Pro-Zionist lobbying group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has released its annual report titled “Murder and Extremism in the United States,” and its contents are mostly unsurprising.
“In 2022,” the group writes, “domestic extremists killed at least 25 people in the US, in 12 separate incidents.” That total, they say “represents a decrease” from what they labeled “33 extremist-related murders documented in 2021.”
The ADL, which is headed by former Obama administration official Jonathan Greenblatt, declared in its latest edition that “all the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists.”
But one categorization sticks out – not so much for the crimes committed by the suspect, but for how ADL staffers decided he was a far-right ideologue. Strangely enough, it appears to be the same way millions of social media users realized that nationalist battalions in Ukraine are far-right as well.
On Wednesday, the ADL’s so-called ‘Center on Extremism’ wrote that it “only included” Anderson Lee Aldrich – the perpetrator of a deadly attack on a gay club in Colorado Springs – “after lengthy deliberation.”
The “dominant factor” in that determination, they say, was the revelation that Aldrich was the administrator of a website which featured a white supremacist video prominently on its front page. To make the case, the report features a screenshot from the video in which Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant is displayed alongside a Nazi ‘Sonnenrad,’ or black sun.
The ADL’s use of one of the Azov Regiment’s preferred symbols to label Club Q shooting suspect Anderson Aldrich “far-right” indicates that they’re well aware of the emblem’s Nazi origins.
© Courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League
But just two months ago, the ADL rejected the idea that the wearer of a Nazi Sonnenrad symbol was automatically “far-right,” when it came to Ukraine’s notorious Azov Battalion*.
Last year, independent American investigative outlet the Grayzone asked the ADL about an incident in which a Ukrainian militant with a Nazi Sonnenrad tattoo was given an award by American comedian Jon Stewart at the conclusion of the Pentagon’s ‘Defense's Warrior Games’ at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
Specifically, journalist Alex Rubinstein wanted to know whether the group would “condemn the Department of Defense's invitation” of a “former member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion [with] a Nazi Sonnenrad tattoo on his left elbow” and “other former members of neo-Nazi organizations to Disney World.”
Two months later, he got a response: the ADL explicitly stated their Center on Extremism “does not see Azov Regiment as the far-right group it once was.”
As one of the country’s most powerful Zionist organizations, the ADL’s classifications are frequently adopted by mainstream media outlets, which tend to treat the lobbying group as a stand-in for Jewish Americans.
In 2019, the group seemed willing to call a spade a spade. Their “report on international white supremacy” warned Azov Regiment members were trying to “connect with like-minded extremists from the US.” Just a few years later, the consensus seems to be that such extremists exist only in the US now.
*The Azov battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.