After receiving much bad publicity over an employee’s eviction of two black men from one of its stores, the Starbucks coffee chain decided to subject its employees to “bias training.” To this end it consulted with various organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL’s presence in turn provoked the ire of the leaders of the Women’s March—still, more than a year after its anti-Trump demonstration in Washington, an influential organization on the left. Jonathan Tobin comments:
[T]o its credit, the ADL has been willing to take on leaders of the march regarding their soft spot for anti-Semitism. . . . Earlier this year, many people who took part in [the march’s] events were shocked to learn that Tamika Mallory, the group’s president, was a supporter of the Nation of Islam’s leader Louis Farrakhan. . . . Others were concerned over the comments of Linda Sarsour, another leader [of the march], in which she demonized the state of Israel and its supporters, and claimed Zionists could not be true feminists. Along with many other people of good will on both the left and the right, the ADL criticized the pair.
So when Starbucks announced that the ADL would be part of its race-education program, Mallory and Sarsour pounced. Mallory denounced the ADL on Twitter for “CONSTANTLY attacking black and brown people.” Sarsour echoed that smear and chimed in with her own indictment of ADL for supporting programs in which U.S. law-enforcement personnel are given training in Israel, as well as for the ADL’s criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement’s attacks on Israel. . . .
No one with even a cursory understanding of the role that the ADL has played in the civil-rights movement and in promoting bias education in recent decades can possibly take the statements from Mallory and Sarsour seriously. . . . However, in a leftist mindset in which intersectional theories that link worries about lingering racism in the United States with the war to destroy the Jewish state, even a liberal-[leaning] group like the ADL must be considered beyond the pale because of its willingness to stand up against anti-Semitism. . . .
At this point, anyone who chooses to work with Mallory and Sarsour is sanctioning Jew-hatred.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/when-bigots-preach-about-bias/