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ADL Regional Director Fired For Challenging Foxman On Armenian Genocide
By Joey Kurtzman / August 18, 2007
Unbelievable! Remember Andrew Tarsy, the ADL regional director for New England who was booed out of the Watertown City Council for defending the ADL's Ahmadinejad-esque position that it can neither confirm nor deny an Armenian Genocide took place?
Well, the Boston Globe reported today that at an emergency meeting Tarsy and the rest of his regional board voted to break ranks with the national office of the ADL.
"I strongly disagree with ADL's national position," Tarsy said in an interview with the Globe, declining to explain his change of stance. "It's my strong hope that we'll be able to move forward in a relationship with the Armenian community and the community in general."
Then, twenty minutes ago, the Globe confirmed what a commenter said several hours ago in the comment thread to our petition: Andrew Tarsy has been fired.
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I think Andy and the board had the right idea, but it might not have been the best way to handle it.
 If you've got an organization that is trying to espouse a specific message, then the employees have to fall in line, regardless of their personal beliefs. It's not like a company, or a content neutral group; to be effective, the message has to be monolithic. I respect them for disagreeing, and for putting their money where their mouths are. But the right thing to do was to resign. There was no way they were going to get away with breaking away from the national organization, especially under these circumstances, and now, as people said above, it's an even bigger black eye to a group that still play an important part in Jewish life, regardless of Foxman's eternally maddening foot-in-mouth fetish. Hopefully at some point the ADL can reacquire its credibility.
I lowered the noise in the textimage settings, it should be easier to do the captchas now.
Joey is my hero. And I thought people said that one person cannot make a difference? I guess they were wrong!
I guess my letter to the ADL complaining about Foxman’s Armenian genocide comments haven’t done much good.
Note to Craig:
The Captcha Validation is very difficult to read and makes it diffucult to post.
Who and why were you asked if you ‘chose Farrakhan as your leader’? I don’t quite understand what you where trying to say.
No other way to put it. Just wow. This is really getting out of control. This went from being a small blip on the Watertown radar a few weeks ago to a maelstrom threatening to rip the ADL apart! Meanwhile Andy Tarsy goes from being booed at a Watertown town meeting on Tuesday for refusing to acknowledge the genocide to being a sacrificial lamb to the cause of genocide recognition! It’s enough to give one whiplash. Now the ADL central council has put down an ultimatum that anyway diverging from them and recognizing the genocide will be asked to resign and fired. It’s utterly absurd. One can only hope (and assume!) that Andy Tarsy’s sacrifice will not be in vain with the rest of the ADL following him. I can’t imagine an ADL without membership or staff to be very good to him! This firing was a terrible idea, he’s turned a localized rebellion into a full-fledged revolt.
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