Do Better, Tablet. #DoBetter.
The People Setting America on Fire
An investigation into the witches' brew of billionaires, Islamists, and leftists behind the campus protests
by
Park MacDougald
Well that name is as goy as they come so this guy is totally a good target for George Soros's baseless smearing operations.
Over the past several weeks, Americans have witnessed what has seemed like a mass outpouring of support for terror on elite college campuses. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Northwestern, Texas, and elsewhere, masked mobs have occupied schools with tent encampments, established self-proclaimed "autonomous zones," clashed with police, harassed and threatened visibly Jewish students, and issued demands for their universities to divest from Israeli "genocide." Politically, moreover, the protests have displayed an incoherent mix of campus progressivism, hardcore Islamism and Arab nationalism, and revolutionary anarchism and communism, including open praise for North Korea. The only unifying thread would appear to be opposition to Israel and its alleged imperial patron, the United States.
Have America's college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the "decolonial" half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.
But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the "mostly peaceful" Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, "outside agitators"--professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals--have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.
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Scratch a pro-Palestinian radical organization, and you are likely to find Tides' involvement somewhere.
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The "movement," [w]hile it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let's take each in turn.
JVP is, in essence, the "Jewish"-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors--including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama's Iran Deal to the public.
Oh, you mean the Iran Echo Chamber that Ben Rhodes simultaneously bragged about creating and mocked for their pliability.
JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros' philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds--which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions--run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor's review of those institutions' tax documents.
SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government's prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no "formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP's campus brand," according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. ...
Today, however, National SJP is legally a "fiscal sponsorship" of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit "sponsors" a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor's tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship's operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a "convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes," according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.
Of course they received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation.
WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP....
WOL-led protests tend to have a few... hallmarks. These include eliminationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state--such as Arabic chants of "strike, strike, Tel Aviv"; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags and other insignia of explicitly Islamist resistance; the presence of masked Arab street muscle; and the antisemitic intimidation of counterprotesters by said masked Arab street muscle.
WOL's role appears to be that of shock troops, akin to the role played by black block militants on the anarchist side of the ledger. WOL is, however, connected to more seemingly "mainstream" elements of the anti-Israel movement. Abdullah Akl, a prominent WOL leader--indeed, the man leading the "strike Tel Aviv" chants in the video linked above--is also listed as a "field organizer" on the website of MPower Change, the "advocacy project" led by Linda Sarsour. MPower Change, in turn, is a fiscal sponsorship of NEO Philanthropy, another large progressive clearinghouse. NEO Philanthropy and its 501(c)(4) "sister," NEO Philanthropy Action Fund, have received more than $37 million from Soros' Open Society Foundations since 2021 alone, as well as substantial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides Foundation.
More than any of the dark-money giants on the left, Tides has become tightly integrated with the ascendant Obama faction of the Democratic Party.
I don't know why we put up with this.
Oh, right, because Mitch McConnell doesn't want any limits on who he can grub money from.