If we had an independent and honest Department of Justice and FBI they would be investigating Soros, his son and their respective organizations regarding the financing of anarchy.
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Some Anti-Israel Protesters Are Paid
Rockefeller and Soros grants are subsidizing those who disrupt college campuses.
By Ira Stoll
Since at least the Vietnam War, exasperated observers of student protests have rolled their eyes and thought: Get a job. In some cases today, activism is a job. Two of America’s largest philanthropic foundations are behind a group that has paid some of the anti-Israel activists for the kind of antics disrupting campuses across the country.
Consider Malak Afaneh, a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, and Craig Birckhead-Morton, a senior at Yale. Ms. Afaneh went viral this month for disrupting a dinner at Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s home. This week the Yale Daily News reported that Mr. Birckhead-Morton had been arrested for trespassing—and then re-emerged to address an anti-Israel crowd blocking an intersection in New Haven.
Ms. Afaneh and Mr. Birckhead-Morton have both been “youth fellows” of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, whose website identifies them by their first names. As of April 4, the campaign was soliciting applications for a new cohort, whose “campus-based fellows” would receive stipends of $2,880 to $3,360 for three-month terms of roughly eight hours of work a week. That “work” could include aiding campaigns that “demand federal or state politicians cut US military, financial, or diplomatic ties with Israel.”
The corporate entity behind these fellowships is Education for Just Peace in the Middle East. Where does it get its funding?
George and Alexander Soros’s Open Society Foundation has put $700,000 into Education for Just Peace in the Middle East since 2018, most recently with a two-year grant in 2022, according to the Open Society Foundation’s website. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given Education for Just Peace in the Middle East $515,000 since 2019, most recently with a three-year grant for $225,000 awarded in August 2023.
While some policymakers have wondered whether activists receive money from overseas, it turns out that there’s a clear paper trail of funding at home. That ought to have policy implications. In considering whether to discipline students for rule violations, university administrators might more harshly punish activism done, at least in part, for pay.
Do the Rockefeller and Soros families want their money to be used to advocate for Hamas’s war aims? They should consider that themselves. Meantime, Congress and the Internal Revenue Service might want to examine whether the grants fit the charitable purposes defined in the tax code.
Mr. Stoll writes at TheEditors.com.
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Women are all about abortion but seem not willing to defend their sex from being raped by men who claim they should be allowed to compete with women in sports, invade their privacy etc.
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FAIR News: Title IX's Shift and What It Means for Women's Sex-Based Rights
Newsletter
Dear Friends of FAIR,
On April 19, 2024, the U.S. Department of Education released its final regulations under Title IX, which will take effect on August 1, 2024. These extensive revisions are likely to significantly affect students across K-12 and higher education, particularly in public and federally-funded private institutions.
You may recall that FAIR previously filed public comments on two proposed Title IX rules: one governs sex-based discrimination in educational programs in general; and the other governs sex-based discrimination in the context of sports. You can read those public comments here and here. In order to provide a timely update to our community, we have drafted an info sheet on the Final Rule, which includes our brief explanation of the history of Title IX, as well as the portions of the Final Rule that we feel will be of the greatest interest to our members.
Originally designed to combat sex-based discrimination, Title IX's new scope now includes protections against discrimination based on gender identity. This shift away from the Act's original framework raises significant concerns about the implications for sex-segregated spaces and activities, potentially requiring schools to allow access based on gender identity rather than biological sex.
Key changes include possible compelled speech regarding preferred gender pronouns, integration of sex-specific facilities, and significantly less robust due process protections for students accused of discrimination. These issues touch on deep legal and ethical questions, particularly regarding safeguarding women’s rights and protecting freedom of speech.
We will explore these topics further in a webinar on April 30 from 6-7pm ET with experts in law, education, and civil rights. We encourage you to participate and bring your insights as we discuss the comprehensive impact of these new rules. You can register for this free virtual event here.
In light of the new Title IX regulations, FAIR is exploring a host of legal advocacy projects aimed at upholding the constitutional rights of all students, and we need your help! If you or someone you know is concerned about the changes to Title IX, and meet any of the following criteria, we want you to reach out to us:
Females involved in high school or collegiate sports who have been required to compete with or against a male;
Any student who has been forced to share a bathroom or locker room with a student of the opposite sex at a public or federally-funded school;
Any student who has sincerely-held beliefs that prevent him/her from announcing their “chosen” or “preferred” pronouns;
Any student who has been accused of misgendering or “dead-naming” another student at a public or federally-funded school;
If you or your child(ren) meet any of the above criteria, please email our Director of Legal Advocacy, Leigh Ann O’Neill, at leigh-ann.oneill@fairforall.org.
Your engagement is vital as we address these critical changes and continue our advocacy for lawful educational practices.
Warmly,
The Team at the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism
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‘Pro-Palestine’ campus mobs think Jew-hatred is progressive
Student protesters don’t really care about Palestinians or human rights. They are indoctrinated sheep who have been taught to think that Israel and Zionism are evil.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
Ideas that reduce complex problems into simple mantras are always popular. But those
hat cloak a political ideology in the sort of language and symbolism in sync with the cultural fashions of the movement and allow people to imagine themselves on the right side of history can spawn world-changing movements. When young people especially are indoctrinated with such notions—the idea of correcting a historical wrong—the results can produce the shocking surge that’s unfolding right now on U.S. college campuses.
The spectacle of a critical mass of this current generation of American college students—egged on by many of their professors and even administrators—chanting slogans about erasing the State of Israel from the map (“from the river to the sea”), cheering on Islamist terror against Jews everywhere (“intifada revolution” and “globalize the intifada”) and speaking openly about banning the presence of “Zionists” from their midst, if not condoning violence against them, has shaken many Americans. That is especially true for liberal Jews and others who believe that antisemitism is primarily if not solely a problem on the political right.
Yet the most important part of this story is what hasn’t happened. Instead of a united nation responding to these expressions of hate and bigotry with one voice, many declarations are being heard in defense of what are, for all intents and purposes, a burgeoning mass movement supporting the Hamas terrorist movement that carried out the manifold atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Toxic leftist ideas
How is it possible for what is supposed to be the best and the brightest of American students—those who attend Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell and many other elite universities where the “pro-Palestine” protests have sprung up—to embrace such a profoundly evil cause?
The simple answer for what should be seen as responsible points to the intellectual fashion of the day, which, for lack of a better term, we are forced to call “woke” ideologies. The toxic ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality, which teach that the world is permanently divided between “white” oppressors and people of color who are their victims, have decided that Israel and the Jews belong to the former, and Hamas and its mass of Palestinian supporters are among the latter.
These ideas have been mainstreamed of late in America’s educational system and culture. Since the moral panic about race that occurred in the Black Lives Matter summer after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in May 2020, they have become the new orthodoxy against which dissent is not permitted in U.S. leading institutions.
While some of us have been pointing out for years that the BLM movement and the ideas behind it grant a permission slip for antisemitism, this has only become obvious to most people in the last six months. To the horror of many Jews, the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t engender sympathy for Israel or the Jews. Instead, it provided the spark for a surge in antisemitism around the world almost immediately after Oct. 7.
Many Jews believed they could always count on enlightened liberal opinion in this country not only to condemn expressions of right-wing Jew-hatred in the strongest terms but to also isolate it. Instead, they have watched with amazement and concern as the mobs engaging in anti-Semitic invective have been defended or rationalized in mainstream liberal media like The New York Times and MSNBC as idealists or, at worst, emotional kids whose actions are an understandable reaction to Israeli atrocities. In doing so, those who are taking this line aren’t just repeating and spreading Hamas propaganda and blatant falsehoods. They are accepting the premise that opposition to the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet is somehow the natural political position of those who call themselves progressives.
‘Very fine people’
Indeed, much like the BLM riots that wreaked havoc in American cities in the summer of 2020, the campus protests are being described as “mostly peaceful.” The narrative about the campus mobs in much of the corporate media is that they are merely “pro-Palestine” and that any antisemitism is merely the excessive behavior of a few marginal people who don’t represent the true spirit of the protests.
Almost as troubling is the fact that even when the anti-Semitic nature of the protests is recognized, the core problem is ignored. It’s not just that those taking part are engaging in demonstrations where Israel and its supporters are demonized, Jewish rights erased and Jews are being threatened. It’s that the people doing this don’t think they are wrong. They are convinced that they are speaking up for a righteous cause. Not only is that false premise being reinforced by mainstream press coverage, but it is also being upheld by leaders of the political left.
Indeed, the most outrageous example of that didn’t come from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who is notorious for her own anti-Semitic statements and who showed up on the Columbia campus this week to show solidarity with the “pro-Palestine” mob in the company of her daughter, a student at Barnard College who had been suspended for her role in violating the school’s rules.
The best encouragement the students received was from President Joe Biden, who, when asked about antisemitism on college campuses, condemned it but then added that he was just as concerned about “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” It was, as Alan Dershowitz and Andrew Stein wrote in The Wall Street Journal, a “very fine people” moment for the president.
That referenced the infamous claim that former President Donald Trump had said that there were some “very fine people” among those who gathered in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 for the neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally. Of course, Trump didn’t say that since he was referencing those who opposed the taking down of Confederate statues, and not Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan.
While that distinction was ignored in the media scramble to condemn Trump, Biden is largely getting a pass for his own effort to treat the cause that the anti-Semitic agitators are supporting as valid. The point being is that much of the media and leftist opinion are treating those yelling slurs at Jews as “very fine people” who are just going a little too far in their advocacy.
In the wake of Columbia University president Minouche Shafik’s ambivalence about enforcing the school’s rules against illegal demonstrations and hate speech, the narrative in the liberal media has again flipped with The New York Times concentrating on what they see as a wrongheaded decision to call in the New York City Police Department to remove the pro-Hamas encampment (though the tents returned the next day). Indeed, the paper’s urban affairs columnist Ginia Bellafante wrote that the main problem isn’t campus antisemitism but the willingness of administrators to punish the antis-Semites, who she and those reporting in the news section analogized to the anti-Vietnam war and anti-South African apartheid demonstrators of the past.
A movement steeped in ignorance
What is lacking in the coverage and most of the discourse is that—as interviews with them show—most of the students even at a school like Columbia can’t really explain why they are against Israel except by mindlessly repeating slogans about racism and oppression that have nothing to do with the facts on the ground in the Middle East or patent falsehoods about “genocide” in Gaza. They don’t know the history of the conflict and seem to think that Israelis and Jews are, as Palestinian propagandists claim, settler/colonialists in the one country in the world where Jews are, in fact, the indigenous people. Their demands for university divestment from Israel are based on intersectional ideology in which the century-old Arab war to deny Jewish rights is falsely depicted as analogous to the civil-rights movement in the United States.
The ignorance of these young adults is pathetic, as is their absurd cosplaying in which the wearing of keffiyehs has become campus terrorist chic. Lacking their own strong identity, they are adopting one that they perceive will give them some cachet as supporters of an embattled though fashionable cause. But having been spoon-fed the same lies that spawned the BLM movement throughout their educational experience, in which anti-Semitism has been redefined as progressivism, no one should be surprised by any of this.
Nor should we accept the claim that they are merely demonstrating sympathy for Palestinians or shock at human-rights violations. Far greater losses of life in wars in the Congo or Sudan—and an actual genocide in Western China where Beijing has put an estimated 1 million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps—haven’t moved them to utter a single word. If they really were for peace or the theoretical cause of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they would be in favor of eradicating Hamas, which is opposed to any peace that doesn’t involve the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its people.
The sad truth is that massive numbers of students at elite schools and elsewhere have been taught to adopt the Hamas Charter, whether they understand what they are supporting or not. If you think that Zionism—the national liberation movement of the Jewish people—is racism, you are denying rights to Jews that no one would think to deny to anyone else. That is antisemitism. If you are advocating for a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to get away with mass murder, you are supporting Hamas. And if you think Israel is illegitimate and should be destroyed, you are also supporting Hamas terrorists, and their genocidal plans and actions.
Tolerating the intolerable
People who advocate for hateful ideologies—whether they are directed at African-Americans, Jews or anyone else—have a First Amendment right to express their views. But they don’t have a right to be tolerated in educational institutions or treated as principled dissenters in the Times. We all know that there is zero tolerance for neo-Nazis or other right-wing extremist Jew-haters at American universities or in the liberal media. But because these institutions have been captured by woke ideologues and mainstream politicians like Biden fear their wrath, their moral equivalents on the left demonstrating on college campuses to “free Palestine” are tolerated, rationalized, excused and even lauded as heroes. In doing so, we are being asked to tolerate the intolerable.
To be “pro-Palestine” today is not to stand up for oppressed people. To the contrary, it is an expression of solidarity with latter-day Nazis and a willingness to mainstream hatred of the Jewish people, not just Israeli policies. But to condemn them is not enough. The only way to explain what has happened and to do something about it is to roll back the woke tide and purge schools, cultural institutions and the mainstream media of those spreading racialist ideas that foment this toxic hatred. Until the “progressive” ideas at the heart of the problem are dismantled, all the hand-wringing and expressions of concern about campus anti-Semitism will be meaningless.
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Why don't Israeli's, who want the hostages back, go to Rafah where the hostages, are being held captive and protest. They might be more effective and quit strengthening Hamas' hand. Hamas is not going to release any hostages and give away their leverage.
All these Israelis are accomplishing is weakening their own government. BIBI has enough on his hands. Why do they add to the mishegas that confronts him?
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China has won in terms of the destruction of America's higher education system. China was ahead when it came to a rigorous education and education is the key to a technological future and we are losing it.
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