White supremacists and neo-Nazi groups have launched a vicious, antisemitic social media campaign against the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Within hours a social media storm was trending in the US, racking up 400,000 tweets.

The prime movers read like a who’s who of the US far right.

White nationalist Keith Woods launched the #BantheADL hashtag campaign. He posted, “The ADL is an anti‑white organisation. It’s time to #BanTheADL”.

Charlie Kirk of far right Turning Point USA, Andrew Torba, CEO of far right social media site Gab, Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes and neo‑Nazi Matthew Parrot joined the campaign.

 “X” CEO, Elon Musk, then actively promoted the hashtag trend worldwide, tweeting 28 times in 24 hours.

Musk has previously joined antisemitic attacks on Jewish financier, George Soros, declaring, “Soros hates humanity.”

The ADL was founded in 1913 in response to rising antisemitism. It opposed US Nazis in the 1930s, and also criticised the anti-left witch hunter senator Joseph  McCarthy in the 1950s.

But since the 1970s, the ADL has campaigned to silence critics of Israel, calling for dismissals of academics and mounting legal actions. It cast the left as a threat, equal to if not greater than the right.

ADL national director, Jonathan Greenblatt, asserted that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Full stop.”

This record of attacks has led to a reluctance on the part of some to resolutely call out the hashtag campaign. 

Some have even promoted the hashtag themselves. But the anti‑ADL campaign is not motivated by anti-Zionism.

Its drivers are antisemitism and white supremacist ideas, triggered by criticism of Musk platforming neo-Nazis on “X”. 

The campaign marks an attempt by the far right to widen its base. In an echo of 1920s car magnate Henry Ford, the richest man in the wold is today openly promoting antisemitism and courting fascism.

The position the left should be taking was expressed by black professor and commentator Marc Lamont Hill.

News network CNN sacked him under pressure from the ADL, for supporting “a free Palestine from the river to the sea”.

But Hill rightly identifies Musk’s attack on the ADL as “deeply antisemitic”, and accuses him of turning “X” into a “white supremacist cesspool”.

At the same time Hill insists, “We must stand with Palestinians while fighting all forms of antisemitism.

“We must criticise the ADL while challenging the antisemitic attacks against them.”

Antisemitism is being mainstreamed in the US and across Europe. It is not only an attack on Jews, it is a dagger at the throat of the left and all those fighting racism and oppression.

We fail to oppose it at our peril.