The former director of the Anti-Defamation League took a swipe at his successor Jonathan Greenblatt for recently praising Elon Musk amid the X owner’s “frequent embraces” of antisemitism.
Abraham Foxman, who now serves as the ADL’s national director emeritus after handing over the reins to Greenblatt in 2015, tweeted out his criticism of his successor on Tuesday night—without explicitly naming the current ADL CEO.
“No amount of acrobatics can justify Musk’s frequent embraces of antisemitic themes and providing X as a-majo[r] platform for his antisemitism,” Foxman wrote. “His recent criticism of Hamas and promise to ban some ugly anti-Israel expressions do not vitiate his endorsement of antisemitism.”
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A spokesman for the ADL did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Greenblatt has come under fire in recent days for commending Musk’s announcement last week that he’d prohibit the terms “decolonization” and “from the river to the sea” from the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, claiming they “imply genocide” towards Israelis.
After Greenblatt called this “an important and welcome move” by Musk, adding that he appreciated “this leadership in fighting hate,” critics quickly pointed out that the Tesla mogul had openly endorsed a blood-soaked antisemitic conspiracy theory two days earlier.
“The most prominent organization fighting anti-Semitism in America will commend your ‘leadership in fighting hate’ 24 hours after you endorse vile neo-Nazi anti-Semitism…if you take a strong stand against critics of Israel,” The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner noted at the time.
Amid an alarming rise in antisemitism following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War, Musk agreed with a Twitter user who said “Jewish [communities] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
After the user added that they’re “deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much,” Musk responded: “You have said the actual truth.”
The “actual truth” that Musk agreed with is what’s known as the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims that Jewish people are funding mass migration into developed Western countries in order to facilitate the eradication of the white race. This white supremacist idea was the motivating factor behind the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018 that left 11 Jewish worshipers dead.
Musk then followed up that tweet by once again going after the ADL, claiming the organization “unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel.” Earlier this year, Musk pondered banning the ADL from Twitter, boosting prominent antisemites and white supremacists in the process. (Despite Musk’s repeated attacks on the ADL, the group dedicated to combating antisemitism resumed advertising on the site last month.)
Following that tweet and reports that major brands’ ads were being displayed alongside pro-Nazi content on X, Musk has scrambled to contain the damage of a massive advertiser exodus. Besides dismissing allegations that he’s antisemitic as “bogus,” he filed a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters—though the complaint essentially confirmed the liberal media watchdog’s reporting about ads appearing next to extremist posts.
Greenblatt, meanwhile, has fired back at criticism over his praise of the edgelord billionaire, noting that he immediately condemned Musk over his endorsement of antisemitism. At the same time, Greenblatt argued, it doesn’t mean that Musk shouldn’t be applauded for banning pro-Palestinian slogans from the site.
“It’s important that he made a good policy decision and announced that he was no longer going to tolerate language… genocidal language that call to eradicate the state of Israel and annihilate the 7 million people who live there,” he told Mediaite in an interview this week. “But we will call out when they get it wrong. And we will credit them when they get it right.”
Greenblatt also said that Chotiner was “totally baseless and wrong,” grumbling that the New Yorker writer did “not comment on the fact that we criticized [Musk] 24 hours before” and “didn’t give him a free pass.”
Meanwhile, Foxman isn’t the only person associated with the ADL who has taken Greenblatt to task for cozying up to Musk. ADL advisory board member Peter Fox wrote in an op-ed that “giving a pass to someone who amplifies white nationalist rhetoric undermines ADL’s credibility,” adding that Greenblatt’s appeasement of Musk is “dangerous.”
Furthermore, former ADL staffers told The Daily Beast that they weren’t surprised by Greenblatt’s praise for the mercurial X owner since he’s “increasingly positioned the ADL as a Zionist organization, equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and—since the outbreak of war in Gaza—called for pro-Palestinian groups to be banned and investigated for providing material support for foreign terrorist organizations.”
