{"id":112633,"date":"2024-05-03T17:05:17","date_gmt":"2024-05-03T15:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=112633"},"modified":"2024-05-03T10:08:28","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T08:08:28","slug":"09-05-104","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=112633","title":{"rendered":"Who is paying for the American campus protests?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Who is paying for the American campus protests?<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

SHIMON SHERMAN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

There has been an undeniable influx of money from overseas into the most prestigious universities in the United States.<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

.
\nA pro-Hamas protest encampment on the campus of Columbia University in New York City, April 22, 2024. Credit: Lev Radin\/Shutterstock.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Over the past few weeks, dramatic scenes of mob action have unfolded across dozens of campuses across the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

Large groups of students, faculty and professional agitators have taken over major swaths of quads and other areas to voice support for the Hamas terror organization and to intimidate pro-Israeli and Jewish students. These protests have often taken the form of encampments in central locations on university grounds, which have prevented Jewish students from accessing classes and other facilities.<\/span><\/p>\n

In several cases, the catatonic response of the university administration has encouraged these protesters to escalate their tactics, including the destruction of property, physical violence against students, seizure of buildings and even holding university staff against their will. Chants in support of Hamas, the Houthis, Iran, bombing Israel and general terrorist action have been the consistent soundtrack in the background of all these protests.<\/span><\/p>\n

The synchronized eruption of these protests, the use of common talking points and well-oiled logistics surrounding the supply of sleeping arrangements, food, water and medical support for the protesters have raised red flags surrounding the organization and funding for this spontaneous phenomenon.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we are seeing is not a random emotional response but the fruition of 20 years of groundwork and preparation by several anti-Israeli, pro-terror groups,\u201d Gerald Steinberg, head of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor organization, told JNS. A closer look into the organizational structure of these mob actions reveals a complex web of student groups, NGOs, nonprofits and even foreign governments.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the surface level, there is a series of student groups that are organizing these protests\u2014the most prominent among them being Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP<\/a>), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP<\/a>) and Within Our Lifetime (W<\/a>OL<\/a>). \u201cSJP has no U.S. revenue service (IRS) status and most of the money sources are hidden, which raises major concerns,\u201d Steinberg said. \u201cThere is simply no transparency about who is funding them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hatem Bazian, the founder of SJP, is one of the clearest links between these protests and terror organizations. Bazian was previously a major fundraiser for the Ohio-based nonprofit Kindhearts, which was censured in 2006 by the U.S. Treasury Department for giving money to Hamas. Kindhearts settled with the Treasury Department and was dissolved in 2012 over the 2006 case.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bazian was also a prominent advocate and speaker for the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which shut down after it was found liable in civil court in 2004 for its support of Hamas. \u201cHatem Bazian, the head of SJP, has clear connections to various terror organizations,\u201d Steinberg told JNS.<\/span><\/p>\n

A recent report by the New York-based Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP<\/a>) shed some light on the source of SJP\u2019s funding. ISGAP found the central donors to be Westchester People\u2019s Action Coalition (WESPAC); Tides Foundation; American Muslims for Palestine (AMP<\/a>), its parent organization Americans for Justice in Palestine (AJP<\/a>); and JVP.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bazian is also a co-founder of AMP. AMP is currently under investigation by the Virginia Attorney General after being accused of being a reincarnation of the IAP. Its former executive director, Abdelbaset Hamayel, and its current one, Osama Abuirshaid, were IAP board members and directors, respectively.<\/span><\/p>\n

AMP has denied any links to Hamas but confirmed that the charity gives grants of between $500 and $2,000 to pro-Palestinian student groups. AMP\u2019s national board member Salah Sarsour was also a major fundraiser for the Holy Land Foundation, which was designated a terrorist group in 2001 for funneling more than $12 million to Hamas.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to ISGAP, Bazian is also deeply involved with JVP, which throws into question how Jewish the \u201clargest Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world\u201d truly is. In May 2023, Bazian tweeted \u201c@JakeTapper, your reporting on Rashida Tlaib\u2019s Nakba 75 event was racist and anti-Palestinian. As Jews who believe in human rights and justice, we demand you do better,\u201d ostensibly thinking that he was posting from the JVP account and not his own. JVP has since denied that Bazian runs their Twitter account.<\/span><\/p>\n

JVP\u2019s support of the student protests has been used to deflect the claims of antisemitism that have gone hand in hand with the demonstrations. \u201cIt\u2019s being presented as a peace movement, that there are Jews involved, that it\u2019s not antisemitic. But when people chant \u2018globalize the intifada,\u2019 it\u2019s very clear,\u201d said ISGAP director Charles Small.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another major financial backer of the student protests has been the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which according to NGO monitor is \u201cclosely linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).\u201d PFLP is recognized as a\u00a0foreign terrorist organization<\/a>\u00a0by the United States, Canada, the European Union, Israel and others.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the Israeli National Bureau for Counter-Terror Financing, Samidoun plays a leading role in the PFLP\u2019s anti-Israel propaganda efforts, fundraising and recruiting activists. Several members of Samidoun are also members of the PFLP, including the chief coordinator of Samidoun, Khaled Barakat, and the organization\u2019s international coordinator, Charlotte Kates.<\/span><\/p>\n

Overall, ISGAP has tracked \u201cover $3 million a year going to various pro-Palestinian student groups\u201d from \u201ca constellation of terror-affiliated organizations\u201d to Columbia University.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Campaigns led by Palestinian organizations\u2019<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Investigating the funding structure for the parent companies backing student groups like SJP and WOL, several prominent backers come up, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the\u00a0New York Post<\/em>, both of these organizations have contributed millions of dollars to the JVP, WOL and other pro-Palestinian groups. U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR<\/a>) is one of the primary recipients of their donations. USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows, and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based \u201cfellows\u201d in return for spending eight hours a week organizing \u201ccampaigns led by Palestinian organizations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

These paid agitators have emerged in multiple university protests as the most aggressive and intense rioters. They have often been instigators of escalatory action by the student protesters. In January, a paid USCPR fellow was\u00a0detained for blocking the route<\/a>\u00a0of U.S. President Joe Biden\u2019s motorcade. At Yale, USCPR\u2019s fellow\u00a0Craig Birckhead-Morton<\/a>\u00a0was arrested on Monday<\/a>\u00a0and charged with first-degree trespassing for occupying the school\u2019s Beinecke Plaza. Another USCPR fellow named Malak Afaneh, also a fellow at CAIR-SFBA (Council on American-Islamic Relations, San Francisco Bay Area) rose to prominence for disrupting a\u00a0dinner for third-year law students<\/a>\u00a0at the home of Erwin Chemerinsky, the Jewish dean of Berkeley Law School, to stage an anti-Israel protest.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, some experts believe that the Soros and Rockefeller links are overblown and not critical in the face of the much clearer connections that student groups have with terrorist organizations. \u201cI think that the Soros connection is much less clear than people want it to be,\u201d Steinberg said. \u201cThe relation is certainly not direct and very muddled by political interests.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The final source of financial support for pro-Palestinian activism on campus is foreign governments. The nature of this support is much less direct than what is seen with various NGOs, and no direct paper trail between specific protests and foreign interests has been reported.<\/span><\/p>\n

That being said, there has been an undeniable influx of money from overseas into the most prestigious universities in America, which may explain both the radicalization of the student body and the soft response from the administration. For almost 20 years, a central player in this development has been Qatar.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2019, a coalition of Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt, boycotted Qatar due to its unwillingness to rein in the Muslim Brotherhood terror group. As part of their effort to undermine Qatar, Arab specialists began uncovering and reporting on a long-term Qatari project to infiltrate the U.S. higher education system.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2020, Najat Al-Saied, a researcher from the UAE, published a report on\u00a0Alhurra<\/em>, a U.S. government-owned Arabic-language satellite TV channel, titled \u201cQatar and the Funding of American Universities.\u201d According to Al-Saied, Qatar sought to ally the Muslim Brotherhood ideology with the progressive left movement on campuses by adopting several commonplace slogans like \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d and \u201cracist thinking,\u201d to signal political alignment.<\/span><\/p>\n

By 2012, Qatar had spent more than $1.5 billion to finance education initiatives in 28 universities across America and became the largest external funder of education in the United States. As of 2019, Qatar regularly spends $405 million a year to finance activities at six American universities with branches in Doha.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2020,\u00a0American author and translator\u00a0Raymond Ibrahim published a report showing that Qatar had invested $5.6 billion in 81 American universities since 2007, including Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Stanford. Ibrahim further showed that Qatar used its influence at the schools to promote Islamic studies and to specifically suppress the study of other Middle Eastern minorities including Christians, Jews, Baha\u2019is, Yazidis, Kurds and Druze.<\/span><\/p>\n

Al-Saied gave two central interests for Qatar in funding U.S. higher education. One was a desire to spread Islamic thought into the West and inculcate the American student body in Islamic theology, proselytizing being a core tenant of Wahabi Islam. The other interest was political, which was to alienate the United States from the Arab coalition of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Emirates and Bahrain.<\/span><\/p>\n

The after-effects of this approach can be seen today as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party seeks to shift Washington from its traditional alliance with the Sunni Gulf States.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Qatari government has openly denied any connection to the student protests on American campuses. Its ambassador recently posted on X that \u201cQatar does not influence these universities, and we have nothing to do with anything that happens on their home campuses in the U.S.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who is paying for the American campus protests? SHIMON SHERMAN There has been an undeniable influx of money from overseas into the most prestigious universities in the United States. . A pro-Hamas protest encampment on the campus of Columbia University in New York City, April 22, 2024. Credit: Lev Radin\/Shutterstock. Over the past few weeks, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112633"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112633"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112647,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112633\/revisions\/112647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}