The ADL, George Bush,
and the Christian Right
In recent weeks, it has come to our attention that White House political hatchet-man Karl Rove has solicited the help of Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), in going after some leading Democratic Party figures who have, of late, turned George W. Bush's nascent second term in office into a political near-death experience. While, on the surface, the idea of a Rove-Foxman collusion might strike you as a political oddity, a brief review of Mr. Foxman's decade-long flirtation with the Christian Right—including some patently anti-Semitic figures—sheds light on the current alliance-of-convenience.
In 1992-93, the San Francisco District Attorney conducted a criminal probe of the ADL, stemming from a series of police raids on ADL offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, which turned up tens of thousands of illegally-obtained government files on political activists. Among the targets of ADL surveillance and dirty tricks, were members of the U.S. Congress, including Rep. Ron Dellums (D-Cal.), Rep. Pete McCloskey (R-Cal.), and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.); the NAACP; a wide range of other civil rights, labor, and Arab-American organizations; and the LaRouche political movement. ADL sleuth Roy Bullock, according to FBI documents, passed some of the illegally-obtained dossiers and surveillance data on to the apartheid regime in South Africa (future South African President Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress were a favorite target of ADL surveillance and disruption tactics).
In the end, San Francisco prosecutors decided not to press criminal charges against the ADL; however, a civil suit settlement in the late 1990s, still in force, bars the ADL from any more spying, and forced the ADL to pay millions into an educational fund.
Stung by the San Francisco probe, which exposed the ADL as anything but a liberal, civil rights organization in the tradition of such figures as the late Nahum Goldmann, the League, in 1994, embarked on a marriage-of-convenience with the emerging Christian Right, which had already forged a strong alliance with the Israeli Jabotinskyite faction of Netanyahu and Sharon, as well as the fanatical Temple Mount Faithful. After intially publishing a stinging critique of the anti-Semitic roots of many Christian Rightist organizations, including the Christian Coalition of Rev. Pat Robertson, by mid-1994, Abe Foxman staged a series of high-profile public rapprochement sessions with the likes of Rev. Jerry Falwell and Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed. Foxman now describes Reed as one of his close friends; and in 2002, the ADL paid for a full-page New York Times ad, in support of the Sharon government in Israel, an ad written and signed by Reed.
As EIR recently revealed, Reed—now the Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and a candidate for Lieutenant Governor—and his long-time Republican Party cohorts Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist, are at the center of a masive Rightwing money-churning machine, which is now under Federal and State criminal investigation, in part, for ripping off American Indian tribes through casino gambling schemes, to finance Rightwing GOP campaigns. As well, the Gang of Three are subjects of a separate probe by the House Ethics Committee, centered around House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).
At the heart of the Foxman-Reed-Falwell collusion has been a fierce opposition to the Oslo Accords and to the land-for-peace efforts overall. In the twisted world of the Christian Right, any kind of just, two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is a sin against God. For Christian Dispensationalists like Falwell, Robertson, and Reed, Middle East chaos is a hopeful sign that the End Times are near, and that the final Battle of Armageddon, in which the Jews and Muslims of the world will either convert to fundamentalist Christianity or die, is on the immediate horizon. The fanaticism of the Christian Right is, in many instances, in sync with the fanaticism of the Jewish Fundamentalists who murdered the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for daring to make peace with the Palestinians.
These are the murky waters into which the ADL's Abe Foxman has waded over the past decade. It is no wonder that Foxman now reportedly shows up on the roster of political opportunists and hacks, who have been dispatched by White House sleaze-meister Karl Rove, to wage political warfare against those who dare to challenge the "mandate" of George W. Bush, including those who would put the full weight of the U. S. behind a just peace between Israel and Palestine.
