Terry Firma

I should precede the affecting video below by confessing that I’m not a terribly big fan of the grievance junkies who commissioned it — the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The ADL can try to pass itself off as the enemy of bigotry all it wants, but those of us who pay attention know that the ADL and CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) are two sides of the same tiresome coin.

New Atheism author Sam Harris once correctly called CAIR “an Islamist public-relations firm posing as a civil-rights lobby,” and much the same can be said for CAIR’s antipode, the Anti-Defamation League. It is the ADL’s mission to cry anti-semitism at every turn, just as it is CAIR’s mission to advance, ad infinitum, the narrative of “Islamophobia.” Victimology is their lifeblood.

So, is the ADL opposed to discrimination, racism, and religious strife? Not always. Sometimes the ADL engages in it. For instance, in 2010 the organization agitated against the building of an Islamic recreation and social center in downtown Manhattan, saying that the center’s adjacent but independent Muslim prayer space would be an intolerable affront to families of the 9/11 victims. The ADL stated that those families were “entitled” to feel “irrational” and “bigoted” toward all Muslims. Hmm.

The ADL, ironically, also makes light of actual anti-semitism by habitually calling it anti-semitic to oppose rightwing Israelis’ favorite policies. People who see a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue can also expect to be smeared by the ADL as anti-Jewish and possibly racist.

One more thing. It surely is a bit much for an organization that defends not just cultural but religious Judaism to use John Lennon’s Imagine as its soundtrack. In that signature ballad, the British bard is asking us to think about a world without religion, a sentiment that didn’t make it into the digital edit used for this ADL video. I wonder why.

Other than that, it truly is a sweet and laudable message, based on a lovely idea that tugs at the tear ducts.