Tag Archives: ADL

The Permission Slip Macklemore Got in 2014

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In May 2014, Macklemore walked onto a Seattle stage wearing a large prosthetic nose, dark wig, beard and black suit. Then he performed “Thrift Shop,” a song about being cheap.

Macklemore in Jewface in 2014, singing about being cheap

It would be difficult to construct a more recognizable antisemitic spectacle: the exaggerated Jewish nose, the beard, the dark clothes, all while singing about bargain hunting. Actor Seth Rogen mocked Macklemore’s explanation that it was merely a random disguise: if someone were instructed to assemble an antisemitic Jewish costume, Rogen wrote, “they’d have that exact shopping list.”

As criticism mounted, Macklemore apologized. He acknowledged that the outfit could be understood as a Jewish caricature but maintained that no Jewish stereotype had crossed his mind.

Yeah, right. That should have been a simple moment for the Anti-Defamation League to clearly denounce the spectacle.

Instead, the ADL chose absolution.

“We take him at his word that he did not have any ill intent,” then-ADL director Abraham Foxman said, “and unreservedly accept his apology.” And then Macklemore gave the ADL a promotional shout-out. “Through this situation I’ve got hip to some incredible groups like the ADL,” he wrote, encouraging people to check out their “great work.”

The country’s best-known antisemitism organization publicly and “unreservedly” accepted his apology and also his advertisement. It is unclear whether there was a quid-pro-quo and whether the ADL was trying to promote its antisemitism study it released the week before.

As they say in text-land: “WTF?”

Twelve Years Later

It is now 2026, and antisemitism is raging through American public life. Much of it no longer arrives wearing a fake nose and beard. It travels under political banners, frequently through rhetoric about Zionists and Israel.

And Macklemore is back on a concert stage.

Opening for Ed Sheeran at MetLife Stadium, he told tens of thousands of people why he had joined the tour: so that he could stand in stadiums and say, “Free Palestine.” He accused Israel of genocide, performed “Hind’s Hall” against a backdrop of footage from pro-Palestinian campus encampments and turned part of the concert into a political demonstration.

This time, the ADL wasn’t offering absolution.

“They came for a concert, not performative, biased and hateful anti-Israel ‘activism’ from his opener, Macklemore,” the organization declared. It pointed to what it describes as his record of demonizing Israel and Israelis, falsely accusing Israel of genocide and engaging in antisemitic rhetoric and behavior.

When Macklemore was subsequently removed from the remainder of Sheeran’s tour, head of ADL Jonathan Greenblatt applauded the decision, saying that “for years, Macklemore has pushed antisemitic tropes and demonized Israel and Israelis.”

What a difference twelve years makes.

The Permission Slip

The problem in 2014 wasn’t only that the ADL accepted an apology. It was that it seemingly confused forgiving the man with minimizing the act.

America’s leading antisemitism organization effectively told the public that Macklemore’s updated and revised intentions settled the matter. A concocted and forced apology after multiple attempts to satisfy the offended, became another chip on the accused – I’m sorry you were offended, not I’m sorry that I have done something terrible that offended you.

Jews are the subject. Always. The antisemite is a victim of Jewish sensitivity.

The ADL granted a permission slip of sorts to this vulgarity and inanity. Permission for American culture to treat an astonishingly recognizable Jewish caricature as something that could be quickly explained away if the right person said he hadn’t meant it.

Now, the ADL that once took Macklemore at his word is no longer particularly interested in his assurances about what he means. It considers impact. The false charge of “genocide” against Israel in Israel’s defensive war is a common pretext to attack Jews today. Macklemore’s appeal to thousands wasn’t a call for peace but incitement to pogrom.

But that was precisely the lesson the ADL could have taught in 2014.

There is an important role for forgiveness in fighting hatred. People must be allowed to recognize mistakes, apologize and change. That is what the Ten Days of Repentance we are in right now is about.

But forgiveness without the party internalizing the matter coupled with contrition is meaningless. It is actually much worse. It is a wink with a get-out-of-jail card. Carry on with spreading antisemitism; we’ll only call it out when the situation becomes intolerable.

Neither October 7, 2023 nor October 8 appeared magically. First One Through has been writing about this phenomenon nearly every day since those same days in May 2014, when it wrote about the UN’s Richard Falk stating that Israel’s “criminal intention [toward Palestinians] is genocidal.”

Does that word have a familiar ring to it? The UN has been using it constantly for well over a decade; before the wars of 2014, 2021 or 2023.

Antisemitism is now systemic. It has been fed into the bloodstream of western education, the arts, jihadi education and the United Nations. And for far too long, it was given a permission slip by the very organizations tasked with confronting it.

The Expulsion of Jewish History, Heritage and Lived Experience from America’s Classrooms

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A quiet purge is beginning in American education. For decades, public schools relied on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to teach students about antisemitism, bigotry, and the Holocaust. Now the largest teachers’ unions are trying to drive the ADL out — not because antisemitism has disappeared, but because a new ideological litmus test has replaced the old moral clarity.

July 10, 2025 statement that largest teachers union in USA recommends no longer using material from the ADL

At the same time as NEA’s push to oust the ADL, New York City’s largest teachers’ union, the UFT, endorsed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani to become mayor. Mamdani’s acceptance of the chant to “globalize the Intifada!” on New York City’s streets threatening Jews, was not considering disqualifying.

CAIR (Council of American Islamic Relations) celebrated the moment. The organization issued statements praising the union’s rejection of ADL and urging school districts across the country to follow suit. In their telling, removing the leading Jewish civil-rights organization from American classrooms was not a loss — it was liberation.

But liberation for whom?

What fills the void when ADL’s anti-bias programs are stripped from schools is not neutrality. It is an ideological curriculum that recasts Jewish history through the false frame of colonial theory. The Jewish people’s 3,000-year connection to the Land of Israel — recorded in scripture, archaeology, language, and tradition — is brushed aside in favor of a political slogan: Jews are Europeans; Israel is a colony; Jewish identity is whiteness in disguise.

And this falsehood is taught with absolute confidence, even though it collapses under the simplest demographic truth: most Jews in Israel are not European at all. More than half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi — descendants of families rooted for centuries in Baghdad, Aleppo, Casablanca, Sana’a, and Tehran. Many arrived as refugees expelled from Muslim countries after 1948. But because their existence breaks the colonial narrative, it is erased.

In this rewritten history, Jews did not return home. They invaded. And Jewish children sitting in American classrooms are told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that their people do not come from the place their prayers face, the place their ancestors named, the place their holidays commemorate.

It gets worse.

Qatar is helping fill the hole in American education course materials. That same Qatar that bankrolls and supports the political-terrorist group Hamas that is sworn to killing Jews. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) published a report that shows how Qatari materials are being mainstreamed in K-12 education.

Map of “Palestine” used by the NEA erases Israel

The shift is not academic. It is surgical.

When the ADL is expelled from the curriculum and radical Islamic materials are substituted, so is the understanding that antisemitism is a unique and ancient form of hatred. So is the recognition that Jews are a minority-minority. So is the historical memory that Jews have been indigenous to the Land of Israel since before Rome, before Islam, before Christianity. The frameworks that replace it reduce Jewish identity to a political position and Jewish history to a fabrication.

And Jewish students feel it instantly.

A seventh grader is told her family “isn’t really from Jerusalem.” A boy wearing a Star of David is treated as if he is declaring an ideology rather than a heritage. Mizrahi and Sephardi students — whose grandparents fled violence or expulsion in the Middle East — learn in school that Jews are “white Europeans.” A child is shamed for speaking Hebrew, as if language itself were an act of domination.

The classroom becomes a place where Jewish children learn that their story is not welcome. That they are frauds.

The unions pretend this is progress. They say they are freeing schools from “biased” Jewish organizations. Democratic senators circle around to defend the teachers’ unions and mock Jewish concerns. They hope no one knows that teacher unions only donate to Democratic candidates.

But the result is not balance — it is a world in which Jewish history is a political inconvenience, and Jewish identity is recast as oppression. The very institutions tasked with protecting vulnerable students are now erasing the vulnerabilities of one of the world’s smallest minorities.

A people is stripped of its past in front of its children. To its children, to create a new type of American: anti-Jewish.

This is not an argument about Israel. It is a warning about America. When unions push out the ADL and bring in organizations which openly provide material support to terrorists, they are not modernizing education. They are dismantling the guardrails that distinguished history from propaganda and identity from accusation.

This has an ugly echo.

On May 10, 1933, 40,000 people watched as students burned Jewish books in Berlin, Germany, part of the Nationalist Socialist (Nazi) Party’s campaign to eradicate Jewish thought and show its control of the intellectual and cultural landscape.

University students burn upwards of 25,000 “un-German” books in Berlin’s Opera Square. Some 40,000 people gather to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: “No to decadence and moral corruption!”

Today, it’s not Jewish opinions but Jewish history, heritage and lived experiences that are targeted for obliteration in America’s schools by the teachers unions. It must stop.

Why WESPAC?

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When IsraelAnalysis.com first reported an act of anti-Israel vandalism on the streets of White Plains, it pointed to the possibility of WESPAC—a long-standing left-wing activist group with a record of anti-Israel rhetoric—as being behind the hate-fueled attack. While no individual has been arrested or charged, the suspicion is not without reason. The question arises: why WESPAC?

Let’s start with timing. The graffiti appeared around 5:00 p.m. on the Ninth of Av, the somber Jewish fast day that mourns the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. WESPAC planned a “urgent vigil for the children of Gaza” at the same time the next day in Peekskill. That city lies further north in Westchester, while many of WESPAC’s most vocal “activists” live in southern Westchester, including White Plains. “Solidarity” for these comrades in southern Westchester may have brought them out on a sunny Sunday.

WESPAC ad for a vigil for Gaza in northern Westchester

Moreover, the vandalized site itself—a street decorated with American and Israeli flags—was an obvious magnet for anti-Israel agitators. What better canvas for those hoping to make a statement on a Jewish day of mourning than one visually celebrating the very state they protest?

But the context runs deeper.

WESPAC has long used the veneer of social justice to cloak its deeply anti-Israel agenda. In neighboring Hartsdale, the group confronted Jews filled with virulent anti-Israel rhetoric. And the current chair of WESPAC, Howard Horowitz, isn’t just a local—he’s a paradoxical figure leading the Israel Action Committee at Temple Israel of New Rochelle, even while aligning publicly with radical anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow.

Horowitz’s own writings are telling. He lashed out at Jewish residents of New Rochelle who had the temerity to run for school board seats, accusing them—and by extension the broader Jewish community—of racism against people of color. He has taken aim at “the vast majority [who] repeat the “I stand with Israel” declarations, disregarding the horrific facts on the ground” in Gaza, making the banner-lined street in White Plains a perfect target for his vitriol. He further believes that such pro-Israel proclamation “denigrates the Jewish tragedies” like the Ninth of Av, making the fast day an appropriate moment to attack Israel supporters.

Horowitz makes no bones about mocking Jewish “nationalism” as evil and “antithetical to Yiddishkeit,” even while he advocates for Arab nationalism. That’s his right, but it doesn’t put him or his group beyond the sphere of suspicion.

As reported by Lohud, the media site covering the lower Hudson Valley, ADL reported that in 2024, Westchester was unique among the suburbs of New York City, to have an increase in antisemitic incidents, a rise of 22% from 2023. Rockland, Nassau and Suffolk counties had declines of 11%, 36% and 26%, respectively. The disparity had much to do with anti-Israel groups including JVP, Palestinian Youth Movement and Democratic Socialist of America – all groups aligned and supported by WESPAC.

Lohud article on rise of antisemitism in New York and Westchester County

To be clear: no direct evidence has emerged tying WESPAC—or Horowitz—to this act of vandalism in White Plains. But in a county like Westchester, where anti-Israel rhetoric has become increasingly normalized in certain activist circles, and where groups like WESPAC operate openly with impunity, the suspicion is understandable.

This wasn’t random graffiti. It was a calculated message, timed for maximum symbolic effect. It struck at a street display of solidarity, and a people commemorating thousands of years of trauma.

And when neighbors ask: Who would do something like this?—it’s not hard to see why eyes turn toward the radical group operating, quite literally, just down the street.

Muslim Anti-Semitism Anchored in Belief that Jews are Responsible for All Wars

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There is no shortage of anti-Semitism in the world.

The Anti Defamation League (ADL) conducted polls in 2014 (somewhat updated in 2015) which showed that many people felt that Jews had too much control of the media and financial markets.  Some respondents believed that Jews were too pompous or were engaged in activities that made people hate them.

The Islamic countries were the most anti-Semitic by a far margin. The rankings:

  • West Bank & Gaza: 93% of the areas are anti-Semites
  • Iraq: 92%
  • Yemen: 88%
  • Libya: 87%
  • Algeria: 87%
  • Tunisia: 86%
  • Kuwait: 82%
  • Bahrain 81%
  • Jordan: 81%
  • Qatar: 80%
  • Morocco: 80%
  • UAE: 80%….

you get the idea.

These percentages dwarfed the non-Muslim countries like Japan 23%, Italy 20%, and Brazil 16%.

A further analysis revealed a split in the nature of the anti-Semitic feelings.  Even countries which showed an inclination for Jew-hatred, appreciated that Jews were not responsible for the wars in the world.  That was an opinion uniquely held by Muslims.

Consider Turkey and Greece.  The two neighboring countries have a long and strained relationship with each other, mostly over land and religious matters (Turkey is Muslim and Greece is Christian).  Interestingly, the countries have nearly identical negative feelings towards Jews, with Turkey and Greece having 70% and 67% anti-Semitic attitudes, respectively.  However, the underlying reasons behind the hatred in the two countries were quite different.

In 2015, 76% of Turks felt that Jews had too much power in the financial markets, while 85% of Greeks held that opinion (note that Greece had been going through dire financial problems). Roughly 63% of Turks felt that Jews had too much control over the global media, while 58% of Greeks felt the same. And 55% of Turks felt that Jews discussed the Holocaust too much, while 70% of Greeks felt the same.

Similar attitudes overall, and a trend that would suggest that Greeks were even more anti-Semitic than the Turks.

However, when the question was posed “Are Jews responsible for most of the world’s wars?” 53% of the people in Turkey responded yes, while only 33% of the people in Greece agreed. A wide margin of difference.

Outside of the Muslim world, very few countries believed that Jews were responsible for world wars, even among the anti-Semites.

  • In Poland, with 37% anti-Semites, only 14% believed Jews had anything to do with wars
  • In Ukraine (32% anti-Semitic), only 14% believed Jews were tied to wars
  • Spain, 29% anti-Semitic and 11% believed a Jewish connection to wars
  • Latvia, 28% anti-Semitic; 12% tied Jews to wars
  • Argentina, 24% anti-Semitic and 14% tied Jews to wars

The ADL started to segment the respondents of some European countries with a significant Muslim population. The Muslims were significantly more anti-Semitic than fellow citizens.

  • In France, only 4% and 6% of atheists and Christians, respectively, believed that Jews were responsible for wars. The percentage was 24% for Muslims in France
  • In the United Kingdom, 6% of both atheists and Christians believed that Jews were responsible for wars, but 34% of the Muslims in the UK held that view – over five times as many.
  • In Malaysia, 23% of Buddhists think that Jews are responsible for wars, but 78% of Muslims believe – over three times as many.

As the non-Muslim world sees the Muslim world at war with itself in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, it has concluded that Jews have nothing to do with the anarchy, death and destruction.  But the Islamic world turns to an old familiar scapegoat and blames the Jews.

Consider the most anti-Semitic regions of the world again. The Palestinian Authority, Iraq, Yemen and Libya top the list. There are fewer Jews in Iraq, Yemen and Libya COMBINED than there are in a New York City subway car. Yet those countries – at war – are the most anti-Semitic.

They believe that the cause of their misfortune is not their own inept governments or co-religionists. It is the Jews.

aleppo

Syrian security officers gather in front of destroyed buildings where triple bombs exploded at the Saadallah al-Jabri square, in Aleppo city, on October 3, 2012.
(AP Photo/SANA)

The terrorist Islamic group Hamas makes its thoughts clear in its charter, Article 22:

“For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.”

The world watches in horror the brutality of ISIS torturing and slaughtering anyone outside of their narrow Islamic view. The world is appalled at the destruction of Aleppo and the murder of civilians in Syria. And the world understands full well, that this is battle where the Jews have no part.

Except the Muslim world.

Related First.One.Through articles:

Israel and Wars

New York Times’ Tales of Israeli Messianic War-Mongering

The Palestinians aren’t “Resorting to Violence”; They are Murdering and Waging War

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