Anti-Defamation League Demands Apology From Jackson

Reacting to revelations that Michael Jackson referred to Jews as “leeches” in a voicemail to a former business manager, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Friday said the pop music icon “has an anti-Semitic streak” and hasn’t learned from his past mistakes, including the use of anti-Semitic epithets in a 1995 song he wrote. “We had hoped that Jackson would have learned from his mistakes,” ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman said in a press release. “While he apologized for, and later removed the anti-Jewish lyrics in ‘They Don’t Care About Us’, it is clear now that he never was able to completely remove the bigotry from his own heart.”