Listen Live on KKFI
Every Friday at 9:30amAbout the Show
Understanding Israel Palestine
This show is inspired by Citizens for Justice in the Middle East, a local group that has advocated for 20 years for a fair and even-handed U.S. foreign policy that recognizes the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. Our program offers interviews with journalists, scholars, policy experts and activists to offer multiple perspectives, and to clarify the underlying issues that are often obscured by headline news.
In Part IV of a series on the Israel Lobby, Margot Patterson talks to journalist and author James Bamford about his recent article in The Nation magazine, “The Anti-Defamation League: Israel’s Attack Dog in the U.S.” Since the onset of the war in Gaza in October, the ADL has reported a dramatic rise in anti-Semitism, citing numbers that members of its own staff dispute and which conflate anti-war protests with anti-Semitism. Bamford writes that for much of its history the ADL has operated as a hostile intelligence agency, surveilling a wide array of U.S. groups and passing information about them on to Israel, the U.S. government and apartheid South Africa. A leading authority on U.S. intelligence services and a former investigative producer for ABC World News Tonight, Bamford personally reported on the ADL’s spying operation when in 1992 it came to light that over a period of 30 years, from the 1960s to the 1990s, the ADL had spied on hundreds of U.S. groups and thousands of U.S. citzens.
