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The People Setting America on Fire 🧵

How are all anti-Israel protests alike? We followed the money to find out.

From the article by Park MacDougald

1/23

Georgia, 2023: prosecutors bring RICO charges against anarchists involved in the “Stop Cop City” protests in Atlanta.

The indictment identified a network of fraudulent nonprofits, fiscal sponsors, and bail funds that were, in reality, front groups controlled by three anarchist roommates, who used millions in tax-exempt funds on an alleged violent criminal conspiracy involving the illegal occupation of public land, planned confrontations with police, doxxing and harassment campaigns.

2/23

Where did the money come from? From donations solicited through left-wing fundraising and organizing networks. One of those networks was the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), an umbrella group for more than 80 “community organizations,” including the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, which organized an illegal anti-Israel protest in the Capitol Rotunda in December at which more than 50 activists were arrested.

CJA’s website promotes a grab bag of far-left causes, and includes a “Free Palestine” page proclaiming that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.”

3/23

CJA is a subsidiary of the Movement Strategy Center, a California-based 501(c)(3) that has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and various branches of the Open Society network.

But it has another financial supporter, one that may come as a surprise: You, the American taxpayer. In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was entrusting $50 million in federal grant money under the Inflation Reduction Act to the CJA, to be distributed in sub-grants to fund “environmental justice” projects by “community-based nonprofit organizations.”

4/23

The first hint that recent far left protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17.

The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago.

5/23

Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc” tactics, covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity, linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting “de-arrests”—i.e., the coordinated swarming of police officers—to rescue apprehended comrades.

At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by antifa.

At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by antifa.

6/23

These resemblances are no accident. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall.

When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested.

Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.

Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.

7/23

They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag.

8/23

On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.

9/23

These groups typically operate in a decentralized manner, using successful tactics drawn from decades of anarchist organizing and spread through left-wing activist networks via word-of-mouth, as well as through formal trainings by professionals such as Lisa Fithian or the nonprofit “movement incubator” Momentum Strategies.

10/23

There is no one decision-maker; rather, decentralized “affinity” groups work together toward a shared goal, coordinating out in the open via social media and Google Docs. This can create an impression of centralized planning.

Matching tents that have cropped up on a number of campuses, prompting speculation that some shadowy entity is buying them en masse. “People keep pointing out, They all have the same tent,” says Center For Security Policy director Kyle Shideler says. “Well, yeah, it’s because the organizers told them to buy a tent, and sent around a Google Doc with a link to that specific tent on Amazon. So they all went out and bought the same tent.”

11/23

The “movement,” in turn, while 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.

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.

12/23

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. 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.

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.

13/23

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.

Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement).

An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF.

14/23

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.

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.

15/23

Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals.

Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund (Bafrayung means “to liberate”), run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”)

In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.

16/23

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.

Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas.

17/23

A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting.

In addition to their confrontational tactics, WOL-led protests tend to have a few other 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.

18/23

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.

19/23

Tides, you might have noticed, is a name that keeps coming up again and again.

The Tides Nexus, of which the Tides Foundation is a part, is one of largest progressive dark-money networks in the country, controlling upward of a billion in assets; its list of major donors is an all-star cast of left-wing billionaires and foundations, including Soros, Peter Buffett and his NoVo Foundation, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the New Venture Fund, controlled by another Democratic dark-money powerhouse, Eric Kessler’s Arabella Advisors.

Indeed, scratch a pro-Palestinian radical organization, and you are likely to find Tides’ involvement somewhere.

20/23

The Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), which organized an illegal blockade of the Port of Tacoma in November and an anti-Israel walkout of high school students in San Francisco—where AROC contracts with the unified public school district—is a fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center.

So is Palestine Legal, which has coordinated with the National Lawyers Guild to provide legal support for students at the encampments and filed civil rights complaints with the Department of Justice alleging “hostile anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic” environments on American campuses.

Another fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center is the Adalah Justice Project, whose executive director, Sandra Tamari, was arrested on April 30 at the encampment at Washington University in St. Louis, and who is also the co-founder of the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, which participated in the April 15 “Strike 4 Gaza” by blockading the local Boeing manufacturing plant.

Still another fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center is the Community Justice Exchange, which ran the legal defense and bail fund for the A15 Action/Strike 4 Gaza “blockade,” raising money through the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue. Since 2020, Tides has also donated just under $3 million to the Alliance for Global Justice, a far-left nonprofit that fiscally sponsors Samidoun, a PFLP front led by Charlotte Kates, the wife of PFLP Central Committee member Khaled Barakat. Barakat, in turn, addressed Columbia students at a seminar in March organized by WOL and SJP.

21/23

Tides has become tightly integrated with the ascendant Obama faction of the Democratic Party.

Tides board member Cheryl Alston, for instance, was appointed by Obama to serve two terms on the advisory committee of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Board member Dylan Orr worked in Obama’s Department of Labor, becoming the first “openly transgender person appointed to a U.S. presidential administration.”

Board member Tim Wang is a managing partner at the Westley Group, a clean-energy venture capital firm founded by Steve Westley, the former California co-chair of Obama for America whom Obama nearly appointed as Secretary of Energy.

Board member Lori Chatman serves as president of the capital division of Enterprise Community Partners, a housing and “racial equity” nonprofit helmed by Shaun Donavon, who served as Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development and director of the Office of Management and Budget.

And the former secretary of the Tides board, Suzanne Nossel, served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Obama administration (Nossel resigned from the board in 2021).

22/23

When I asked Shideler for his opinion on why not only the IRS, but federal and local law enforcement, seemed reluctant to act against what seemed to be clear violations of the law, he offered me a quote from The Wire: “If you follow drugs, you get drugs and drug dealers. If you follow the money, you don’t know what you’re going to get.”

As mentioned above, Abdullah Akl, the WOL organizer popping up across New York calling on “Abu Obeida” to “strike Tel Aviv,” is also an employee of Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change, and Sarsour herself has appeared at various protest encampments and New York City direct actions.

But her Arab American Association of New York, which co-organized an Oct. 21 “Flood Brooklyn for Palestine Protest” with WOL, has received $6.8 million in New York City taxpayer funds since 2010, according to a review of records by the New York Post.

23/23