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Groups Behind Protests Seizing College Campuses Get Bad News as Senators Send Letter to IRS

We should not need to remind you of the heinous support NSJP chapters across the country have voiced for Hamas, the letter states.

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By Isabel Vincent

The cash from Soros and his acolytes has been critical to the Columbia protests that set off the national copycat demonstrations.

Three groups set up the tent city on Columbia’s lawn last Wednesday: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Within Our Lifetime.

At the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” students sleep in tents apparently ordered from Amazon and enjoy delivery pizza, coffee from Dunkin’, free sandwiches worth $12.50 from Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips and $10 rotisserie chickens.

An analysis by The Post shows that all three got cash from groups linked to Soros. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund also gave cash to JVP.

The fund is chaired by Joseph Pierson, and includes David Rockefeller Jr, a fourth-generation member of the oil dynasty, on its board of directors. The non-profit gives money to “sustainable development” and “peace-building.”

And a former Wall Street banker, Felice Gelman, a retired investment banker who has dedicated her Wall Street fortune to pro-Palestinian causes, funded all three groups.

17Free sandwiches from upscale takeout joint Pret a Manger are on offer at the encampment, worth up to $12, and $10 rotisserie chickens. Cash for the encampment has come from billionaire investor George Soros.NYPJ

Both SJP and JVP were expelled from Columbia University in November for “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” JVP blamed Israel for the Oct 7 Hamas terrorist attack that left 1,200 Israelis dead.

“Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence,” JVP said in a statement on its website.  

SJP called the terrorist strike on Israel “a historic win.”

17Also on offer for the thirsty anti-Israeli protesters camped out at Columbia is free coffee from Dunkin’. Behind the scenes, the groups organizing the encampment have received cash from Soros and another former Wall Street banker.NYPJ

An analysis by The Post shows how Soros and Gelman’s cash made its way to the students through a network of nonprofits that help obscure their contributions.

Soros has given billions to the Open Society Foundations which his son Alexander — whose partner is Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s top aide and the estranged wife of pervert Anthony Weiner — now controls.

In turn, Open Society has given more than $20 million to the Tides Foundation, a progressive nonprofit “fiscal sponsor” that then sends the cash to smaller groups.

Those groups include A Jewish Voice for Peace, which between 2017 and 2022 has received $650,000 from Soros’ Open Society. Its advisers include the academic Noam Chomsky and the left-wing feminist author Naomi Klein.

JVP has been a prominent part of the protests at Columbia and one of its student members was among a group expelled from the university for inviting the leader of a proscribed terrorist group, Khaled, to the “Resistance 101” Zoom meeting.

Soros has also donated $132,000 to WESPAC, called in full the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation.

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BY PARK MACDOUGALD

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. 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. 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. 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). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. 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. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.

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.

Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. 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, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and the sister of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman. (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.

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. 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.

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.

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by Dion J. Pierre

These organizations have maintained both influential and radical friends, NGO Monitor explained in its new report released on Thursday, noting that JVP — a fringe anti-Israel group that has often joined forces to coordinate events with SJP — has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Other donors to JVP include the Open Society Policy Center and the Kaphan Foundation, among others.

As for SJP, one of its founders, Hatem Bazian, is also a co-founder of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), an advocacy group that, according to a landmark report last year by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), “retains ties to terrorist groups operating in the Palestinian Territories.” AMP is a growing power player in the US Democratic Party and has led several legislative initiatives aimed at eroding Democratic support for Israel.

NGO Monitor also named in its report Within Our Lifetime, a New York City-based group headed by a former City University of New York (CUNY) student who once threatened to set a Jewish student’s Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sweater on fire while he wore it. Since Oct. 7, WOL has openly cheered Hamas’ atrocities as the “right to resist zionist [sic] settle violence” and “Resistance in all its forms. By any means necessary” — an apparent endorsement of Hamas’ abductions and sexual violence against Israeli women. The group’s funding is a source of mystery; the public cannot freely donate to it because a link to its donation platform, “Donorbox,” is broken, but it is widely believed that the Westchester Peace Action Committee (WESPAC), a nonprofit based in New York, is WOL’s principal funder.

Another group named in the new report, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), supports a network of allied groups, including AMP, JVP, and WESPAC. USCPR has received immense financial support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which has awarded it at least $355,000 since 2018.

Many of the same groups backing the ongoing protests have also been integral in the growth of the BDS movement. Indeed, a growing alignment of large philanthropic organizations with BDS has been fueling the movement’s growth on American college campuses, as was revealed in the NAS report from last year.

According to NAS’s findings, JVP as of last year had received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, whose endowment was valued at $1.27 billion, since 2017, and the Tides Research Fund, a sponsor of Black Lives Matter, has given the group at least $75,000 since 2019. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants. Additionally, Palestine Legal, a lawfare group founded in 2012 to support campus BDS groups like SJP, is the beneficiary of generous funding from Tides Foundation, a pioneer of activist investment that has given over $1.5 million to anti-Israel initiatives, according to figures included in the report.

“Saturation of anti-Israel, pro-BDS sentiment on college campuses is a long term danger to US support for Israel by its simple normalization of demonizing the Jewish state,” NAS said at the time. “Beyond the problem of antsemitism, the importance of academia to the BDS movement’s growth and viability demonstrates the steady erosion of its political neutrality that has taken place over the past two decades.”

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by Gabe Kennedy

The ADL raised concerns to Mayes about the Tucson-based Alliance for Global Justice, which faces an uncertain future after a Washington Examiner investigation into its Palestinian terrorism ties prompted payment processors to kick it off their platforms. Meanwhile, the letter to James focused on both AFGJ and the WESPAC Foundation, a New York-based charity that houses the national Students for Justice in Palestine college campus group and other pro-Hamas projects.

ADL Chief Legal Officer Steven C. Sheinberg told the attorneys general that AFGJ could be landing itself in hot water legally by housing a project called the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, an Israeli-designated terrorist group. Samidoun, as the Washington Examiner reported, shares employees with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — a U.S.-designated terrorist faction.

“The level of ‘control and discretion’ exerted by AFGJ over its fiscally sponsored projects is crucial in light of serious concerns that have been raised regarding Samidoun’s endorsement of and/or support for terrorism-related activities, as well as its efforts to expand support for terrorist organizations like Hamas and PFLP in the U.S.,” Sheinberg wrote in the letters. “Samidoun’s status as a terrorist organization abroad, or at the very least its connection to known terrorist organizations, calls into question whether AFGJ and its board are exercising the appropriate level of oversight and control over its projects to ensure AFGJ’s charitable assets are being used consistent with its tax exemption.”

Meanwhile, when it comes to WESPAC, the ADL raised concerns to James that the charity’s projects engage in “blatantly antisemitic activities” that could run afoul of WESPAC’s charitable purpose. WESPAC and AFGJ both fiscally sponsor many organizations, meaning they service these projects with key services such as human resources, legal, and donation processing.

The letter to James cited examples of Students for Justice in Palestine chapters endorsing the Oct. 7 attack, while some affiliates have “interfered with the rights and safety of other students and in some cases, led to student arrests,” Sheinberg said.

WESPAC also sponsors a project called Within Our Lifetime-United for Palestine that is based in New York and, Sheinberg said, hosts rallies featuring “explicit support for violence against Israeli civilians by U.S. designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and affiliated individuals such as Leila Khaled and Hamas’ military wing spokesperson Abu Obaida.”