Congress is debating legislation to strip tax-exempt status from “terrorist-supporting organizations.” The Open Society Foundations would be a prime target.
As pro-Hamas, virulent anti-Semitic propaganda against Israel and Jews erupted and continues spreading after Hamas’ brutal attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, the silence of the poster boy of anti-Semitic victimhood, George Soros, is deafening.
Deafening but not surprising.
In his 1995 book, “Soros on Soros,” the Hungarian-American financier declared that Zionism “doesn’t appeal” to him because it is “the founding of a nation [Israel] where the Jews are in the majority.” For Soros, “being a Jew [is] being in a minority.” He also asserted moral equivalence between the Jews’ response to attacks and that of their attackers, saying that sometimes Jews choose to “identify with their oppressors” and even “try to become like them.”
In 2003, at a Yivo Institute for Jewish Research event, Soros blamed the rise of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred in Europe on the George W. Bush administration’s war on Islamic terrorism and “likened the behavior of Israel [in defending itself against Arab terrorist attacks] to that of the Nazis, invoking some psychological jargon about victims becoming victimizers.” He was booed, and many walked out of the event.
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According to the imperious, vainglorious Soros, the “unintended consequences” of his financial activities contributed to the rise of “the new Anti-Semitism [which] holds that the Jews rule the world.”
Criticism of Soros’ market manipulations did not cause the rise of anti-Semitism. It is the self-declared “agnostic” Soros’ deliberate exploitation of the religion he was born into as a strategy to shield and pre-empt criticism, thus trivializing anti-Semitism. That, more than anything, contributed to the rise of Jew hatred.
In 2016, David Friedman, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, opined that “George Soros has done more to vilify the state of Israel and to fund anti-Israel propaganda machines than almost any individual on the face of the earth.” His son and heir of the Open Society Foundations, Alex Soros, is continuing in his father’s footsteps.
Soros, the self-anointed arbitrator of social “justice,” expressed his support for Hamas as soon as it took over Gaza in 2007, criticizing Israel for refusing “to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government,” deliberately ignoring the fact that the Islamist terrorist group’s explicit and well-advertised objective is the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel.
Not surprisingly, he chose his good friend and an avowed pro-Palestinian, Baron Mark Malloch-Brown, as president of the Open Society Foundations. Brown told the British House of Lords in 2007, “Hamas must be a party to a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.”
The Open Society Foundations took three weeks to issue a statement condemning Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians, upholding Israel’s “right and responsibility to defend its citizens.”
According to the OSF, however, “Israel’s current military campaign is becoming increasingly indiscriminate … [and] is likely to be judged as collective punishment. International humanitarian law must be respected.” So on November 15, the OSF announced a “$3.3 million emergency funding initiative to provide critical support to leading human rights organizations documenting violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza and protecting vulnerable communities under attack, including Palestinians in the West Bank and inside Israel.” These so-called “human rights organizations” in Gaza have been repeatedly exposed as fronts to Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and others.
As expected, as soon as the Israeli Defense Forces began retaliating against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, Soros-funded “human rights” organizations began concocting alleged “war crimes” committed by Israel.
Human Rights Watch, which for decades has been promoting the Palestinian cause, including support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, and demonizing Israel — and which was turned by Soros into a powerful organization with a reported annual budget of more than $129 million — is demanding that the “international community” investigate Israel’s response to Hamas’ attacks as “war crimes.
Amnesty International — another beneficiary of Soros’ largess — which works closely with the United Nations Human Rights Council, called on the international community “to stop Israel’s … collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population, [which] is a war crime and is a key aspect of Israel’s system of apartheid.”
Soros must be pleased with his investments promoting anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian radical groups in Gaza, Israel, and the United States, where many of the anti-Israel activists are also the disciples of the radical progressive, neo-Marxist, and other leftist anti-American groups and individuals funded by Soros. His network has funded training and “continuing education” programs for decades. The graduates go on to occupy positions in academia, nonprofits, and media and win local and national elections with further support from Soros.
Since the Soros network is notoriously opaque, its funding of particularly questionable organizations takes some digging.
One example of many: According to the tax records of Just Peace in the Middle East, which supports the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee, the group received $700,000 from the OSF’s Foundation to Promote Open Society between 2018 and 2022.
Another example is the Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian nonprofit organization registered in California as the Middle East Policy Network, which, according to its website, is a transnational think tank whose mission is “to educate and foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self-determination within the framework of international law.” From 2017 to 2022, it received $550,000 from the OSF.
There are many others.
On November 15, a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the nexus between terror financing, tax-exempt charities, and anti-Semitism discussed HR 6408, a bill to “terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist-supporting organizations.” If and when it’s passed, the legislation would apply to the Open Society Foundations. And not a minute too soon.
*Rachel Ehrenfeld is the author of The Soros Agenda and Funding Evil –How Terrorism is Financed -and How to Stop it, and is the director of the American Center for Democracy.
*This commentary was first published by Blaze Media on December 1, 2023