Pro-Palestinian campus protest groups funded by major Biden donors
Funding for groups frequently structured to avoid IRS scrutiny
A Politico report released on Sunday revealed that some donors to U.S. President Joe Biden's re-election campaign also contribute to anti-Israel protest groups on American college campuses.
According to Politico, donors to the anti-Israel protest groups include “some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker.”
Very wealthy Democratic donors such as George Soros, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, David Rockefeller Jr., a member of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Susan and Nick Pritzker, who own the Hyatt Hotel Corporation, have donated to the Tides Foundation, which funds many left-wing, progressive causes.
The report specifically named two organizations that have given material aid to the protesters at Columbia University: Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now.
Both of these organizations reportedly receive funding from the Tides Foundation, a non-profit organization with a history of funding progressive groups, including Black Lives Matter.
The organization Jewish Voice for Peace, despite its name, was exposed recently after one of its executives, Dr. Hatem Bazian – a professor of Islamic studies and activist for Palestinian causes – accidentally posted a message from his personal 𝕏 account instead of the organization’s official account
However, the Politico report is not the first time the funding of these groups has been investigated.
In November and December, The Washington Examiner published its own research on Democratic donors behind the pro-Palestinian groups.
The Examiner found that pro-Palestinian protests across the United States had financial ties with “designated terrorist factions.”
In their November report, Anne Herzberg, legal advisor to the Israeli watchdog group NGO Monitor, called the financing “a national security issue.”
“That these groups have such shadowy financing is something the U.S. government really needs to investigate. It’s definitely a national security issue,” Herzberg.
In late November, Jonathan Schanzer, senior research vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), warned about the influence of such support for pro-Palestinian groups.
“There are far too many progressive causes that have thrown their arms around pro-Hamas, pro-PFLF, pro-violent factions, and we are seeing the impact of it on American campuses and on the streets of major American cities,” Schanzer said at the time.
Along with the Tides Foundation, another nonprofit, WESPAC Foundation, often financially sponsors the groups organizing the campus protests, which allows them to avoid financial disclosure to the IRS.
The two nonprofits have provided funding to groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Palestinian Youth Movement, both of which have called for the destruction of Israel and made statements praising the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack.
The New York Post also published an exposé on some of the “dark money” used to fund anti-Israel causes, backed by Democratic donors.
That report found a Washington, D.C.-based “dark money network” called Arabella Advisors had contributed to an array of anti-Israel groups since 2018. The network was also a source of funding for antisemitic activist Linda Sarsour.
We recommend to read:
The All Israel News Staff is a team of journalists in Israel.
