Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/8/24 Grant F. Smith on the ADL’s Influence over the FBI

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Scott is joined by Grant F. Smith to talk about some documents he recently acquired through the Freedom of Information Act that reveal the Anti-Defamation League’s role in teaching FBI agents how to define genocide and civil disobedience. He and Scott discuss the ADL’s history of defining both terms very dishonestly to contemplate what FBI agents are learning.  Discussed on the show: “ADL defines genocide and civil disobedience within the FBI” (IRmep) “The Anti-Defamation League: Israel’s Attack Dog in the US” (The Nation) Grant F. Smith is the author of a number of books including Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America, Divert!, and most recently The Israel Lobby Enters State Government: Rise of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board. He is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i got the great grant f smith he is the founder and the director of the institute for research middle eastern policy And what that really means is he is America's foremost expert on the Israel lobby. And he wrote what, eight, ten books about it so far, blow your socks off, including big Israel.

That's the big one. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Grant? Hey, doing well, Scott. Thanks for having me on. That's Eliza, the big one. It's one of them and one of the big latest, all-encompassing type, broad overview type things. but the whole corrupt founding of A-PAC and all of their crimes

and stealing nuclear material and all of the, man, trade dealings and everything. Grant F. Smith, go check out his Amazon page there. And you know what you do too for fun one weekend? You go site colon earmep.com. And that way you're searching just that site and in space and then just put dot pdf and see what you find there. I bet you'll have fun. Yeah, well, the latest PDF is the entire basic field training course that we've been trying to get for 10 years from the FBI.

Yeah. And it is developed and delivered by the Anti-Defamation League. Oh, you don't say. So that's the headline. ADL defines genocide and civil disobedience within the FBI. Yeah. The looming threat to Middle East peace activism, and that is irMEP.com, earmep.com. So, please do tell what it is.

What are the standards that the ADL is teaching the FBI about American thought crime, Grant? Yeah, that's a good question. So even before we received this Freedom of Information Act request, we had requested other documents relating to the ADL-FPI relationship. and they were basically trying to tarnish Palestinian rights groups in the U.S. by conflating them with hate crimes and violent, armed, domestic terrorism. And so this FOIA that we finally got documents on is something that's been underway since 2014. And the ADL has managed to become in charge of training all brand new agent trainees and new intelligence analyst trainees at the FBI and trying to sort of form them to the ADL worldview as to what constitute legitimate civil disobedience and what is. genocide as defined by the Anti-Defamation League. So those are, you know, if you're going to

talk about dot crimes, and that's a framing I hadn't thought of, the thought crime here is thinking of genocide as anything but what happened during World War II during the Holocaust and thinking of civil disobedience as being anything but what happened during the civil rights era. Everything else is really not legitimate if you look at the ADL training material and absolutely off limits would be any current day analysis of the genocide that's occurring in Palestine today or any of the very legitimate civil disobedience that is taking place on American campuses and elsewhere protesting that genocide. So I think it's timely that they finally released it now. Yeah. Because if you look closely at what the ADL is teaching all of these

special agents, it's really trying to mold them to become as worshipful of the Anti-Defamation League as the mainstream media is and kind of take at face value all of their pronouncements about what's legitimate and what's not legitimate. Yeah. So I admit I didn't read the ADL report and I'm really interested in the history here which you go into which of course only you can in this way and I want to hear all that but on this particular question of anti-Israel protests what's going on now it's mostly college campuses or you know younger people who are I don't know incontrovertibly protesting within MLK parameters right like what is it? How did they parse and say when Palestinians or American leftists or who mostly go out

and protest against what Israel is doing? This is why you should not see this as a kind of thing that Martin Luther King and his people would do or support. It's something different. They're what? Just they're Nazis and we say so? Or do they even have an argument or what? Yeah, the argument is that if you're on, campus and you're protesting what Israel's doing in Gaza that you are actually sort of an agent of Hamas, or as Nancy Pelosi says, if you're protesting at her house and making her life difficult, you must be an agent of China or, or, oops, Russia, or whoever the state enemy of the day is, she doesn't even know. So that, I mean, that's the transparent attempt. It's an attempt to port

portray legitimate civil disobedience and protest as something that it's not. I think Max Blubenthal was challenging anybody to come up with video and audio of protesters saying what some of the people grilling college officials on Capitol Hill were saying was being said in any of these protests. They can't because it's not. They're basically out there saying, stop uh the war ceasefire now uh with you know some probably some outlier uh people saying worse things river well i wouldn't say river to the sea is is worse but you know the train to basically change the framing of what these protesters are doing and throw it into the category of a hate crime or worse so not you know i've looked at it about as close i think as

anyone has. I haven't found anything in all of the video and protests and marches that would rise to the occasion of, you know, being anything that shouldn't be on campus. And to his credit, the FBI director promised that they're not going to investigate or surveil peaceful pro-Palestine protests. But as you know well, they do sometimes react to outside and political pressure to get some results by creating fake plots, finding some mentally compromised individuals, giving them some fake weapons and creating terror plots where none would have existed but for the efforts of the FBI. So I think it's important to sort of reveal all of this. And I'm not the only one who's saying it. I think James Bamford, when he wrote an almost simultaneous article in

the nation magazine talking about ADL espionage and covert action and its previous experience working with South African, apartheid South African intelligence and the Israelis to try to frame and shut down all sorts of civil rights groups in California and elsewhere. Yeah. You know, this is what the ADL does. And as you briefly mentioned, they have an. 80-year history of trying to infiltrate the FBI. Yeah, wait, hold that thought,

because I'm going to ask you that next. But on this current thing, I guess, I'm just making fun of myself here where I'm like, yeah, but what's the crux of the argument, Grant? Because where there's such BS, it requires really good BS. But there is none, right? How do you convince it?

It doesn't. And look, I know that FBI agents are a bunch of mindless meathead Waco killers. But at the same time, if somebody just says to them, hey, FBI agent, you see those hippies over there. They're not hippies. They're pro Hamas. It seems like even an idiot meathead potential Waco butcher FBI agent would say, come on. I mean, that's just because you like. like Israel a lot or whatever, but that's not true. They're

college leftists. You know what I mean? Like the meme of the white girl with the dreadlocks. Everybody knows what they are. They happen to be good on this one. But nobody says they're pro, oh yeah, this is Hamas's fifth column, has taken over all the colleges. I mean, even David Horowitz would probably try to blame Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood or something first, right? It just makes no sense. Well, you know, to its credit, when the ADL was encouraging the FBI to investigate Friends of Sebel, which is an Iowa-based small group for hosting some American Muslim Alliance speakers, the FBI to its credit did say, oh, okay, this is just the ADL having another ideological disagreement with a couple of groups. They basically don't have any power or influence anyway. So, but I don't think it's good to discount the power of any node of the Israel lobby,

making fact-free assertions that instantly have to be acted upon. For example, you know, there's been no public presentation except for maybe Channel 4 in the UK that UNRWA had active operational people in the October 7 attack. But they made the assertion, and boom, suddenly there's no more Western funding for that organization. I mean, that's not just absurd on its face the way this is. Right. Like these same people be protesting for recycling next week. How are they Hamas?

They're a bunch of vegans and a bunch of communists, you know? I think the argument that the FBI has to take, you know. The FBI has to take every single ADL allegation at face back. Because, number one, against their own better judgment up until 1968, they didn't want to deal with the ADL. But now they have to. They have to liaise with each regional office. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.

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disobedience within the FBI. That's at IRMEP.com. Go ahead, Grant. Yeah. So I was, as I was saying, if there hadn't been an 80-year effort that gradually overcame the FBI's better judgment, then yeah, it would be kind of ridiculous. But this isn't just some old lady calling up thinking that there's a terrorist plot in the garage across the street that can be discarded or some threat called in to a gathering that the FBI can and does disregard as, you know, banter, which I've actually heard them use that word. No, this is the ADL. So as I mentioned in the article, they began in 1940 trying to liaise with the FBI by offering a bunch

of ADL investigators to Director Hoover as resources. and the ADL rejected it because they had a lot of the people offered up on lists as you know potential conventional weapon smugglers as many were doing and people who were mentally unbalanced which was their view and so you know they really saw the ADL as an organization shaking down Americans trying to build a war chest and at first they had no idea what the ADL was up to. They didn't like the ADL claiming that they were unofficial auxiliaries of the Justice Department, which they were claiming, although they weren't, or conducting almost 400 investigations in the 1940s on the FBI's behalf. And so Hoover

didn't want anything to do with them. He knew about their attempts to infiltrate people like Arnold Forster into the FBI when he was actually the ADL's chief investigator until about 2003. They were lobbying for joint events and meetings, and the FBI was confused about that. And finally, they asked in 1944 for access to FBI files, which was an incredible, incredible brash thing to do, which, of course, the FBI refused. You know, do they have access today? Some people think they do. But anyway, in 1968, the FBI was basically ordered politically to liaise with the ADL. And now you've got the ADL directors writing things like love letters to the FBI and pretty much showing that they're willing to comply with any political orders to treat the ADL with kid gloves and treat all of their assertions as legitimate.

And the height of that was probably when Attorney General Janet Reno had a giant file of ADL espionage evidence on her. desk that people were urging she act upon and she just buried it and said, no, no, no, we're going to continue to be a partner of ADL's, you know, investigations of hate crimes and be an active resource to them. So, you know, the FBI has to take anything the ADL says as a legitimate potential crime. And I don't think people, you know, people have known for a that they had some training role at the FBI, that they could go in and talk to each new trainee. But what they didn't know is, well, what exactly are they saying? And I think based on the 10 years it took us to get this, that they cleaned up their curriculum a bit, because we were

trying to get it directly from some of the content providers who denied access and said they didn't hand it out to just anybody. I think we got a sanitized version of the training. But basically, our argument in the article is that the FBI has become subordinated to ADL trainers. And any past legitimate investigations of the ADL's relations with the Israeli government and covert operations in the U.S. have basically become unthinkable because all these new agents leave their first years of training basically. Having been shown that the position of the ADL is, it's subordinating their employer. So I don't think we'll ever see another legitimate espionage investigation or anything into what the ADL actually does. And, you know, I really do think it's not really, you know, there's a lot of pushback you can see online and some of the platforms that haven't gone under yet questioning what the ADL really is.

you know what is this organization today based on what it does and uh you know it's certainly yeah they got some heat back from Elon Musk because they went kind of full bore against him and calling him an anti-Semite and targeting companies and telling them they better stop uh advertising on Twitter and this kind of thing and so that really raised their profile like hey man what exactly is y'all's role here like keeping america safe from literal Nazis or going around and calling all enemies of Israel Nazis, including the richest guy in the world who has the PR to fight back. You know what I mean? Well, he doesn't. I think he got a little taste of what real power is. Yeah, that's true. He gave in, didn't he? He did give in. He's wearing

an Israeli soldier's dog tags now. He's taking tours of Yad Vasham. I might have missed the dog tag thing. Shapiro, the, you know, podcaster. And he's really started shadow banning left and right all sorts of formerly visible accounts. So I don't think Musk realized that when he tweeted out, should we ban the ADL? Because he attributed them to something like $30 or $40 billion in advertising losses, which they're more than capable of doing. They are the experts of boycott. It's certainly not the BDS movement. So, you know, he tweeted that out and it's been to his everlasting regrets. And he is alternately lifting the shadow bands and putting them back on. But he has foregrounded the ADL. And the ADL now is community response central. So if they see

something they don't like, they get carte blanche on Twitter to kind of put in their view as the definitive correction to the handful of hosts that in any way challenge what's going on. So, you know, he got a taste. And, you know, I don't know why he didn't think he was vulnerable being a military contractor, having a social media company, having cars. It could be recalled for safety. I mean, I guess he should have read they dare speak out. Or some of the Wait, Grant, that's a good one, but, but we're almost out of time, and I got one more question, but we only got three minutes because I got a hard break here, but, um, I just, I wanted to make this point. I forget if you had mentioned this previously, but where, and every, this is getting wide coverage is kind of how cynical it is that the ADL is claiming this huge increase in anti-Semitic incidents, but everybody knows that all they're doing is counting every peace protest. And, and, which is completely ridiculous. And everybody, can see how ridiculous that is, I think, maybe not FBI meathead, potential Waco butchers, but everybody else could tell how retarded that is. But then my question for you for the last

couple of minutes here is, what about the right? Because it goes without saying from the ADL's point of view that anyone on the right who doesn't love and want to serve Israel must be the worst kind of national socialist anti-Semitic potential mass murderer. And so I wonder how much of that is in this same manual. We talked about how they characterize the left protesters, I guess. Well, there's nothing about that in the manual. The FBI is extremely, extremely active on white nationalist groups and extremely active conflating, you know, what they do with terrorism, domestic terrorism. But the ADL training manual, the version we have, and again, we're trying to get the earlier versions, doesn't say anything about that. But,

You know, I think... That's interesting, isn't it? Is that just because it's a different training program that they have for that? So they just leave this to... No, I think since they've been... I mean, we're not the only ones who've been trying to get this curriculum. I think they saw the potential negative reaction that would occur when it was released, and they had a decade to clean it up.

That's what I'm saying. Or is that your question? Oh, well, that makes sense. I mean, I know that there are other reports that do talk about this, particularly Homeland Security reports that have been leaked and that kind of thing, possibly FBI. I'm not the... Yeah, well, there's no, you know, the FBI and the whole national security infrastructure has taken Israel off the table as a counterintelligence issue.

You can read James Bann for that. But, you know, the thing to remember is there was no evidence needed for the UNRWA defunding. There was no evidence needed for a lot of things that have led to U.S. military strikes. There's no evidence required when it's the ADL. or other prominent nodes of the Israel lobby, especially A-PAC, they just simply have the power to push this stuff through. And the idea that the ADL is training FBI agents should frankly scare anyone who's going to a protest or even receiving the wrong type of mail.

All right, you guys, that's definitely the truth. And you heard the proof. It's Grant Smith. That rhymes, so you know it's right. I-R-M-E-P-com. I thought it was dot org. Did you get them both now, I guess? Dot com.

Yeah, we got them both. The newer, faster, better website is dot com. Okay, great. I R&P. I'm used to saying it the other way, so I was like, hey, I got to make a new neural pathway there. Yeah, both roads. Both roads go to the right place. Yeah.

Oh, okay, great. And then also, like I say, search the site for the PDF files of all the great FOIA work this guy's done over the years. You won't believe it. And check out his great Amazon page for all his great books on the Israel Lobby, including Big Israel. uh thank you very much for your time sir appreciate all right man thanks the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scothorton dot org and libertarian institute dot org