Letters to the Editor

• ADL on torture and wiretapping

  [Read the article: The ADL purports to respond again]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I decided that another way to investigate ADL's commitment to human rights would be to see what it has said with regard to torture. Googling "ADL torture" returned as its first hit a story from The Jewish Daily Forward written by Marc Perelman on July 6, 2006. Titled "Synagogues Speak Out Against Wiretapping, Torture", the article provides a strong parallel to kovie's comments pointing out that Jewish opinions vary widely on political issues and that the extreme right wing does not speak for all. The entire article is worth reading, but I will quote extensively from it. Note especially the quote from Foxman, as it is revealing:

  The country’s two largest synagogue movements are stepping up their criticism of the Bush administration’s domestic wiretapping program and treatment of detainees, in sharp contrast to the approach of the major non-sectarian Jewish civil rights organizations.

  
  

  Senior figures of the Conservative and Reform movements have recently called on the White House to prohibit the use of torture and urged Congress to look into the secret wiretapping program launched by the National Security Agency in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Officials at the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and American Jewish Congress, on the other hand, have been silent on the wiretapping program and generally less confrontational when offering any critique of the administration on the torture issue.

  The two issues highlight what appear to be both substantive and stylistic differences between the non-Orthodox synagogue movements and the Jewish civil rights groups, as well as policy gaps between the Jewish community’s grassroots and the more hawkish donors who hold increasing sway on many Jewish organizational boards. While the synagogue movements can boast of representing the millions of members of their congregations, observers in Washington say that lawmakers are more likely to see the nonsectarian groups as the Jewish community’s main address on security issues.

  [...]

  The Reform movement’s advocacy arm in Washington, the Religious Action Center, urged lawmakers to further investigate the NSA wiretapping program in a June 23 letter to the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The domestic surveillance program, which was revealed by The New York Times in December, prompted the administration to launch an investigation into possible leaks of security information.

  “We believe that to allow the NSA program to continue without full understanding of its scope and impact violates basic American values and endangers civil liberties protections enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” the letter stated. “It also accepts as normal an atmosphere of government secrecy, distrust and ambiguous legality — representing a step backward on our quest to create a just, moral and equitable society.”

  Last March, at the annual convention of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly in Mexico City, delegates adopted a resolution on civil liberties that pointed to the domestic surveillance program as an example of how the Bush administration was weakening constitutional and statutory protections. The resolution called on the government to abide by the spirit and the letter of the Constitution.

  The Rabbinical Assembly also adopted a resolution on the war in Iraq urging its members to “speak out against the use of torture as a tool of war” and to “maintain support for civil liberties during a time of war.”

  Earlier this month, several rabbis, including the Religious Action Center’s director, Rabbi David Saperstein, and the executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Jerome Epstein, signed an interfaith ad published in The New York Times calling on the administration to ban torture without exception, stop using secret prisons around the world and cease authorizing “renditions” whereby terrorism suspects are sent to countries known for their brutal interrogation methods.

  On the wiretapping issue, the nonsectarian groups have opted not to take a position. “We are monitoring the issue but we don’t have an opinion,” said Richard Fulton, general counsel of the AJCommittee.

  Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, said his organization had not debated the wiretapping issue. He stressed the need to recalibrate security and civil liberties by granting law-enforcement enhanced powers to fight the war on terror. “I don’t think this is a Jewish issue per se,” he added. “If rabbinical groups think so, God bless them!”

  While the ADL has also not actively lobbied the administration on the issue of detainees, the AJCommittee and AJCongress have staked out similar ground as the Reform and Conservative movements, if not adopting the same confrontational tactics.

  http://www.forward.com/articles/403/

  Foxman's position, then, is that the war on terror calls for recalibration of security and civil liberties so that law enforcement can protect us against the terrorists. Although all of the other Jewish groups (including the otherwise right wing AJCommittee and AJCongress) speak out on torture, because Foxman does not see this as "a Jewish issue per se", torture is not worthy of comment from the ADL.

  I see no way Foxman's position on torture can be reconciled with the stated charter of the ADL where its ultimate purpose is to "secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike".

  Permalink Tuesday, October 9, 2007 05:36 AM