The American Civil Liberties Union, once a great organization for defending free speech and civil rights in America, is circling the drain. They now have more than one foot in the extreme Social Justice arena, defending the right of surgically and chemically untreated biological men who identify as transwomen to compete in women’s sports.
Now the ACLU has a Human Rights Program headed by one Jamil Dakwar, whose bio is here and whose duties and background is described by the ACLU:
Jamil Dakwar (@jdakwar) is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program (HRP) which is dedicated to holding the U.S. government accountable to its international human rights obligations and commitments. He leads a team of lawyers and advocates who use a human rights framework to complement existing ACLU legal and legislative advocacy, primarily focusing on promoting racial and economic justice and ending mass incarceration, police violence, and extreme sentencing. HRP conducts human rights research, documentation, and public education, as well as engages in litigation and advocacy before U.S. courts and international human rights bodies.
. . . Before coming to the United States, he was a senior attorney with Adalah, a leading human rights group in Israel, where he filed and argued human rights cases before Israeli courts and advocated before international forums.
He’s also an “adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), Bard College, and Hunter College”, and previously worked at Human Rights Watch.
The tweet below appeared on a Jewish website, but I can’t find it on Dakwar’s Twitter feed. He may have taken it down, perhaps because the notion of “Zionist supremacy” has a long history of connection to anti-Semitism. If you go through Dakwar’s tweets, though, you’ll find many of them excoriating Israel and valorizing Palestine (there is NO denigration of Palestine, which of course is a notorious human rights violator). This singling out of one country as a human rights violator and valorizing countries whose human rights violations are numerous is a sign of anti-Semitism.
I’ve put another of his tweets and one retweet below, but you’ll find much more on his Twitter feed.
The Summit for Democracy on December 9-10 (there will be another) was organized by Biden with the goal of “[bringing] together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector in our shared effort to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.” You can see their schedule here, the list of participating delegations (many countries) is here (they all seem to be democracies); and I find no mention of Palestine. Why should there be, since Palestine, like many Middle Eastern countries, isn’t a democracy?
Dakwar’s response to Biden’s summit touts Palestinian organizations that “expose human rights violations” (e.g., by Israel). Read more about these six organization below:
This will be the best response to Biden administration inclusion of Israel in the #SummitForDemocracy #StandWithThe6 https://t.co/Z6W2gHZdzL
— Jamil Dakwar (@jdakwar) December 9, 2021
As NPR and Reuters report, Israel has investigated these six organizations and designated them as fronts for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an organization that, as Wikipedia notes, “has been designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and the European Union”. NPR reports Israel’s allegations that the PFLP is “an armed faction that has carried out deadly attacks against Israelis,” All of the six organizations touted by Dakwar are thus extremely likely to have supported terrorism, and Israel has labeled them terrorist organizations. I won’t label them that, but I do believe that they’ve supported the PFLP.
So we have the director of the ACLU’s human rights wing defending organizations that transfer money to terrorists (the evidence for this is substantial).
It thus looks as if the ACLU has gone even woker, as now its Human Rights director is attacking Israel and defending Palestine constantly. But that’s what the Woke do, and what the extreme “Progressive Left” does.
1/3 ACT NOW to fight Israel's attack on Palestinian human rights defenders who work to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes.
Visit https://t.co/eRV8ifK1uL to call on US State Sec @SecBlinken and EU High Rep @JosepBorrellF to condemn this move. #StandWithThe6 pic.twitter.com/o00NjzcVK2
— Adalah (@AdalahEnglish) December 14, 2021
The ACLU have turned into yet-another left-wing campaigning organisation. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself, but there are plenty of such organisations already and few left that care about actual civil liberties.
Another example issue that they’re now campaigning for, but should stay out of entirely, is cancelling student debt.
I read somewhere, the Atlantic I think, which I do read regularly, that the “student debt” problem is disproportionately a Black problem, (marginal students from poor families admitted under affirmative action oversold to accumulate enormous debts to keep the diversity numbers up. Then as mediocre graduates they can’t command the salaries to service that debt even at historically low interest rates.) This guarantees that the Democratic Party and organizations like the ACLU will forever stay in it up to their eyeballs.
It’s also safer and easier to complain about Israel, just as it is safer and easier to make a stink about US violations than, say, Russia or China, or Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc., since they (and we) are unlikely to retaliate in any significant way. Such moral cowardice can at least be somewhat understandable in those circumstances, if nevertheless far from admirable.
Is there an axiom somewhere that states that any organization with a progressive slant, however, moderate, will invariably spill over into a Control-Left organization?
Your comment seems to be referring to Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It’s not spot-on, but it seems to be relevant here, too, where PC administrators have to constantly up their game and find something new to defend in order to justify their jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy
I’m still flummoxed by the smooching of the extreme left with anything Islamic.
And there is no mistake, most of the Palestinian organization’s are Islamic organizations, whose aim is to restore Israel/Palestine to it’s ‘due’ Islamic state, and if you know a bit about history, Islam is one of the greatest opressive ideologies.
Islam is indeed one of the greatest oppressive ideologies, but it is mostly believed in by people “of color”, and that excuses everything in the eyes of the woke.
(And anyhow, the far-left has never had a problem with oppression, cf Stalin, Mao, etc.)
One minor clarification to comment #4: remember that the far Left’s smooching never extended to the Muslims of Bosnia. This exception probably proves Stempels’ rule, inasmuch as the Bosnian Muslims suffered from the sin of excessive whiteness. Alternatively, perhaps the Bosniaks weren’t crazy enough. Of course, when Islamists get really, pathologically crazy (e.g. ISIS), the far Left, the territory from Corbyn through Galloway, typically blames this on the US and Israel.
“I’m still flummoxed by the smooching of the extreme left with anything Islamic” – it’s all down to the identification of the Israelis as oppressors of the Palestinians. Regardless of the history of the Jews being persecuted for millennia.
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In this connection, when was the last time an “apartheid week” on a US college campus was held to protest: (a) the apartheid that Egypt has long imposed on its ancient, Coptic Christian minority; (b) the apartheid Lebanon imposes on its Palestinian refugees by refusing them work permits; (c) the apartheid that the Arab Emirates impose on their non-Arab guest-workers who are largely without legal rights; and (d) the apartheid that nearly all Arab countries manifested when they forced into exile 90-99% of their Jewish minorities in the 1950s-60s. The last time the word “apartheid” was used in these connections in academia was…never. It would be interesting to attempt a demonstration of this sort on any US campus: the DEI office would probably forbid it on the charge of “Islamophobia”.
Very good points! The mistreatment of the Copts in Egypt, and of the mostly poor and marginalized Christian minority in Pakistan, receives very little coverage in the media, while, according to a report some months ago in The Guardian, more than 6,500 migrant workers have died building the facilities for next fall’s World Cup in Qatar.
And some would call that ‘slavery’ rather than merely ‘apartheid’.
Dakwar apparently objects to the inclusion of Israel to a meeting of Democratic nations? He is evidently against the “normalization” of Israel, a radical position which has no place in an organization supposedly dedicated to human rights.
Right about now, what with reproductive and voting rights under siege, we sure could use the ACLU of yore.