Leopards Don’t Always Eat Your Face

The ADL goes full fash. There’s no reason to think it will suffer for it.

Credit: Sumeet Moghe, CC

This weekend ICE invaded Columbia student dorms and seized pro Palestinian activist and protestor Mahmoud Kahlil while his pregnant wife, an American citizen, watched helplessly. Kahlil has a green card and is a permanent resident; the government cannot simply revoke that without a hearing. But ICE didn’t care.

Neither did the ADL. The ADL is, in theory, a civil rights organization. It was founded to protect Jewish rights, but since fascism is bad for Jewish rights, the ADL has also tracked and organized against the far right broadly.

Or at least it did until the Trump/Netanyahu era. Under its current far right leader Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL has allied itself with the fascists because it sees Nazis as good allies in the quest to silence and ultimately exterminate Palestinians.

This isn’t an exaggeration. The ADL rushed to defend Elon Musk’s Nazi salute. And it literally thanked the Trump administration for kidnapping Kahlil.

We firmly believe there should be swift and severe consequences for those who provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations, incite violence in support of terrorist activities, or conceal their identities in order to harass and intimidate Jewish individuals and institutions with impunity.

There is no evidence that Kahlil provided material support to foreign terrorist organizations or that he incited violence or concealed his identity. Given these wild, disgusting allegations, the ADL’s hand-waving insistence that “any deportation action or revocation of a Green Card or visa must be undertaken in alignment with required due process protections” is an exercise in hypocrisy. They say they want due process while baselessly smearing Kahlil and hoping that his arrest is a “deterrent.” The thing they want to deter, of course, is free speech—and particularly, any speech which criticizes or questions Israel.

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First they came for the people I hate, so I cheered

The ADL here is following in the footsteps of pastor Martin Niemöller, who wrote that famous “first they came for” poem. As I’ve discussed here, Niemöller was a conservative antisemite who despised Jews and communists. He supported the Nazis because he believed they would harm those he disliked.

Later, Hitler started to target Jewish converts to Lutheranism and to try to take over German churches. Niemöller did not support those actions and became an enemy of the state himself; he spent years in concentration camps and had a lot of time to reconsider his eager early embrace of Nazism. The leopards, as they say, ate his face—and he responded, nobly, by concluding that setting the leopards on anyone had been wrong.

Watching the ADL embrace fascism, it’s hard not to warn them (and Zionists generally) that the leopards may soon be throwing them in camps too. Historically, fascism has been very dangerous for Jewish people. Elon Musk is a rabid antisemite who just this week accused Jewish donors of organizing the anti Tesla protests that have targeted his shitty car business. Is the ADL certain he will never disappear Jews he perceives as enemies?

The only justice is us

The thing is, the ADL would, I think, have no problem with Elon Musk and Trump sending storm troopers to arrest me for criticizing Zionism. I don’t think Greenblatt would care if Trump put trans Jews in camps either; how dare those Jews irritate Israel’s best friend, Donald Trump, by existing?

Niemöller discovered that the Nazis wanted to destroy things and people he cared about. But it seems pretty clear that Jonathan Greenblatt’s sole moral commitment is to silencing and murdering Palestinians. He doesn’t really care about anything else, or anyone else, as long as the Trump regime uses fascist force to crush anti Zionists. If the Trump admin comes after left Jews (like me), I’d expect Greenblatt to shrug, or even to cheer him on.

Obviously, if the Trump administration decided to imprison Greenblatt and his family, Greenblatt would be upset about that. But that doesn’t seem likely to happen. Instead, Greenblatt has slithered into the niche occupied by people like Clarence Thomas.

Thomas is Black, but he has devoted his life to advancing white supremacy. As a result, white supremacists love him, and have showered him with money, gifts, and adulation. People often say on social media, “They don’t really love you, Clarence,” or “They’ll come for you eventually,” but there’s little evidence that either of those statements is true. White supremacists seem to genuinely adore Thomas, and there’s little chance he will ever be a target of white supremacist violence or f Trump’s fascist segregationist purges. Thomas decided that the best way to prevent white supremacy from harming him was to become the most white supremacist man in the US, and that strategy has worked pretty well for him.

Obviously, not everyone can be the most white supremacist man in the US; Thomas’ life plan is not scalable. But the point is that choosing hatred and fascism doesn’t necessarily mean your face will be eaten—not even if you are a marginalized person, not even if you are Jewish. There is no cosmic justice; there is no karma. Evil people often die wealthy and in their beds. Trump probably will. Clarence Thomas probably will. Greenblatt will too. They may even get to write the history books themselves, as the Confederates did.

I’m not saying we should despair, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t demand better from our institutions and our communities. I’m just saying that if we want justice, we generally have to make it ourselves. Warning Jonathan Greenblatt that there will be a comeuppance for him is probably useless. he doesn’t think there will be one, and there probably won’t be one.

We can’t wait for the leopards to eat faces, even if leopards eating faces was an unalloyed good, which it generally is not. Instead, we need to focus on solidarity with those who need it, and fight to keep safe all those who can’t, or won’t, make the ugly bargain with fascism. Right now that means standing with Mahmoud Kahlil. It also means telling Jonathan Greenblatt that, whether or not the leopards eat his face, he is a disgrace to Jews and to humans in general, and he should fuck off.