One of the stranger phenomenon that has been observed in the American Jewish community during the past 30 years is when Jewish leftists represent themselves as martyrs and victims of censorship by a stodgy old conservative Jewish Establishment. The love of playing make-pretend martyr is so deeply entrenched in the Jewish Left that it is hard to imagine how they would function without it. They wave their stigmata to show the world that they are victims of a Jewish Establishment Diocletian and are being persecuted and martyred in Christ-like fashion.

The cry of "Witchhunt!!" was first adopted by the Israel-bashing leftist groups like Breira and Arthur Waskow's "Jewish Organizing Project" (devoted to raising money among Jews to give to black militants) in the early 1970s. It was then picked up by the post-Breira clone groups, like the Israel-bashing New Jewish Agenda and the New Israel Fund (which funds anti-Israel groups in Israel like the Communist-front Bat Shalom and the anti-Israel "human rights" group Betselem). And of course Tikkun continues to this day to pretend that it is a persecuted underground magazine that must be published in secret lest the Republican Jewish stormtroopers close it down. In all cases, these groups argue that they are poor persecuted victims of an anti-democratic anti-liberal Jewish Establishment.

All of this of course illustrates Orwellian magnitudes of comic absurdity. First, the Jewish Establishment is not dominated by conservatives but by liberals, and always was. The Jewish Community Relations Councils, the American Jewish Congress and AJ Committee, Bnai Brith, the Federations, the Reform and (in part) the "Conservative" synagogue movements, have all been kneejerk liberal institutions, supporting each and every liberal political fad to wobble along, for as far back as anyone can remember.

The Federation Jewish weeklies are inevitably liberal unbalanced PC journals, varying somewhat in the extent to which they support Israel, almost always pro-Oslo. Not only are leftists not "suppressed" by an evil Republican Jewish Establishment, but the opposite is often the case. Many Federation weeklies will not print a politically incorrect or conservative column, and many not even a letter. The San Francisco Northern California Jewish Bulletin is one of many such examples. These weeklies, for example, were uniformly pro-affirmative action and anti-CCRI, and rarely if ever allowed a dissident opinion to be expressed therein, all this despite the fact that affirmative action explicitly discriminates against Jews. The Tikkun whining fetish about being victimized by undemocratic suppression of speech is all the more comic, given the nature of Tikkun magazine. Tikkun is a monochromatic (pink) instrument of leftist advocacy, in which there has never yet appeared a politically incorrect thought, article or even letter. So when it comes to suppressing open discourse, Tikkun and its editor, Michael Lerner, hold the kiddush cup.

Bnai Brith has also been dominated by liberal fads and suppression of political incorrectness. Bnai Brith sponsors the Hillel houses on campuses. These have been more often than not little refuges of political correctness in which no non-leftist idea may be voiced. On the numerous Hillel email chat lists and bulletin boards, totalitarian censorship has been exercised for years, and no political incorrectness is tolerated. I have gotten myself permanently banned from all these lists for daring to express a non-Politically Correct opinion on them. Bnai Brith and the ADL have never yet voiced any criticism or distanced themselves from Hillel thought control and suppression of dissent. As for the Israel-bashing groups like Breira and New Jewish Agenda, not only are they not suppressed, but in fact they are often sucked up to by the liberal Jewish Establishment. The minuscule "Friends of Peace Now," with no constituency to speak of, got itself invited to join the Council of Presidents of Jewish Organizations.

Despite all the disingenuous whining by the leftists about how "courageous" they are to stand up to the nasty conservative censors of the Jewish Establishment, in fact it takes quite a bit of courage, and indeed courage rarely seen in the American Jewish community today, to stand up and say that the liberal Emperor has no clothes. That Israel-bashing Jewish leftists are in fact assimilationist self-hating Uncle Toms. That the predominant "liberalism-as-Judaism" party line of the Jewish Establishment is assimilationist claptrap, that Oslo is a path of national suicide, or that PC liberalism is a failure and mistaken in nearly everything. Now all of this forms the background to the hullabaloo this week over the invitation and honoring by the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith of anti-Israel journalist Thomas Friedman. The star of this pashion play has been Abraham Foxman. A year ago Foxman appointed himself official spokesman for the Jewish people and granted Michael Jackson absolution for Jackson's "Jew Me, Kike Me" lyrics in his new song. Foxman then went on to grant Marlon Brando similar papal dispensation on behalf of the Jews after Brando spoke against the Jewish cabal running Hollywood. Granting Hollywood Anti-Semites absolution has become such a passion for the head of the ADL that perhaps he should be renamed the Twentieth Century Foxman. In recent days, the same liberal Abe Foxman, head of the ADL, has picked up the well-worn cry of "Censorship!" to paint himself and his ADL group as the victim of thought patrols and speech suppression. Among the places he displays his stigmata are the Jerusalem Post (Dec 11) and Haaretz (in Hebrew Dec. 12). All this because Foxman and the ADL were criticized by many Jews, including the Zionist Organization of America, for their choice of whom to honor. In particular, the Twentieth Century Foxman denounces David Bar-llan, ex-editor at the Jerusalem Post and now Netanyahu's media adviser, for expressing criticism regadring the sense and judgement of the ADL in this choice.

Foxman's concern for the First Amendment does not extend to the freedom of opinion of Israeli advisers to the Prime Minister. Rather than defend himself against those who question his judgement in honoring Friedman (why not also honor Lou Farrakhan or Jesse Jackson?), Foxman prefers to pretend that this is all a fight over freedom of speech, suggesting the idea that the ADL perhaps change its name to the Anti-Definition League. Freedom of speech? When Friedman's column appears every few days in the New York Times and as a syndicated column elsewhere in 500 papers (including in Hebrew in Haaretz) for anyone interested in reading Israel-bashing "reporting" to enjoy? Freedom of speech? This coming from the same Bnai Brith under whose auspices a totalitarian rigidity of opinion is enforced in Hillel House activities? Freedom of speech? Well the criticism of Foxman and his ADL pals had nothing at all to do with Friedman's expressing his dislike of Israel, but rather with the intelligence and taste exhibited in the decision to honor him. Foxman wants us all to think that his critics want to deny Friedman and himself First Amendment rights. Exactly like the Breira gang (to which it turns out that Friedman belonged in the 1970s), or the Tikkun New Age cult members. Friedman's bellicosity towards Israel is excellently documented in Edward Alexander's book on the Jewish Critics of Israel (as is Michael Lerner's). It is right there for all to see. Is it suppression of speech to suggest that Friedman is hardly the sort that should be honored by a Jewish defense group? Like the New Jewish Agenda, Tikkun, etc., Foxman reacts to getting criticized by screaming Witchhunt! because he and the ADL are incapable of proffering a rational defense of their views and actions.

Editor's Postscript: The following is a letter sent to "The Forward" from Prof. Edward Alexander regarding Thomas Friedman, Abraham Foxman and the Zionist Organization of America.

3 December 1996
Editor, The Forward

Dear Sir:
Your article of November 29 on the "Fracas Over [Thomas] Friedman" reporting how Abraham Foxman expressed shock and consternation over ZOA president Morton Klein's criticism of the choice of Friedman as an ADL speaker calls to mind the old adage "Physician, heal thyself!" No sooner has Foxman chastised Klein for targeting such (apparently sacrosanct) individuals as Friedman, Strobe Talbott, and Leonard Fein than he urges that Klein "be expelled from the organized Jewish world" and "ostracized in the community." "He's an attack dog of the thought police," says Foxman. (There is something suspect about an indignation that depends on borrowed language: Letty C. Pogrebin, another exemplar of the ferocious illiberalism of liberals, called Klein "Philadelphia attack dog" in a letter to the Forward of July 2, 1993.)

Of course Foxman knows that politics operates differently from moral philosophy. In the latter, it is understood that we lash the vice, but spare the name. But no living political idea -- good or bad --ever came out of a committee. Indeed, I notice that in the current issue of New York Review of Books, Foxman attacks (and rightly so) both the Hitler-loving David Irving and his apologist Gordon Craig, neither of whom, last time I looked, was the name of a philosophical abstraction.

And then there is the Thomas Friedman question. Does Foxman really believe that Friedman, who holds the Joe DiMaggio journalism award for having written 56 consecutive columns on the Middle East "conflict" which assigned blame for its continuance to Israel, has invariably written "within the context of support for the State of Israel"? If so, then the ADL director is a likely customer for some choice real estate in downtown Sarajevo. It was, for example, Friedman who injected into James Baker's brain the idea of humiliating Israel by publicly offering Prime Minister Shamir the White House phone number and telling him to call when he was serious about peace. Does Foxman also think Friedman's laudatory preface to Meron Benvenisti's Intimate Enemies (1995), which calls for the dissolution of the State of Israel and its replacement by a Lebanese-style Israel/Palestine confederation, a fine instance of writing "within the context of support for the State of Israel?"

Why Jewish leaders like Foxman can hardly wait to reward the animus that Friedman has lavished upon the State of Israel (and also, for that matter, on these leaders themselves) is a question too abstruse to be answered in a letter.

Yours truly,

Edward Alexander
Professor of English
University of Washington, Seattle

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