The Nation's Pulse/ The ADL Defamed
Puddington, Arch
T his year marks the eightieth anniversary of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, America's most distinguished civil rights organization. The ADL's principal mission, of course, is the...
...The police have released a 700-page dossier on the case, and there have been selective leaks to the media intimating that the ultimate targets are not Bullock and Gerard but higher-up officials of the national ADL...
...Much of its credibility derives from the reports on extremism and prejudice it periodically issues...
...In America, anti-Israel and "anti-Zionist" prejudices were rampant in the New Left, and these attitudes, while somewhat muted, are still encountered and even accepted within progressive circles...
...Its legal staff played an important role in landmark civil rights litigation, and its investigators helped expose and weaken white supremacists...
...In recent years the ADL has supported lawsuits brought by whites claiming to be victims of discrimination...
...His abilities won the respect of law enforcement officials, and he established a working relationship with the local police, the FBI, and other agencies...
...The ADL was a stalwart organization in the original civil rights coalition...
...He passed some of the file material along to the ADL's New York headquarters...
...Indeed, the ADL serves as the model for ethnic anti-discrimination projects...
...The core of the "spy" case is this: Bullock is said to have received several cartons of material that had been the property of the San Francisco police...
...Bullock has infiltrated a number of hate organizations, and was credited with having helped bring to justice a man who was responsible for a string of synagogue bombings in the Bay Area...
...Organizations like the White Aryan Resistance have crowed over the ADL's troubles...
...they have been joined by a variety of more reasonable-sounding anti-Semitic publications, including one edited by Victor Marchetti, the ex–CIA agent who gained fleeting celebrity on the left some years back by writing a book that "unmasked" the intelligence agency...
...A Bay Area weekly referred to the ADL as a "Zionist version of the CIA," while Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun and Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning" guru, accused the ADL of seeing "every liberal group as a potential threat to the Jewish people...
...L ittle has been said about Bullock's having infiltrated neoNazis and skinheads, and it goes without saying that the ADL's critics never raised civil liberties objections when the targets were white supremacists or anti-Semites like Gerald L. K. Smith, not even when the ADL's investigations included infiltration or cooperation with police agencies...
...The ADL has also focused on black anti-Semitism, issuing reports condemning Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, black newspapers that provide a forum for anti-Jewish bigotry, and black politicians and educators who rail against Jewish dollars, Jewish editors, or Jewish conspiracies...
...Bullock, who is not Jewish, has worked for the ADL for nearly forty years, having volunteered his services as a youngman out of personal revulsion over the Holocaust and a desire to subvert the Ku Klux Klan...
...Not all the files focused on anti-Semitic organizations...
...Meanwhile, just as anti-Semitism became more tolerated on the left, anti-Jewish attitudes were diminishing among conservatives...
...T he ADL's difficulties stem from an investigation into the activities of Roy Bullock, a San Francisco art dealer who worked as a part-time investigator for the organization...
...Attention has been focused on files maintained by Bullock in his personal computer that encompassed groups across the political spectrum...
...To understand the seething disdain in which the left holds the organization, we must go back to the 1960s...
...There is no evidence that Bullock did anything but maintain files gleaned from the press...
...The issue goes well beyond the fact that anti-Semitism was the semi-official policy of many Communist regimes, and that East Germans, Soviets, and other Communist countries trained and funded the perpetrators of the anti-Israel terror...
...The real issue is whether it is legitimate for an organization dedicated to the defense of Jewish interests to investigate those who kill Jews as a matter of ideology...
...The ADL is also the subject of a class-action suit filed by former antiwar Congressman Pete McCloskey, an inveterate critic of both Israel and of what he views as Jewry's baleful influence over American foreign policy...
...Arab-Americans, for example, have established a legal defense organization patterned on the ADL...
...The case rests principally on whether Bullock violated California law to receive these files, but the legal complexities have become irrelevant in the current propaganda offensive...
...The ADL has been quite explicit in condemning leftists who preach anti-Semitism, disseminate conspiracy theories about Zionist influence, or consort with those responsible for violence against Israelis, including Yasir Arafat...
...This implies treating with suspicion ideas like multiculturalism, diversity, and quotas...
...A Village Voice writer seemed alarmed over unsupported charges that the ADL had monitored the comings-and-goings of representatives of lthough President Clinton is on A record as supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement, his budget director Leon Panetta has declared NAFTA "dead—for now...
...All this has been seized upon by the lengthy list of political groups the ADL has managed to offend over the years...
...Could the ADL, honored by presidents and paid tribute to by hundreds of victims of bigotry, be the same organization the Village Voice calls a "Jewish thought police...
...When the San Francisco Chronicle claimed that "numeroussources" had charged the ADL with using intelligence information "to tar its ideological opponents," the examples listed in the article were hardly convincing: one would expect the ADL to maintain files on Noam Chomsky...
...Yet to some on the left, the ADL's refusal to oppose "Reaganism" while concentrating on the activities of American sympathizers with Arab terrorists signified that the organization had gone reactionary...
...It speaks volumes about the real ideology of certain groups that claim to be working for minority rights that they are now assailing one of this country's bravest adversaries of prejudice and terror for doing its job too well...
...Even Laurence Tribe said that Richey's decision "blows my mind...
...The ADL's attitude is that, where the Jewish people are concerned, there are indeed enemies on the left...
...In a ruling on a suit filed by three anti-NAFTA environmental and consumer-action groups (Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth), Federal District Court Judge Charles Richey ordered the government in late June to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement on NAFTA...
...Investigative journalists have produced no evidence of ADL violations of political ethics...
...Nor is it surprising that the ADL would have been interested in the "Los Angeles Eight," a group that faces deportation for alleged links to the PLO...
...Though most Americans still identify the ADL as a resolute opponent of anti-Semitism and racial hatred, critics describe the organization as a "secret police agency" and speak of "the biggest domestic spy scandal in recent American history...
...Yet the ADL today finds itself in crisis, its leadership accused of maintaining a nationwide intelligence network that has attempted to infiltrate and subvert extremist groups and legitimate political organizations alike...
...Bullock amassed impressive files from press accounts, meeting transcripts, and other public sources...
...Some ADL leaders think that the anti-Semitism of the left ultimately poses a greater threat to Jews than the loud but generally ineffective chauvinism of the fringe right...
...But more serious have been the attacks from the left...
...Richey's heavy-handed intervention will be reviewed by the Court of Appeals on August 24, but if the decision is not overHamas, the fundamentalist group that has recently emerged as the Middle Eastern terrorist entity par excellence...
...like any good reporter, Bullock believed that part of his job was to stay informed about the many and quite varied participants in Bay Area politics...
...The ADL's principal mission, of course, is the defense of Jewish interests, an assignment that even its detractors agree has been carried out with admirable diligence and professionalism...
...the bulk was simply entered into Bullock's computer for possible future use...
...The files had belonged to a now-defunct investigative team, of which Bullock's friend Tom Gerard was a member...
...Alexander Cockburn hinted that cooperation between the ADL and the Mossad might be involved...
...The pact is about a hundred votes shy of passage in the House of Representatives, where members await guidance from constituents and the freshman class remains acutely sensitive to the wrath of Ross Perot and other anti-NAFTA forces...
...The courts, too, have got into the act...
...Yet the ADL has obstinately stuck to what might be called a traditionalist definition of civil rights: equal opportunity, as opposed to equal outcomes...
...The ADL goes to extraordinary lengths to get its facts straight, and takes a straightforward, non-hysterical tone...
...The San Francisco police and the prosecutor's office have fed the hysteria by handling the investigation like a drug probe...
...Nevertheless, on the basis of those files, the ADL has been accused of "spying" on organizations like Greenpeace, the NAACP, and Peace Now...
Vol. 26 • September 1993 • No. 9
