Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith is an International Jewish spy network.
Is the Anti-Defamaton League of B'nai B'rith Spying on
You?
by Bill Hughes
Are you being watched? Is information about your First
Amendment activities being sent covetly to alien intelligence
agencies? Have secret files been compiled on you?
A major scandal, centered around ex-San Francisco Police
Inspector Tom Gerard, a shadowy character named Roy Bullock,
and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) suggests that American liberals, and others,
may be under surveillance. Evidence seized by the police indicates that numerous progressives
activists, newspapers, elected officials, and labor unions-are the targets of a domestic snooping
operation. Its legality, and scope, are now being tested and examined in a civil rights case filed in a
state court in San Francisco.
Gerard has been charged in San Francisco with theft of government property and conspiracy. He is
suspected of having collected privileged material on many residents and organizations in the Bay
Area. He turned the information over to Bullock. Gerard was introduced to Bullock in the San
Francisco office of the ADL. An antique dealer, Bullock, has been the ADL's top "investigator" for
more than three decades. The ADL paid him over $170,000 between 1985 and 1992 for his
cloak-and-dagger work.
Bullock liked to pick through the garbage of his victims, and once infiltrated an Arab-American
delegation that visited Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in her Washington, D.C. Office. (Pelosi is the
daughter of Baltimore's late Mayor Thomas J. D'Alesandro, Sr.) According to a Los Angeles Times
article (04/09/93), Bullock worked as a paid informant for the FBI, as well as the ADL. On April 8,
1993, police carried out a five hour raid of the ADL offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They
discovered the ADL had copies of computer files on 12,000 Americans and more than 950 groups.
According to police reports and court documents, Bullock acknowledged he obtained the
information from Gerard, who traded police files, criminal histories and license plate numbers in
exchange for Bullock's data on so-called extremist groups. It is feared by some that this confidential
information may have been filtered to spook networks in Israel, South Africa, and the United
Kingdom. Gerard had tied earlier in his career to the CIA.
The ADL boasts of keeping its eye on extreme right-wing groups, like the Skinheads, the Klu Klux
Klan, and Aryan Nations. Their role in this mess indicates they may have reached too far in search
for "Anti-Semites." Police found files on the African National Congress: the ACLU: Irish Americans;
the United Auto Workers; AIDS activist groups like ACT-UP; Mother Jones magazine; Pacifica
News Network; Lesbian Agenda for Action; Greenpeace; Christic Institute; Rep. Roy Dellums
(D-CA); the National Lawyers Guild; NAACP; CISPES; Carpenters Local 22; Jews for Jesus; and
many Arab and Palestinian individuals and organizations. The ADL had denied any wrongdoing in the
growing scandal. Gerard has pleaded "not guilty" and released on $20,000 bail. Bullock has not been
charged. The probe is continuing. Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, lashed out at the San
Francisco district attorney for "trying us in the media, " according to an interview he gave to the
Northern California Bulletin, a local Jewish weekly. Foxman said the ADL would continue to
monitor people or groups that "pose a threat to Jews" and defended the organization's probe of the
African National Congress on grounds the ANC "were violent, they were anti-Semitic, they were
pro-PLO, and they were anti-Israel." (See The Washington Report on the Middle East
magazine,08/93).
The ADL was founded in 1913 for the declared purpose of defending Jews against "defamation."
For the most part, their record over the years has been a laudable one. During the Reagan years,
however, the ADL made a noticeable turn to the Right. Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal, a respected author
and anti-Zionist, said, "What exactly constitutes anti-Semitism was to receive continually different
interpretations. With the creation of Israel in 1948, the meaning of the word was broadened and
eventually, totally distorted." (The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 07/93). Irwin Suall
presently runs the ADL's "fact finding" division out of their national office at the United Nations Plaza
in Manhattan. It operates in all 50 states and has 31 regional offices, and it works closely with state
and federal police forces. It has over 400 employees and an annual budget of around $32 million.
In a memo dated July, 1992, Suall praised Roy Bullock as "our number
one investigator." He was also quoted as saying that the real enemies of the
Jews are on the "American Left." (Robert I. Friedman's 'The Enemy
Within', Village Voice, 05/11/93).
On April 8, 1993, a detailed report on this brouhaha was presented on
ABC's "Nightly News" before a national audience estimated at over 18
million. This expose first ran in the print media in the San Francisco
Examiner and was later taken up by the Los Angeles Times. Alexander
Cockburn has been doing a running and biting commentary on it in the
pages of The Nation. In his riveting account of the affair, Friedman made
this damning statement: "Once a proud human rights organization, the ADL had become the Jewish
Thought Police." The ADL sharply disagrees with that assessment. They see themselves as an
altruistic human rights organization dedicated to watching out for the kooks and fringe groups in our
society.
Ex-US Rep. Pete McCloskey (R-CA) has filed a class action lawsuit in a California court against the
ADL, charging invasion of privacy. His name also appears in the data base, along with that of his
wife. McCloskey has been a persistent critic of Israel's brutal suppression of the 1.8 million
Palestinians languishing in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. The son of the former Israeli Defense
Minister Moshe Arens, Yigal Arens, is also a plaintiff in the suit. Arens supports a two-state solution
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The ADL believes,"said Arens, "that anyone who is an
Arab-American or who speaks politically against Israel is at least a closet anti-Semite." (See also,
The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, (06/93). The civil suit claims that the ADL
collected information on opponents of Israeli and South African government policies and passed it on
to those countries. The ADL has denied all the charges in the suit and has promised a vigorous
defense. It says it does not condone illegal methods of obtaining information. Bullock had his
computer-based data divided into four categories: "Right Wing", "Pinkos", "Arab and Skinhead"
organizations. About 4,000 of the files are on Arab-Americans; the rest are on groups and individuals
as diverse as the Assembly of Jesus; Boycott Coke; Black United Fund; the Weatherman
Underground; and the United Farm Workers. Bullock admits to selling some of his ADL files on
anti-Apartheid activists to South African intelligence agents. He also had ties to a group of informants
across the country with code names, like "Scumbag", "Ironside", and "Flipper".
Attorney Marc Van de Hout of the National Lawyers Guild, which is listed in the ADL's files, said, "I
am a Jew myself, and when I see the breath of the organizations in these files that the ADL has
conducted surveillance on, it is very clear that they have sort of lost touch with reality in terms of
organizations that are engaged in real anti-Semitic activity." (See Washington Report, 08/93). As
Doug Struck's recent insightful reporting in the Baltimore Sun amply demonstrates, the Israeli
crackdown in the occupied territories has resulted in gross abuses of human rights, including the
"torture of Palestinian prisoners."
Americans should have the right to complain about Israeli
wrongdoing, about their huge annual raids on our national treasury
($11.3 billion in 1993), or their controversial trial of John
Demjanjuk, without ending up in a file of the ADL or under
surveillance. I think it is wrong for the ADL, or any other private
group, to appoint itself as the pseudo-guardian of our civil liberties.
The ADL, however, like any other defendant, is entitled to its day
in court and to present its side of this mounting controversy to an
objective fact finder.
(Published in the Baltimore Sentinel, September, 1993 issue.)
*Author's Note-A partial settlement has been reached to resolve the very important civil rights suit
mentioned above that was brought in the federal district court in central California by the fiesty
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). At this
writing, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Fall 1998 Docket, the ADL has
agreed not to engage in such unlawful spying activity "in the future". The ADL has also agreed "to the
establishment of a complicated system of oversight, including the appointment of a special referee, to
purge certain confidential information. The plaintiffs agreed to waive general damages except in cases
where job loss or other injury occured."
The CCR, located at 666 Broadway, 7th floor, NY, NY 10012, (email at CCR@igc.apc.org), is
part of the outstanding legal team representing civil rights and social justice groups and individuals in
this lawsuit to vindicate the rights of American activists against the illegal over reaching of the ADL's
national surveillance network.
**Another Note-On 11/13/98, Abraham Foxman, National Director of the ADL, in response to the
above mentioned court decision, referred to his group as simply a "journalistic newsgathering
organization...". Gee, I'll bet a lot of Americans are going to be surprised by that one. Most folks
were led to believe that the ADL is kind of like a "civil rights" organization. Now, Foxman is sending
out a different kind of message. Could the ADL be both? Does it wear two hats or maybe more?
What exactly is its mission? Wouldn't you like to know? It is your country, isn't it?
Source, Washington Times.
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