According to the Washington Post yesterday the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has been routinely used as a reliable news source without any critical review of their claims or their methodology, but this is beginning to change. On June 17, the online publication Jewish Currents(https://jewishcurrents.org/examining-the-adls-antisemitism-audit) conducted a line-by-line review of ADL’s claims of a 140% increase of anti-Semitic acts in the last year in America, and found that these claims are false and don’t even meet the ADL’s own standards.
On June 20 a report from the Jewish Telegraphic Society](https://www.jta.org/2024/06/20/united-states/adl-doubles-down-on-its-campus-antisemitism-report-cards-despite-backlash) was critical of the ADL’s “report card” on the response by universities to charges of anti-Semitism on their campuses. The report questions the ADL’s criteria, its oversimplification of issues, and even the fact that the ADL did not interview any Jewish students or faculty on the campuses where they claim there is rampant anti-Semitism. The ADL is also recently under fire for its reported 16-fold increase in spending on lobbying Congress to pass the Anti-Ssemitism Awareness Act in late April, which adopts a new definition of anti-Semitism that is focused less on hate, and more on legitimate political differences with Israel’s war policy.
Based on all of this evidence, 120 volunteer editors of Wikipedia debated the use of ADL data for two months and then voted to not use the ADL as a source. Wikipedia editors wrote that the ADL is unreliable, “due to significant evidence that the ADL acts as a pro-Israeli advocacy group and has repeatedly published false and misleading statements as fact, unretracted, regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict. The general unreliability of the ADL extends to the intersection of the topics of anti-Semitism and the Israel/Palestine conflict.”
While 40 Jewish groups wrote a letter to Wikipedia expressing their “concern and dismay,” from the standpoint of actual reasoned debate on the internet this is a most welcome development.
