UPDATE: 2/27 6:30AM PST It seems the person making the attack, Shelley Rose, is part of a climate activist group, see below.
UPDATE: 2/27 2:50PM PST, The ADL Atlanta website has deleted comments on the issue, and has closed the press release to further comments. See below.
Boy, this is ugly, and I hope this boils down to simply an error in judgement by a lower tier administrator because this is like some bizzaro-world episode; on one hand the Anti-Defamation League is coming down against the “…type of comparison diminishes and trivializes the Holocaust.“, while on another they are giving a “get out of jail free card” to the people who have repeatedly done that very thing over several years.
Two telephone calls and two emails today requesting comment from ADL’s Southeast Interim Regional Director Shelly Rose have gone unanswered. She’s aware of my calls. I asked for her directly, gave my name and affiliation, and after a pause on hold her assistant asked if it would be OK to “send you to voice mail”. Ms Rose did provide a copy of the press release below, after I queried the main organization in New York after receiving a tip about this release, but found no evidence of its existence on the ADL Press Center website. The press release below still isn’t on the website as of this writing at 6:15PM EST well after close of business there. All of my requests were done during normal business hours for both the Atlanta and NYC office.
I have to wonder if the main organization is endorsing this press release, or if this is some regional director who went rogue.
Here is the press release.
==============================================================
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Shelley Rose (404) 262-3470 work; 678-938-1399 cell
ADL Condemns Spencer’s Nazi Analogy
February 25, 2014, Atlanta, Georgia … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today denounced remarks by University of Alabama – Huntsville professor Roy Spencer who wrote on his blog that those who refer to him as a climate change “denier” should be called “global warming Nazis” and that they “are supporting policies that will kill far more people than the Nazis ever did — all in the name of what they consider to be a righteous cause.”
He also claims those who advocate for policies to slow global warming are “like the Nazis” in that they are fascist and anti-capitalist. The post is also accompanied by an image of a swastika.
Shelley Rose, ADL Southeast Interim Regional Director issued the following statement:
University of Alabama Professor Roy Spencer’s analogy of proponents of global warming to Nazis is outrageous and deeply offensive. This analogy is just the latest example of a troubling epidemic of comparisons to Hitler and the Holocaust.
It has become too common to use comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazi imagery to attack people with opposing views, whether the issue is global warming, immigration or stem-cell research.
The six million Jewish victims and millions of other victims of Hitler deserve better. Their deaths should not be used for political points or sloganeering. This type of comparison diminishes and trivializes the Holocaust. There is no place for it in civil discussions.
Shelley Rose |Interim Regional Director
Anti-Defamation League | 3490 Piedmont Road; Suite 610 | Atlanta, Georgia 30305
Phone: 404-262-3470 I Fax: 404-262-3548 I Cell: 678-938-1399 I srose@adl.org
ADL website I our blog I facebook I twitter I youtube I pinterest I google+ I linkedin
==============================================================
I queried Ms Rose for a comment on the last paragraph, asking:
Wouldn’t that also apply to the use of “denier” to denigrate people, including Dr. Spencer. whose research has nothing to do with the holocaust or denial of it?
I also asked her to comment on the “green light” as a working title, asking if it was an accurate representation of their position. It was clear to me from the lack of response to two emails and two telephone calls was ” no comment”.
From their website, apparently slurs in major league football rate higher in concern than comparing climate skeptics to holocaust deniers for the purpose of denigration:
ADL Welcomes NFL’s Willingness to Address Hate Speech
The League welcomed reports that the NFL is considering how to discourage the use of offensive slurs during the course of games and said that “the question of how to address offensive speech and the best ways to counter it on playing fields and in locker rooms is an important conversation.”
And that’s why I think this is bizarre. The selective hypocrisy is stunning. I’m hoping the main office in New York will come to their senses and disavow the press release from the “Interim Regional Director”. Surely they must see the ugly conundrum they’ve manufactured for themselves.
Dr. Roy Spencer responds:
Hypocrisy at the Anti-Defamation League?
He asks exactly what I was thinking; where was ADL all these years when such ugly and hateful comparisons were being made:
Ms. Rose, where was your organization when journalists, politicians, and even some scientists, chose to call us skeptics “deniers”?
We don’t deny either “global warming” or “climate change”. Yet, we are called “deniers”. Ms. Rose, do you have any inkling why the term “denier” (which is a lie) might be used against us, rather than the term “skeptic” (which is accurate)? I think you know why.
I’d really like to know how ADL can turn a blind eye the use of “denier” for the purpose of denigration while at the same time calling out a victim of the denigration for fighting back after years of abuse.
There’s also a newspaper article about it:
UAH climate expert Roy Spencer calls critics ‘global warming Nazis’; Anti-Defamation League objects
http://blog.al.com/breaking/2014/02/uah_climate_expert_roy_spencer.html
UPDATE: The PR is now posted on the Atlanta ADL website here
http://atlanta.adl.org/news/adl-condemns-spencers-nazi-analogy/
Comments are allowed there. Be civil if you leave comments please.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that this person simply doesn’t know the history, and committed a terrible error in judgment.
UPDATE2: 2/27 6:30AM PST It seems the person making the attack, Shelly Rose, is part of a climate activist group, see photo and caption.
The caption reads:
Congregations Caring for the Climate – Atlanta, GA
Bill Witherspoon, from Congregation Bet Haverim writes: This was taken Friday evening before Erev Shabbat Services. We had about three times this many for services eventually, but these were the ones who arrived in time for the photo. As part of our second week of the Omer to Honor the Earth, Shelley Rose (third from right, just right of our Torah scrolls) gave the d’var (sermon) on acting with awareness that we all breathe the same air, and Tovah Melaver (second from right) led a breathing meditation.
April 13, 2007
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stepitup2007/464126698/
You can read all about this organization at http://stepitup2007.org
Of note is the list of “Friends and Allies” which reads like a who’s who in climate activism.
This whole episode makes a lot more sense now.
UPDATE3: 2/27 2:50PM PST, The ADL Atlanta website has deleted many comments on the issue, and has closed the press release to further comments. About an hour ago, I noted 90 comments were posted, now it is down to 50. See below.
Meanwhile I’ve drafted and sent a letter by email and by fax to ADL National Director, ABRAHAM H. FOXMAN asking if ADL plans to comment on the issue, and to ask id they plan to apply their condemnation equally, along with examples of what climate skeptics have been subjected to over the years. I think they simply have been caught unaware in a conundrum created by their Atlanta Interim Director.
I ask that if anyone makes communications with this organization, please be factual and respectful – Anthony
COPY OF MY LETTER TO THE ADL
Dear Shelley,
I write this letter as a Jew, and as a long-time skeptic of the scientific rigor and integrity attached to the study of climate science. As such, I have been subjected for many years to the insulting and libelous use of the Holocaust-derived term ‘Denier’ to describe anyone with the temerity to question the results, methodology and scientific validity of global warming claims. This ad hominem calumny is hurled daily at hundreds of scientifically sophisticated individuals, including Dr. Spencer, who are conducting independent climate research as well as ongoing efforts to replicate published scientific findings.
Individuals with unimpeachable integrity and profound scientific ability have thus been categorically equated with skinheads, neo-Nazi fascists, racists and bigots. The ADL has never objected to this usage or its pernicious effect on scientific debate. The ‘Denier’ tag is the cherry topping on an avalanche of falsehoods and personal insults leveled against climate change skeptics that sweep across hundreds of coordinated global warming press outlets, blogs and web-sites. There can be only one explanation for these continuous demeaning smears and use of delegitimizing labels–a systematic efforts to eliminate all dissenting voices and stifle open debate of rising scientific uncertainty. Dr. Spencer in particular has been a target for many stigmatizing attacks, as the satellite global temperature records maintained by his University of Alabama-Huntsville Department have shown increasing divergence from predicted warming and challenge the underpinnings of climate change theory*.
While I personally wish Dr. Spencer had used more temperate language, his response is raised in the context of being continuously labeled with Nazi terminology in order to diminish his scientific reputation. You might imagine the bitterness and frustration of his circumstances. Even a brief overview of the global warming movement would reveal a disturbing number of totalitarian hallmarks and tendencies. I share his deep concerns that climate science has been hijacked by a closed circle of self-referential academics and politicians who are rushing towards catastrophic policy fiats against the backdrop of accelerating scientific uncertainty. The ADL has a role to play in supporting civility by formally objecting to the use of the ‘Denier’ smear against scientists and individuals engaged in legitimate, scientific, skeptical debate on an issue of enormous social magnitude.
Sincerely,
Howard S. Wiseman
Also – doesn’t alarmist use of the term “denier” constitute hate speech?
Calling alarmists deniers as I have done is not, because we have the evidence to prove they are, and it relates specifically to unnecessary deaths caused by public policies – exactly like the Nazis’.
Dr. Spencer couldn’t be more right – the people he thus accuses are behaving like Nazis. Thank heavens he has had the courage and the mojo to step up and call those people what they are.
Would contrarians do? Also please take your blinkers off and smell the coffee Arabica.
AND
AND
Are your blinkers off yet? Naivety is a dangerous thing for any sceptic of CATASTROPHIC ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING.
While I am not Jewish, I have eaten at Moishe’s Steakhouse in Montreal (the pickles and coleslaw are ridiculous). Therefore I feel compelled to point out that everyone is using the “Nazi card” these days to the extent that it has become a pointless comparison. I’m waiting for a group of skin-heads in Germany to launch a “take back the Nazi” campaign.
I would also point out that if you write an editorial that condemns the use of Nazi or comparisons to the Holocaust you are also obligated to condemn the use of the word “denier”, stop comparing skeptics to doctors promoting smoking and actively promote the debate of climate science.
As an aside, when I was a young man working at a tombstone company we would regularly erect monuments in the Jewish cemetery. It was more difficult and a little unsettling (compared to the typical Christian cemetery) because the Jewish bodies were placed in wooden boxes and not in concrete. After several years the boxes would rot and much of the ground around the body would be caved in leaving a decent view of the underground. It was tough dragging a 600 lb stone across that ground.
On one delivery we arrived at the cemetery only to find swastikas painted on the gates and several monuments knocked over. A few people were inside attempting to reset the stones (not easy without the right tools). We spent a few hours fixing the fallen stones and then set about putting up the new ones we had brought. When we were done (as always) we pulled out our lunches and started to play frisbee. A man walked over and asked “is it appropriate to do that in a cemetery”? I replied “we haven’t had any complaints so far”.
Millions died fighting the Nazis so we can be free to say and write what we want within the law. Warmists want to do away with these rights for sceptics because they are certain they are smarter and they are right. What if they are WRONG???? The surface temperature standstill points to less warming than previously feared for 2100. IPCC report after IPCC report keeps LOWERING the projections. WHY????
Below is a comment on Roy Spencer’s blog.
I have written to this lady as follows:
Attn Shelley Rose, ADL Southeast Interim Regional Director.
From Queensland, Australia.
Dear Ms Rose,
I have seen a post on Wattsupwiththat.com which has highlighted your selective condemnation of Dr Roy Spencer for his use of the term Nazi in describing proponents of the global warming theory, (that human induced Carbon dioxide is warming the planet), WHO HAVE ABUSED HIM.
I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assuming you are ignorant of the long history of personal abuse of Dr Spencer, and all the rest of us, who question this theory, calling us “deniers” which is a clear reference to the Holocaust and people who deny that it took place.
However as someone who is high in this organisation, if ignorance is your excuse, that is to be condemned in you as incompetence. I am writing to the head of this organisation and asking for you to be demoted for incompetence.
I may not live in your country, but I, and the rest of the free world, have a vested interest in US organisations that portray themselves as being for the common good. I expect you to be even handed in your condemnation of denigrating terms.
However, in calling the global warming brigade Nazis, I fail to see that this in any way actually is akin to denying the Holocaust. They are two separate issues, which you are linking together.
Is it now an offence to liken someone who is jack-booting over freedom a Nazi? To me it is an accurate portrayal. The attempt to shut down all debate and the way Dr Spencer and other well respected scientists who query this theory have been abused, demoted and some of them, lost their jobs (think David Bellamy and the BBC in Britain, Patrick Moore founder of Greenpeace, and many others), is absolutely disgraceful. Nowhere has your voice been raised, or that of your organisation, until Dr Spencer has finally had enough, and hit back, and then you kick the victim!!!!!
I, and many other people who are fighting back, will remember your name, and your organisation, not in flattering terms in future. Yours truly, ….
I find this whole situation unfortunate, but necessary.
The leftist use of derogatory terms has gone on far too long unchallenged. While I think better path was available, I stand by Dr. Spencer and his choice to not take it anymore and stand up for himself.
Let the scrum begin.
Frankly, considering the socialist nature of just about all climate activists, I think a better name would have been “Climonistas”. Derived from the Sandinistas (socialist coalition) who took over Nicaragua in 1979.
as people have pointed out, the references to CAGW sceptics as “deniers” has OFTEN explicitly related the word to “holocaust deniers”. like “climate deniers”, it has evolved to simply “deniers” over time. ADL said NOTHING.
bbc had several people discuss this last nite. only the israeli they spoke to thought it was funny. the others interviewed couldn’t believe Jerusalem Post would put this pic on their website with no context. merkel has been in israel with most of her cabinet for talks, and did not even meet with palestinians.
26 Feb: Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu casts ‘Hitler moustache’ shadow on German Chancellor Angela Merkel
A photographer who took a shot of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inadvertently giving German Chancellor Angela Merkel a “Hitler-style” moustache has apologized.
Jerusalem Post photographer Marc Israel Sellem took a picture of the two leaders at a press conference Monday. The picture showed Mr. Netanyahu pointing, but his finger casts a shadow onto Ms. Merkel’s upper lip.
The Jerusalem Post briefly put the photo on its website. Although the editors soon reconsidered and took the photo down, it became an immediate viral sensation on Facebook and Twitter and was reprinted hundreds of times.
“When I saw the photo on my computer, I thought that it was unique and funny. It was not my intention to insult Merkel in any way or to make any kind of Nazi connotation with the photo,” Mr. Sellem said in the Jerusalem Post…
Germany is perhaps Israel’s closest ally in Europe and some 30,000 Israelis today live in Berlin.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/02/26/israels-benjamin-netanyahu-casts-hitler-moustache-shadow-on-german-chancellor-angela-merkel/
Hear hear. Some uncles (both Mom and Dad’s side) came back from the war (WWII) and one, whose first name I now carry as my middle name, did not. Dad was aboard a carrier during that conflict to boot, a carrier launched in 1942 christened as the USS Essex.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Essex_(CV-9)
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rogerknights says:
February 26, 2014 at 5:40 pm
“In the accuser’s minds’ we’re “in denial” of the obvious facts and their implications. There’s no other word they could use to get that concept across.”
Contrarian? Skeptic? Dissenter? Heck, here’s a whole page full.
It is very clearly a very mean and infantile slur. Somewhat akin to children playing the old game of “I’m not touching you”, as their hands hover in front of their tormentee’s face. “Oh, I’m just saying you’re in denial (snicker, snicker)”. Jackasses.
Nothing has quite such a hypocritical stink as selective moral outrage. Using the platform of the ADL to make contrived associations with the Holocaust is what in fact “diminishes and trivialises the Holocaust”.
“The six million Jewish victims and millions of other victims of Hitler deserve better” than an organisation trying to hitch its cart to the CAGW bandwagon with an outburst of cultivated indignation.
Al Gore’s book “Earth In The Balance” (1992) has a passage about Nazi Germany and how the world was slow to react and accept what was happening in Germany and he then goes on to compare AGW to the holocaust. From page 177
Now warnings of a different sort signal an environmental holocaust without precedent. But where is the moral alertness that might make us more sensitive to the new pattern of environmental change? Once again, world leaders waffle, hoping the danger will dissipate. Yet today, the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin. We are still reluctant to believe that our worst nightmares of global ecological collapse could come true.
As all here know all too well, the vicious smears against all who dissent in any way from Global Warming Hysteria has been going on for many years. Have we ever seen the ADL or any similar lefty activist groups object to the “denier” tag used for so long to smear skeptics and dissenters?
Here’s just one example of a leading columnist working to smear and marginalize all critics of any aspect of the Global Warming Hysteria.
Prominent columnist Ellen Goodman, writing in the Boston Globe in 2007:
http://newsbusters.org/node/10730
http://web.archive.org/web/20070214041353/http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/02/09/no_change_in_political_climate/
[the link to Goodman’s original Boston Globe column is in the article linked above, but requires purchase from the Boston Globe archives, which I do not care to fund]
Jimbo – well said.
If Warmists get their way many millions will die. If it’s more than the victims of the Nazis then whey will blame the sceptics. Fuel poverty = death. Don’t let them fool you with emotional talk and guilt. They don’t feel guilty about condemning millions of the world’s poor to fuel poverty with their carbon schemes and private, personal investments in CAGW. They follow the money and could not give a damn. Don’t be taken in as most of them a vicious hypocrites.
I left a couple comments over at http://atlanta.adl.org/news/adl-condemns-spencers-nazi-analogy/ I won’t be surprised if that page disappears tomorrow.
This is not the time to make popcorn, it’s the time to play a Barbara Streisand album.
ferdberple says:
Dr. Spencer’s move has brought the issue into the light where it belongs. We need more scientists of Roy’s stature to stand up.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Yes, out in the open for all to see and think about.
Yup. “Global Warming Nazis” it is then.
“The do not like it up ’em.”
hswiseman said:
February 26, 2014 at 6:18 pm
COPY OF MY LETTER TO THE ADL…
——–
Well said Sir. Please post the reply – if you get one.
The ADL is going to object to gratuitous misuse of the term “Nazi”, even if there is s legitimate point to be made. It should, by all rights, oppose the abuse of the term “denier”, but there are two problems here:
First, there genuinely are some people who would not believe in CAGW even if evidence clearly supported it. Those have to be distinguished from regular skeptics who simply hold climate science to the same standard as the rest of science and find current theories wanting. I have not seen a better term for them.
Second, that use of the term is now commonplace, and complaints were not brought to, or were not considered, by the ADL before it became common. It would now take a full-blown campaign for the ADL to legitimately take a stand against it, and launching one would be a policy-level decision, way above Shelly Rose’s authority. I doubt that her failure to reply is due to an unpalatable stance that she would prefer not to have in writing. It’s probably because she can’t give the appropriate reply without word from ADL leadership.
“Huntsville professor Roy Spencer who wrote on his blog that those who refer to him as a climate change “denier” should be called “global warming Nazis” and that they “are supporting policies that will kill far more people than the Nazis ever did — all in the name of what they consider to be a righteous cause.”
Yes, well, this was just asking for trouble. I understand Spencer’s frustration, but this is just unwise as hell. He comes off like a raving lunatic in the eyes of those whose minds we hope to change. Let them sound like the loons and screwballs. They’re so good at it.
Not smart.
The concerned cliche are losing their minds.
This selective umbrage from the “Anti Defamation League” is classic nanny statism, their pets, shills and useful idiots are losing the argument
Now mummies coming to the rescue of her poor wee bully.
The wheels are off their trolly, the semblance to the Black Knight of Monty Python fame grows every day.
I wonder how much of the fear, hostility and desperation from these pompous nitwits is due to classic progressives methodology.
Over the last decades these progressive cliches have shut down civic discourse.
Their standard procedure at public meeting are, control the script.Control the chair.
Shout down any dissent.Slander,yell, mob the mike, whatever it takes to control the microphone.
Normal people stop talking to these types.
But then the fun begins, having silenced any questioning , they seem to believe silence equals consent.
I am not kidding, they really seem to believe this.
So for them the public must support their belief, because the public says nothing.
Then when we vote them out, refuse their stupid ideas at referendum, they are surprised, hurt even.
But it is always the same song, they say if we were better educated, we would agree with them.
If only, they had “communicated” better.
I believe you can’t fix this kind of stupid.
In the days of the 4×5 Graflex (or the 2 1/4 inch even) film cameras (think: large, 1940’s-50’s newspaperman cameras!), I could buy this pat. But not today. Not even 20 years ago when motorized drives for 35mm format cameras and LARGE capacity camera backs were plentiful. Point I’m making, is, that photo/image was selected for that exact purpose … so, did you think the ‘reading public’ really ‘bought’ that story? (An attempt to sell the fiction that one and only ONE photograph was taken by that photographer during that time at that ceremony?)
BTW, it had to have been the grapics editor or editor-in-charge who gave the go-ahead in the use of that image, unless that was a One-Horse operation or website …
Old ‘newspaperman camera’ – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graflex
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re: Ric Werme says February 26, 2014 at 7:00 pm
I left a couple comments …
Well-done Ric. They were showing up as of half an hour ago.
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send ms rose the photoshopped nazis of the SkS website.
she might understand pictures.
[Abbreviation changed to ‘SkS’. SkepticalScience has asked that this abbreviation be used, and WUWT has agreed. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/25/a-modest-proposal-to-skeptical-science/ – mod]