Globalists, Marxists, and Hamas: Tying Campus Protests to the Anti-Western Cabal (Pt. 2)
How America’s pro-Palestine astroturf campus protests were organized by “white privilege” elites tied to radical Islamist groups and known terrorists.
Philanthropy & Football for Hamas?
Pro-terrorist occupations and protests exploded across American college campuses—coincidentally, as final exams approached. Many have asked how these Hamas-loving protesters seemed so organized, coordinated, and well-supplied. The source of funding and strategy has been an open question as tent cities and occupations pop up simultaneously at universities across the country.
Many of the usual suspects have coordinated everything from tents to strategies to direct cash payments to agitators. This echoes the paid, coordinated riots that occurred in 2020, another presidential election year, after the death of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter.
Those usual suspects include George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Tides Foundation, and other far-left nonprofits.
The Soros-centered galaxy of nonprofits has a long history of funding pro-Palestinian causes. The Tides Center and Tides Foundation, two “charities” that have spent over $4 billion on “social change” for decades, fund the Alliance for Global Justice. According to the Washington Examiner, this charity has ties to Palestinian terrorism:
Newly filed 2022 tax forms show the Tides Foundation and Tides Center combined to steer more than $303,000 to Alliance for Global Justice [AFGJ], a charity in Arizona revealed through a Washington Examiner investigation to maintain ties to Palestinian terrorism. And those grants add to the millions of dollars that have flowed in recent years from Tides to AFGJ, which, this year alone, saw a swath of payment processors and liberal foundations cut ties with the nonprofit group.
Legal experts have accused AFGJ of providing “material support to terrorism” in violation of federal law because it sponsors the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, an Israeli-designated terror group that has shared staffers with the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]. Another reason is that AFGJ recently raised money for Collectif Palestine Vaincra, a Samidoun coalition member described on its website as a partner of the PFLP.
On the heels of Oct. 7, Collectif Palestine Vaincra and Samidoun have been mobilizing protesters against Israel on social media and posting event flyers. Samidoun was banned in Germany in October after its activists reportedly passed out candy to people in celebration of terror, while German authorities last week raided four properties related to Samidoun, Reuters reported.
AFGJ lends its 501(c)(3) status as fiscal sponsor to 140 other Samidoun-aligned groups. As mentioned above, AFGJ lost its ability to accept credit card donations after an expose on its sponsorship of terror-aligned groups. This begs the question why they still enjoy nonprofit status from the IRS as well as in Canada.
Tides funds the WESPAC Foundation—short for the Westchester People’s Action Coalition—which sponsors anti-Israel demonstrations and campaigns on behalf of imprisoned terrorists. WESPAC has lent its fiscal sponsorship to Within Our Lifetime and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, which allows those organizations to skip federal tax filings:
Several of the pro-Palestinian organizations, including Within Our Lifetime and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, do not have public tax filings. However, they and several other groups use a progressive nonprofit group based in New York called Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, or WESPAC, as their fiscal sponsor to collect and process online donations. U.S. tax law allows nonprofit groups with 501(c)(3) status to collect money on behalf of smaller groups.
Within Our Lifetime started as the Columbia University chapter of SJP, but “rebranded” in 2015. Its founders endorse Palestinian resistance “by any means necessary,” and maintain a strict “anti-normalization” policy. Within Our Lifetime organizes frequent demonstrations in New York City, including an annual Nakba Day (Arabic for “catastrophe,” the way Palestinians describe Israel’s creation in 1948). Within Our Lifetime organized a Day of Rage for Gaza on May 6.
Like many of the radical leftist philanthropy organizations, Tides receives significant taxpayer funding. In a separate report, Washington Examiner notes Tides has received at least $81 million in federal subsidies, subawards, and other public grants since 2006.
WESPAC also funds Students for Justice in Palestine, one of the main groups organizing the pro-Hamas protests and occupations on college campuses.
An environmental nonprofit called Sunrise Movement has received funding from Tides as well. Sunrise dedicates itself to building a “movement of young people to stop climate change” and was an early agitator for Joe Biden’s Green New Deal policies. Sunrise has also made demands for an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza with a “toolkit” to stand in “solidarity with Palestinians and their allies.”
Big Philanthropy isn’t the only source of funds used by the pro-terrorist rioters. America’s most popular professional sports league, the National Football League (NFL), funds a wide network of social justice initiatives in its Inspire Change initiative. That network includes the Community Justice Exchange, which funded bail, court fees, fines, and legal defense for protesters arrested while blocking bridges and freeways during the pro-Hamas A15 protests, organized in cities all over the United States on April 15. The Community Justice Exchange, along with bailing out terrorist sympathizing protesters, works to end cash bail and pre-trial detention, as well as immigration detention. Not exactly the most patriotic of efforts for the NFL to support. The Community Justice Exchange also gets funding from Tides and uses ActBlue for its online fundraising efforts.
The New York Post has reported extensively on the far-left funding sources and coordination of the campus protests. Students for Justice in Palestine gets much of its funding through Soros and his Open Society Foundations, as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The other radical pro-Palestinian groups receiving similar funding are Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Within our Lifetime. According to Politico, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, have received funding from Tides, and previously received grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Chicago’s Democratic Pritzker family. Jewish Voice for Peace came under fire in 2017 for having a convicted terrorist speak at one of its events.
According to the Post, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow also received funding from Felice Gelman. Gelman, a retired investment banker, dedicates her massive fortune to pro-Palestinian causes.
The vast funding networks extend further than that, however, and includes foreign governments and terrorist organizations intent on destabilizing the West.
Foreign Infiltrators and Terrorist Ties
The funding network extends far beyond just these examples and includes foreign governments. For instance, Qatar funded Human Rights Watch to the tune of $3.75 million, just in 2018.
Western governments have even gotten into the act of indirect support of terrorism. Independent reporter Chuck Holton reports that the European Union recently announced €1 billion ($1.08 billion) in “aid” to Lebanon, a safe haven for terrorism in which Hezbollah operates with “relative impunity.”
The Associated Press (AP) reports all these groups have extensive ties to the BDS movement. NGO Monitor released a report showing deep ties between radical nonprofits, student groups, and terrorist organizations:
These organizations have maintained both influential and radical friends, NGO Monitor explained in its new report released on Thursday, noting that JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] — 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.
The report states plainly, “Under the guise of human rights and justice, these NGOs work to undermine the economic, military, and other ties between the US and Israel, and to besiege and divide the US Jewish community.” They also cite non-transparent funding as a key to their ability to organize. This shields possible foreign funding—including from terrorist organizations.
The military wing of PFLP, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, bragged about participating in the Oct. 7 atrocities and urged other Palestinians to join it.
According to NGO Monitor, the wife of Samidoun’s founder spoke to Columbia University activists during a “Resistance 101” event. “Your work is so important to the resistance in Gaza,” she told them. “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas.”
Suzan Quitaz, a Swedish reporter of Kurdish descent, reports American college campuses turned into a “second front for Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).” The virulent anti-Semitic chants reveal support for the Muslim Brotherhood, she writes:
We are no longer talking about Neo-Nazi or Islamist thugs but rather a sophisticated well-coordinated campaign of infiltration and persuasion of American academia aimed to pursue the agenda of specific political ideals. One of which is the idea that Israel, “Zionism” personified, is inherently evil and must be eradicated. To the “new respectful antisemitism” belong a group of professors who are suited and booted, like Professor Joseph Massad, who praised and glorified Hamas’s Oct 7 attacks against Israeli civilians, calling it “an awesome, stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.”
[Prof. Mohamed] Abdou sees Hamas as a “resistance against Israel and the West” and described Hamas terrorists as a “dedicated few” who managed to defeat a “larger enemy” in “stealth mode” on Oct 7.
The Qatar Problem
Quitaz notes that these and other professors have their positions funded, in many cases, with money from NGOs and even from foreign governments—specifically Qatar, which has lavished billions of dollars on American universities and has bankrolled Hamas to the tune of $1.1 billion since 2012. This “unchecked foreign investment” in academia has turned American campuses into “incubators of terror,” Quitaz writes.
American colleges continue to enjoy funding from some of America’s leading adversaries, topped by Qatar. This helps to explain the anti-American climate on campus. The Network Contagion Research Institute has tracked these foreign gifts to American colleges in detail. In a report titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind,” they show a clear correlation between campuses that received the most foreign “gifts” and anti-Semitic incidents on campus. The more money they took, the more incidents occurred. “This relationship of foreign funding to campus antisemitism,” they write, “was stronger when the donors were Middle Eastern regimes rather than other regimes.” Those campuses also reported more “illiberal, anti-democratic behaviors around campus censorship and suppression of academic freedom.” The amount of “gifts” from foreign governments to American colleges exceeded $13 billion for the period 2014-2019. The report notes $4.7 billion of that funding was previously undisclosed. Most of the foreign “gifts” originated from countries with authoritarian, non-democratic governments. Qatar led the pack by a wide margin for the reporting period, with over $2.6 billion given.
Notably, the tiny island nation of Bermuda ranked fifth overall, with almost a billion given in that time.
The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise released a similar report in May 2024 that goes back even further. They note American colleges and universities have received $55 billion in foreign “gifts” since 1981, about a quarter of which came from Arab individuals, institutions, and governments. The vast majority of the “gifts” they tracked came from three nations: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Both reports state plainly that these foreign donations share a disturbing lack of transparency in both the sources of the funding and their purpose.
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Several national and state-level leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have expressed solidarity with Hamas since the ghastly Oct. 7 attacks, with CAIR executive director Nihad Awad saying he was happy to see Palestinians “break out of Gaza.” CAIR has a long and sordid history, most famously as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) terror financing trial in 2007–2008. The FBI referred to CAIR as “a front group for Hamas” and traced interconnected relationship between the two groups in documents released in a FOIA request.
Just 5 days after the Hamas attack, CAIR held an Oct. 12 protest in Georgia against Israel’s military response where CAIR national deputy director Edward Mitchell called Israel’s response “war crimes.” He said the military operation to destroy Hamas amounted to “collective punishment” and continued war crimes and human rights abuses dating back to the 1960s:
And the way to permanently stop this horrific cycle of violence, to save Israelis, Palestinians, and others is to end the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory [emphasis added].
In November, the Triangle Imams Council in North Carolina held a press conference at the CAIR office in Durham, North Carolina, in which they implored the U.S. Congress to address “Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias in this country,” and demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. They used the hashtags #genocide and #EthnicCleansing in their posts on X/Twitter announcing their demands.
Obama Administration 2.0
Despite these disturbing activities over the years, both the Obama and Biden administrations cozied up to CAIR. The Obama Department of Justice, under Attorney General Eric Holder, killed investigations into and indictments of CAIR in the HLF terrorism funding case.
When Biden took office, CAIR once again gained access to the White House—at least until Nihad Awad expressed support for the Oct. 7 attacks, forcing the Biden administration to disavow its connections.
CAIR’s continued access to the White House should come as no surprise, given the recycled Obama radicals that came along for his third term—in the form of Joe Biden. One such radical came to the public’s attention recently, Maher Bitar. According to the Canary Mission:
Maher Bitar is a senior U.S. intelligence official who spread hatred of Israel and promoted a policy that would result in Israel’s destruction. He was also a leader of the anti-Israel campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Georgetown University (Georgetown) in 2006, where he promoted [p. 119] the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
As of March 3, 2024, Bitar had been serving in the White House as special assistant to the U.S. president and senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council (NSC) since January 2021.
Bitar served in the Obama administration as the NSC’s director for Israeli-Palestinian affairs. PJ Media’s Vodkapundit referred to Bitar as “the jihadi in the White House.” His resume includes working for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)—directly linked to Hamas—and serving as Rep. Adam Schiff’s lead counsel in his impeachment of Donald Trump. And Bitar is far from the only federal official with sympathies for our adversaries.
Biden even submitted a lifetime federal judicial nomination for a guy who funded candidates tied to Hamas.
Perhaps this explains the Biden administration’s advance knowledge of an imminent Hamas attack, prior to Oct. 7.
An Utter Lack of Leadership
Biden obviously has what many now call his “Michigan problem.” He must balance the working class vote with the radical pro-Hamas factions in Dearborn and other cities that have become home to large populations of immigrants who think of America as oppressive to their culture and religion. So far, he has failed to find a unifying message to assuage the mainstream and radical factions of his party. He risks losing votes to both factions in his bid for reelection in November. Biden’s attempts to play both sides and to buy votes have rung hollow with the voters. Even in today’s America, it seems unlikely that assuaging the growing pro-terrorist fringe of the radical left, represented by the likes of Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D–MI) and Ilhan Omar (D–MN), will win him a majority of the vote.
Many of America’s ills find their source in an utter lack of leadership at many levels. Whether that be among elite liberal college presidents, soft-on-crime district attorneys and mayors, open border policies, blue state insanity, and everything in between, America cries out for stronger leaders who will make the tough decisions necessary to clean things up.
Solutions
How do we fix what ails America, as reflected in the anti-America and pro-terrorist campus demonstrations? As this investigation reveals, we have several problems to address on a national level:
- Delegitimize and outlaw any group—for-profit, nonprofit, charity, whatever—with ties to terrorism, including BDS
We have a cancer in America that has metastasized over the period of a couple of decades, mostly escaping the notice of the citizens. In the Age of Obama, we have been convinced to turn a blind eye too often to the advance of America’s adversaries—in all of our social institutions. The voters need to be educated and need to start electing officials at all levels that take seriously their constitutional responsibility to provide for the common defense. Previous generations of Americans would have considered it perfectly natural to deny rights claimed by anti-American actors on our home soil, rejecting their claims of constitutional protection while they undermine our way of life.
- Education on the horrors of the Holocaust
A study in 2020 revealed that a majority of young adults (aged 18–39) could not cite basic facts of World War II, the horrors committed by the Nazi Party in Germany and across Europe, or the genocidal actions that caused the slaughter of millions of Jews and others considered “undesirable” by the Nazis. That basic lack of knowledge has opened the door to a rise in anti-Semitism, which creates a deleterious feedback loop with the BDS movement. We need to ensure that we mean it as a nation when we say, “Never again.” That starts with educating people on actual history—something the BDS movement, and the woke intersectional academic elites, say we should avoid.
- Education on the horrors of communism
Similarly, too many college students have once again taken up the radical revolutionary cause, as their grandparents did in the 1960s. When asked, most would say they support Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung, and would call claims of the numbers of murders they committed lies. That only enables our young people to get radicalized more easily. Too many believe Western culture has held back the advancement of humanity, instead of fueling its acceleration. We need leaders in our academic institutions to take their educational responsibilities seriously.
- Audit and reform foreign funding in America’s institutions of higher education
This investigative report merely scratched the surface on foreign influence and funding in our institutions of higher education. No other nation on earth would be crazy enough to allow their adversaries to fund their universities and influence the curriculum to the extent America has. We need to audit the taxpayer funding given to these institutions, we need to audit the curriculum they offer, and we need to launch extensive investigations into foreign influence on America’s college campuses.
- Reform and regulate radical nonprofits
In his report on Arabella Advisors, Restoration News editor Hayden Ludwig laid out an excellent list of priorities Congress needs to implement. Big Philanthropy has run roughshod over IRS regulations and the American way of life for decades, with little oversight. If we as a nation wish our charitable institutions to do good for our society, we need to tell them what we need from them—and what we don’t.
- Congress must exert far more control over executive and judicial appointments with terrorist ties
This report exposed a handful of government officials with direct ties to terrorist groups. Those examples were chilling enough, but we are not doing enough to expose these connections. Every governmental appointee, employee, and elected official should be subject to regular audits to ensure they minimize influence by foreign actors, adversaries to our way of life, and terroristic organizations. A galaxy of organizations exists that share the common vision of tearing down American society and our unity of purpose. It is natural and good for us as a people to defend against those forces.
Jeff Reynolds is a senior investigative researcher for Restoration News.
