Internal tensions have risen at the Anti-Defamation League after CEO Jonathan Greenblatt supported Elon Musk’s proposal to ban the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “decolonization” on Twitter/X, according to a new report by Rolling Stone detailing that two ADL board members have threatened to quit as a result.

Musk said in mid-November he would ban the phrases from his platform and any others that “necessarily imply genocide.” “Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension,” Musk wrote at the time, arguing that the phrases call for the elimination of Israel.

Rolling Stone‘s EJ Dickson spoke with two current ADL advisory board members, Eli Pariser and Peter Fox, who expressed serious concerns about Greenblatt’s recent embrace of Musk, whom he’d very recently condemned for his highly publicized agreement with a tweet supporting the anti-Semitic “Great Replacement Theory.” That same tweet earned Musk a condemnation from the White House; it was one of the most blatant examples of Musk’s public embrace of anti-Semitic rhetoric.

But Dickson reported that even while Musk seemingly agreed that some pro-Palestinian language could be seen as anti-Semitic, Greenblatt’s support of the conspiracy theorist while simultaneously supporting the Israeli government’s military response to the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks “are eroding the organization’s credibility.”

Pariser, who is a founder of MoveOn.org and serves on ADL’s tech advisory board, told Dickson: “Censorship of these phrases will not reduce antisemitism, Especially while Musk himself, one of the most popular users on the platform, continues to engage with and boost it.” He also said he intended to “step down from the Tech Advisory Board” unless the ADL “acknowledged it had made a big mistake and course corrected.”

Fox, who serves on ADL’s NextGen board, said that Greenblatt’s sudden support of Musk after the latter expressed agreement with the Great Replacement Theory “sort of calls back the memory of why this organization was founded in the first place,” which was in response to the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was falsely accused of murder and found guilty after a trial “defined by anti-Semitism.” Fox added: “I think there is a fine line between honoring the core mission of the organization and engaging in public diplomacy.”

Fox did not explicitly threaten to quit the board, but in a November 18 op-ed on Forward that was directly addressed to Greenblatt, he stated that “Musk consistently violates the basic tenets of decency, integrity and respect that ADL stands for. There comes a time when it’s just not worth it. And acquiescing to Elon Musk’s ego is certainly not worth compromising the organization’s integrity for.”

Other board members to whom Dickson spoke expressed support for Greenblatt, and Fox told Dickson that he was “lambasted” by other NextGen board members for not going through “the proper channels” when he wrote his op-ed.

The post ADL Board Members Threaten to Quit Over Jonathan Greenblatt Backing Elon Musk’s ‘Censorship’ on X first appeared on Mediaite.

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