Anti-Defamation League head vows to sign up to registry Trump promised while campaigning, legally obligating Muslim Americans to be tracked

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The head of the Anti-Defamation League has vowed to sign up to a Muslim registry if it is established by Donald Trump.

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Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the ADL, told an antisemitism conference in New York he would register as a Muslim if need be.

“If one day Muslim Americans will be forced to register their identities, then that is the day that this proud Jew will register as a Muslim,” Greenblatt said.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for the president-elect denied that he had ever advocated establishing a registry for monitoring people based on their faith.

However, in a video shot at a campaign event in Iowa in November last year, Trump said he would certainly implement a database for tracking Muslims, and that Muslims would be legally obliged to sign up.

Some Trump surrogates have voiced support for the idea in the past week, leading to fears that the incoming administration may pursue such a policy.

Trump has also been accused of turning a blind eye to antisemitism within his campaign organisation. Greenblatt, one of the most vocal critics of Trump’s appointment of the former Brietbart chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, spoke to the Guardian this week.

“The reason why we stepped up at the ADL is we think it’s problematic when people who peddle in the worst stereotypes and who promote ideas about the inferiority of different people are sitting in ‘the people’s house’,” Greenblatt said.

“I can’t describe Mr Bannon’s intent, I don’t know, but I’m focused on outcomes and under his watch Breitbart became the haven for the so-called alt-right, it became the messaging platform for some of the worst ideas in our society.”



In a scathing statement issued in reaction to the appointment of Bannon, the ADL said he was “hostile to American views” and described the alt-right as “a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed antisemites and racists”.

“At the ADL we really appreciated President-elect Trump’s call for unity on election night,” the statement continued, “and we appreciated his comments on [CBS’] 60 Minutes where he talked about stopping the hate.

“That’s why naming Bannon seems so discordant with those messages. At a time when the country needs to come together, this is an individual who has spent his career dividing people, and we’re deeply concerned.”

Greenblatt, who has led the ADL for 16 months, pointed to a sharp spike in antisemitism in the US over the past year, driven in part, he said, by “an explosion on social media”.

A rash of hate crimes have been reported since the election, as has a disturbing rise in the use of swastikas and Nazi terminology on social media and in instances of vandalism, often in connection to Trump.

On Tuesday, a Jewish and openly gay New York state senator found a swastika carved into the door of his apartment. A few days earlier, a swastika and the word “Trump” were found written on the wall of a dorm room in an upstate New York university.

At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, swastikas and the word “nigger” were written on library walls, along with Trump’s name and “MAGA”, which stands for Trump’s campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again”.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organisation which monitors extremist groups, has been monitoring incidents of hate since Trump’s shock victory. Its tally surpassed 400, with a number of groups as targets, between 9 and 14 November.

Last month, the ADL released a report that analysed 12 months of data on Twitter, finding that from August 2015 to July 2016, some 2.6 million antisemitic messages were posted. Of those, 20,000 were directed at a handful of journalists.

“We have seen white supremacists under the guise of the so-called alt-right utilize platforms like Twitter to intimidate and terrorise minorities, and in particular Jewish journalists,” Greenblatt said.

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“They were targeted because they had written things during the campaign that had offended the alt-right. The pattern of abuse is staggering.”

On Monday, the FBI released data showing that hate crimes in the US grew by 6.8% in 2015, to a total of 5,850 incidents. Against Muslims, the number rose by 67%, an increase experts said was fueled by acts of extremism abroad and anti-Muslim rhetoric in Trump’s campaign.

“We think the country is in a very tense place right now,” Greenblatt said, “coming off the election, and you’ve seen this manifest with real world incidents – verbal harassment, acts of vandalism, actual physical assault.

“I should be clear that the left is not exempt from intolerance: we’ve seen Trump supporters attacked, and in September we saw the GOP headquarters in north Carolina firebombed.”