The Defamation Tactics of the ADL
by Gary DeMar

Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), is again attacking Christian conservatives and their involvement in politics, something the ADL does on a regular basis. Foxman wrote:

“Today we face a better financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before. Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us!”

If Christians had attacked Jewish political lobby groups and black churches because of their nearly blind support for the Democrat party, media vitriol and charges of anti-semitism and racism would be splashed across the front page of every major newspaper in the country. As it is, it is open season on Christian political involvement.

This isn’t the first time Foxman has gone on an anti-Christian tirade. In 1994, the ADL published The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America. Some of the usual anti-Christian suspects contributed to the 193-page support: Americans United for Separation of Church and State, People for the American Way, and Frederick Clarkson. The content and rhetoric of the report were so egregious that a group of nearly 80 Jewish leaders took ads out in various periodicals disassociating themselves from it. They offered this summary statement: “It ill behooves an organization dedicated to fighting against defamation to engage in defamation of its own.”

The Christian Coalition published A Campaign of Falsehoods in response to the poorly research and argued ADL report: “The ADL report is filled with fabrications, half-truths, innuendo and guilt by association that are reminiscent of the political style practiced by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.” After a number of factual mistakes had been pointed out to Foxman, Foxman wrote a letter of apology to Pat Robertson. He ended the letter with this paragraph: “Pat, I hope that you are assured of our good faith; I hope as well that you and I can move forward with added empathy for each other’s religious and civic sensibilities.” So much for ADL “empathy” in 2005.

As far as I know, no mainstream Christian group involved in politics has uttered a single anti-Jewish remark since the 1994 ADL report was published. So what’s changed? Iran’s new hardline President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has said the Jewish state “should be wiped from the map,” and Islamic terrorists haven’t met a Jew that they did not want to kill. So who does Foxman go after? Christians!