Boston area civil rights advocates have teamed with Armenian and Jewish American community activists in expressing disappointment and outrage at recent statements by Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director Abraham Foxman denying the Armenian Genocide and opposing Congressional legislation affirming that crime against humanity, reported the Armenian National Committee of Eastern Massachusetts (ANCEM). Foxman’s statements have seriously jeopardized the credibility of the Watertown “No Place For Hate” (NPFH) anti-racism and tolerance promotion program, with pressure mounting on its leadership to sever ties with its parent organization, the ADL.

Further examination of this Web page shows that Foxman did not overtly deny that the genocide happened, but he did say this:

Foxman’s statements were from an April 21st Los Angeles Times article titled “Genocide Resolution Still Far from Certain” in which Foxman argued that “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.”

Here is ADL’s response to criticism of Foxman’s words:

ADL has never denied what happened at the close of the First World War. There were massacres of Armenians and great suffering at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. We believe today’s Turkish government should do more than it has done to come to grips with the past and reconcile with Armenians. We have said that to Turkish officials and we have said it publicly. ADL continues to believe this is the best way to proceed.

ANDREW H. TARSY
Regional director
JAMES L. RUDOLPH
Regional chairman
ADL New England
Boston

Armenians, however, consider this far from adequate:

THE ANTI-DEFAMATION League is caught in controversy, and it was brought on by its insensitive national director, Abraham Foxman. While preaching tolerance, Foxman takes a stand on the Armenian genocide that is akin to denial. Rather than condemning the Armenian genocide and its coverup, he is has become a party to its coverup by stating, “The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past.” I guess one could as well say that the Nazis and Jews, or Darfur victims and the Janjaweed, should revisit their history. Foxman knows better, but is allowing political forces to divert him from intellectual honesty and the truth.

JOSEPH DAGDIGIAN
Harvard

This is not the first time that Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League have whitewashed hatred for political convenience.

ADL Welcomes MoveOn.org’s Responsiveness in Removing Anti-Semitic Messages

Posted: September 5, 2006

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) welcomed the responsiveness of MoveOn.org Political Action in removing anti-Semitic messages that had been posted on the Action Forum on their Web site.

In response to a letter of concern, Eli Pariser, Executive Director of MoveOn Political Action, has been in direct contact with ADL. He indicated that MoveOn.org found the comments abhorrent and had them removed.

ADL is pleased with Mr. Pariser’s responsiveness to our concerns and believes the matter has been resolved satisfactorily.

That’s very interesting, because http://www.stentorian.com/MoveOn/sideshow1.html is a collection of anti-Semitic and other forms of hate speech that was harvested from MoveOn.org’s Action Forum on or after September 17, 2006, almost two weeks after Foxman & Co. expressed their satisfaction with MoveOn’s removal of this material. The material at http://www.stentorian.com/MoveOn/sideshow2.html was retrieved on or after September 20, 2006, more than two weeks after ADL expressed its satisfaction with MoveOn’s responsiveness.

It is a matter of record that this was brought to the ADL’s attention on September 15, 2006, but ADL is sticking by the above story.

From - Fri Sep 15 11:28:04 2006
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
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Message-ID:
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:28:03 -0400
From: “William A. Levinson” [E-mail deleted for public posting]
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: [contact name deleted for public posting] @adl.org
Subject: Anti-Semitic slurs NOT removed by MoveOn.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Per our discussion: MoveOn.org may have gotten rid of “Jew Lieberman”
and “media-owning Jewish pigs” but every single one of the following was
online as of yesterday evening and the ones I checked are still online
right now.

In addition, MoveOn was not truthful about not seeing “Jew Lieberman”
because it was extremely diligent about finding and removing things I
posted, such as “When the N word is used, a lady or gentleman leaves the
room or turns his back” as opposed to voicing approval of the slur–
which is what the Action Forum participants did by voting “Agree” with
anti-Semitic and in a couple of cases racist commentary. The worst of
the latter said that Black soldiers should be segregated and disarmed
because they are likely to mutiny over their “oppression” by Caucasians.

http://www.actionforum.com/forum/scores.html?&comment_id=294678

“We can all see how AIPAC/Israel has taken control of America. Not to
get nasty but jews have a long history of subverting governments for
their own enrichment and glory to the detriment of whole societies. Many
more than “6 million” have died by semetic aggression, 100’s of millions
even, remember the conqueror writes history. Even the roman empire
feared jewish power.”

http://www.actionforum.com/forum/scores.html?comment_id=294138 (5 of 6
agree): 361 Representatives who labeled Hamas, a Foreign Terrorist
Organization as defined by the U.S. State Department, a “terrorist
sanctuary” are denounced as “316 Jews.”

http://www.actionforum.com/forum/scores.html?&comment_id=304961 12 out
of 14 agree, “Removing all Israeli obsessed Jews from congress would
stop a lot of killing.”

http://www.actionforum.com/forum/scores.html?&comment_id=302833 9 out of
10 agree, “I respect everybody’s opinion but obviously some people hate
Jews. I am sure they have their reasons but they should not let whatever
bad experience they had with some Jews (and I am sure they had some)
interfere with their judgment. ”

http://www.actionforum.com/forum/scores.html?comment_id=302690 “American
Jews pay the Israeli cowards to kill with missiles.”

These are not the only examples that were provided in this E-mail either, and the Action Forum was still online at the time. In other words, even though the Anti-Defamation League could verify for itself that MoveOn.org did not remove more than a few token pieces of hate speech, it stuck by the statement, “ADL is pleased with its fellow left-wing Democrats’ Mr. Pariser’s responsiveness to our concerns and believes the matter has been resolved satisfactorily.”

We reviewed the ADL’s Form 990 tax return for 2005, and it shows revenues and expenditures in excess of $50 million. We must really ask what we are getting for this money. The ADL does have an impressive dossier on hate organizations and professional hate mongers, most of whom are white supremacists. Conspicuously absent from this list, however, are the prominent racist and anti-Semite Al Sharpton and his National Action Network. Most of the white supremacists on ADL’s dirt list merely use their First Amendment right to make loathsome and despicable statements about Black people, Jews, and other ethnic groups, although a couple have gone to jail for putting their hateful beliefs into violent practice. Al Sharpton’s hate speech played at least an indirect role in two violent incidents (Crown Heights riots and Freddy’s Fashion Mart) in which people were killed, and his racist Nifonging of innocent people in the Tawana Brawley scandal resulted in another man’s suicide. While we do not know ADL’s specific motives in leaving Sharpton out of its list of professional bigots and hate mongers, perhaps the following has something to do with it:

Now let’s get back to the Armenian genocide. “A genocide not to be denied” (Boston Globe) reports,

The slaughter of the Armenians would be followed a generation later by the Holocaust, a crime against humanity with a greater death toll. There is some evidence that Hitler saw the genocide as a precedent for his atrocities.

We have also read that Hitler expected to get away with exterminating entire populations because the world had, as of the late 1930s, pretty much forgotten about the Armenian genocide. What part of “Never Again” do Abraham Foxman and the ADL not understand? Every time someone downplays an act of genocide or mass murder, they encourage the next would-be perpetrator. We have already seen that “Never Again” is pretty much an empty statement, given:

(1) The killing fields of Cambodia, and mass murders in Vietnam (which John Kerry & Co. downplay and deny)
(2) Rwanda
(3) Uganda
(4) Bosnia/Serbia/Kosovo, with ethnic murders committed by both sides
(5) Darfur
(6) 9/11 (noting the prevalence of “9/11 Denial” and conspiracy theories from MoveOn.org and the Jeff Rense Show)
(7) Saddam Hussein’s genocide of Kurds
(8) Mass murders by the Mainland Chinese government
and so on and so forth.

Since Mr. Foxman seems to need some help in managing his public relations on the Armenian genocide issue, however, we will be delighted to propose a statement for his organization to make:

Draft ADL statement on the alleged genocide of Armenians during the First World War:

(1) It didn’t happen.
(2) Furthermore, all the Turks were somewhere else at the time.
(3) Besides, they were only following orders.