Louis Farrakhan files $5B defamation suit against ADL over ‘false’ antisemitism claims
Farrakhan, 90, has filed a $4.8 billion Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit against the civil rights group, accusing it of interfering with his First Amendment rights by wrongly labeling him an antisemite.
“This lawsuit is to ensure that the abuse, misuse, and false use of the terms ‘anti-Semite,’ ‘anti-Semitic,’ and ‘antisemitism,’ as falsely charged by the [ADL] is permanently barred from being a tool to defame [Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam] and stifle the exercise of constitutional rights,”‘ he contends in court papers.
Farrakhan contended he “has never harmed a hair on the head of any Jewish person or even advocated for such,” and boasted he “honors, respects, and even admires many members of the Jewish community, including his boyhood idol and one of the greatest violinists, Jascha Heifetz, who was a Russian Jew, and his own Jewish violin teachers.”
He called his contentious relationship with the ADL a “battle of Biblical proportions” and buttressed his court filing with 787 pages of “supporting” documents.Farrakhan has referred to Jews as “termites;” allegedly called Judaism a “gutter religion,” and proclaimed “the powerful Jews are my enemy.”
“The Jews have been so bad at politics they lost half their population in the Holocaust,” he said during a 1998 speech.
“Jews are responsible for all this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out: turning men into women, and women into men,” he said more recently, in 2018.
The Anti-Defamation League is “an unAmerican organization and has woven itself into the fabric of both the United States government, in general, and into local governments within America, in particular, to advance interests that are unAmerican to the extent that it tramples and trammels upon the Constitutional rights of Minister Farrakhan and American citizens,” he said in the lawsuit.
The dispute began in 1984, according to Farrakhan, when he supported then-presidential candidate Jesse Jackson after he was accused of referring to Jews with a racial slur.
“It is because of Minister Farrakhan’s unwavering defense of himself and Reverend Jackson that the ADL began plastering him with the false and injurious label of ‘anti- Semite,'” Farrakhan said in court papers.
While the ADL typically doesn’t comment on litigation, Director Jonathan Greenblatt told The Post the suit “has no merit.
“Louis Farrakhan is an antisemite. One need look no further than his own words and statements to come away with the same conclusion,” he said.
Lawyers for Farrakhan did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
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