In a controversial address to Republican officials, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the New York-headquartered Zionist lobby group Anti-Defamation League (ADL), repeatedly drew parallels between Palestinian student protesters and members of Al-Qaeda and Daesh, labeling them as “terrorists.”
According to audio from the event obtained by the Forward, Greenblatt compared campus protesters to terrorists at multiple points in his remarks, which were part of a panel discussion at the Republican Attorneys General annual summer conference on Friday.
“You have people hiding their faces behind scarves and keffiyehs like they’re in ISIS, storming libraries, vandalizing buildings and literally – I’m not exaggerating – terrorizing their classmates,” he claimed.
At another point, he said the state officials should support laws that ban people from wearing masks at protests because “the founding fathers didn’t want al-Qaeda right running rampant on our streets.”
The ADL is an extremist Zionist lobbying and pressure group based in the United States, which operates under the guise of fighting anti-Jewish hatred. It has an annual budget of around $100 million and works closely with other Zionist groups based in Western countries.
The group is known for vigorously lobbying for the Israeli regime, justifying the Israeli policy of expansion into the occupied al-Quds and the West Bank, opposing the return of ethnically cleansed Palestinian refugees, and supporting US military interventionism in West Asia.
The activities of the ADL are aimed at critics of Zionism and the Israeli regime, most often with methods to equate criticism with Nazism and terrorism.
In most cases, they use available funds and influence to run smear campaigns and lawsuits.
Greenblatt also said protests against Israel were driven by the “same kind of nihilists” who participated in Black Lives Matter, a movement launched more than a decade ago advocating for the rights of Black people and calling for an end to systemic racism and police brutality.
