FPI / May 17, 2024
Geostrategy-Direct
The shocking outpouring of support for terrorism this year at major campuses across the nation is neither spontaneous nor organic. It is supported by a well-funded network of leftist nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups that are largely backed by big-money donors aligned with the U.S. Democrat Party, according to independent media reports and security analysts.
Over the past two months, groups of students and other radical activists have set up tent encampments and self-proclaimed “autonomous zones” at several elite American colleges.
At Columbia, Yale, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Northwestern, Texas, and several others, mobs of masked activists have clashed with police, threatened and harassed Jewish students, and demanded the colleges divest from Israel.
Much as it was in the summer of 2020, when “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests raged, “outside agitators” which include professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals have joined forces to organize the protests and have encouraged an escalation in confrontational tactics.
“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” said Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.
“On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement,” Shideler said. “We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”
Palestinian and Islamist groups — SJP, AMP, CAIR, and Within Our Lifetime called for an April 15 “Strike 4 Gaza.” Since “encampments” were reportedly planned as early as November 2023 at U.S. universities, it seems likely that the timing of the “Strike 4 Gaza” was decided by “the movement” well in advance.
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 Democrat 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).
JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by progressive donors, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling President Barack 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’s philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
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
MPower Change, the “advocacy project” led by Linda Sarsour, 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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