CNN is reporting: “Elon Musk blames the ADL for 60 percent ad sales decline at X, threatens to sue.”
EMMAIA GELMAN, emmaia.gelman@gmail.com, @mishmoshk
Gelman teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is writing a book about the Anti-Defamation League. See her piece “The Anti-Defamation League Is Not What It Seems.”
She said today: “Elon Musk’s Twitter is in many respects a dumpster fire of racism and violent, virulent trolling, including antisemitism. It has lost whole communities of users and advertisers in droves. This is common knowledge and widely reported. But the ADL is hardly the hero of this battle.
“The ADL is a self-appointed liberal watchdog against antisemitism. Despite its relentless attacks on social justice movements, including BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color], Palestinian, queer, and Jewish groups, the ADL has been given an enormous platform by corporations and public officials and egregiously mislabeled as a civil rights organization. Over 200 groups including major antiracist and immigrant rights organizers have called to #DropTheADL.
“Musk and the ADL perform this dance in which Musk rallies his racist base, and the ADL gets to present itself as if it’s an antiracist organization. It isn’t — the ADL is an advocate for Israel and for key positions of the U.S. right, including anti-CRT and the notion that antiracist organizers are agents of ‘Soviet’ ideology, in their own words. Their perception is that anyone who endorses Palestinian freedom over Israeli violence, which U.S. antiracist groups do, is a danger to the political order.
“As antiracist and immigrants rights groups have said, the ADL fosters the misperception that it’s an antiracist ally because it’s powerful to attach civil rights claims to other political goals.
“The white supremacist #BanTheADL hashtag is racists’ bid not only to stir antisemitism, but to undermine BIPOC and Jewish groups’ calls to #DropTheADL.”
See recent IPA news release: “The Palestine Laboratory: X/Twitter Reportedly Working with Israeli Surveillance Firm.”