Abraham Foxman has become a menace to his own legacy. That is a shame because it is a good and decent legacy. Over the course of a career spanning 42 years at the Anti-Defamation League, Foxman has been an ardent champion of civil rights, a tireless defender of the separation between church and state against those who insist on tearing it down, and a consistent watchdog of the fever swamps of extremism, into which he has shined the bright lights of opprobrium on bigots of all stripes. These achievements should all be applauded.

And yet Foxman has also shown himself to be both morally obtuse and ethically challenged. One of the more egregious instances of such impropriety occurred in 2001, when a congressional probe revealed that Foxman had helped orchestrate fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich's controversial pardon from then president Bill Clinton. Rich had fled the country in shame to avoid federal charges that he had cheated the government out of $48 million and had traded with the enemy. The timing of Foxman's personal appeal to Clinton on Rich's behalf was no coincidence. A few months prior to that, the ADL had received a $100,000 pledge from Rich. In short, Foxman had prostituted the ADL's credibility for a deep-pocketed - and exceedingly shady - donor.

All of which takes me back nearly nine decades to Ottoman Turkey, where over one million Armenians perished in a horrific spasm of organized slaughter. This historical episode has become a political flashpoint in Washington, D.C., where all kinds of influence peddlers have been engaged in a fierce struggle over whether Congress should officially codify the Armenian massacre as genocide. The Turkish government has spent millions of dollars and twisted countless arms in an effort to trounce this resolution. More troubling, it has been able to enlist the support of the ADL - along with other Jewish organizations - in its campaign of denial.