“Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure,” the saying goes. Enter the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who just made an interesting claim.
To wit: “Right-wing extremist violence is our biggest threat.”
“The numbers don’t lie,” Greenblatt further avers. But the ADL does, according to FrontPage Mag’s Daniel Greenfield, who writes that “Greenblatt’s ADL has become notorious for undermining its mission by putting out fake hate crime statistics. And these fake statistics were as surreally egregious as they were confusing.”
Greenfield continues:
The executive summary of the ADL’s annual report claimed that, “2018 was a particularly active year for right-wing extremist murders: Every single extremist killing — from Pittsburgh to Parkland — had a link to right-wing extremism.” This false claim was quickly picked up and repeated by the media.
Typically, the ADL report contradicts itself when it later claims that, “Almost all of the 2018 extremist-related murders were committed by right-wing extremists.”
Is it “every” or “almost all”?
The trick here is that the ADL report exploits any link, no matter how tenuous or dubious, to make its first claim, while its second claim essentially concedes that the shooters weren’t “right-wing extremists”.
How is it possible for a killer to have links to “right-wing extremism” without being a “right-wing extremist”? Why even try to link people who aren’t “right-wing extremists” to “right-wing extremism”?
Because that’s the only way the group, which we should now call the American Defamation League, can make its case.
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Consider that the ADL identified Nikolas Cruz, the criminally inclined young man who murdered 17 last year in Parkland, Florida, as “a budding white supremacist” who, notably, killed five Jewish victims. Yet Greenfield explains how tying the shooting to “right-wing extremism” is a conspiracy theory that was debunked early on, but to which the ADL shamelessly clings. Hey, why not? With people’s short memories, how many will notice?
Moreover, the school Cruz attacked (which he’d also attended) had a 40-percent Jewish population, yet 12 of those killed were non-Jewish. So Jews constituted 29 percent of the victims and thus were actually underrepresented among them.
Note, too, that anti-Semitism in America today is largely a leftist and Muslim phenomenon — see Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) et al.
The ADL report also labels killers Tierre Guthrie and Malachi Qaadir Dorns, whom Greenfield identifies as black members of black nationalist Moorish groups, as “right-wing.” Talk about a stretch.
The ADL then states that Muslim jihadist killers are largely “absent from this list” (that is, their list); Greenfield counters, however, that we merely “got lucky” in 2018 as many jihadist plots were foiled.
Among the sampling he provides, most notable is that “the ADL neglected the Toledo synagogue plot by an Islamic terrorist who had wanted to carry out a synagogue attack modeled on the Pittsburgh Tree of Life mass shooting,” relates Greenfield. “The attack, which was intended to kill a Rabbi and congregants, was stopped with a Chanukah arrest.”
Even more outrageously, the ADL labeled “right-wing” a vicious 2018 stabbing attack on a family by a 17-year-old Muslim convert named Corey Johnson. The ADL’s pretext for doing so was that the boy had once been a KKK fan — prior to adopting Islam. Never mind that he took the name “Mustafa”; quoted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man who helped birth ISIS; had watched jihadist videos; had earlier threatened to kill “every single infidel” at a certain school; read the Koran for courage before his attack; and actually said that he committed the act in his Islamic beliefs’ name.
Oh, one more thing: This “KKK lover’s” victims were white.
But such sleight-of-hand is nothing new — and not just for the usual suspects, the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center. For example, the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, which is an affiliate with the extreme leftist The Nation magazine, and the website dubbed Reveal from the leftist Center for Investigative Reporting claimed in 2017 that “far-right” terrorism was a vastly bigger threat than the jihadist variety. I dug into their data and showed that under their “methodology, founders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson could be considered ‘terrorists,’” as I wrote at the Observer at the time.
“Moreover, researchers included in the right-wing-acts category a black nationalist; a rampaging, mentally ill young man distraught over romantic failures; and a Colin Kaepernick supporter who describes himself as a ‘hard socialist,’” I continued. (By the way, for all those wondering why conservatives never saw a culture war they couldn’t lose, know that my revelatory findings were ignored by even right-wing media.)
Then there’s the Big Lie notion that “most mass shooters are white.” Crunching data provided by left-wing Mother Jones, I debunked this in 2014, demonstrating that whites’ representation among such criminals is no greater than their overall percentage of the population would suggest.
To add more perspective, though, if we’re to measure our “greatest” crime threat based on body count, then it would be gangland killings and “greed crime” (e.g., robberies). For the ADL tells us that “at least 50 Americans [were] killed by extremists from different movements” in 2018 — yet there are many thousands of “garden variety” murders.
As to extremism, there’s also the problem of classification. What is a “right-wing” or “left-wing” incident? Are black nationalists “rightist” just because they claim to be “sovereign citizens,” which the aforementioned Malachi Qaadir Dorns did?
The problem is that the terms “right” and “left” are lacking, corresponding to “conservative” and “liberal,” whose only consistent definitions are, respectively, a “desire to maintain the status quo” and a “desire to change the status quo” (I explained this more in-depth here). And it’s easy to classify given groups as right or left using tendentious definitions.
But here’s the bottom line: However you define “right-wing” extremism, one thing it’s certainly defined as in America is American. And since the country is virtually all American (excluding the foreigners in our midst), we’d expect a high proportion of extremist crimes to be “right-wing” incidents.
In contrast, an FBI report showed that between 1980 and 2005, the Muslim demographic constituted only one percent of the American population. Yet it accounted for 24 percent of all deadly domestic terror attacks and 94 percent of related casualties (2,986 of 3,182 deaths).
Lastly, so-called “right-wing” killers are generally lone wolves and are often mentally deranged. Muslim jihadists are part of an easily identifiable worldwide movement with consistent, rather precise goals, effective outreach, and a troubling capacity to win converts.
Thus, equating the two groups is dangerous media malpractice that blinds Americans to the true dangers and can render them sheep being led to the slaughter. Those guilty of it are to be despised.
