ADL Articles

by: Jewel Nesmith April 26, 2016 Fears of extremism, radicalization and mass violence in our schools have unfortunately become all too common for educators and school administrators across the United States. At the same time, information that allows educators to understand the threat and leaves them equipped to address it without perpetuating biases and stereotypes is scarce. In order to fill this gap, the Anti-Defamation League and START (the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism…

by: Oren Segal April 26, 2016 There is fighting and acrimony between supporters of the two most visible websites in the white supremacist movement—Stormfront and The Daily Stormer—over the role of white women. Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi who runs The Daily Stormer, has infuriated many white supremacist women by posting articles on his site that attack white women. When a fan of Anglin’s recently asked on Stormfront why that website seemed to be deleting posts referencing…

by: Oren Segal April 25, 2016 Marking the anniversary week of Adolf Hitler’s April 20th birthday, several neo-Nazi and Klan groups held collaborative events over the weekend of April 23. Four such events were held within approximately 150 miles of one another in north Alabama and central Georgia.   The United Klans of America (UKA) hosted a private event in Alabama which included a cross burning and several Klan weddings.  The event was open to all members of the Black and…

by: Oren Segal April 22, 2016 By Lauren Jones, Civil Rights National Counsel As Jews gather around the Seder table to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, we are commanded to tell the story as if we had personally fled slavery. We will read from the Hagaddah, “This year we are slaves. Next year may we all be free.” In grade school we learned in history classes that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States in 1865. What fewer learn or remember, however,…

by: David Robbins April 21, 2016 By Jonathan Green­blatt CEO of the Anti-Defamation League This article originally appeared on The Huff­in­g­ton Post Blog This Friday night, Jews around the world will gather at Seder tables with friends and family to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. We are commanded to tell the story as if we had personally fled slavery, transforming the experience from the simple recounting of an ancient tale to an…

by: Mark Pitcavage April 20, 2016 On April 20, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that famous abolitionist and rescuer of slaves Harriet Tubman will be the new face of the $20 bill, replacing Andrew Jackson (who moves to the bill’s back). The move is intended to answer a long-standing call for more diversity on America’s paper currency. Tubman, a former slave herself, helped hundreds of other slaves escape into freedom. Initial reactions were largely positive—but not…

by: David Robbins April 19, 2016 By Jonathan Green­blatt CEO of the Anti-Defamation League This blog originally appeared on Medium A little over a year ago, the Anti-Defamation League reacted to the newly announced parameters of the agreement between the world powers and Iran, saying it left us with “many unanswered questions” about Iran’s nuclear program and the Islamic Republic’s intention to fully and transparently uphold its commitments…

by: Oren Segal April 14, 2016 By Kenneth Jacobson April 15 is the 69th anniversary of the entry of Jackie Robinson into the major leagues. To commemorate that historic event and that historic figure, PBS is running a new two-part documentary  looking at how this grandson of slaves rose from humble origins to integrate Major League Baseball. In some ways, the story of Robinson and the integration of baseball is a little hard for us to understand in 2016. Society in general has come a…

by: Mark Pitcavage April 13, 2016   In the popular imagination, the bomb is the weapon typically associated with terrorists or extremists—but in the U.S. extremists seem to be killing more people with firearms than with any other weapon, and that use may be increasing. It is certainly true that many of the high-profile terrorist attacks in the United States over the past century have been bombings, including the 1919 anarchist bombing campaign, the 1963 16th Street…

by: Marilyn Mayo April 13, 2016 Ken O’Keefe, an anti-Zionist ex-Marine and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist with a substantial following on YouTube, is currently on a national tour of the United States titled “F-ck the USSA/TSA/ Homeland Security Tour.” He is scheduled to visit cities all over the U.S., as well as Canada. O’Keefe proudly announced that he would embark on this tour, taking Amtrak instead of flying. In announcing the tour, he claimed that the security…

by: Oren Segal April 11, 2016 It’s April 12, 2016 — Equal Pay Day, the symbolic date that women need to work until to catch up with what men had earned by last Dec. 31. The fact is that women who work full time, are paid an average of 79 cents for every dollar paid to men — and on average, African American and Latina women are paid even less. It’s not a day to celebrate, but it is a teachable moment to focus on the needless, costly, and discriminatory gender wage…

by: Oren Segal April 07, 2016 Ali­son Weir, the direc­tor of the anti-Israel organizations If Amer­i­cans Knew and the Coun­cil for the National Inter­est, is behind a series of billboards that read “Help the USS Liberty Survivors Attacked by Israel.” The billboards, which have appeared so far in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, are “paid for by www.honorlibertyvets.org,” a website that promotes the anti…

by: Oren Segal March 31, 2016 The Nation of Islam (NOI) has published a series of interviews with anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracy theorists to support Farrakhan’s repeated claim that Jews are to blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The NOI’s Research Group published the hateful interviews on its website in response to ADL’s article in the Huffington Post Reconciliation Cannot Mean Turning a Blind Eye to Farrakhan’s Anti-Semitism, an answer to Russell Simmons’ The…

March 28, 2016 Updated: July 05, 2017 Andrew Auernheimer (aka Weev) is doing his best to escalate the increasingly fraught battle between CNN and the anonymous Reddit poster who created a video clip of President Trump wrestling "CNN" to the ground. Auernheimer threatened CNN on the Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website, giving the network one week to fulfill a range of demands, including firing everyone involved in the Reddit story, creating a college scholarship for the Reddit poster, and…

by: Marilyn Mayo March 25, 2016 Update — 3/28/16: Hacker Andrew Auern­heimer has claimed credit for exploit­ing net­work print­ers at these col­leges to print these flyers. More information available here. On Thursday, March 24, a number of campuses around the country received an anti-Semitic flyer that blamed Jews for destroying the country “through mass immigration and degeneracy.” The flyer asks people to “join us in the struggle for global…

by: Oren Segal March 25, 2016 It’s tough being born as a teenager. Yesterday, Microsoft launched its new artificial intelligence (AI) computer bot - named Tay and envisioned as a teenage girl – and she had a very rough first day.  She was immediately besieged by excited techies, the curious and the haters. In a few hours, she was drawn into tens of thousands of exchanges. In the process, racists, anti-Semites, misogynists and other haters manipulated her into repeating…

by: Mark Pitcavage March 21, 2016 Federal prosecutors in Portland, Oregon, obtained a 19-count grand jury indictment in mid-March against Winston Shrout, a Hillsboro, Oregon, resident and one of the most prominent sovereign citizen gurus in the United States, a man whose videos and seminars have attracted thousands of people to the anti-government extremist movement. Shrout was charged with 13 counts of using fictitious financial instruments in connection with an alleged debt elimination…

by: Oren Segal March 18, 2016 This week marks the 30th anniversary of a significant event in ADL history – the decision by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to posthumously pardon Leo Frank.  Frank was the Jewish manager of an Atlanta pencil factory who was falsely accused and wrongly convicted in August 1913 of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who worked in the factory.  Anti-Semitism was rampant in the early 1900’s and Leo Frank&rsquo…

March 15, 2016   The political discourse has reached a point where we have to ask ourselves: What should we tell our children?  Young people watch and emulate what adults say and do. For that reason, many adults—parents, neighbors, teachers, caregivers and yes, even politicians—are role models to children.  These values—using accurate and appropriate language, standing up for one’s beliefs, checking ourselves when it comes to bias and…