Abe Foxman’s Retirement: A TOO Retrospective, Part 1

Abe Foxman is retiring from the ADL as of July, 2015. He’s had a very successful career pursuing Jewish interests, from unqualified support for Israel to strictly enforcing the ban on assertions of White identity and interests. The ADL is an 800-lb. gorilla of American politics and culture, pulling in $53 million in 2011; his salary of $688,188 should ensure him a comfortable retirement.

Since our beginnings in 2008,  TOO has posted 68 articles mentioning Foxman, so perhaps a retrospective is in order.  The vast majority of our comments relate to statements and actions of Foxman and the ADL that get reported in the media, thereby ignoring the many important programs that continue whirring in the background, such as holocaust education, making alliances with Latinos and other non-White groups, promoting diversity education (CLASSROOM OF DIFFERENCE™), etc. Still, the record as seen in TOO is a good summary of the tactics Foxman has used to advance Jewish interests, often at the expense of White America.

Hypocrisy. Paul Gottfried called attention to Foxman’s hypocrisy in a book of essays reviewed on TOO — “the idea that Israel must be a Jewish state, while having no sympathy for the idea that America should be defined as a White, Christian republic.”

Foxman’s hypocrisy was also front and center in an article titled “Shocker! Abe Foxman is a hypocrite.” Discussing the  mostly ill-fated Arizona law on illegal immigrants (also discussed here), Foxman said it was “biased, bigoted and unconstitutional.” When asked about how to reconcile this with Israel’s successful policy of getting rid of illegal immigrants, Foxman didn’t see a problem: “Well, in terms of size and dimension Israel is nowhere near the U.S.”

Wow, great news for small, traditionally White countries like Norway, Switzerland, and New Zealand! Foxman has doubtless pressured the powerful Jewish communities in these countries to oppose immigration so that they can retain their traditional White ethnic and cultural character.

And if you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

Similarly, an article on Dutch politician Geert Wilders noted that “Abe Foxman is incensed at Wilders’ failure to agree with both prongs of the Jewish strategy, loving multiculturalism at home and Israel abroad [quoting Foxman]: “It’s akin to the evangelical Christians. … On one hand they loved and embraced Israel. But on the other hand, we were not comfortable with their social or religious agenda” (Geert Wilders’ Unrequited Love“).Enforcing Penalties for Free Speech. America has that pesky First Amendment, so, at least without another vote on the Supreme Court, there are no laws against speech that Jews dislike. Foxman and the ADL would love to see people locked up for dissident views, but in lieu of that, they are a big part of the informal infrastructure that attempts to get people fired from their jobs or suffer ostracism and walls of hate in their daily life if they hold certain opinions.

While Foxman basks in a well-appointed retirement, he will doubtless gloat at his list of victims. In Foxman’s ideal world, these people would be panhandling for spare change on a street corner. This list would doubtless be much longer, except that TOO has only been around since 2008.

• Recently American venture capitalist Tom Perkins was vilified for calling attention to Jewish wealth in Germany even after the National Socialists came to power. Foxman complained that “He discredits himself and his argument by leaping to the absurd conclusion that class differences in America are stirring up sentiments similar to the virulent anti-Semitism that led to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust. … This is historical trivialization of the worst kind imaginable.”

It would seem that Foxman was more than usually outraged by Perkins analogizing the class warfare going on in San Francisco with the hostility toward Jews in 1930s Germany. That’s because, in the official story, the fact that Jews were an elite in 1930s Germany had nothing to do with the hostility directed against them. The official pitch is that anti-Semitism is nothing more than a psychiatric condition, completely unrelated to Jewish behavior.

• A …  Forward article recounts the firings of Rick Sanchez, Octavia Nasr, and Helen Thomas for their comments on Jewish issues. It points out that “Jews have done more than other groups to make it clear that they will not suffer lightly the public slights like those made by Sanchez [on Jewish media control]— let alone by those with even bigger mouths, like Mel Gibson. As Foxman put it, ‘We are a community that is sensitive, and — have no doubt — we’ll respond.’  (from “Alan Dershowitz on Jewish Media Influence“)

• When Pat Buchanan was fired by MSNBC, he noted that, in addition to other groups that opposed him, “On Nov. 2 [2012], Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on.” In a comment on Buchanan’s VDARE article on his firing, he quotes Foxman complaining that Buchanan ”bemoans the destruction of white Christian America.” I noted, that “as Buchanan says, why shouldn’t he complain about it? He’s a Christian. And he’s White. Watch Foxman go into a rage at the thought that Israel doesn’t have a right to do everything it can to remain a Jewish state. And need I state the obvious—that Jewish money funds the left [in the U.S. which is the major force for the destruction of White, Christian America]?”
• Also related to Buchanan, the ADL condemned Buchanan for appearing on James Edwards’ radio talk show in early 2012 to promote his book, Suicide of a Superpower and again complained that “Buchanan has repeatedly demonized Jews and minorities and has openly affiliated with white supremacists. He has also claimed that the sovereignty of the United States is being undermined by Israeli control and Mexican incursion.” Another example of the Canard Strategy described in Part 2: Simply to list the charges is to refute them. It’s also an example of the “Cordon Sanitaire” discussed in Part 2: Establish a barrier between acceptable and unacceptable media. James Edwards, an explicit White advocate, is in the latter category.
• Foxman also expressed his displeasure with Buchanan’s column “Are Liberals Anti-WASP?” where Buchanan wrote: “If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?”Jewish activists immediately went to work. The National Jewish Democratic Council complained about Buchanan’s “over-the-top, conspiratorial screeds.” Abe Foxman was at his most colorful, calling Buchanan a “recidivist anti-Semite who doesn’t miss an opportunity to show his fangs.” Foxman also gave his expert, unbiased opinion that Kagan “is a highly qualified candidate for the judiciary, an exemplary Solicitor General and a great legal mind” (“The New Elite Doesn’t Officially Exist“)
• Foxman has been active in condemning the Catholic Church. “Foxman declared that “It would be unthinkable to allow a Catholic breakaway sect [i.e., Society of St. Pius X] that includes a Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard Williamson, to be reintegrated into the church while still being allowed to promote anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism — which they have been doing for years in their teachings and on their web site.” This quote appeared in a TOO article by Peter Stuyvesant emphasizing the lack of reciprocity in Jewish-Catholic relations. While Jews have been successful in expunging anti-Jewish statements from the Catholic liturgy, there has been no reciprocal action by Jews, including Foxman and the ADL, to remove anti-Christian passages from the Talmud (e.g., Jesus was a bastard, etc.).
• Foxman attacked Mel Gibson for his anti-Jewish tirade when arrested for DUI and then complained loudly about Gibson’s involvement in a planned film on the Maccabees (“a travesty”).

The “Disease” of Intolerance. Foxman continues the Jewish tradition, dating at least from the 1950s, of conceptualizing any criticism of the organized Jewish community or even any description of Jewish power and influence as a disease and therefore a public health problem. (In 1987 Foxman as the new head of the ADL stated, ““We’ve conquered time and space. We’ve reached the moon. We’ve developed a vaccine for smallpox. And yet, unfortunately, we have not yet come up with a vaccine against this disease [i.e., anti-Semitism].”) Recently Andrew Joyce called attention to ” the closing remarks from … Foxman’s unintentionally hilarious Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype [2010], where parents and teachers are urged to ‘try to help the next generation grow up freer from the infection of intolerance.’ The goal being, as Mr. Foxman so recently articulated, to ‘make America as user-friendly to Jews as possible.’”

Supporting Israel. The metaphor of America being user-friendly to Jews suggests an image of Jews using America instrumentally to advance their interests, just as a user-friendly software program allows one to easily attain one’s goals. And high on the list of Jewish goals is to use America to advance the interests of Israel. A comment on an article by John Mearsheimer on “The Future of Israeli Apartheid” included Mearsheimer classifying Foxman as among “the “new Afrikaners” — people like Abe Foxman and Elie Wiesel whose views are identical to those of the politically dominant ethnonationalist government in Israel. At the very least, the new Afrikaners will support Israel no matter what it does.” (As another TOO article notes, “when John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt published their work on the Israel Lobby, organizations like the ADL were quick to condemn them as anti-Semites and compared their writing to classic anti-Jewish themes in writings like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”)

There’s also the recent case where the Economist withdrew a cartoon from its website due to the ire of the ADL which described it as “anti-Semitic.”  As usual, everyone knows about the power of the Lobby, especially in Congress, but no one is supposed to talk about it.

Foxman, therefore emerges as an icon of the most ethnocentric element of the Jewish mainstream — so much so that he becomes an ideal contrast to someone like Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss:  “[Weiss] does not have a sense of historical injustice, at least when he thinks of his own experience in America. As he acknowledges, in this regard, he is quite unlike most American Jews and certainly unlike the activists who staff the organized Jewish community — the Jews like Abe Foxman who use their sense of persecution as a badge and sword” (“Philip Weiss on Philosemitism and Ethnocentrism“).

Given that the Israel Lobby has been actively influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, at times by successfully advocating wars seen as benefiting Israel, an important function of the ADL has been to prevent assertions that in fact the Jewish identity of these advocates has anything to do with the policies they promote. The following appeared in “The Canard Strategy in the Service of War with Iran“:

The main Jewish activist organizations [were] quick to condemn those who have noted the Jewish commitments of the neoconservative  activists in the Bush administration or seen the hand of the Jewish community in pushing for war against Iraq and other Arab countries. For example, the ADL’s Abraham Foxman singled out Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, Rep. James Moran,Chris Matthews of MSNBC, James O. Goldsborough (a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune), columnist Robert Novak, and writer Ian Buruma as subscribers to “a canard that America’s going to war has little to do with disarming Saddam, but everything to do with Jews, the ‘Jewish lobby’ and the hawkish Jewish members of the Bush Administration who, according to this chorus, will favor any war that benefits Israel.”

Similarly, when Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC) made a speech in the U.S. Senate and wrote a newspaper op-ed piece which claimed the war in Iraq was motivated by “President Bush’s policy to secure Israel” and advanced by a handful of Jewish officials and opinion leaders, Abe Foxman of the ADL stated, “when the debate veers into anti-Jewish stereotyping, it is tantamount to scapegoating and an appeal to ethnic hatred …. This is reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government.” (“Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,” pp. 15–16)

When there were widespread reports that Israelis in New Jersey were celebrating the 9/11 bombings, a TOO article quoted a source suggesting that Carl Cameron’s Fox News report was squelched after Foxman intervened:

According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News’ parent, News Corp., to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, “Look, you guys have generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this stuff out there? You’re killing us”. The Fox News source continued, “As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well, what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, ‘Stop the e- mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we’ll stop being in your face–by way of taking our story down off the web. We will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we will at least take it off the web.'” Following this meeting, within four days of the posting of Cameron’s series on Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message, “This story no longer exists”.

Invoking the Holocaust. The holocaust, which is the focus of elaborate educational programs run by the ADL, is used as the ultimate moral trump card. Foxman has often used it to frame particular Jewish interests as preventing another holocaust.  This was apparent in the recent campaign to get the Obama administration to go to war with Syria. Here Foxman invoked the holocaust as implying that America must attack Syria:

The world failed to act during the Holocaust and stood by through the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. It is a moral imperative that the international community act now to prevent further atrocities in Syria.

Perhaps the most revealing Foxman quote on the Holocaust appeared in a review of Gilad Atzmon’s The Wandering Who?: The Holocaust is “not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God’s chosen children and, thus, on God himself.”

In Foxman’s view then, God may be equated with the Jewish people—exactly the point of view of the Old Testament, as seen, for example in this complaint from Ezra about intermarriage: “For they [the Israelites returning from the Babylon exile] have taken of their daughters [i.e., the daughters of the Israelites who remained behind and were genealogically suspect]  for themselves and for their sons; so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the peoples of the lands’” (Ezra 9:2). “The use of the phrase ‘holy seed’ is … a rather unvarnished statement of the religious significance of genetic material and the religious obligation to keep that genetic material pure and untainted. … For the Israelites, there was really only one purpose for God—to represent the idea of kinship, ingroup membership, and separateness from others. … In a very real sense, one may say that the Jewish god is really neither more nor less than Ezra’s ‘holy seed’—the genetic material of the upper‑class Israelites who were exiled to Babylon” (see here).

Foxman may be living in the 21st century, but his mindset is that of Ezra in 500 B.C.—a consummate example of Jewish hyperethnocentrism.

Foxman has also been involved in the holocaust reparations industry. Norman Finkelstein became a victim of the organized Jewish community after publishing his book The Holocaust Industry. In a TOO review, Foxman was  noted as actively involved in pressuring the Swiss government on holocaust reparations: “In June 1998 the Swiss made a final offer of $600 million.  Head of the ADL Abraham Foxman called it ‘an insult to the memory of the victims.’  By August the bankers finally gave in with a $1.25 billion settlement.”

A year after the settlement, no plan was drawn up to distribute the money to actual Holocaust survivors.  By December 1999 only half of the $200 million originally given in 1997 had reached the victims.  Finkelstein’s last edition of the book was released in 2000 but as of 2009 only $490 million of the $1.25 billion had gone to individual claimants.  The rest went to such worthy causes as lawyer fees, Jewish organizations and Holocaust propaganda, presumably to help create a new generation of suckers.  Holocaust programs in schools are recommended or required in seventeen states.

Go to Part 2.