What a bunch of crybabies. Since when is calling somebody a “renegade Jew” a hateful act?
Nathan Guttman writes: WASHINGTON — Even as leaders of the Anti-Defamation League gathered in the nation’s capital on May 16 for their annual meeting, hateful campaign rhetoric kept piling up in the presidential race.
In the latest incident, David Horowitz, a columnist for the right-wing news site Breitbart.com, denounced Bill Kristol, an anti-Donald Trump Jewish Republican, as a
“renegade Jew.”
A week earlier, Trump’s presidential campaign sought to appoint a white supremacist leader
as a delegate to the Republican convention. Shortly before that, a Jewish journalist was bombarded with anti-Semitic attacks and threats
on social media after she published an unflattering profile of Trump’s wife, Melania Trump.
In a way, it’s been ADL’s moment: What better group to take the bull by the horns than the organization set up to confront exactly the kind of perceived bigotry that Trump and his supporters are promoting?
“Here at ADL we haven’t seen this kind of kind of mainstreaming of intolerance at this level” for decades, said the group’s national director Jonathan Greenblatt in a May 16 interview. Trump’s comments about Muslims and Latinos, his refusal to disavow racist supporters, and his belated action against such supporters, said Greenblatt, was reminiscent of the campaign of southern segregationist George Wallace’s in 1968 and to Pat Buchanan’s angry, racially tinged 1992 campaign. “But to make these policies core to a candidate’s platform, that is new and its troubling and we think it’s a very worrying trend,” Greenblatt said.
During the course of this campaign season, other Jewish groups that share a commitment to combating racism have sought to address what they view as an epic eruption of hateful rhetoric. But for the most part, they have done so while seeking to avoid calling out by name the presidential candidates they hold responsible.
In contrast, ADL, which has undergone a leadership transition this year, has entered the political fray combatively to take on Trump and some of his political supporters over their rhetoric. ADL also issued statements against Ted Cruz for his call to patrol Muslim neighborhoods and against Democrat Bernie Sanders, who made inaccurate statements on Israel’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza. ADL has, in fact, become the leading group in the organized Jewish world in speaking out against intolerance in the political campaign.
But most of the group’s attention has been focused on Trump, his associates, and supporters of his campaign. Over the past six months, ADL has issued at least five public statements or press releases singling out the New York real estate mogul for his positions, conduct or rhetoric.
