founded them, guided them or have worked for them. A company or a voluntary organisation will only survive and thrive if it is relevant, honest, provides a good service or has good products. Equally important to the long term success of an organisation or company is for the entity to take steps to preserve the good name that may have been built up by the hard work of many people over a number of years. For example, a luxury car maker may take a long time, possibly decades, to establish their good name before it is true to say of them that they produce ‘the best car in the world’. On top of that they need to innovate, whilst never losing sight of the organisation’s heritage or their founding principles.
What applies to companies manufacturing cars or electronic equipment or other products, also applies to a very large extent to voluntary organisations. It takes years and years of struggle on the part of those who found or run organisations to prove to the world that they can provide the service for which the organisation was set up. The organisation also has to make sure, as any company would do, that they hang onto the good reputation that previous generations of staff and management have managed to garner.
An organisation that throws away that which was dearly bought by previous management and donors is one that may have lost sight of why it was founded in the first place and placed some short-term frippery or political fashion ahead of what they really should be doing. We’ve all seen it haven’t we, previously good and sound organisations making seriously bad or unethical or destructive decisions and then losing the respect their organisation may have previously had?
There are two such organisations from the Jewish community that have gone down that path of making bad decisions or associating with bad people and organisations. Because of these follies, these entities are going to end up losing the trust and respect of those whom they were supposed to be serving, a trust that was built up over a large number of years. What is extremely concerning, at least to this particular Jew, and other Jews of like mind that I’ve spoken to, is that these organisations are operating on different sides of the Atlantic. This shows that the issue of Jewish organisations doing counterproductive things is not just a ‘little local difficulty’.
The organisations in question are, from the United States, The Anti Defamation League (ADL) and, from the United Kingdom, The Community Security Trust (CST). Both these organisations were set up for a purpose that the management seems to be abandoning and they are associating with individuals and groups that will, more than likely, damage the reputations of both the ADL and the CST.
Let us look at the concerns about each organisation in turn, starting with the Anti Defamation League.
The ADL was set up 103 years ago in 1913 as a branch of the Jewish service organisation B’nai B’rith. It was founded to tackle and campaign against some monstrous anti-Semitism that could be found in the United States at this point in history, which included the lynching of an innocent Jewish man. The organisation’s founding statement reads:
The immediate object of the League is to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens
These are fine aims and just ones as well. The ADL has also monitored the words and actions of anti-Semitic groups, produced reports on the levels of anti-Semitism in the United States and worked to preserve the memory of those who perished at the hands of the Nazis in the Shoah. They are also moderately pro-Israel and have fought against attempts by anti-Israel activists to de-legitimise the Jewish State.
But in recent years, the priority that the organisation started with over a century ago, that of protecting Jews from defamation and assault, appears to be being abandoned. Instead of dispelling myths about Judaism and Jews or appealing to the consciences of the fair minded in order to protect Jews from assault, the ADL has become yet another Left dominated Social Justice Warrior (SJW) institution. The ADL now has the similar sort of broad, vague and mushy aims and objectives of similar organisations in the SJW universe and also now sadly, the same Leftist mindset.
This moral decline of the ADL and its apparent abandonment of their core aims, at a time when the protection of Jews from murderous Islamic anti-Semitism is desperately required, has been further evidenced by one of their recent staff hires. According to an article written by Ari Lieberman of Front Page Magazine, a conservative comment outlet from the United States, the ADL has gone and hired one George Selim, an Arab-American former Obama employee as a Programmes Director. However, George Selim is not exactly a clean hands sort of character when it comes to his prior dealings with certain Muslim organisations which had had links to Hamas, the genocidal Islamic group. Sadly, as you will see from the article excerpt, this is not the first time that the ADL has done dirty political deals with Islamic organisations that have a distinctly anti-Jewish character.
Ari Lieberman said:
On August 28, The Anti-Defamation League announced that it had hired Obama holdover, George Selim, as its “Senior Vice President of Programs.” According to the ADL’s press release, Selim will be the ADL’s point man on programs connected to law enforcement, education and community security. This newly created position will ostensibly help the ADL better track, monitor and thwart all forms of xenophobia and prejudice. Selim will report directly to the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt.
On paper, Selim, an Arab-American of Egyptian and Lebanese descent, appears qualified for the role. He served in the Bush and Obama administrations in various capacities, principally in the areas of community outreach and countering violent extremism (CVE). But beneath the surface lies a more sinister side to Selim, one that renders him entirely unfit for his new position.
In a June 7, 2012 interview with the Daily Caller, Selim admitted engaging with representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and further acknowledged that there were “hundreds” of such meetings taking place with various governmental departments and agencies. Selim refused to elaborate on the content of those meetings and offered no insight on which CAIR officials he met with.
In 2007, the United States Department of Justice named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the infamous Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development criminal probe. Members of the HLF were charged with laundering money to Hamas, a genocidal organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department. The HLF and five of its officers were convicted of all charges.
It’s truly appalling that the ADL should hire someone who has had meetings with CAIR, a group that is linked to the criminal Holy Land Foundation. It’s a moral scandal and does, as Mr Lieberman says, render him unfit for this position with the ADL. Selim is said to have had ‘hundreds’ of meetings with a group that has not only been linked to a Hamas funding source but has also helped to promote a highly dishonest Islamic victim narrative across the USA. For example: CAIR were caught out earlier this year promoting the fake story of a man who claimed that he had been kidnapped and abused because he was Muslim. The narrative promulgated by CAIR rapidly fell apart when it was revealed that the kidnap claimant was lying.
It’s possible of course, that the management of the ADL under their Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Greenblatt, knew absolutely nothing about Selim’s background or his hundreds of meetings with the Hamas-fans of CAIR. If that is the case then both Mr Greenblatt and the rest of the ADL board and the human resources department have failed dismally in detecting Selim’s exceedingly extensive dodgy contacts.
Mr Lieberman continued and gave more information about the culture of anti-Semitism that pervades CAIR and which has been there since its founding.
Mr Lieberman said:
Moreover, CAIR officials are on record spewing vicious anti-Israel and anti-Semitic vitriol. Its founder and executive director, Nihad Awad, is a poster child for conspiracy theories and medieval-style anti-Semitism. He is a Hamas supporter, has refused to condemn acts of terrorism committed against Israeli civilians, rejects Israel’s right to exist, espoused anti-Semitic canards of Jewish influence and control over U.S. foreign policy, and has entertained wild David Duke-like conspiracy theories suggesting that Israel had a hand in the September 11 attacks. Even Greenblatt’s ADL has recognized CAIR’s odious nature publishing a dossier of the group on its website.
Selim’s engagement with members of an organization possessing such a malevolent history is beyond baffling. Would he engage with the KKK or the Nazi Party? But what is even more incomprehensible is the ADL’s inexplicable decision to hire him.
What on earth are the ADL thinking about hiring someone who has had cordial dealings with an organisation whose attitudes would not be out of place in someone who cheered on the massacres of Jews in Strasbourg in 1341? Awad’s attitudes are indeed ‘medieval’, but then what else can we expect from those such as Awad, whose belief system is more dark ages than being a light unto the nations?
It is indeed inexplicable and baffling that the ADL hired this person, it really is. You can understand or even explain away one or two meetings with a group like CAIR as a mistake, a lapse of judgement or even a temporary political necessity, but you can’t make such excuses for hundreds of meetings with Hamas-fans. Selim is obviously too close to CAIR to be put in any position of authority in any Jewish group, especially one that should be primarily concerned with protecting Jews.
If this hiring was not a mistake, then it’s possible that Jonathan Greenblatt and others involved in the hiring process knew about Selim’s dodgy dealings with the Hamas-fans of CAIR and either didn’t care or ignored them in order to promote a greater political aim. The facts are that Selim was a former servant of the Obama administration, something that would attract Leftists, and that the ADL under Greenblatt has a history of doing deals with some seriously unsavoury Islamic groups and individuals, such as Keith Ellison and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which is a group that is on the ADL’s own top ten list of rabid anti-Israel activist organisations.
By hiring Selim and by some of these other actions, the ADL under Greenblatt seems to have thrown their organisation’s moral compass under the bus. They seem to have done this because the primary motivation of those in charge of the ADL these days appear to be more enamoured of Leftist causes than protecting Jews from harm. Whether the ADL can recover its once admirable reputation and recover from this infection of anti-American, anti-West and perversely anti-Jew mindsets, only time will properly tell. But there must be many American Jews, especially Orthodox Jews and Jews of the political Right, who are extremely angry that an organisation built on the hard work of many generations of activists and the support of hundreds and hundreds of generous donors, has been squandered by the ADL.
