I have not been a fan of Abe Foxman, the former director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Whether it was his his criticism of Israel, being an apologist for the Obama administration, or just being ridiculous, I think he got it wrong way too many times.
But I have to give him credit now for recent comments on Linda Sarsour. He has not been fooled by her attempts to paint herself as a friend of the Jews.
During an interview with The Algemeiner on Friday, the conversation inevitably turned to the subject of Linda Sarsour, the vocal BDS advocate who, this past week alone, earned the praise of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in the pages of Time magazine and was invited to speak at the commencement ceremony at CUNY’s Graduate School of Public Health.
“She’s a champion of equal rights, except when it comes to Jewish rights,” Foxman said of Sarsour. “She plays that game, ‘I love Jews, I don’t like Zionists.’ Well, I’ve got news for her. Every Jew who’s a Jew prays to Jerusalem, says ‘Im eshkachech Yerushalayim,’ (If I forget you, Jerusalem.) So this is a throwback to 1948.”
Yet Foxman is careful not to charge every Palestinian solidarity activist with antisemitism. “You can be an advocate of the Palestinian liberation movement without being an enemy of Jewish liberation,” Foxman stressed. But that, he continued, is not the case with Sarsour. “She is an enemy of Jewish sovereignty and Jewish liberation,” he stated. “She’s a bigot, and she shouldn’t have been invited [to CUNY].”
Amen. Except while it is theoretically true you “can be an advocate of the Palestinian liberation movement without being an enemy of Jewish liberation”, my experiences tells me this is rarely the case.
Read the whole thing. Foxman also seems to get it right on the “politicization” of antisemitism we are seeing now.
