May 11, 1993
The
Jewish Thought Police How the Anti-Defamation
League censors books and librarians, and spies on
citizens By Robert Friedman BOOK BANNING may seem
like a minor inconvenience compared to home
demolitions and mass-deportations, to name just two
of the better-publicized tactics employed by Israel
in its war against the Palestinians. Yet while
censorship does not maim like a rubber bullet or a
soldier's club, it is meant to obliterate the
national consciousness - the very soul of a people.
For this reason, the Israeli military has banned
nearly 4000 books in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza strip since 1967, including the plays of
Sophocles, the works of Egyptian Nobel
laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and The Battle for
Peace by Ezer Weizmann, Israel's president.
Few in the West have protested this assault on
intellectual freedom. But a Chicago librarian
decided it wasn't a trivial matter. In July 1992, David Williams presented a
resolution at the American Library Association's
annual convention in San Francisco, calling "upon
the government of Israel to end all censorship and
human rights violations in the Occupied West Bank
and Gaza, and in Israel itself." The censorship
resolution and a second resolution condemning the
pending deportation of a Palestinian librarian were
overwhelmingly passed at the ALA's membership
meeting. They were also endorsed by the
organization's ruling office. The 56,000 member ALA, which has been the
central forum for libraries and librarians since
its founding in 1876, is hardly a radical
organization. Though it passed resolutions
condemning apartheid in South Africa, it didn't
take a firm stand against segregated libraries in
America until the late 60's - and then only after a
decade of acrimonious debate. The resolution
condemning Israeli censorship was easily the most
daring political statement the ALA had ever
made. The ALA's action did not go unnoticed outside
the cloistered world of librarians. In fact, the
resolution set the stage for a dramatic showdown
this June at the ALA convention in New Orleans: On
one side was a small band of progressive
librarians, many of them Jewish. On the other was a
well-oiled coalition of conservative Jewish
librarians backed by the Anti-Defamation League of
the B'nai B'rith, which engineered a campaign to
rescind what is called the "false and biased
anti-Israel resolution." But this is not just a cautionary tale about one
librarian's battle against book banning in the
occupied territories. It is part of a larger story
about the most powerful Jewish organization in
America, and its attempt to determine what should
be taught in our nation's schools, what should be
read in our nation's libraries, and what should be
publicly discussed about Israel at public forums.
Through its 31 offices across the country, the ADL
monitors school curricula, library acquisition
lists, and public conferences and symposiums,
working behind the scenes to stifle intellectual
freedom. All of this is occurring against the backdrop of
the biggest domestic spy scandal in recent U.S.
history, embroiling the ADL in a criminal
investigation in San Francisco, where it may face
multiple felony charges for illegally obtaining
confidential information from police files on
thousands of groups and individuals ranging from
American Arabs to anti apartheid activists.
According to the police confessions of two paid ADL
investigators, buttressed by 700 pages of court
documents and interviews, the ADL freely passes its
files to South African and Israeli
intelligence. In recent weeks, the criminal probe has spread
to Los Angeles, where police are investigating
allegations that the ADL illegally received
confidential information about citizens from one or
more police officers, according to the Los Angeles
Times. And, revealed here for the first time, the
Internal Affairs Divisions of the Chicago Police
Department is currently investigation allegations
that the ADL has been running a massive spy
operation in the Midwest that was aided and abetted
by local police officers. "We are identifying
people in the Chicago Police Department who may
have provided information illegally or improperly
or improperly to the ADL," Sergeant John Putney of
the Chicago Police Department's special
investigations unit told the Voice. Putney added
that he is also attempting to identify three ADL
undercover operatives in the Chicago area known
only as Chi.l, Chi.2, and Chi.3. The existence of
the Chicago spy network was revealed in documents
released by the San Francisco D.A.'s office.  The
ADL refuses to speak to the Voice for this article.
But defamation league national director Abraham
Foxman (left) has repeatedly denied any
wrongdoing on the part of his organization,
declaring that he sees nothing wrong with keeping
files on groups and individuals he believes are a
threat to Jews. Foxman told the Jewish Bulletin of
Northern California that critics who have called
the ADL's information gatherings "spying" are
"scapegoating" the organization. This is "an attack
on the Jewish community vis-à-vis an attack
on the ADL," he declared.
 AT
FIRST GLANCE David Williams seems an
unlikely candidate to take on the ADL. Hardly an
imposing figure, the 43-year-old librarian stands
just a tad over five-six, and would be lost in a
crowd save for his trademark Panama straw hat. In
1972, when Williams graduated from the University
of Wisconsin in Madison, the stately Mid-Western
campus was the seat of radical anti-war protests
that had spread across the country like rolling
thunder. As a student, Williams was deeply engaged
in the antiwar movement. Upon graduation, he went
to Atlanta to help organize for the Socialist
Workers Party. and later earned master's degrees in
history from Georgia State University and library
science from Emory.
In 1976 Williams was hired as a reference
librarian by the Chicago Public Library. He became
head of the Social Science and History Division's
Middle East acquisitions six years later. In 1983,
Williams wrote to the ALA, documenting examples of
Israeli book censorship in the occupied
territories. "I fear that ALA will not be willing
to confront this issue, given the hysteria that
arises in the United States whenever anyone sharply
criticizes our alley and the 'only democracy in the
Middle East,"' Williams wrote. "Of course, it's
easy to dismiss this issue with the excuse that
ALA's concerns for intellectual freedom are limited
to the domestic United States.... Not being
familiar with ALA structure and procedures, I can't
suggest a particular action that you might take on
this issue, but have brought it to your attention
in at least the faint hope that ALA could be
prevailed upon to study the matter and make some
pronouncement." Over the next decade, Williams not only
bombarded the ALA with countless missives about
Israeli censorship, but brought speakers to from
Israel and the occupied territories to speak at an
annual convention as well. While some colleagues
admired his determination, others found him to be
strident and single-minded. Even some of his allies
in the censorship battle say his tendency to
self-righteously attack his political opponents
undercut his support. "David sometimes showed a
real lack of sensitivity," says Mark
Rosenzweig, a professor at La Guardia Community
College who backed the censorship resolution. A growing number of librarians even whispered
accusations of anti-Semitism, a charge Williams
vehemently denies. "Equating legitimate criticism
of Israel with anti-Semitism is a way of
intimidating public criticism of Israel," says
Williams. "It's an outrageous and false charge.
They can't find anything I've done except criticize
Israeli policies on human rights grounds." Williams insists that he was "very pro-Zionist"
until he went to college and read books that
contradicted the Leon Uris myth that
fair-haired Jews wrested Israel away from venal
Arabs who were, in any case, interlopers with no
historical ties to the land. Today, though Williams
calls himself "an anti-Zionist," he favors a two
state solution on pragmatic grounds, declaring that
"Israel should not have been established at the
expense of the Palestinian people." While many of
his progressive friends busied themselves over the
past two decades with protesting the Vietnam War,
or apartheid, or U.S. policies in Latin America,
few dared to speak out on Israel, because, he says,
they feared being labeled Jew-haters by groups like
the ADL. Williams soon discovered how treacherous the
ADL, could be when he became ensnared in a heated
controversy about - of all things - a bibliography.
In 1989 he complied a bibliography on the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the Chicago Public
Library. It included 147 books divided into 11
categories, such as "The Palestinian National
Movement" and "Zionism." Williams selected a mix of
Israeli and pro-Israeli Jewish authors, as well as
many Arab authors who are often ignored in standard
reading lists on the topic. He also included
several avowedly anti-Israeli polemicists. Uri
Davi's Israel: An Apartheid State and Ingela
Bendt's We Shall Return: Woman of Palestine could
be found alongside Golda Meir's My Life and
Menachems Begin's The Revolt. Williams bibliography
was widely praised by academics, and was used as a
teaching aid by the prestigious Center for Middle
East Studies at the University of Chicago. In August 1989 Chicago's Chief Librarian
Samuel F. Morrison received a call from a
prominent Jewish patron, complaining about the
"biased" bibliography. The library's director of
collection development was dispatched to meet with
Williams and examine the bibliography title by
title. Convinced that the list was thoroughly
professional, Morrison sent a letter to the patron
affirming the bibliography's balance. Two months later, the ADL and the Jewish
Community Relations Council launched a concerted
campaign against the bibliography, sending letters
to library administrators and trustees as well as
to Cindy Pritzker, the president of the
Chicago Library Board (Whose family owns the Hyatt
Hotel chain). On November 8, Morrison responded to
the ADL's allegations of bias, stating that "as a
matter of policy, The Chicago Public Library
endorsed the Library Bill of Rights and the Freedom
to Read Statement of the American Library
Association. Article 2 of the Library Bill of
Rights states that 'Libraries should provide
materials and information presenting all points of
view in current and historical issues.' Proposition
1 of the Freedom to Read Statement states that 'it
is in the public interest of publishers and
librarians to make available the widest possible
diversity of views and expressions.' It is the
opinion of Library staff that the bibliography
successfully reflects those principles. Undeterred, the ADL responded in a November 22
letter, complaining that the bibliography lacked
balance and was flavored by a pro-Palestinian bias.
The ADL also prepared a 19-page précis of
William's bibliography, attacking authors and books
deemed not to the league's liking (so, therefore,
presumably unfit for public consumption). the ADL
portrayed many prominent Israeli historians like
Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim as unfairly criticizing
Israel. Even so mainstream a figure as David
Shipler, the former New York Times bureau chief
in Israel, was lambasted for his Pulitzer
Prize-winning book Arab and Jews. Wounded Spirits
in the Promised Land. "Often," the ADL wrote, "his
attempt at evenhandedness results in distorted
equivalencies between Arab and Israeli actions."
Books that earned the ADL seal of approval included
Bower J. Bell's sympathetic history of the
right-wing terrorist underground, the Irgun and the
Stem Gang, headed by Menachem Begin and
Yitzhak Shamir respectively Soon after, Chicago-area ADL leaders met with
Morrison behind closed doors and demanded a
revamped bibliography. Instead, Morrison agreed to
send the bibliography to four Chicago-area branch
library heads for critical review and comment. The
branch heads praised the bibliography's
professionalism, though two reviewers who supported
the list suggested adding a few more avowedly
pro-Zionist titles. But the ADL wasn't appeased.
When informed of the results, the league turned the
letter writing campaign up a notch. Aldermen in
heavily Jewish neighborhoods were bombarded with
calls until they too complained to library
officials and even the major's office. In January 1990, a shell-shocked Morrison
offered the ADL a compromise. He would update the
bibliography, adding many more pro-Zionist books.
Not satisfied, the ADL demanded that Morrison place
38 books it chose in a new bibliography and forbid
Williams from working on this and future reading
lists. On the second week of January, the library
administration capitulated, agreeing in writing to
include more than 30 titles selected by the league
in a revised bibliography, which would be compiled
by someone other than the troublesome Mr. Williams.
But the ADL's victory was short-lived. On January
30, Chicago Sun Times columnist Dennis Byrne
revealed the ADL's covert attempt to impose its
will on the readers of Chicago. "Chicago has been A
place where you can fix everything from getting
pals to zoning for skyscrapers," Byrne wrote. "But
have you ever heard of people using their clout to
get a library reading list changed?... Ominously,
the group (ADL) has complained about the compiler's
(David Williams) past. In a letter to the library,
the group warned that it is 'aware' of his
'previous role' and 'association' with (an Arab)
group on the other side... I can hear the echo of
Joe McCarthy demanding: 'Are you now or have you
ever been a member of the ..."' The column followed by a second one a few days
later, created an uproar. Here was unequivocal
proof that the ADL was attempting to censor a
public library, eerily reminding Williams of
Israel's practices in the occupied territories.
Dozens of outraged educators, attorneys, and
librarians wrote to the Commissioner of the Chicago
Public Library to condemn the ADL's assault on
intellectual freedom. "As a Chicago Public Library
cardholder, a taxpayer, an educator, indeed, as a
Jew with a very personal stake in seeing that
balanced treatments of the tragic
Palestinian-Israeli conflicts are presented to the
American public, I ask you to stand firm." wrote
Sandra Lee Bartky, a professor of philosophy at the
University of Illinois. "There is a shared
perception that political pressure of the sort
brought by the ADL and the JCRC threatens the
independence, not to say the excellence of a major
cultural resource in out city and that the giving
way to such pressure would set a dangerous
precedent." John Coatsworth, the chair of the
University of Chicago's history department , wrote
the commissioner, saying: "For the general reader,
Williams has put together an extremely useful and
carefully balanced works on this important topic.
As usual, Mr. Williams work conforms to the highest
standards of professionalism. Criticisms by groups
like with strongly partisan sympathies in respect
to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should, in my
judgment, be dismissed out of hand." Used to working quietly behind the scenes, the
ADL backed away from its high-pressure lobbying
campaign (as did the JCRC in its cameo role) after
the flurry of negative press coverage. Still,
Williams was instructed to include some titles from
the ADL's list in an updated bibliography. So he
balanced ADL-recommended books like Clare
Sterling's The Terror Network with Edward Herman's
The Real Terror Network. The ADL's public
drubbing in Chicago was an anomaly. Like the
Yankees of DiMaggio and Gehrig, the league
expects to win big every time it enters the
park. The ADL, with a budget of $32 million, has
far more firepower than a recalcitrant librarian
- a fact that Williams was reminded of at the
ALA's recent national convention.
NEW ORLEANS, June 28, 1993. The fight to
rescind the year-old resolution condemning Israel's
censorship policies in the occupied territories
drew more than 1,500 librarians - three or four
times more than usual - to the Monday night
membership meeting of the ALA's annual
convention. "There he is," cried a Jewish librarian, sitting
directly behind me, as David Williams strode into
the cavernous Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel,
where members had gathered to either reaffirm or
reject the controversial resolution. "I'd like to
kill the little bastard." Calls for William's head had been echoing
through library corridors ever since his censorship
resolution passed the previous summer. Back then,
he had strong support on the floor, most notably
from E.J. Josey, an African American professor of
library science at the University of Pittsburgh and
a past president of the ALA, who dramatically rose
to support the resolution during the debate, saying
that Israel was committing an "injustice." I think
I did sway a lot of votes," Josey says now. The ADL immediately went to work to overturn the
resolution. An ADL delegation met with ALA director
Peggy Sullivan in Chicago, where the library
association is headquarter. The ADL demanded that
Sullivan unilaterally revoke the resolution. "I was
very conscious of how unknowing they were about the
way the ADL works," says Sullivan, who told the ADL
that the resolution's fate was up to the will of
the membership. So the ADL launched a letter-writing campaign,
sending communiqués around the country.
"Behind the scenes, the Anti-Defamation League met
several times with ALA, with no positive results,"
Martin Goldberg, a co-chair of the ALA's
Jewish Librarians Task Force, wrote to colleagues.
"Abraham Foxman, ADL national director said,
"Unfortunately, the failure of the ADL leadership
to public denounce these resolution...signals to us
that the ADL leadership condones inflammatory
anti-Israel activities within its
organization." Meanwhile, Hadassah, the Women's Zionist
Organization of America, sent an action alert to
its members to attend the New Orleans convention in
order to defeat the "anti-Israel" resolution.
Hadassah, like the ADL, also prepared a "fact
sheet" on censorship in the Middle East, asserting
it was much worse it the Arab world, so why single
out Israel? The fact sheets were distributed at the
convention, and Haddassah flew down a professional
lobbyist as well. (The fact that the ALA in years
past had endorsed resolutions condemning censorship
practices in Afghanistan, Iran, and even Great
Britain was conveniently ignored by the Hadassah
women.) "We decide we would bring something to this
effort - something that no other Jewish
organization could, and that is grassroots
involvement," says Sarabeth Lukin, a senior
Hadassah official who headed the organization's
efforts. "We had many of our members down
there." Although she doesn't have precise figures Lukin
acknowledges that the ALA membership meeting was
packed with Hadassah women. A large delegation of
librarians from New York cheered every time a
speaker criticized Williams. Moments before the
vote, Jesey left the room. He later told me he felt
ill. But according to another librarian, Jesey said
he was afraid he would be branded a black
anti-Semite if he voted to reaffirm the censorship
resolution. After the acrimonious 45-minute debate, the
librarians voted to overturn the censorship
resolution by a huge margin. By most accounts, the
overwhelming rejection was due to a larger number
of pro-Israel activists who came down at the behest
of Hadassah, the fear of many ALA members that the
controversy was tearing the organization apart, and
a backlash against William's overbearing and
self-righteous personality. "The resolution was
very divisive to the ALA," says Sullivan, who
supported revoking it. "We had members who felt it
was not appropriate; they felt embarrassed by it,
ashamed by it, mad about it." After the vote, I spoke to Helen S.
Kohlman, a lawyer and a library trustee, who is
also head of the 1000-woman New Orleans Hadassah
chapter. Several days before we met, she had hosted
a cocktail party at her home for ALA officials, who
mixed with local Jewish leaders lobbying against
Williams. "David Williams is either anti-Semitic or
stupid," said Kohlman. "If anybody has any Simmel
at all and they want things to be fair, and they
want a more humane Middle East, then they shut up!
Now is the time for calm, now is the time for
quiet. Now is not the time for David Williams.. .1
have a right to take him on. And I did. And I'm
glad. And we won, And I feel wonderful." The same week in New Orleans, ALA officials
announced that they had set up a task force -
reported at the ADL urging - to investigate
Williams. (Some Jewish librarians privately
speculated that Williams was on the PLO payroll,
but when asked for evidence, could offer none.)
While the task force was quickly disbanded thanks
to protests by liberal librarians who warned it
smacked of McCarthyism, ADL issued a press release,
praising the ALA for rescinding the censorship
resolution.
FROM ITS INCEPTION in 1913, the ADL has
successfully masqueraded as a civil rights
organization concerned with the civil liberties of
all Americans. Yet the ADL has had a long and
inglorious history of suppressing intellectual
freedom. It is a history that is now only coming to
light in the wake of the revelations emerging from
the ADL spy scandal. The ADL was founded by Sigmund
Livingston, an attorney from Bloomington,
Illinois, to fight anti-Semitism. It started with a
budget of $200 and two desks. When Arnold
Forster, a young, tough, street-smart Jewish
lawyer, joined the league in New York in 1938, it
was still relatively unknown. Several years before
coming to the league, Forster had set up an
organization called the Junior Guild. It's members,
mostly Forster's law school chums, traveled around
New York on the subway, monitoring the meetings and
speeches of anti-Semitic hate groups. It was a time
when "Jews were suffering a national epidemic of
scapegoating," Forster wrote in his autobiography,
Square One. The guild soon became, wrote Forster, an
informal field arm of the ADL in New York, and I
"assigned the members to cover meetings of such as
the KKK, Christian Front and German-American Bund,
check backgrounds of anti-Jewish activists, and
identify the sources of anonymous anti-Semitic
literature.. .When people reported anti-Semitic
slurs in a subway car or on a street corner, I
would assign a volunteer member to meet with the
complainant and prepare an affidavit for
counteraction. We were at long last routinely able
to record under oath much of the violent
anti-Semitism in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and
later, Boston... As thin as our operation seemed -
by today's standards, insignificant and amateurish
- its fact-finding and counteraction became the
heart of the organization and eventually American
Jews adopted ADL as its eyes and ears for exposing
and monitoring anti-Semitism. At the onset of the Cold War, the ADL was
running perhaps the largest private spy agency in
America, regularly feeding the FBI information not
only on anti-Semitic groups like the KKK and the
American Nazi party, but also on Jewish leftists
and members of the Communist Party. "They [the
ADL] maintained this very strong anti-Nazi,
anti-Communist position," says a San Francisco
official who is closely involved in the
investigation of the ADL. "The anti-Nazi position
was obviously very common to everyone in the U.S.
at that time. But the anti-Communist position was
not common during World War II. Immediately after
the war people had a lot of different feelings
about Communists - until the Iron Curtain really
shut down." But there was the ADL, blithely combing
through its files, naming names. It supplied not
only the FBI, but, according to the Congressional
Record, the Commerce Department, which reviewed the
files of applicants for government jobs, searching
for "subversives." Meanwhile, Forster had become the ADL's spy
master. "In many instances our agents were employed
by an outside investigative agency operating as an
independent contractor," wrote Forster. "Many were
retired local or federal government investigators,
non-Jews as worried about the safety of our
democracy as we were. (Jewish agents were not as
secure from detection, having to conceal their
Jewishness to function effectively. In a sense that
created a kind of double jeopardy - hiding one's
real purpose and true identity.)" In the '50's and '60s, the ADL continued to
penetrate and expose racist and fascist groups. It
also championed the civil rights movement, speaking
out for fair housing and against job
discrimination. Yet as always, there was a darker
side. The ADL spied on Martin Luther King and
passed its files to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI,
according to Henry Schwarzchild, who was an ADL
officer from 1962 to 1964 and is now an official
with the ACLU. "It was common and casually accepted
knowledge," Schwarzchild told the S.F. Weekly. Two events occurred in the late 1960s that sent
the ADL on a headlong plunge toward
neo-conservatism: The Israeli military occupation
of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that followed
the 1967 Six Day War, and the birth of the New
Left. With all of its radical assumptions about
race and feminism and its fervent support of Third
World liberation movements, the New Left not only
threatened the ADL's hard-line anti-Communist
critique, but seemed to undermine Israel as well.
The ADL viewed its embrace of Palestinian
nationalism as a new kind of anti-Semitism that
used anti-Zionism as its smoke screen. The New Left
certainly had its share of anti-Semites. But in the
ADL's myopic zeal, the entire counterculture became
suspect - not to mention a prime target for
penetration, misinformation, and elimination. By the time the Likud came to power in Israel in
1977, the ADL was a transparently right-wing
organization. The Likud's desire to colonize all of
the West Bank and Gaza found enthusiastic adherents
in the ADL. Its current national director, Abraham
Foxman, keeps a framed portrait of Vladimir
Jabotinsky, the tyrannical founding father of the
Likud, on prominent display in his office. The ADL
also publicly supported Ronald Reagan's policies in
Latin America, criticized Nelson Mandela's ANC as a
terrorist organization, and embraced the Christian
evangelical community, whose conservative domestic
and foreign policy views went against the Jewish
community's long-standing support for civil rights
and abortion and opposition to school prayer. "The [Christian] fundamentalists'
relative religious intolerance can and does coexist
with religious and political attitudes being
supportive of Israel's well-being," wrote Nathan
Perimutter, the late director of the ADL.
"Fundamentalists intolerance is currently not so
baneful as its friendship for Israel is
helpful." In past years, says an ADL regional head who
spoke on condition of anonymity, the 31 regional
directors gathered annually to hash over policy
with the organization's national officials. But
that practice stopped around the time Liked came to
power. Now policy is dictated by neocons in New
york. Liberal ADL officials - and there were once
many - either hold their tongue or have fled the
organization. "The left in this country, including those
within the ADL, really feel either sort of betrayed
or stifled or rolled over by the ADL," says the ADL
regional head. "Liberals used to say this was the
first place they were going to go for an ally. Not
anymore." The ADL took a particular hard line against the
affirmative action, straining its relations with
the black community almost beyond repair." So
strong was the ADL's objection to affirmative
action that when Richard Lobenthal, the
ADL's Michigan representative, wrote a book
supporting it, he was ordered to remove his name or
be fired, according to knowledgeable sources. A few
years later, when the ADL issued a white paper
smearing civil-rights leader James Foreman
as an anti-Semite, more than a dozen regional heads
wrote to the national office in New York denouncing
the tract as racist garbage. Jack Greenberg,
the legendary head of the NAACP's Legal Defense
Fund, who filed many affirmative action lawsuits in
the belief that they held the key to advancement
for minorities, told Jonathan Kaufman, the
author of Broken Alliance, that in his view, the
ADL's most vociferous opponents of minority quotas
had become "haters." As far as the ADL's critics are concerned, one
of the most notorious "haters" is Irwin
Suall. In 1967, after a brief stint as a
sales-man for his brother's candle company, Suall
joined the ADL's fact-finding Department, which he
soon headed. Suall was the embodiment of the
anti-Communist paranoid. In his youth, he had been
a socialist with Trotskyite leanings. By the time
he joined the ADL, according to those who knew him,
he hated the left with a vengeance. Under Suall,
the fact-finding Department became even more
politicized, as he expanded its spy-gathering
operations to the New Left, including Jewish peace
groups. "I think that fact-finding without
perspective is dangerous," says the ADL regional
head. "I am never comfortable that Suall has a
sense of perspective... Suall is too narrow. If you
don't say yes to everything he says then you are an
enemy." After Breia, a Jewish peace group, began
spreading its doctrine of a two-state solution in
the early 1970s, it was pilloried by the ADL and
other Zionist organizations for being "a dangerous
cell of PLO supporters," according to Edward
Tivnan's book, the Lobby. B'nai B'rith, the
ADL's parent organization into Breira's leader,
Rabbi Arnold Wolfe, then Hillel director at
Yale, who was publicly denounced by the ADL
national leadership. "They were quite open about
it," says Rabbi Wolfe, who now officiates at a
Chicago synagogue. "They tried to get me fired
because my view of a two-state solution...,was in
their opinion unacceptable. Now they have the right
to argue with me. Maybe they have the right to get
me fired if they can, but they can't expect me not
to notice that they are spending community funds
and community energy in a decisive action - an
action which turns Jews against Jews, not just in
debate, which is certainly permissible, but in this
undercover activity." The ADL undercover activity wasn't limited to
Jewish progressives. Nor was it limited to domestic
matters. Indeed, in 1948, the ADL set up a joint
intelligence-gathering operation with the
government of Israel, an activity that seems to
raise questions about its charitable, tax-exempt
status. In a July 7, 1961, letter, ADL national director
Benjamin Epstein asked Saul Joftes, a
senior official of the B'nai B'rith, for $25,000 to
help fund a spy operation against Arabs. "As you
know," Epstein wrote, "The Anti-Defamation League
for many years has maintained a very important ,
confidential investigative coverage of Arab
activities and propaganda... In the course of our
work, we have maintained an information-gathering
operation since 1948 relating to activities
emanating from the Arab Consular Office, Arab
United Nations Delegations, Arab Information
Center, Arab Refugee office, and the Organization
of Arab Students. "In order to obtain complete and
thorough data on these activities, we must
follow the Arab diplomatic corps in their
political efforts, lobbying activities and
propaganda programs emanating from their
embassies... [as well as] Arab relations
with organizations like the American Friends of
the Middle East and all their publicity efforts."Our information, in addition to being
essential for our own operations, has been of
great value and service to both the United
States State Department and the Israeli
Government. All data have been made available to
both countries with full knowledge to each other
that we were the source..." Around the same time, the B'nai B'rith set up a
joint spy operation with the Israeli government to
debrief Jewish tourists and business men returning
from East bloc nations. The operation was run out
of B'nai B'rith's New York headquarters and
coordinated by Un Ra'anan, the Israel consul
general. Ra'anan subsequently taught Soviet Studies
at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at
Tufts, where one of his star pupils was Jonathan
J. Pollard, later convicted as an Israeli spy.
(Ra'anan, Pollard told Blitzer, was "my Jewish
experience at Fletcher." Pollard also told Blitzer
that he spied on Third World students at Tufts as a
"free-lancer" for the CIA. In a letter to a
supporter written from prison, Pollard implicated a
top ADL official in his Israeli spy ring.) But at least one senior B'nai B'rith official
took issue with the Soviet Bloc operation run by
Ra'anan. "I am absolutely opposed to any
involvement by any B'nai B'rith entity.. .in any
such activity as described in the memorandum
[which detailed the spy operation]," Joftes
wrote to B'nai B'rith head Philip Klutznick
in a confidential memorandum dated September 12,
1960. "I am astonished at the naiveté of the
proposal. I suggest that this memorandum with
attachment be destroyed." Joftes continued to
battle with his superiors for several more years,
until he was fired. Few outside the ADL knew about the extent of its
massive, decades-long spy operation until the San
Francisco Examiner revealed in January that the
district attorney's office was investigating the
league for illegally gathering information on
thousand of private citizens and more than 900
political groups, ranging from the American Indian
Movement to skinheads. Many of the ADL's files were
allegedly based on confidential information
illegally obtained from police computers.
Investigations by the FBI and police in San
Francisco have also revealed that the ADL has
shared at least some of its spy gathering material
with Israeli government officials. According to
court documents, a veteran ADL investigator sold
reports he had prepared for the league on
anti-apartheid activists to South African
intelligence. Suall later told the FBI that "he
didn't think dealing with South African
intelligence was different than dealing with any
other police agency," according to a law
enforcement source. On May 11, the San Francisco
Examiner reported that top officials of the ADL,
including Suall, "are the ultimate targets of the
San Francisco district attorney's domestic spying
investigation.... A San Francisco law enforcement official with
detailed knowledge of the criminal probe has told
the Voice that when police, armed with
search warrants, raided ADL offices in San
Francisco and Los Angeles last April, they
discovered numerous memos from Suall instructing
field operatives to obtain confidential criminal
records from law enforcement agencies. While the
San Francisco DA is investigating allegations that
Suall may have acquired this information illegally,
ADL officials insists the organization has done
nothing wrong. "On the ADL's behalf - it's kind of a backhanded
compliment - they have been obtaining confidential
files from law enforcement all over the country for
50 years," says the official force. "Most of their
people are legitimately shocked that anyone would
have the nerve to tell them they can't have these
records because...they are more like the police
than the police are... They thought that they not
only had the right to it, but that they had the
premier right. And they happen to be wrong." In fact, the ADL has become a clearing-house for
law enforcement agencies. In the '70s and '80s, as
many police intelligence units that gathered
political information on citizens were shut down
under court order because the violated
constitutional guarantees to privacy and freedom of
speech and assembly, their files were often
bequeathed to the ADL. The ADL, in turn, would
often lend the files back to the original donor or
broker them to another intelligence agency. "It is
like sending your money to the Bahamas," says the
San Francisco law enforcement source. It's a way
for police agencies to avoid violating their own
rules."
THE SAN FRANCISCO DA's investigation has
devastated the conservatives who run the ADL. At a
breakfast in New York not long ago, ADL general
counsel Arnold Forster looked back at his
long past with the organization, reportedly bowed
his head in anguish, and cried, "All that I've
worked for is being destroyed!" Others would say that
happened long ago, when the ADL decided to use its
vast resources to spy on progressives, shape
bibliographies, and attempt to fire progressive
rabbis. |
I
have a special reason to loath the ADL: in February 1996
they started a clandestine 
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