Where's our leadership?

Published: JANUARY 17, 2010 23:49

abe foxman adl 88 (photo credit: ) — abe foxman adl 88

(photo credit: )

Few Jewish leaders and almost no mainstream organizations have explained to the community that we now face a radically new and potentially existensial threat - radical Islam.

We are a small people. We have multiple and powerful external enemies. Striving for Jewish political unity is our natural and rational impulse. Criticizing other Jewish leaders and mainstream Jewish organizations is usually just not done. But these are extraordinary times. We face daunting challenges for which there are no known answers. Chief among them are Islamic anti-Semitism and the global jihad that pose enormous, unanticipated threats to Jews around the world.

The premier Jewish defense agency, the Anti-Defamation League and its head, Abraham Foxman, have failed to respond to these threats. In truth, it is not only the ADL that is failing: Few Jewish leaders and almost no mainstream organizations have decided to stop doing business as usual, and to explain to the community that we now face a radically new and potentially existential threat.

It should be clear to anyone who can see beyond The New York Times that the Jews now live in a new time. World Jewry is caught up in a perfect storm: In Western societies, real danger to Jews no longer comes from Christian hatred of Judaism or from Nazi-like animus against our "race"; it comes instead from a hatred of the Jewish state and its Jewish supporters. That this animus comes mostly from the ideological left, with which a majority of Jews identify, is painful and confusing to many.

At the same time, blowing in from the Muslim world is a different sort of anti-Semitism, one which combines modern anti-Zionist themes with primordial Islamic theological hatred. Jew-hatred now drives countless masses around the globe. Imbibing this poison, Muslim radicals have attacked and murdered Jewish people from Israel to Europe, from India to Seattle.

Islamic hatred has indeed come to America.

In 1999, Sufi Sheikh Hisham Kabanni, head of the Supreme Islamic Council, testified to the State Department that 80 percent of American mosques are in the hands of radicals. A study by Freedom House, a Washington policy center, found Saudi-produced anti-Semitic literature in Islamic centers around the country. "Close Guantanamo, reopen Auschwitz" has been shouted by Muslims at anti-Israel demonstrations in Fort Lauderdale and posted on Boston-based Muslim Web sites.

JEWISH LEADERS, at least at the national level, are not blind to these threats. Two years ago at an international conference on global anti-Semitism in Jerusalem, the heads of many major American Jewish organizations heard speakers like Robert Wistrich, the director of Hebrew University's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, who described Muslim Judeophobia as an existential threat. Last March, Wistrich wrote in Haaretz that "the scale and extremism of the literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist Web sites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films, and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst." Through the Internet, this material is available to Muslims living among us here.
Because the mainstream media for various reasons downplays these threats, Jews who depend on The New York Times, The Boston Globe or CNN mostly don't see how our situation has been radically altered. And so the question remains: If our leaders know, why haven't they told us?

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I suggest three reasons. First is a fear of being attacked as racists, bigots and Islamophobes - a line of attack that has been particularly effective against Jewish organizations. Second is a fear of being targeted for "defamation" suits like the one launched against activists and media outlets in Boston who reported on, or asked questions about the radical connections of leaders of the Saudi-funded Roxbury mosque. "Lawfare" works: Legal defense costs can be crippling. But I think the real reason that our leaders are silent is that they simply don't know what to do. Rather than admit this, they stay mum and mostly limit their public efforts to issuing reports, posting articles on their Web sites and speaking about the matter in private or to small groups.
Recently ADL officials have protested this criticism, claiming I am "unaware of ADL's activism" against radical Islam, then pointing to articles about Islamic extremists and Arab anti-Jewish cartoons on ADL's Web site, along with instances of congressional testimony and consultations with world leaders. Surely this is not a serious effort for an operation with a $50 million annual budget that claims to be our chief defender. These are tactics. Where is the big-picture strategy?

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In response to the arrest of an Arab on an airplane who raged that he wanted to kill Jews, an ADL official recently told the press that this shows "anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews is still very much a part of society." Society??!! Yes, on the ADL Web site there was a press release which appended a few sentences about "Islamist extremism," but which seemed an afterthought. To continue to be politically correct in the face of a real threat that needs to be named is to mislead the Jewish community and the public at large.
Should Jews not expect Abe Foxman - and our other leaders - to level with us? To tell us what they know about the penetration of the Muslim Brotherhood into our communities and about the proliferation of radical mosques across America, and the intimidation, sometimes physical, of Jewish students on campus by radical Muslim students?

There needs to be a serious new effort. We can start with public conferences around the country on Islamic anti-Semitism and Islamist penetration of American society. We need to fund research in universities about these threats. We need to focus on the Saudi lobby and its impact on silencing scrutiny and criticism of anything Islamic. We need to reach out to congressmen to address these issues. Why not press for sensitivity training for foreign students who come from lands seething in anti-Semitism? Help us, Abe Foxman. We cannot continue with PC-denial and with timidity. Silence is potentially deadly. Let us face this challenge forthrightly, and together.
The writer is president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance. A version of the article was first published in the Boston Jewish Advocate.