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Asa Winstanley
Middle East Monitor
Last month the American reporter Eli Clifton revealed a secret “Anti-Israel” enemies list maintained by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The ADL was founded 103 years ago as a civil rights organisation to defend Jews in America from then-rampant anti-Semitism. However, long ago, it all but abandoned this mission.
Instead, its main function today is to act as one of the main lobby groups for the continuation of Israeli war crimes and apartheid in the Unites States. It even works hand in glove with both American and Israeli spy and police agencies.
Any genuine civil rights group would be aiming to hold such agencies to account, not cosying up to them.
The list of “Anti-Israel Groups” was presented in a series of PowerPoint slides (see pages 69-70) seemingly intended for internal presentation only. It was apparently leaked to Clifton. It lists 12 such enemies, including Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; CODEPINK: Women for Peace; Jewish Voice for Peace; Students for Justice in Palestine and the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
It’s far from the first time that the ADL has come up with such blacklists, and it has even published them in the past. In 2013, it published a list of “top ten anti-Israel groups based in America.” The list was quite similar to the secret one revealed by Clifton.
Back in 1983, the ADL distributed a more extensive enemies list, in the form of a booklet entitled Pro-Arab Propaganda in America: Vehicles and Voices. In his seminal book The Fateful Triangle (page 178) the renowned academic and critic of American policy Noam Chomsky said it contained “numerous falsehoods and slanders, as one would expect in the ‘enemies list’ of an organisation now largely dedicated to defamation.”
As I revealed in 2013, FBI documents released under freedom of information law show the ADL once used its spy network to regularly keep tabs on Chomsky’s activities. The enemies list at the time included Palestinian American academics and critics of Israel Edward Said and Walid Khalidi.
It goes much deeper.
Throughout the 1980s, the ADL spied on and infiltrated many different civil rights and solidarity organisations. It did so while sending its “intelligence” (often faked and exaggerated) back to the Israeli regime and the apartheid-era government of South Africa. Roy Bullock, one of its main spies, was eventually uncovered by activists. The last civil case against him was settled out of court in 2002, for substantial amounts of money. It is only because the spied-on campaigners in this final case rebuffed the pressure put on them by the ADL’s lawyers and refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement that we know about it.
One of the most stunning details of Bullock’s infiltration and subversion of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) – an entirely peaceful civil rights group – is that he actually attempted to manufacture a false link between the ADC and neo-Nazi, white supremacist groups. He did this by attending a Holocaust denial conference and distributing ADC literature.
According to one activist quoted in the spring 2002 edition of Jewish Socialist magazine: “The reason Bullock gave us for attending the IHR [Institute for Historical Review] conferences was to distribute ADC literature and recruit some new members for the Arab-American organisation. We found it both strange and suspicious that it had not occurred to him that [anti-Jewish and perhaps even pro-Nazi people were] the last type of individual that the ADC would want as a member.”
This kind of connection, of course, fits right into the perennial theme of pro-Israel propaganda: that its critics are motivated by anti-Semitic hatred, not concern of justice for Palestinians.
Earlier this month in Haaretz, Israel’s most important liberal Zionist newspaper, we learnt of another enemies list, this one maintained by the Israeli embassy itself in London.
Addicted as Israeli leaders are to the war mentality, it takes the form of a battle map: “The map of Britain hanging on the wall in the office of Yiftah Curiel, spokesman of the Israeli embassy in London. Like the war room of a brigade on the Lebanese border, the map shows the front – the main campuses, the deployment of pro-Israel activists and the location of the ‘enemy forces’.”
Curiel, “a diplomat and son of a diplomat,” we learn is one of the “real fighters” against BDS.
The closest parallel in the UK to ADL is the Community Security Trust (CST). Like the ADL, the CST is an anti-Semitism watchdog and also a charity. But the CST has a more secretive anti-Palestinian agenda. Behind closed doors, it working hand in glove with the Department for Communities and Local Government (under successive governments) to further Israel’s interests. And, as I revealed back in 2011, its volunteers even receive Mossad training.
To what extent, if any, the Israeli embassy and the CST are currently coordinating in the battle against BDS, we do not know. In one 2011 Jewish Chronicle column, critical of the CST, the historian and ultra-right-wing Zionist Geoffrey Alderman said he was aware that the CST has an “inevitably murky dimension, namely that of a watching brief with regard to extremist organisations, possibly including the infiltration of such bodies.”
The word “extremist” here is a clear (and typically slanderous) reference to peaceful campaigning organisations like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods.
Is the CST currently active in infiltrating Palestine campaign groups in the UK in the way the ADL did in the US in the 1980s? We should demand answers.
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London and an associate editor with The Electronic Intifada.
Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com