The ADL has chosen to defend Keith Ellison, the Islamist who wants to be the DNC chief, despite his own ugly history with anti-Semitism.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL's new left-wing boss, has made a point of defending Keith Ellison and has repeated Ellison's same old lies about his past with the Nation of Islam. He writes that,
"As his candidacy has developed, many on the right have attacked Rep. Ellison for a variety of reasons. He has been blasted for once having supported the Nation of Islam. The congressman readily admits to his role in helping to organize the Million Man March. But long ago he disassociated himself from the organization and apologized for its anti-Semitism."
This is very deliberately misleading because it implies that Ellison was merely involved in organizing the Million Man March, much like Obama. That is wildly untrue.
Keith Ellison and I were then both 31 years old. He was on record as defending Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism since at least 1989, under the alias of Keith Hakim. But unlike the CBC, which immediately suspended its ties with the Nation of Islam after the vote, Ellison apparently saw no reason to rethink his position. In fact, he continued to identify with Farrakhan and work actively for the Nation of Islam for years after Muhammad’s speech.
In 1995, Ellison himself organized a rally featuring Muhammad—still an outspoken racist and anti-Semite—at the University of Minnesota. Muhammad apparently brought his A-game to the rally, promising that “if words were swords, the chests of Jews, gays and whites would be pierced.”
In 1997, Ellison defended a member of the Minneapolis Initiative Against Racism who said that Jews are “the most racist white people.” In his remarks, Ellison also defended America’s most notorious anti-Semite. “She is correct about Minister Farrakhan,” Ellison insisted. “He is not a racist. He is also not an anti-Semite. Minister Farrakhan is a tireless public servant of Black people…”
In fact, Ellison continued to publicly defend Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam through at least the year 2000, by which time he was serving as a Minnesota state representative. But in 2006, while running for Congress, Ellison evidently had second thoughts about the usefulness of the main public affiliation he had maintained from his early 20s into at least his late 30s, when, responding to concerns voiced by the Jewish Community Relations Council, he claimed that his only involvement with NOI was during an 18-month period supporting Farrakhan’s October 1995 “Million Man March”; that he was unaware of NOI’s anti-Semitism; and that he himself never held nor espoused anti-Semitic views. Most of that is demonstrably false, the remainder begs skepticism.
Jonathan Greenblatt is certainly well aware of this. The ADL is quite good at collecting information on anti-Semitic groups. He is choosing to misrepresent Keith Ellison's anti-Semitic past in deliberately vague language.