Anti-Defamation League Chief Bashes Rush Limbaugh

Abe Foxman has come out against a great and wonderful friend of the Jews, Rush Limbaugh.

That is bad enough, but it is symptomatic of a deeper problem: I have for years derided Jews in America and the Jewish lay leadership for tolerating and supporting clear and present enemies of the Jewish people among our senior ranks. It is a sickness of the soul.

The liberal Jew worships at the church of human secularism. These lost souls are married to their liberal dogma.

On Frida, Norman Podhoretz, whom I rarely cite, as his capitulation on Gaza and other existential matters of grave concern to the Jewish people have been most damaging, called Foxman out on the ADL chief’s denunciation of Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Semite.

He called Foxman’s attack on Rush “vile” and noted that Foxman “has a long history of seeing an anti-Semite under every conservative bed while blinding himself to the blatant fact that anti-Semitism has largely been banished from the right in the past 40 years, and that it has found a hospitable new home on the left, especially where Israel is concerned.”

He said that rather than Rush apologizing to Foxman, it should be the other way around: “If an apology is owed here, it is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League who should apologize for the defamatory accusation of anti-Semitism that he himself has hurled against so loyal a friend of Israel as Rush Limbaugh.”

As a passionate, proud Jew, I too stand with Rush Limbaugh and would take up against Foxman in a heartbeat. Thank God for righteous Gentiles like Rush. He is beyond delicious.

Abe Foxman, on the other hand, has come out repeatedly against one of the greatest friends of the Jews and Israel, my friend the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders.

Foxman strongly condemned remarks Wilders made at a conference at which I also spoke (see here). At that conference, Wilders called Israel a “wonderful country” and affirmed, “I love it, I do love Israel.”

A resident of Israel for several years, Wilders said that “Israel is a beacon of light in an area, the Middle East, that is pitch black everywhere else.”

He told the prophetic and often-ignored truth that “Israel is not just fighting for itself, Israel is fighting for all of us, for the entire West, just like those brave American soldiers who landed in Sicily in 1943 and stormed the Normandy beaches in 1944.”

That’s not all. Back in August 2007, I demanded Foxman’s resignation after his continual denials of the Armenian genocide.

We, as a people, cannot condone such unspeakable silence. We, of all people, must never be silent about the systemic death of a people.

This Islamic genocide was heinous and brutal. And considering the level of Islamic anti-Semitism in the Quran and Sunnah, it would be healthy and good for living Jews (and all decent and good people) to denounce roundly the Islamic genocide of the Armenian people.

But Abe Foxman not only would take that basic fundamental stand, but he went one step further. He fired Andrew Tarsy, the New England regional director, after he broke ranks with national ADL leadership and said the human rights organization should acknowledge the Armenian genocide that began in 1915.

Dr. Andrew Bostom said at the time that Foxman “apparently thinks that [he] can pick and choose among genocides . . . In a telephone interview, James Rudolph, the regional ADL chairman, called Tarsy an extraordinary leader. Indeed, Tarsy was acting in the best ADL tradition of trying to unite people of different ethnic groups, in this case Jews and Armenians, to promote human rights.”

If the national ADL doesn’t acknowledge the genocide, it is complicit in a cover-up.

Back in 2006, I called Foxman out for his attacks on those dear and precious friends of Israel, the Evangelical Christians. And Caroline Glick said this of Foxman that same year: “Rather than stand with the Catholic church as Benedict moves boldly against radical Islam, American Jewish leaders led by ADL Director Abe Foxman have been attacking the church for its theological decisions.”

Foxman also came out in support of the Islamic school in Brooklyn whose principal was forced to resign because of her involvement in anti-Semitic “Intifada NYC” T-shirts (see here).

See the pattern? Foxman demonizes Christian groups that love Israel but is kowtowing to the Islamic jihad.

Which Jews support deleterious characters like Foxman? Which Jews give blood money to these self-hating wretches? Who empowers these terrible Jews?

Our Jewish leadership has failed us miserably. One only has to look at the lack of response to Israel’s defensive action in Gaza last winter to see the terrible situation we are in.

We have failed the Jewish youth, who haven’t a clue as to who we are and why we must fight for our survival. I attended anti-Israel rallies — the Muslim youth come out in full jihad drag.

It is an event, a destination. It is theater. Jewish youth, by contrast, were conspicuously absent from pro-Israel rallies.

Why wasn’t Foxman in front of the curve on this? Why wasn’t he helping to organize counter-protests against the Islamic rallies calling for Jewish genocide?

Why didn’t he rally the Jewish day schools, Hebrew schools, synagogues, Christian Zionists, and all friends of Israel to come together and march against this scourge?

We should be fiercely defending our right to fight for our survival. We need proud, unapologetic, vigorous Jews to lead our people now.

Mr. Foxman, please step aside now for the sake of the Jews.

Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs Web site and is former associate publisher of the New York Observer. Her Op-Eds have appeared in The Washington Times, Newsmax, Human Events, Big Government, WorldNetDaily, the American Thinker, Israel National News, and other publications. She is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon and Schuster).