This is stunning. In their press release titled “New BESA Center/ADL Poll: Attitudes of Israelis [Muzzlewatch emphasis] Toward the U.S. Remain Strongly Positive”, Abe Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League writes:

The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today released results of a comprehensive poll (.pdf) of Israeli opinions on a number of issues involving U.S.-Israel and Israel-Diaspora relations.

The poll is a follow up to the 2007 BESA Center-ADL survey on these issues.

Nowhere in their lengthy release does it mention what you can only find by reading the actual report, under Methodology, where it says:

The poll was conducted as a telephone survey…constituting a representative sample of the adult Jewish population (aged 18 and higher) in Israel.

So in the eyes of the ADL, if you are not Jewish, you are not Israeli. Some 25% of Israelis are not Jews- they include Muslims, Druze, Christians and the nearly 5% who identify as “other”. So while Jews comprise just about 75% of Israel’s population, the ADL feels that theirs are the only voices that matter. Actually, Jews are Israelis, non-Jews are other. They are not citizens. (Imagine, if you will, a survey of “American attitudes” that in the fine print mentions that it only includes Christians, also some 75% of the US population.)

Sounds just like “anti-Arab demagogue” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who thinks of non-Jewish Israeli Arabs, whose families lived in Jaffa and Hebron long before most Jewish Israelis made Aliyah, as a fifth column. Some choose to think Lieberman’s open racism is an exception, but it’s not. The kind of thinking which only recognizes Jews as citizens and denies full rights to others has long pervaded Israel and the Jewish Diaspora here.

What’s remarkable about this is that a Jewish anti-bigotry group, which knows all too well the price we Jews paid for not being considered citizens of our home countries, is committing the exact same sin. There is simply no excuse: this is precisely how groups and individuals are complicit in building support for the terrible kind of ethnic cleansing supported by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. The two work hand in hand. Shame on the ADL.

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