Civil rights group’s leader fears direction of U.S. politics

By J. Patrick Coolican

Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, says he fears the state of American political discourse, as radical rhetoric races through the veins of the body politic.

That extremism, combined with massive economic dislocation and digital technology that gives every anonymous extremist a printing press, could lead to violence, he said in an interview Wednesday with the Sun editorial board.

“It’s like almost a perfect storm. You’ve got the economic crisis, a lot of dislocation, instability, anxiety. You have the immigration issue … and the election of an African-American president,” he said.

He cited signs at rallies protesting ongoing efforts to overhaul American health care that read, “Next time we’ll come armed.”

“That’s very disturbing,” Foxman said.

Foxman, born in Poland in 1940, escaped the Holocaust with the protection of his Polish-Catholic nanny.

In town for the Anti-Defamation League’s annual Las Vegas dinner Saturday, Foxman said a top ADL issue at the moment is the ubiquitous bigotry and hateful misinformation on the Internet, much of it cloaked in anonymity.

“This country, our tradition, permits you to be a bigot, but it also requires you to take responsibility for your bigotry,” he said. “The fact that you could hide behind a mask allows you to be a bigot without being responsible.”

Foxman acknowledged the constitutional dilemma of forcing Internet companies — or newspaper Web sites — to expose anonymous writers, especially in light of America’s long history of anonymous pamphleteering and important pseudonymous tracts, including the Federalist Papers.

A key achievement of the ADL, Foxman said, was a 1950s-era Georgia law, upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court in 1990, that validated the right of authorities to force members of the Ku Klux Klan to take off their masks. Courts said the mask was anonymous terror, not anonymous free speech.

It’s not clear the analogy to the Internet is precise, however, as a civil libertarian — and Internet providers — would argue that taking off the mask of a threatening Klansman is not the same as requiring anonymous Internet authors to put their name to a text.

Although Foxman strongly condemned the direction of American political rhetoric, in recent days the ADL has taken some criticism of its own for not being aggressive enough in condemning the promiscuous comparisons between the administration of President Barack Obama and Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

New York magazine, for instance, recently noted the following comments from Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission: “What they are attempting to do in health care, particularly in treating the elderly, is not something like what the Nazis did. It is precisely what the Nazis did.”

Land then compared Ezekiel Emanuel, an Obama health care adviser, to Joseph Mengele, the infamous Nazi torture physician.

Similar comparisons by talk radio hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have become routine.

Foxman said his organization is doing what it can, but suggested the ADL can’t be everywhere at once.

“Politicians exaggerate. Am I troubled with it? Yes, I’m troubled. Will we stop it? No. Do we have a responsibility to educate, to sensitize? Yes.”

Foxman suggested that most abusers of the analogy usually come around when educated about the significant differences between a regime that systematically murdered 6 million Jews and, say, an attempt to reduce Medicare budgets.

Despite Foxman’s faith in education, the analogies have continued apace.

Foxman, who is also a strong advocate for Israel, said he believes Obama is a friend of Israel and its security. He said he disagreed with the administration’s previous policy of forcing Israel to stop building some settlements in the West Bank as a precondition to new peace negotiations, but overall is supportive of Obama’s attempts at Middle East peace.

He said he isn’t confident the Iranians will give up their nuclear ambitions without being compelled to with tough sanctions.

But he said he believes the administration is right to try to engage Iran, even if only to build a moral case for sanctions by showing every effort has been made to get Iran to willingly give up its nuclear program.

A nuclear Iran, he said, would be dangerous not just for Israel and the region, but for the entire world, as Iran would attempt nuclear blackmail.

The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 to fight anti-Semitism and now has a broad mandate to fight bigotry, defend democratic ideals and protect civil rights.

More information on Saturday’s event is available by calling 862-8600.