MIT Student Condemned Genocide — So ADL Chief Said She Helped Cause Boulder Attack

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks at the Javits Center in New York City on March Bryan Bedder Getty Images for Anti-Defamation League As the head of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt has done little to uphold his organization s contends to fight antisemitism as the leading anti-hate organization in the world Instead he s shored up the ADL s role as little more than a fierce pro-Israel lobby group known for defending Israel by attacking its critics With no sense of irony much of this effort manifests as defamatory speech at least in the everyday if not the legal sense by Greenblatt This weekend on Fox News however Greenblatt outdid himself In his appearance Greenblatt announced college graduates and social media influencers who have spoken out against Israel s genocide were responsible for a man in Boulder Colorado throwing Molotov cocktails at a group of elderly people calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza Greenblatt singled out a speech by the graduating class president from the Massachusetts Institute of Hardware while naming streamer Hasan Piker and social media influencer Guy Christensen as promoters of hate These speakers at these graduations it just happened the other day at MIT spreading blood libels about the Jewish people or the Jewish state it creates conditions in which this kind of act is happening with increasing frequency Greenblatt stated referring to both the attack in Boulder and the shooting of two Israeli embassy agents in Washington D C last month Megha Vemuri the MIT class president that Greenblatt referenced did not mention the Jewish people at all and spread no blood libels antisemitic false accusations that Jewish people are murderous She is one of several graduating students around the country who have used their commencement speeches to decry Israel s U S -backed onslaught which had already razed every university in Gaza to rubble by January of last year Every day new footage of mutilated children s bodies desperate hospital workers and scenes of searing grief are broadcast directly from Gaza to our phones While Greenblatt s declares on Fox were false and harmful strong free-speech protections under the First Amendment mean that it is unlikely a defamation lawsuit against him would succeed in this country But there is little doubt that in the everyday sense of the term defamation the Anti-Defamation League CEO s contends that commencement speakers were spreading antisemitic lies and suggestion that they re responsible for two stochastic violent attacks were defamatory and dangerously so We ve got to stop it once and for all Greenblatt disclosed of speeches like Vemuri s I hope the Trump administration will do just that Read our complete coverage Chilling Dissent In her fact-based and morally informed criticism of a nation state under inspection for genocide Vemuri praised her classmates for protesting for their school s divestment from the genocidal Israeli military Related MIT Shuts Down Internal Grant Database After It Was Used to Research School s Israel Ties As scientists engineers academics and leaders we have a commitment to advocacy life promotion aid efforts and call for an arms embargo and keep demanding now as alumni that MIT cuts the ties Vemuri declared We are watching Israel try to wipe out Palestine off the face of the earth and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it In both the Colorado and D C attacks which had otherwise nothing obvious in common the individuals shouted Free Palestine and reportedly described police that their actions were in response to Israel s assault on Gaza Without knowing these very different individuals media consumption habits I doubt they were spurred to action by graduation speeches Every day new footage of mutilated children s bodies desperate hospital workers and scenes of searing grief are broadcast directly from Gaza to our phones Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly releases population statements about ensuring that Gaza is ethnically cleansed His cabinet s eliminationist violence in Gaza has been so extreme unrelenting and crucially livestreamed that even multiple complicit leaders in the West have in fresh weeks condemned Israel s excesses Their belated words are no doubt gestures to future-proof their own reputations against charges of enabling genocide but they nonetheless speak to the undeniability of the horror So blinkered is Greenblatt s view though that it is only criticism of brutal Israeli acts not the acts themselves that could promote a violent response from observers abroad Related Atlanta Suburb Repeals Law Forcing Protesters to Obtain Consent of Anyone Within Feet The logical conclusion of Greenblatt s claim is that anything but silence on or aid for Israel s actions is not only antisemitic but also produces the conditions for violence against Jewish people in the United States Through Greenblatt the ADL has backed the McCarthyite repression of campus protests and pro-Palestinian campus speech praising overreaching crackdowns by university administrators and the cabinet Meanwhile the Trump administration is continuing its campaign to cage and deport students and graduates who express criticism of the Israeli regime Though Greenblatt marginally backtracked and called for more transparency the ADL s first reaction to Mahmoud Khalil s kidnapping by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for his constitutionally protected speech was one of endorsement We appreciate the Trump Administration s broad bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism We are watching Israel try to wipe out Palestine off the face of the earth and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it MIT banned Vermuri from walking in her graduation ceremony in retaliation for her speech New York University withheld the diploma of commencement speaker Logan Rozos who used his speech to condemn this genocide and complicity in this genocide These were just the latest examples of universities responding to pro-Palestine speech with punishment What further extremist censorship could Greenblatt desire Blood libel has become a standard retort of Israeli administrators and their mouthpieces when critics draw attention to the Israeli military s killing or maiming of over children in Gaza While hardly alone in this Greenblatt has been a consistent constituents voice enforcing the pernicious lie that anti-Zionism is antisemitic and that the movement to stop the mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians a movement in which thousands of Jewish people like myself participate is a movement against Jewish safety Related Anti-Defamation League Maps Jewish Peace Rallies With Antisemitic Attacks Long before last year s Gaza solidarity encampments the ADL s reporting on antisemitic incidents played a crucial role in obfuscating understanding about the state of antisemitism in the U S When the ADL counts antisemitic incidents it includes actions done in protest of Israel which in turn downplays the threat of far-right antisemitic violence notably Greenblatt excused white nationalist billionaire Elon Musk s apparent Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration rally as an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm while Greenblatt has compared the Palestinian keffiyeh scarf to a Nazi swastika A number of the organization s own staff quit in the months following October when Greenblatt doubled down on targeting Israel s critics The continued insistence that Israel s brutality is carried out in the interest of all Jewish people absolutely puts Jewish people at danger all around the world through the forceful conflation of Jewish identity and an ethnostate carrying out genocide an alignment that thousands of anti-Zionist Jews like myself reject It is ideologues like Greenblatt not the anti-genocide scholar activists he targets who insist on connecting Jewish identity with Israeli state violence While the ADL is ostensibly committed to tracking all forms of extremist violence Greenblatt has not blamed pro-Israel voices in the U S for the rise in Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian attacks in the last two years We did not hear equivalent calls for the authorities to deal with Zionist advocates when three Palestinian students wearing keffiyeh were shot in Vermont in late leaving one paralyzed or when a pro-Israel landlord in Illinois killed a six-year-old Palestinian-American tenant by stabbing him times with a large military knife or when a Texas woman attempted to drown a Palestinian-American three year old last September in an act police commented was motivated by racial hatred Greenblatt and the U S ruling body under both Biden and Trump reserve their accusations of collective culpability for Palestinians and their supporters In a New York Times Morning newsletter on Tuesday which itself mangled distinctions between anti-Zionism and antisemitism author Jonathan Weisman wrote Attacks on Jews for the actions of an Israeli cabinet a world away are collective punishment and collective punishment is bigotry On this point Weisman is entirely correct It s nonetheless an extraordinary comment to make without stressing that Israel s all-out destruction of Gaza in response to October is collective punishment at its majority extreme Meanwhile Greenblatt is inviting this country s authoritarian authorities to carry out further collective punishment against Israel s critics The post MIT Pupil Condemned Genocide So ADL Chief Stated She Helped Cause Boulder Attack appeared first on The Intercept