As the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt has done little to uphold his organization’s claims to fight antisemitism as the “leading anti-hate organization in the world.” Instead, he’s shored up the ADL’s role as little more than a fierce pro-Israel lobby group known for defending Israel by attacking its critics. With no sense of irony, much of this effort manifests as defamatory speech — at least in the everyday, if not the legal, sense — by Greenblatt.

This weekend on Fox News, however, Greenblatt outdid himself.

In his appearance, Greenblatt said college graduates and social media influencers who have spoken out against Israel’s genocide were responsible for a man in Boulder, Colorado, throwing Molotov cocktails at a group of elderly people calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Greenblatt singled out a speech by the graduating class president from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while naming streamer Hasan Piker and social media influencer Guy Christensen as “promoters of hate.”

“These speakers at these graduations — it just happened the other day at MIT — spreading blood libels about the Jewish people or the Jewish state, it creates conditions in which this kind of act is happening with increasing frequency,” Greenblatt said, referring to both the attack in Boulder and the shooting of two Israeli embassy officials in Washington, D.C., last month.

Megha Vemuri, the MIT class president that Greenblatt referenced, did not mention “the Jewish people” at all and spread no “blood libels” — antisemitic false accusations that Jewish people are murderous. She is one of several graduating students around the country who have used their commencement speeches to decry Israel’s U.S.-backed onslaught, which had already razed every university in Gaza to rubble by January of last year.

Every day, new footage of mutilated children’s bodies, desperate hospital workers, and scenes of searing grief are broadcast directly from Gaza to our phones.

While Greenblatt’s claims on Fox were false and harmful, strong free-speech protections under the First Amendment mean that it is unlikely a defamation lawsuit against him would succeed in this country. But there is little doubt that, in the everyday sense of the term “defamation,” the Anti-Defamation League CEO’s claims that commencement speakers were spreading antisemitic lies — and suggestion that they’re responsible for two stochastic, violent attacks — were defamatory and dangerously so.

“We’ve got to stop it once and for all,” Greenblatt said of speeches like Vemuri’s. “I hope the Trump administration will do just that.”

In her fact-based and morally informed criticism of a........

© The Intercept