You can always count on the ADL to side with the Left against Israel.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo moved to defund Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other leftist groups. While the US should obviously not be funding them in the first place, the basis for barring them was antisemitism.

 U.S. President Donald Trump may soon declare that several prominent international NGOs, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam are, in fact, anti-Semitic organizations, Politico reported on Thursday.

Sources in the State Department told the online magazine the declaration was likely to come from U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism Elan Carr, whose next report could name the three and “declare that it is U.S. policy not to support such groups, including financially, and urge other governments to cease their support.”

The report would cite such groups’ alleged or perceived support for the anti-Israel BDS movement.

Nothing alleged or percieved about it.

As NGO Monitor notes, HRW has lobbied intensively in support of the discriminatory UN database of businesses operating across the 1949 Armistice line, aimed at bolstering BDS campaigns against Israel. HRW has signed multiple letters to the UN calling for the database to be implemented without further delay.

On January 19, 2016, published “Occupation Inc.” a 162-page report calling for businesses to cease operations in Israeli West Bank settlements, constituting a de-facto call for a boycott of Israel. Coinciding with HRW’s publication, Kathleen Peratis, co-chair of HRW’s Middle East North Africa Advisory Committee and emerita Board of Trustees member, penned a pro-BDS article in Ha’aretz.

 

These groups get funding from the usual BDS donors, e.g. Rockefeller Brothers. 

And you can guess the ADL’s position easily enough.

“We oppose broadly applying the antisemitism label to these human rights organizations; doing so is neither accurate nor helpful to the fight against antisemitism. Rather, this move would politicize the fight against antisemitism.

As opposed to the ADL’s current habit of falsely claiming that all critics of George Soros, including Jews, are engaging in antisemitism.

Jonathan Tobin writes that,

In other contexts, the ADL accepts the IHRA definition and denounces those who violate it. But right now, the group and its CEO, former Clinton and Obama administration staffer Jonathan Greenblatt, have a different priority. As with so many of its stands during the last four years, the ADL is not so much interested in anti-Semitism as it is in defeating President Donald Trump. Acknowledging that this administration has not only been the most pro-Israel in U.S. history but also devoted more resources to fighting anti-Semitism, especially on college campuses, than its predecessors undermines the Democrats’ talking points about Trump dog-whistling or enabling far-right Jew-haters.

Just as troubling, Greenblatt seems to value ADL’s alliances with partners on the left, even if means making common cause with a trio of groups whose policy agenda is antithetical to the ADL’s brief to fight anti-Semitism. Denouncing them for anti-Semitism violates the ADL’s current impulse to see no enemies on the left.

If anything this is charitable.

Greenblatt’s mission has been to make the ADL into a generic lefty group and whenever there’s any conflict between the Left and being pro-Israel, the choice has been predictable.