WASHINGTON REPORT on Middle East Affairs, DECEMBER 1997, Page 57:Bookburners and Their Victims:
First-Hand Accounts of Pro-Israel McCarthyism In California Court CaseADL Still Delaying Disclosure of Where It Got and What It Did With Personal Data on Anti-Apartheid and Pro-Palestinian Activists
By Kurt Holden
In late 1992, the FBI informed the San Francisco police that one of its officers, Tom Gerard, had been secretly cooperating with a "spy," Roy Bullock, who had been secretly paid by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith for over 30 years to infiltrate organizations which the ADL deemed hostile to Israel.
Gerard was believed to have illegally turned over to Bullock material gathered from police files. Worse, the police previously had been ordered to destroy those files, which a court had ruled violated the civil rights of the people upon whom files had been opened.
Bullock's job was to collect facts about "enemies of Israel" which were then organized in central ADL files in Los Angeles and New York, and used for confidential dissemination to the "active" Jewish community, which could be counted on to take "counter-action" to neutralize or discredit these "enemies."
In the 1980s, Bullock's assignments had been expanded to include surveillance of individuals and organizations opposed to apartheid in South Africa, presumably because Israel and South Africa were allies, drawn to each other because both were resisting United Nations human rights resolutions regarding the Palestinians and indigenous South Africans.
Bullock would ingratiate himself into Arab-American and anti-apartheid groups by indicating he was in sympathy with their goals. Attending their meetings and going into their homes, he would note their car license plates and, through "official friends" who were police officers or who had access to government records, try to get drivers' license numbers, P. O. boxes and criminal investigative reports, if such existed.
FBI officials had become interested in 1992 when they discovered that in addition to collecting information for the ADL, Bullock and Gerard wereselling information to South African intelligence agents.
The San Francisco police, made up of officers largely of Irish and Italian ethnic backgrounds (and certainly not aware of the enormous political clout of the Jewish community), obtained search warrants and seized some 12 boxes of records at the ADL headquarters in Los Angeles and San Francisco in early 1993.
Subsequently they sent notices to some 12,000 people and organizations whose names were found in ADL's files. In at least two cases, they also provided such individuals with excerpts from ADL's files on them which obviously had come from confidential government records. Both individuals, Jeffrey Blankfort and Steve Zeltzer, were prominent Jewish advocates of fairness to Palestinians and for ending apartheid in South Africa. From those activities they already were aware that the ADL worked in cooperation with Israel's Mossad.
The ADL worked in cooperation with Israel's Mossad
In 1993 they and 17 other plaintiffs filed a class-action lawsuit in the San Francisco Superior Court. The suit has become known as Audrey Parks Shabbas, et al., plaintiffs, vs. Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, et al., defendants. In addition to the three above-named plaintiffs, others are Victor Ajlouny, Yigal Arens (son of former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens), Amal Barkouky-Winter, Manuel Dudum, Colin Edwards, Carol El-Shaib, George Green, Paula Kotakis, Stephen Mashney, Helen Hooper McCloskey, Margaret Ann McCormack, Donald McGaffin, Anne Poirier, Agha Saeed, Jock Taft and Marianne Torres. Attorney for the plaintiffs is former Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey, who practices law in Woodside, California.
In fact, the suit was filed on behalf of two classes of individuals--those who opposed Israeli policies toward the Palestinians and those who opposed apartheid in South Africa. The lawsuit alleged an invasion of their privacy, citing a California law which imposes a minimum of $2,500 in punitive damages for each act of publication of confidential information obtained from governmental files.
The ADL responded by arguing that it is a newsgathering organization and thus entitled to the reporter's privilege of keeping sources of information secret.
Under California law and a famous Supreme Court ruling known as the Mitchell decision, a plaintiff is barred from obtaining what a reporter claims is "privileged" information until the plaintiff can show that he has exhausted all other reasonable means of obtaining the facts necessary to prove his case, and has met four other requirements. For four and a half years, ADL refused to produce the information.
An Order to Disclose
Depositions were taken of ADL employees and law enforcement personnel, but ADL was able to withhold the information until Aug. 19, 1997, when Judge Alexander Saldamando of San Francisco ruled that ADL and the San Francisco police would have to disclose to the plaintiffs the illegally obtained information, from whom it had been obtained, and to whom it was sent.
ADL has announced it will seek a writ from the Court of Appeals to block enforcement of Judge Saldamando's order. The result should be known by Oct. 30, which is the date ADL is required to produce the information.
The stubborn refusal of ADL to reveal where it received its information, and to whom and for what purposes it was disclosed, promises many more revealing insights on the methods and motivations of this American-incorporated organization which has been working diligently on behalf of the governments of Israel and apartheid South Africa.
Kurt Holden is a free-lance writer who divides his time between the U.S. and the Middle East.
More on the Jewish "Anti-Defamation League" (ADL)
Internet:
The Jewish-ADL Perspective
The Jewish "ADL" has developed a filter (ADL HateFilter™) that blocks access to Radio Islam and to other Web sites that contain "inappropriate" material!
STATEMENT OF THE "ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE " (ADL) BEFORE THE US SENATE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
SEPTEMBER 14, 1999
This text is published in the US Senate´s homepage
(http://judiciary.senate.gov/91499ad.htm):Ahmed Rami "One high-profile Arab Holocaust denier is Swedish-based Moroccan exile Ahmed Rami, creator of the Radio Islam Web site. Once a lieutenant in the Moroccan military, Rami reportedly played a leading role in a failed 1972 coup d'Ètat and fled, gaining political asylum in Sweden. In 1987, Rami began using a public access Swedish radio station to broadcast Radio Islam, ostensibly a public relations program for Sweden's Muslims but in fact a vehicle for unvarnished anti-Semitism.
Rami has rationalized his bigotry as support for Palestinian causes. While he has become a source of embarrassment for serious Palestinian activists, Holocaust deniers have unabashedly and enthusiastically associated with him. Rami spoke at the 1992 IHR conference and has often been praised by Ingrid Rimland, among others.
Off the air from 1993 to 1995, Rami's program returned in 1996, the same year that he established the Radio Islam Web site. From the start, Rami's site offered visitors anti-Semitic material in English, French, German, Swedish and Norwegian. Early versions of the site described the "so-called 'holocaust'" as a tool used by "Zionists" to win "sovereign rights to oppress and vilify other people," namely Palestinians. These "Zionists," according to Radio Islam, have a monopoly over "information services in the West" and bribe Western politicians to support them in their "Anti-Arab and anti-Moslem racism" and "hatred against everything German."
Today, visitors to the Radio Islam site are greeted with a statement that seems to deny Rami's extremism: "No hate. No violence. Races? Only one Human race." Yet his site has become even more bigoted than ever and demonstrates the implicit connection between Holocaust denial and other forms of anti-Semitism. Radio Islam promotes a myriad of anti-Semitic works in addition to those of Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson, Greg Raven, John Ball, and Bradley Smith.
The Radio Islam site continues to portray the Holocaust as part of a Jewish conspiracy to draw the world's attention away from "the ongoing Zionist war waged against the peoples of Palestine and the Middle East" and "Zionism's totalitarian and racist backgrounds." To support this theory, it provides numerous anti-Semitic texts that allege Jewish conspiracies for political domination, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Expanding on the anti-Semitism expressed by its denial of the Holocaust, Radio Islam equates "Jewish Racism," envisioned as Jewish prejudice against Muslims, with "Jewish 'Religion,'" as outlined by the Talmud. Visitors to Radio Islam can read "The Truth About The Talmud" by Michael A. Hoffman II and Alan R. Critchley, which asserts that Jews are impelled, by religious law, to mistreat and attempt to dominate non-Jews. The Nature of Zionism by Vladimir Stepin, also available at the Radio Islam site, declares that Zionism rests on three basic beliefs: that Jews are "God's chosen people"; that all others are "merely two-legged animals (goys)," and that "Jews have both the right and the obligation to rule the world."
Furthermore, according to Radio Islam, the Jews are not the "chosen people" for they are not "'descendants' of the mythic Jews of the Bible." Rather, today's Jews are "descended from Mongolians and other Asiatic peoples who had adopted 'Judaism' as their 'religion' over 1,000 years ago and had become know as 'Jews.'" Often advanced by Identity believers, this theory alleges that most, if not all, Ashkenazic Jews descended from the Khazars, an obscure Turkic people whose leaders converted to Judaism in the eighth century. While Identity adherents employ this theory in order to bolster their assertion that Anglo-Saxon whites are actually the biblical Church of Israel, Rami uses it to demonstrate that the ancestors of the Jews were not from Palestine, implying that Israel has no right to exist.
What are Internet "filters" and when is their use appropriate?
Filters are software that can be installed along with a Web browser to block access to certain Web sites that contain inappropriate or offensive material. Parents may choose to install filters on their children's computers in order to prevent them from viewing sites that contain pornography or other problematic material. ADL has developed a filter (ADL HateFilter™) that blocks access to Web sites that advocate hatred, bigotry, or violence towards Jews or other groups on the basis of their religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or other immutable characteristics. HateFilter™, which can be downloaded from ADL's Web site, contains a "redirect" feature which offers users who try to access a blocked site the chance to link directly to related ADL educational material. The voluntary use of filtering software in private institutions or by parents in the home does not violate the First Amendment because such use involves no government action. There are also some commercially marketed filters that focus on offensive words and phrases. Such filters, which are not site-based, are designed primarily to screen out obscene and pornographic material.
May public schools and public libraries install filters on computer equipment available for public use?
The use of filters by public institutions, such as schools and libraries, has become a hotly contested issue that remains unresolved. At least one Federal court has ruled that a local library board may not require the use of filtering software on all library Internet computer terminals. A possible compromise for public libraries with multiple computers would be to allow unrestricted Internet use for adults, but to provide only supervised access for children.
Courts have not ruled on the constitutionality of hate speech filters on public school library computers. However, given the broad free speech rights afforded to students by the First Amendment, it is unlikely that courts would allow school libraries to require filters on all computers available for student use."
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Races? Only one Human race United We Stand, Divided We Fall |
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No time to waste. Act now! Tomorrow it will be too late |
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