ADL Mountain States Region Board Chair James Kurtz-Phelan recently published an opinion piece in the Intermountain Jewish News about “fake news” and the Jews. As a people that have had a long and tortured history with real “fake news,” Jim implores us all to stand up for truth. The full op ed follows below.
“Fake News” is much in the news today. President Trump and his supporters cry “fake news” whenever there is a story they don’t like or that is critical of him or his policies. But negative stories are not fake news. Fake news is the use of false stories to attack another person or organization, people or movement.
Jews have a long and tortured history with fake news, beginning with the canard that “The Jews” killed Jesus, and continuing for millennia. Passover celebrants were accused of using the blood of Christian children to make matzot. Jews did not suffer during the Black Plague as badly as others and, of course, were blamed for the ravages caused by fleas on the backs of rats. Leo Frank was falsely accused of murdering a young girl in his family’s factory in Georgia and was lynched by a mob. Israelis are accused of harvesting organs from poor Palestinians in Gaza. In perhaps the most infamous example of fake news about Jews in the modern era, the Czar’s secret police propounded the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to denigrate Jewry in Russia and Europe, a calumny spread throughout the world by Henry Ford and others. Even today the “Protocols” are read and believed in numerous countries and the tales of Jewish domination of the world still abound.
Lies are at the heart of anti-Semitism. The Nazis conjured tales of Jews as the cause of many of the ills of Germany. White Supremacists in the United States blame the Jews for the ills of white America. Anti-Semitism is used to rally whites around a message of hate and bigotry.
Lies and claims of fake news are a pernicious presence in any society and can form the basis of tyrannical rule. When government leaders shout “fake news” at every turn, people can get to the point where nothing is believed but the words of the Supreme Leader. In 1974, Hannah Arendt spoke tellingly of the dangers created by a pattern of lying: “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer….. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
What can we do about this situation? The Anti-Defamation League has been fighting the lies of anti-Semitism since its founding in 1913 and continues the fight today. The ADL’s response is not to suppress the lies in a country where free speech is so highly valued, but to counter fake speech and hate speech with truth and more speech. This strategy is not only consonant with the First Amendment, but it is also based on the Jewish belief that truth lies at the heart of a moral society. In a recent commentary on fake news, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: “Of course, you don’t need to be religious to value truth, because without it there’s no trust and without trust there’s no society. But it does mean that we need a strong shared moral code, because if all we have is individuals pursuing self-interest, people will deceive whenever it’s in their interests to do so and can get away with it. Fake news erodes the moral ecology on which liberty depends. We really do need truth if we’re to stay free.” Our task, the challenge to each and every one of us, is to stand up for truth–whether we like that truth or not–and to speak out against fake news and lies whenever they occur.