How the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee (ADC)’s Times Square Campaign Colonizes History and Mind
The recent deployment of the “Jesus is Palestinian” digital billboard in Times Square by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) represents a sophisticated exercise in political and historical revisionism that extends far beyond mere advocacy. The ADC’s campaign serves as a mechanism of “colonizing the public space” through the instrumentalization of religious iconography. By projecting a modern nationalist identity onto a first-century Judean figure, the ADC engages in effectively erasing Jewish indigeneity to construct a new transnational “imagined community.”
The ADC, led by National Executive Director Abed Ayoub, functions not merely as a civil rights organization but as a political vanguard that strategically utilizes the American legal system to contest US foreign and domestic policy. This distinction is crucial: the organization operates simultaneously on two registers—the juridical and the semiotic. On the legal front, the ADC has maintained a consistent pattern of institutional activism designed to reshape the boundaries of permissible speech regarding Israel and Palestinian politics. The organization’s history reflects this dual strategy. Most notably, in Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (1999), the ADC challenged deportation proceedings based on political affiliation, establishing itself as a constitutional actor willing to contest state power. Yet it is under Ayoub’s current leadership that the organization has escalated its litigation strategy into lawfare —the weaponization of legal proceedings to achieve political ends. The ADC has aggressively sued to block the adoption of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism in state education systems, most prominently in California’s AB 715, arguing that defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism violates First Amendment rights. This litigation is not merely defensive; it represents an active effort to rewrite the legal definition of hate speech in America, immunizing anti-Zionist rhetoric from the categorical framework of antisemitism. Abed Ayoub himself functions as a “moral entrepreneur” in the Beckerian sense—a figure who frames geopolitical claims within the protective language of civil rights discourse. His rhetoric consistently translates political positions into victimological narratives, transforming what are fundamentally claims about territorial politics into claims about discrimination and erasure. When confronted with the historical fact that Jesus was born in Judea and was ethnically Jewish—not Palestinian, an identity that did not exist as a political category until the twentieth century—Ayoub retreats into postmodern relativism, suggesting that Jesus’s identity is merely a matter of interpretation. In this rhetorical move narrative becomes weaponized against evidence, and political convenience supersedes scholarly rigor.
From the perspective of rigorous historiography, the slogan “Jesus is Palestinian” constitutes a foundational anachronism—a deliberate or negligent projection of modern categories onto ancient reality. This is not a marginal interpretive disagreement among scholars; it represents a fundamental distortion of historical fact that warrants explicit deconstruction. Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem of Judea (Provincia Iudaea) in the early first century CE. He was ethnically Judean and religiously Jewish, operating within the theological and cultural frameworks of Second Temple Judaism. The critical historical point is this: the term “Palestine” as a political designation did not exist during Jesus’s lifetime. The Romans did not apply the designation Syria Palaestina to the region until 135 CE—over a century after Jesus’s crucifixion—following Emperor Hadrian’s punitive response to the Bar Kokhba Revolt. This renaming was an intentional imperial strategy designed to erase the Jewish historical and cultural connection to the land, deliberately suppressing the Hebrew and Aramaic names of the region and replacing them with a designation derived from the Philistines, an ancient non-Semitic people who had disappeared millennia earlier. To label Jesus “Palestinian” is therefore to validate and perpetuate the Roman imperial project of de-Judaizing Judea—to adopt the very colonial narrative that sought to expunge Jewish presence and history from the geographic territory. More profoundly, it represents a form of cultural and theological appropriation that systematically strips the historical Jesus of his specific ethnic and religious particularities and conscripts him into a modern nationalist struggle that would have been entirely unintelligible to him and his contemporaries. The slogan performs a double negation: it erases Jesus’s Jewishness while simultaneously instrumentalizing him for a geopolitical project.
The theoretical implications of this campaign extend into the very foundations of liberal democracy and rational discourse. In his seminal essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant envisions the “public use of reason” as a sphere where citizens engage in sincere, truth-seeking debate governed by the rational principles of evidence and logical argumentation. The Times Square billboard violates the Kantian imperative of sincerity in a structural and deliberate manner. The slogan “Jesus is Palestinian” is not a proposition open to debate—which would require evidence, counterevidence, and reasoned disputation—but rather a dogmatic assertion masquerading as a factual claim. By Ayoub’s own admission, the goal is not to “inform” or to “persuade through reason” but explicitly to “provoke”. In Kantian terms, this represents a fundamental corruption of the public sphere: the ADC does not treat the citizens of Times Square as rational agents capable of evaluating evidence and forming autonomous judgments. Rather, they treat them as passive receptacles for a political slogan dressed in the garments of a holiday greeting. The public use of reason is thus degraded into semiotic violence—the strategic deployment of symbols designed to manipulate affect rather than engage intellect. This corruption becomes comprehensible through Erving Goffman’s theory of Frame Analysis, which illuminates why the message proves so socially and psychologically jarring. Times Square during the Christmas season operates within a specific social frame: that of Holiday Celebration and Commercial Universalism. This frame establishes expectations about what kinds of communication are appropriate, what emotional registers are operative, and what social obligations bind the participants. The frame is fundamentally low-intensity and inclusive—it aims to create moments of collective joy across denominational and political lines. The ADC billboard performs what Goffman would call a “keying” error of catastrophic magnitude. It inserts a high-intensity geopolitical conflict frame into a low-intensity celebratory frame, fundamentally destabilizing the social situation. More critically, this represents precisely what Jürgen Habermas theorizes as the “colonization of the lifeworld” by systemic rationality. The private, cultural, and affective sphere of religious celebration—the lifeworld—is invaded and instrumentalized by the strategic imperatives of political activism—the system. The tourist or resident seeking a moment of communal festivity is not merely exposed to a message; they are ambushed by a demand to take a position in a foreign conflict and to endorse a historical fiction. The political is thus forced into the domain of the prepolitical, violating the boundaries that permit democratic life to function. This is, in the most precise sense, what the user correctly identifies as “colonizing public space”—not merely occupying it, but structurally reorganizing it according to the exigencies of a particular political agenda.
Beneath the surface of this campaign lies a more ambitious project: the construction of a new collective imaginary. Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as an “imagined community” proves essential here. All modern nationalisms, according to Anderson, require myths of origin—narratives that locate the nation’s roots in a distant, often mythical past, thereby lending the modern political project an aura of inevitability and divine sanction. The Palestinian nationalist movement, as a twentieth-century political formation, faces a particular legitimacy challenge: how does one construct a sense of national continuity when the national identity itself is recent? The ADC’s invocation of Jesus as Palestinian represents an attempt to overcome this temporal problem through what might be termed “retroactive nationalism”—the projection of modern political categories backward through time to appropriate ancient figures and historical events. By claiming Jesus, the Palestinian cause attempts to bypass its twentieth-century origins and establish roots extending back two millennia. This is not accidental; it is a deliberate strategy of temporal colonization. Cornelius Castoriadis’s concept of the “social imaginary” proves illuminating here. Every society maintains an imaginary—a set of shared, largely unreflective understandings about what is real, what is possible, what is good. The ADC campaign is an attempt to institute a new imaginary, to rewrite the collective memory in such a way that “Jesus the Palestinian” becomes plausible, even natural. The “Palestinian Jesus” is, in Jean Baudrillard’s terminology, a simulacrum—a copy without an original. There never existed a “Palestinian Jesus” in history; the category did not exist. Yet the image of the Palestinian Jesus, plastered across the most visible commercial billboard on Earth, becomes hyper-real—more visible, more emotionally potent, more politically effective than the historical reality of the Judean Jesus who actually lived two thousand years ago. This is colonization of the mind: the rewriting of collective memory such that a modern political narrative comes to appear as if it had always existed, as if it possessed divine sanction, as if to reject it is to reject historical truth itself.
The campaign’s power derives partly from its capacity to induce a state of psychological dissonance that renders rational critique difficult. For the Christian believer, Jesus is universally recognized as the Savior and the Son of God; for the historian or scholar, Jesus is a Jew of the first century; for the contemporary political activist, Jesus must be conscripted into service as a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. The billboard forces these three incompatible identities into simultaneous coexistence, creating what psychologists term cognitive dissonance—the uncomfortable mental state produced when holding contradictory beliefs. This dissonance is weaponized through what Gregory Bateson called the “double bind.” To reject the slogan appears, within the ADC’s framing, as an act of “silencing” Arab voices or denying Arab historical presence. To accept the slogan, however, requires one to abandon historical fact and embrace a narrative that contradicts everything scholarly consensus has established. The propaganda mechanism thus paralyzes rational critique: any objection can be moralized as racism or bigotry, while acceptance requires epistemic surrender. This is the signature move of sophisticated disinformation campaigns—they render the terrain of factual dispute itself contestable, converting what should be a matter of evidence into a matter of political allegiance.
The ADC’s Times Square campaign is not, as Ayoub claims, a contribution to legitimate debate about the historical Jesus or about Palestinian political claims. It is fundamentally an act of what might be termed “epistemic violence”—the deliberate distortion of historical truth for the purpose of advancing contemporary political objectives. By projecting a twentieth-century political identity onto a first-century Jewish figure, the organization engages in a form of colonization that operates simultaneously on three registers: the temporal (rewriting the past to serve present political needs), the spatial (dominating the most visible public arena in the Western world), and the cognitive (manipulating the collective imaginary to make historical fiction appear as established fact).
What is particularly consequential about this campaign is its strategic deployment of the most sacred figure in Western Christianity to accomplish this epistemic colonization. By appropriating Jesus—a figure whose authority transcends academic debate and commands reverence across denominations—the ADC leverages religious symbolism to immunize political claims from scholarly scrutiny. The message thus functions as calculated disinformation designed to sever the historical link between the Jewish people and the land of Judea, utilizing the most visible commercial space on Earth as the medium through which this fiction is validated. In doing so, it represents not merely a contribution to political discourse but a systematic attempt to rewrite the foundational narratives upon which historical understanding rests.
