The Hindu American Foundation are repeating the mistakes of the Anti-Defamation League
Promoting majoritarian fascism in one country by rebranding it as a defence of minority rights in another
The Anti-Defamation League
The ADL was founded in 1913. Its mission is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” It has an admirable history of campaigning for Jewish safety. It has also fought for civil rights, including: abortion rights, marriage equality, and reparations for Japanese Americans interned by the U.S. during World War II.
The organisation takes pride in its wide remit and impact. Its mission and history page states that it was “founded with the clear understanding that the fight against one form of prejudice cannot succeed without battling prejudice in all forms.”
That clarity dimmed in 1948 when the state of Israel was founded. The ADL now had two objectives - ending prejudice and supporting Israel. Time and time again, when these objectives came into conflict, Israel won. For example, when Elon Musk accused Jews of “hatred against whites,” the ADL defended him. It did so because Musk was limiting pro-Palestinian speech on Twitter.
The ADL defended Musk again when he sieg heiled at Donald Trump’s inauguration. They said he “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.” How did the ADL reach this conclusion? Approached for comment by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, it refused to elaborate.
Compromising its principles has damage the ADL’s reputation. Jewish journalists now criticise their antisemitism statistics, which conflate valid criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. Wikipedia’s editors recently declared the ADL a “generally unreliable” source on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including related antisemitism. One editor on the decision panel remarked that:
The ADL no longer appears to adhere to a serious, mainstream and intellectually cogent definition of antisemitism, but has instead given into the shameless politicization of the very subject that it was originally esteemed for being reliable on.
You might think this would give the ADL pause for thought. It did not. They instead tried to get Wikipedia’s board to overrule their editors. That request was rightly rebuffed. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank then escalated the situation. It threatened to dox Wikipedia's editors. Approached for comment, the ADL declined to condemn this threat.
Things got so bad that ADL staff wrote to their boss.
[We are losing trust with] other extremism researchers, media outlets, anti-hate organizations, civil rights groups and - perhaps most concerningly - large swaths of the Jewish community that we are committed to serving.
Some of these staff were summoned to meetings with the ADL’s HR department. They were reportedly asked to quit.
All of this is bad news for the defamed people who the ADL aims to defend. We can learn lessons here.
The Hindu American Foundation
The HAF is an ADL-lookalike group. Partnered with the ADL, it aims to replicate their political success. They are also mirroring the mistakes made by their mentor.
This article examines these organisations and their shared mistakes. It proposes a return to the ADL’s forgotten founding principle: “The fight against one form of prejudice cannot succeed without battling prejudice in all forms."
Exceptionalism
Both organisations assert themselves as the singular voice representing their communities. They want to be the only voice of an entire people, and they shun and denigrate anybody who disagrees. The ADL compares Jews who disagree with it to “white nationalists”. Then, it contradicts itself by calling them “Iranian proxies”. The HAF similarly dislikes Hindu groups that oppose its conservative politics.
Hubris has led these civil rights organisations to oppose civil rights. They need to get over themselves. To accept that their communities are not monolithic and allow diversity and disagreement within them. They must recognise that interfaith solidarity is the only way to achieve true equality.
Friendly fire
The ADL and the HAF aren’t the only organisations constructing hierarchies of racism and then placing themselves at the top. Many organisations subscribe to this zero-sum logic. They believe there’s only so much equality to go around, so they’d better get theirs. This pattern leads to interest groups harming each other.
I think that this story will help to illustrate what I mean. Bear with me, there are a lot of acronyms:
Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) is a South Asian and Indo-Caribbean campaign group. The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) is a billionaire backed nonprofit. TAAF supports both DRUM and the ADL.
The ADL successfully called for desi protestors to be jailed for protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. TAAF, who you’ll recall are partnered with the ADL, then funded DRUM to help bail those individuals out of jail.
In the words of Fahd Ahmed, DRUM’s executive director:
In the last nine months, we’ve had to do actual work on the ground that is being created by the ADL’s targeting of students and teachers in high school for Palestine activism … TAAF is supporting us to do work that we’re having to do because of ADL.
The ADL shot back:
We make no apologies for doing everything in our power to stop antisemitism.
Friendly fire incidents like this will keep happening so long as civil rights groups position racism against their affinity group as a unique problem instead of what it is: one form of bigotry among many interconnected hatreds.
Ethno-nationalism
Another similarity between the HAF and the ADL is a legitimacy crisis. They both face questions about who and what they represent. Both crises stem from a clash of agendas. The groups' ethno-nationalist goals conflict with their founding principles of equality and justice.
Most of my readers know Israel is an ethno-nationalist apartheid state. Hindutva, also known as Hindu nationalism, is less well known, so here’s a quick primer:
Hindutva is a nationalist response to colonial rule in, and the partition of, India. I oppose all ethno-nationalisms, but it’s important to acknowledge that Hindutva can manifest benignly, as faith-based national pride, and that it helped to dismantle the governing structures of the British Raj.
However Prime Minister Narendra Modi mainstreamed Hindutva as a majoritarian far-right project. It marks Hindus as insiders and other groups, notably Muslims, as outsiders. It advocates for Hindu supremacy and seeks to turn India, a secular state, into an ethno-religious nation.
The HAF support Modi’s Hindutva in many ways:
Promoting his political party, the BJP.
Excusing the BJP’s human rights violations.
Attacking mainstream human rights organisations that criticise the BJP.
Advocating that the U.S. government monitor Sikhs.
All of this uncannily echoes the ADL’s approach to silencing critics of Israel:
Promote Israel.
Excuse the country’s human rights violations.
Attack mainstream human rights organisations that criticise Israel.
Demonise critics of Israel including:
Muslims, supporters of Palestinian rights,
and shamefully, even opponents of South African apartheid.
Advocate, and allegedly take part in, spying on and infiltrating these groups.
Laying out the ADL & the HAF’s tactics like this, it’s not difficult to spot the similarities. Both of these organisations are promoting majoritarian fascism in one country by rebranding it as a defence of minority rights in another. This looks like a shared playbook, and begs the question…
Are these organisations beyond saving?
Are these the honest mistakes of flawed but salvageable groups? Or, is this the playbook of a new multiracial far right?
Despite all that I’ve written above, I still hold a naïve hope that we can salvage these groups. The ADL was once a leading anti-hate group. It's been upsetting to see its moral collapse.
The organisations aren’t the point though. They are vehicles for our desires, so it’s our desires that need to change. We must abandon the myth that any one of us can be safe if we are not all safe. We need to form coalitions, not interest groups. We will achieve safety through solidarity. If these organisations cannot get onboard with that, then we will replace them.
A call to action
If you oppose organisations advancing ethno-nationalist agendas while claiming to be civil rights organisations, I recommend that you read and sign:
Savera’s declaration against Hindu supremacy.
The #DropTheADL campaign’s open letter to progressives.
Further reading
The Other ADLs episode of the Jewish Currents Podcast is a comprehensive and helpful primer on this topic.
HAF Way to Supremacy: How the Hindu American Foundation Rebrands Bigotry As Minority Rights
This is, as well as a fun bit of wordplay, an exhaustive report on this topic.
Hindutva as a variant of right-wing extremism by Eviane Leidig is a useful history. It contextualises Hindutva in the broader scope of right-wing extremism as a global occurrence, and debunks some common Western misrepresentations of Hindutva.
Another similarity between the supremacist projects discussed above is that both are vestiges of British colonial meddling. This topic is too large to address here but it connects to my argument: our answer to supremacy must never again be counter-supremacy.