ADL chief bows to critics (Armenians show how to defeat Judeo-lobby)

[Petr]

Other gentiles should take notice, and get rid of the defeatist notion that Judaics are invincible on lobbying game. Perhaps they have been succeeding only because their opposition has been so weak, getting rep in "bum fights"?

http://www.boston.com/news/local/art...ritics/?page=1


ADL chief bows to critics

Foxman cites rift, calls Armenian deaths genocide

By Keith O'Brien, Globe Staff | August 22, 2007


The national director of the Anti-Defamation League bowed to pressure from both the Jewish and Armenian-American communities yesterday and officially acknowledged the genocide of Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks more than 90 years ago.

In doing so, Abraham H. Foxman reversed years of ADL policy and a position he had reaffirmed as recently as Friday when he fired the ADL's New England regional director, Andrew H. Tarsy, for defying the national organization and acknowledging the genocide.

"We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against Armenians as massacres and atrocities," Foxman said in a written statement yesterday. But upon reflection, Foxman continued, "the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide."

In an interview with the Globe, Foxman said that for some time he has privately believed that the mass killings constituted a genocide, but thought that describing them as atrocities or massacres was enough. Yesterday, he said, he realized this description was dividing the Jewish community and the ADL changed its position.

"So if that word [genocide] brings the community together, that's fine," Foxman added.

He refused to say for just how long he had privately recognized the genocide and also declined to comment on whether Tarsy would be reinstated, given the new national position.

"That's a management decision," he said. "And when we make it, you'll know about it."

While Foxman's statement acknowledging the genocide appeased many, including some regional board members scheduled to meet this morning to discuss the rift between the regional and national offices, others, in both the Jewish and Armenian-American communities, felt Foxman's statement did not go far enough. He stopped short of saying that the national ADL would support a resolution pending in Congress to formally acknowledge the Armenian genocide, a crucial point for Armenian-Americans.

However, both Jewish and Armenian-American leaders applauded Foxman yesterday for a policy shift that they say was long overdue. Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said he believed that the ADL's policy change and the attention the debate has attracted would boost the profile of the resolution in Congress this fall.

"I think it only helps the legislation," Hamparian said. "I think it shows that even long-standing reservations about the genocide itself are crumbling in the face of community pressure and facts. The opposition is falling apart."

The debate began locally weeks ago in Watertown, home to more than 8,000 Armenian-Americans. Some residents there became upset when they learned that the ADL, which had long refused to acknowledge the genocide, was the sponsor of the town's antibigotry program, No Place For Hate.

Last week, the Watertown Town Council voted to pull out of the program. And as other towns began considering pulling out of the program, Tarsy and the regional ADL board broke ranks with the national office.

The regional board's executive committee resolved last week to acknowledge the genocide and support the congressional resolution. Tarsy, meanwhile, told the Globe that he disagreed with the national office's position, and he was fired the next day.

At issue was not the ADL's antibigotry program itself, but rather a longtime dispute, dating back more than 90 years. From 1915 to 1923, Ottoman Turks slaughtered as many as 1.5 million Armenians in what is now modern-day Turkey. Armenians, historians, and nations including France, Canada, and Britain have recognized the killings as genocide. But the Turkish government has refused to accept the genocide label, and the national ADL has refused to use it, as well. As an organization founded in 1913 to fight anti-Semitism, the national ADL had long expressed concern that acknowledging the genocide would have a negative impact on the Jews living in Turkey, a rare Muslim ally to Israel, and on Israeli-Turkish relations.

Foxman reiterated those concerns yesterday. In his written statement, he said the congressional resolution "is a counterproductive diversion" that could put Jews at risk. Nevertheless, he said, after consulting with Nobel laureate, renowned author, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel on the issue, he ultimately decided that the ADL's relations with the Jewish community was more important than the single issue of the genocide debate.

"In this time, for us to be split apart on an issue, which, as important as it is, is not foremost on the agenda of our safety and security, I found very troubling," Foxman told the Globe yesterday, en route to Boston to meet with board members. "I therefore did what I did to bring the community together."

Steve Grossman, a former regional board member of the ADL and a recent Foxman critic, gave Foxman credit for changing his position, while Nancy Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, called Foxman's announcement "great news."

But Foxman's comments did not play as well in the Armenian community, which has sought endorsement of the congressional resolution, nor in the Turkish community.

"We're very disappointed," said Nurten Ural, president of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations in Washington, D.C. Ural said she believes the national ADL "was pressured to do something they really didn't believe in."

"If someone put a gun at your head, you're going to do what they say," Ural told the Globe. "And that's what happened, unfortunately."

Some said that Foxman's comments did not go far enough. In Watertown, Councilor Marilyn Pettito Devaney said she and others still plan on lobbying other towns to pull out of the ADL's No Place for Hate program. The goal, she said, is to have the ADL support the legislation in Congress, adding that "anything less is unacceptable."

It was a feeling shared among the leaders of the Armenian Assembly of America, the Armenian National Committee of America, and US Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who introduced the Armenian genocide resolution in the House.

"I'm pleased that the ADL is now on record recognizing the facts of the Armenian genocide and that it is, in fact, a genocide," Schiff said. "I think that takes their position a step forward. But they've only cut half the distance."

Schiff, like many Armenian-Americans, said it is inconsistent to acknowledge the genocide, but then refuse to support Congress's effort to do the very same thing. James Rudolph, the regional board chairman of the New England regional ADL, said the national office's failure to take this next step may trouble some board members.

"But I hope our board members will continue to stay with us," Rudolph said.

Foxman said he was not sure what would come of this morning's board meeting or his trip to Boston.

But one goal for many local Jewish leaders was clear yesterday: They wanted Andrew Tarsy back in office as the ADL's regional director.

"What are they going to do about that?" asked Ronne Friedman, the senior rabbi at Temple Israel, Boston's largest synagogue. "Why is he a casualty of this?"

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

[Petr]

http://www.takimag.com/site/article/firing_foxman


Firing Foxman

Posted by Paul Gottfried on August 20, 2007


A truly spirited commentary by Jewcy-webmaster Joey Kurtzman entitled Fire Foxman may be the most devastating and pointed attack I have seen on Abe Foxman, who has been National Director of the Anti-Defamation League for the last twenty years. According to Kurtzman, Foxman, a Polish Jew who was saved from the Holocaust by a courageous Catholic nanny, has been a morally outrageous representative of the Jewish community. Most recently he has worked to block congressional action to condemn the mass murder of one million Armenians in 1915 by Turkish military divisions, because such an action would supposedly not have been in the interest of Israel. Foxman’s comment that “the Jewish community should not be the arbiter of that history, nor should the U.S. Congress” is indeed startling since Foxman’s career as ADL National Director has been devoted to opening the scabs of bitter historical memories. “He has resorted to scaremongering to fill its [the ADL’s] coffers.” Further, “Foxman claims that today the Jewish people face as great a threat to their safety and security as they did in the 1930s. It is still 1939. It will always be 1939.”

Kurtzman notes that Foxman screams day and night about Christian anti-Semites in the U.S., in total obliviousness to what is really happening: “While Christian groups can’t get the ornaments of Christianity placed on government buildings, Chabad [an Hasidic Jewish organization] has succeeded in publicly erecting enormous gaudy menorahs throughout the country.” Kurtzman stresses with particular vehemence “ADL’s jihad against Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ,” a film that, according to Foxman, would revive atavistic Christian hatred against Jews and result in pogroms across America. Although absolutely nothing of the kind occurred, neither Foxman nor his group later apologized for their “self-destructive” hysteria. One might also point out that on July 14, Salon carried an article dealing with Foxman’s latest diatribe against Evangelicals and other members of the Religious Right. Since the mid-nineties this National Director has been commissioning ADL publications depicting Christians who oppose the Left’s social agenda as a grave danger to American Jews. Here Foxman’s hatred of Christians has overcome his sense of Jewish self-interest. Evangelicals, contrary to what Foxman would want us to believe, have been passionate and often irrational Philosemites and Zionists. (The Israeli Right cannot have enough of them.) But even more relevant, as I document in an article for The American Conservative (June 4, 2007), Evangelicals have been moving toward the social left (that is, in Foxman’s direction) on moral issues and is currently fixated on human rights, missionizing for democracy, and the presidential nomination of socially liberal Republican Rudolph Giuliani. Foxman’s continuing attack on the Christian Right seems as bizarre as his knee-jerk attempt to treat any deviation from the agenda of the National Gay and Lesbian Alliance or NOW as an invitation to a second Holocaust.

When Foxman made the dubious observation twelve years ago that American Christians did not show sufficient remorse for Christian atrocities committed against Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition immediately agreed. Reading Reed’s obliging response in the New York Times on April 4, 1995, I had to wonder why this descendant of English Baptists was accepting responsibility for the intolerance of a Spanish government practiced five hundred years earlier against Spanish Jews, some of whom had already converted to Catholicism. And why should Foxman demand that an American Protestant or even an American Catholic treat him with special indulgence for unkind acts that had been done by a third party—not against his ancestors in Eastern Europe but against Sephardic Jews in the Iberian Peninsula? What did not surprise me was that an Evangelical leader did the predictable groveling.

A small reservation about Joey’s fine expose concerns the suggestion that Foxman is blinded by narrow Jewish self-interest. This complaint would seem to have some basis in fact, insofar as Foxman and ADL do try to anticipate the wishes of the Israeli government. Their response to congressional efforts to recognize the killing of Armenians in 1915 was at least partly motivated by concern about the feelings of the Turkish government, which has good relations with the Israeli state. (Although there are other grounds on the basis of which one might challenge the presentation of the mass murder in question as genocide, I see no reason to go into them here.) In his youth and even afterwards, Foxman also identified himself, like his father before him, with the rightwing Zionist Betar, a group that followed Zev Jabotinsky and others Eastern European Jewish nationalists who wished to have a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. Moreover, Foxman has never broken his ties, as far as I know, to the Orthodox Jewish community, ties that may well express his strong Jewish ethnic identity.

In this case, however, Jewish self-interest has taken a grotesque form, albeit one that has been prevalent in Jewish organizations in Germany, Italy and until recently, France. Enthusiastic support for Israel, and of a kind that leans toward the Zionist Right, has been paired at the ADL with hatred for Western Christian societies, and unswerving endorsement of anti-Christian leftist agendas, even when such agendas have conflicted with Jewish communal interests. For example, it has been ideologically useful for Jewish victimologists to interpret Muslim anti-Jewish outbreaks—to which pro-multicultural Jewish organizations may have contributed by shaming European Christians and by supporting Islamic immigration—as a fresh outbreak of European fascist or medieval Christian anti-Semitism. In the U.S., Foxman has done his part to address the fact that we live forever frozen in 1939 by redirecting money coming into his coffers to gay, feminist, and militant secularist causes. How this advances Jewish self-interest is anyone’s guess, and the politics in question has occasioned expressions of irritation from Jewish as well as Christian commentators. Dennis Prager, Ilana Mercer, Don Feder, and Rabbi Daniel Lapin are only a few of the Jewish writers who have repeatedly asked how Foxman and his crowd are helping Jews, whose only allies at this point are devout Christians, both Catholic and Protestant.

I would also question, pace Kurtzman, whether the effect of Foxman’s grotesque behavior has been “to demoralize Jewish Americans, sending young Jews scurrying for the communal exit doors.” Given the fact that he raised over half a billion dollars last year, as reported by one of Kurtzman’s respondents, and has probably done comparably well as a fundraiser since 1987, when he took charge of the ADL following the death of his less obnoxious predecessor Nathan Perlmutter, it is fair to assume that Foxman’s moonshine has lots of buyers. And judging by the leftist pattern of American Jewish voting and by Jewish responses to Gallup polling on social issues, one would have to conclude that Foxman’s nuttiness is a widely shared phenomenon among American Jews. It also resonates well among liberal Christians and non-Jewish secularists here and in Europe. With few exceptions, every time I pick up a Western European newspaper, I have the impression that the editorial page was produced by a clone of the ADL’s National Director. Foxman stands in the cultural Marxist mainstream and as such, bears a stunning resemblance to the types of self-hating European and American journalists and intellectuals I have written about in books. If only Joey Kurtzman’s subject were a localized Jewish eccentricity or a particularly hateful organizational head, his tics would be far less troubling.

[Walter Yannis]

Maybe Abe Foxman capitulated on the Armenian issue because the Israeli government told him that there was a change of plans vis a vis Turkey???

Just speculating, but that would seem to make sense.

[Sertorius]

All these people who wish to live in America need to leave all of this excess bagage in the lands where it was created. Congress has no business voting on condemnations of anything like this. I don't waste my time here writing about what the English did to my ancestors, they should do the same and get over it.

[madrussian]

Armenians aren't that different from the Jews.

It's one ethnomafia dealing with another one. Whites aren't involved in this in any way, except as donors for other peoples' "holocausts".

[Petr]

All these people who wish to live in America need to leave all of this excess bagage in the lands where it was created. Congress has no business voting on condemnations of anything like this.

Symbolic acknowledgement of the genocide would be the very least that Western countries should or could do.

In fact, if there is any cause over which it would be worth launching an idealistic crusade, it would against Turkish oppressors.

As Theodore Roosevelt put it back in 1918:

To Paul Shimmon for use among the Armenians and Assyrian Christian $1,000.00 I send this through Mr. Shimmon because so far as I know he has never sought to excuse or justify what I regard as our inexcusable dereliction in duty in having failed to declare war on Turkey, and therefore in having failed to play a manly part in the effort permanently to remedy the hideous wrongs of the subjects of the Turk in the only really effective way, by destroying Turkish rule.

http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trnobeldispose.html

I don't waste my time here writing about what the English did to my ancestors, they should do the same and get over it.

Apples and oranges. I daresay Armenians have suffered worse than anything that the English did to your ancestors.


Petr

[Walter Yannis]

Apples and oranges. I daresay Armenians have suffered worse than anything that the English did to your ancestors.
Petr

Not if they're Irish. The British imperialists committed genocide - or at least something very close to it - in Ireland in 1847.

See The Great Hunger by Cecil Wodham Smith

I have no objection to the Congress passing a non-binding resolution calling the Armenian massacre of 1915 a genocide (which it was).

I do object strongly, however, to making "denial" as in "Holocaust denial" a crime, as this violates our bedrock principal of freedom of speech.

[Gregz]

The history of the Irish is a far darker one than most people realise.

The Sketch of a Woman and Children represents Bridget O'Donnel. Her story is briefly this:-- '. . .we were put out last November; we owed some rent. I was at this time lying in fever. . . they commenced knocking down the house, and had half of it knocked down when two neighbours, women, Nell Spellesley and Kate How, carried me out. . . I was carried into a cabin, and lay there for eight days, when I had the creature (the child) born dead. I lay for three weeks after that. The whole of my family got the fever, and one boy thirteen years old died with want and with hunger while we were lying sick.

[Walter Yannis]

The history of the Irish is a far darker one than most people realise.

You might find this interesting.

[Texas Dissident]

I have no objection to the Congress passing a non-binding resolution calling the Armenian massacre of 1915 a genocide (which it was).

Exactly where in the Constitution does it allow for that, Brother Walter?