A good place for Blue Cross

BLUE CROSS Blue Shield of Massachusetts is being challenged by some local Armenian-Americans and their supporters to defend its sponsorship of antibias programs run by the New England Anti-Defamation League. On balance, continued corporate partnership with the ADL is not only a defensible position, but the right one.

Abraham Foxman, the head of the national ADL office, blundered badly last year when he failed to acknowledge unambiguously that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians during and after World War I. It was an especially egregious lapse for a Jewish organization well-schooled in the lessons of the Holocaust. A dozen cities and towns in Massachusetts subsequently jettisoned the ADL's No Place for Hate program, which trains local leaders to counter hate crimes and intolerance in their communities.

Tomorrow, a Blue Cross official is scheduled to address the Watertown town council, which is asking the state's largest healthcare insurance company to sever its relationship with the ADL.

Blue Cross provided funding for No Place for Hate from 2001-2006, and currently provides in-kind services, including meeting space for the program. It can point to a statement last month by the ADL national office that terms the massacres of Armenians by its rightful name - genocide - as well as the 2008 ADL calendar that memorializes the "genocide of approximately 1.5 million Armenians" from 1915-1923.

It can point with pride to a June intervention in Marshfield, where the New England ADL mobilized an effective community response to an alleged racial assault of a black man. And the local ADL chapter deserves special recognition for forcing the national office to clarify its policy on the Armenian genocide.

Shari Melkonian, chairwoman of the Armenian National Committee of Eastern Massachusetts, says that ADL is still avoiding a "full and public acknowledgement" of the genocide. Some of the ADL's public statements condemning the genocide could be clearer. But much of this debate has become bogged down in ADL support for Israel, which counts Turkey among its few friends in the Islamic world, and reluctance in Congress to pass a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide.

Local officials shouldn't be dragged into this morass. They need to stay focused on ways to address and prevent local hate crimes, including vandalism of houses of worship and harassment of ethnic and religious minorities in schools. Such goals are well-served by the ADL's No Place for Hate program.

Recent attempts by some ADL detractors to unseat the program in Marshfield suggest an unhealthy obsession. Blue Cross, which promotes the well-being of communities, should maintain its healthy support for No Place for Hate.