US: ADL chief compares student protesters to ISIS

Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League CEO, repeatedly compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to Islamist terrorists in comments to Republican attorneys general and said the left harbored the “real deal threat” to Jews.

“We are an apolitical, non-partisan organization, but you have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what’s happening on the left,” Greenblatt said last June, according to audio from the event obtained by the Forward.

“There is a throughline from Occupy Wall Street to BLM to ‘defund the police’ to ‘River to the Sea,’” he added, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement launched a decade ago to protest police violence. “They are the same people, these are the same kind of nihilists.”

Greenblatt compared campus protesters to Middle Eastern terrorists at multiple points in his remarks, which were part of a panel discussion at the Republican attorneys general annual summer conference.

“You have people hiding their faces behind scarves and keffiyehs like they’re in ISIS, storming libraries, vandalizing buildings and literally – I’m not exaggerating – terrorizing their classmates,” he said.

At another point he said the state officials should support laws that ban people from wearing masks at protests because “the founding fathers didn’t want al-Qaida right running rampant on our streets.” The ADL advocated in the mid-20th century for the passage of anti-mask laws as a means of exposing Ku Klux Klan terrorists.

He said later that student activists were “frothing at the mouth, looking like they just came out of Mosul,” an apparent reference to a major battle against the Islamic State in the northern Iraqi city.

Greenblatt acknowledged that “white supremacists and armed militia” posed a right-wing threat to Jews, but suggested officials who said antisemitism was “a problem on all sides” were misguided.

The “real deal threat” was rather “this convergence of what I call the radical left and, like, Islamist groups here in the U.S.,” which he said was resulting in the worst expression of hate against any group in the country for the last 100 years.

Source: First published in The Forward