Contents
(1) Mission and target audiences of TheADLExposed.org (TADLE)
(2) The background and operational DNA of TADLE
(3) About Jon Sutz, TADLE creator and editor
(1) Mission and target audiences
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) claims its primary mission is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people,” and defines itself as “the global leader in combating antisemitism, countering extremism and battling bigotry.” These claims, plus the fact that hatred of, and hate crimes against Jews in America and the West are skyrocketing, serve as the pretext upon which the ADL solicits, and collects more than $76 million a year in donations.
In reality, the ADL has been systematically betraying its core mission, and instead, engaging in a variety of hyper-partisan activities that have absolutely nothing to do with this mission, including vicious defamation and disinformation campaigns.
The mission of TheADLExposed.org (TADLE) is to produce world-class investigative reports that reveal what the ADL actually does with its prestige, influence and donors’ money — as opposed to what it claims to do.
TADLE will pursue this mission by recruiting a team of fierce but fair-minded journalists, researchers and media designers, who will create both text-based and video reports that walk audience members though basic facts in an efficient manner, with off-ramps to enable them to see the underlying evidence upon which each allegation is based.
Our primary audiences, in order of priority, are:
- Major donors to the ADL
- Conservative-leaning Jews and Zionists of all stripes
- The general public – especially the young
(2) The background and operational DNA of TheADLExposed.org
The ADL was created in 1913 with a noble purpose and a vital mission: To combat the institutional anti-Semitism that engulfed American universities, government, the arts and beyond. Here is how the ADL describes its origins and activities over the years. Until 2000 or so, the ADL was indeed the gold standard of defending Jews’ civil rights, and combating the lies that animate those who violate them — lies that, in their final form, lead to terrorism, and genocide.
In the early 2000s, however, the ADL began drifting from its founding mandate. By 2016, the ADL was visibly transforming itself into a hardcore leftist propaganda machine, that uses the goodwill, prestige and influence earned over the previous 100 years, to act as a sort of hybrid “palace guard” and attack dog for the most extreme fringes of the cultural left, and its propaganda. Numerous Jewish and Zionist watchdogs have documented aspects of this transformation:
Here are a few reports that provide substantive documentation to support this contention:
No More ADL: The organization now does more harm than good – by Liel Leibovitz, Tablet Magazine, November 7, 2022
The ADL Has Lost Its Way. Elon Musk Is Right to Stand Up to Its Censorship – by Ron Coleman, Newsweek, September 5, 2023
The Shame of the Anti-Defamation League – by Seth Mandel, Commentary Magazine, November 2018
The real lesson of 9/11 isn’t a story about Islamophobia (The ADL’s apology for its former director’s opposition to a Ground Zero mosque is one more way the anniversary is being used to change the narrative about the attack), by Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS News, September 10, 2021
The ADL Has Corrupted Its Mission and Betrayed the Jewish Community, by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, Newsweek, July 28, 2022
The ADL Exposed 1: Ignoring the anti-Semitic murder of an American college professor – Jon Sutz, Jon’s Essentialia, December 14, 2022
Replace American Jewish Communal Leadership: Look around at the disarray and the betrayal of Jews by alleged friends and allies, and you’ll see a bitter truth: Our leadership has gone bad, by Alana Newhouse, Tablet, November 08, 2023
After the ADL gets caught spreading woke ideology, Greenblatt must go – by Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS News, September 7, 2022
The ADL betrays history and the people it pledges to protect; It has formed an alliance with an antisemitic leader whose incendiary rhetoric against Jews helped lead to the worst pogrom in U.S. history– by Ezra Ben-Pesach, JNS News, September 12, 2023
In general, the only audience these articles reach are conservative Jews, who make up only a tiny fraction of America’s Jewish population. As a result, the ADL has been left free to continue its transformation, and with each passing day, further betray its stated mission, with virtual impunity.
On November 4, 2022, however, the ADL’s transformation and betrayals reached their zeniths.
For it was on that date that the ADL publicly declared war on (a) the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, and (b) Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion. The ADL claimed it instigated this war due to its alleged “profound concern about antisemitism and hate on the platform,” which it claimed was caused by Musk’s management decisions — in the eight days he had been running the site. On this basis — and for the first time ever — the ADL openly urged advertisers worldwide to abandon Twitter, with the clear intent to destroy the site, by starving it of the revenue upon which its survival depends.
Because of the ADL’s virtually unchallenged credibility, news organizations blindly repeated its allegations, and advertisers began fleeing the site. By September 2023, according to Musk, Twitter’s ad revenue had dropped by 60%, costing him an estimated $22 billion. Musk stated that based on his discussions with former advertisers, the ADL was primarily responsible for their decisions to abandon Twitter. As a result, on September 4, 2023, Musk announced his intent to sue the ADL to (a) recover his damages, and (b) stop its defamation against Twitter (now renamed X).
These events thrust the ADL and its credibility into the global spotlight as never before.
These events also created an opportunity for its critics to have their views considered by a much wider audience, far beyond Jewish circles.
The ultimate purpose of TheADLExposed.org will be to seize this opportunity, and develop world-class reports that help produce rapidly-growing public awareness of basic realities regarding the ADL, and the falsehoods that have become so ingrained in American culture.
Each work product we develop will be born out of an embrace of four key facts, that few Americans are aware of:
(1) The war to defend Jews and Israel from the most toxic libels and incitement is being lost, on a massive scale. For example:
– January 2023 – 10 months before 10/7: 40% of Americans believe the statement, “Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated Jews,” is accurate.
– 50% of American 18-34 year olds say Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Jews was “justified.”
– 51% of Americans age 18-24 say “Israel should be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians”
– 48% of American college students do not blame Hamas for the October 7 terrorist attack
– 27% of 18-27 year-olds don’t think Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid.
– 56% of Americans who identified themselves as Democrats said they were less likely to support a candidate who backs military assistance for Israel.
– “Young adults show the biggest decline in ratings of Israel, dropping from 64% favorable among 18- to 34-year-olds in 2023 to 38%.” (Gallup)
– An average of 40% of Americans under age 35 support Hamas more than Israel.
– 30% of American Jews believe Israel is committing “genocide” on Palestinians; 51% supported President Biden’s decision to pause arms shipments to Israel.
(2) The average Western adult has an initial attention span of eight seconds.
(3) Young Americans increasingly possess not even a basic grasp of history, geography or economics — particularly regarding the Middle East. Our children can go from kindergarten to a PhD with no functional understanding of Israel and its neighboring regimes, of the jihadist ideology, or having ever witnesses a cogent articulation of why Israel deserves their support — least of all in a format that they can easily understand, and validate as accurate. See some of the metrics that support this contention here.
(4) The overwhelming majority of hate crimes against Jews in America are neither perpetrated nor incited by white supremacists, right-wingers or neo-Nazis. For example, in New York City, the largest Jewish enclave outside of Israel, according to the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force, 97% of hate crimes against Jews are perpetrated by other minorities — 69% of whom are black. Yet the ADL chronically paints white supremacists, etc., as the dominant threat to Jews — and as of July 2024, has never even publicly acknowledged the NYPD-HCTF data, or articulated how it plans to work to combat it.
Update, October 24, 2023: The ADL has started acting like the organization it’s supposed to be
If one peruses the ADL’s Twitter timeline from October 8 onward, they would be hard-pressed to find examples of its endemic betrayals of Jews and Israel (here is one, though). On whole, it has been doing and saying things that its stated principles and mission would require, such as here. Fairness required at least acknowledging this fact.
The problem, however, is that as TADLE documentation proves, for many years the ADL has been passively enabling the very hate, lies and incitement that burst forth on American streets, and in college campuses and news rooms, in the wake of Hamas’s savage October 7 attacks on Israeli Jewish. Responsibly revealing this fact is the central purpose of TADLE.
(3) About Jon Sutz, creator and editor of TheADLExposed.org
TheADLExpsoed.org (“TADLE”) was created, and is edited by Jon Sutz, a visualization & graphic designer, writer, multimedia journalist, satirist and creative consultant. See JonSutz.com.
Jon is also the son of one of the last Jewish children the Nazis allowed to leave occupied Vienna, and the grandson of a Polish victim of violent Russian anti-Semitism. The vast majority of his ancestors were murdered by National Socialist (Nazi) or communist Jew-haters.
Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Jon primarily worked in advertising, corporate communications and skills-training media. Law firms that are engaged in high-value and complex litigation rave about how his skills in visualization design, linguistic analysis and developing overall messaging frameworks help them to prevail in the courtroom – and the court of public opinion.
9/11 caused Jon to refocus his skills — and his life — on projects to help defend freedom, America, Western civilization and Israel. His work in these realms includes writing & producing documentary videos, investigative reports, as well as branding design and creative direction. See examples here. Jon is also the creator and owner of the ILoveIsrael project, which presents evidence-based information about what makes Israel such a remarkable, inspiring nation.
Upon becoming aware of the controversy within the Jewish community over the ADL, Jon found it difficult to believe that the allegations against it could be true. Over recent years, however, his observations and research led him to conclude that the reality of the ADL was actually far worse, in many ways, than the worst of the currently-known allegations.
In December 2022, Jon produced his first investigative report under the banner, “The ADL Exposed,” on his Substack platform:
The ADL Exposed 1: Ignoring the anti-Semitic murder of an American college professor
Jon’s debut report for TheADLExposed.org reveals the myriad betrayals and falsehoods that undergird the war the ADL instigated against Twitter — eight days after Elon Musk took it over:
The ADL’s fraudulent war against Elon Musk & Twitter, Part 1: The Farrakhan Factor