How to Defund the Leftist Non-Profit Empire Behind the Campus Riots

It’s time to enforce the law.

On Friday, I talked to Daniel Horowitz (no relation) of Conservative Review about the funding behind the Hamas campus riots and the other street riots in support of terrorism.

There are some very well-researched articles making the rounds connecting the dots when it comes to who’s funding the pro-Hamas campus riots.

Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium secured documents showing that the Columbia occupiers were getting advice from Palestine Legal which is funded by the Ford Foundation.

The New York Post had a widely circulated piece connecting the dots to George Soros. I had my own article on the Soros links last week.

Other organizations in play include the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which has extensively backed the anti-Israel movement.

This is not an either/or situation. Most pro-terror orgs benefit from multiple funding sources.

The bigger issue beyond Soros or the Ford Foundation is the work that the David Horowitz Freedom Center has been doing in looking at the rise of radical nonprofits.

The nonprofits involved are casually violating tax regulations with no response from the IRS (which has been persecuting the Freedom Center for 5 years). Some of the worst abuses involve WESPAC, a fiscal sponsor for some of the ugliest players around. (The same incidentally is true of the nonprofits behind the ecoterrorism including the attacks on classical art museums around the world.)

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus group at the core of the pro-Hamas protests, has local chapters who are funded by student activity fees while its national group is fiscally sponsored by WESPAC.

One would be to define more clearly what a “fiscal sponsor” is allowed to do. Currently, any “public charity” under § 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code can be a “fiscal sponsor” and offer a tax deduction to a donor who contributes to an organization that is not tax-exempt. There can be good reasons for this, such as if a donor wants to support a group that is new and has not yet received its tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). But when the group has been operating for a while and could reasonably have been expected to obtain a tax-exempt status of its own (or if it had been denied one), having a “fiscal sponsor” looks more like a way of evading tax laws than a temporary expedient. (The national chapter of SJP has been operating since 2010 and some of its campus chapters even longer.)

“Fiscal sponsors” are also expected to take responsibility for ensuring that the donations they accept on behalf of another organization are spent as intended. For example, someone who wanted to support SJP is directed to make a gift to the WESPAC Foundation, a public charity in White Plains, N.Y., which serves as its “fiscal sponsor.” But WESPAC is not legally required to report publicly what it does with the money, except in functional categories (such as how much it spends on salaries, conferences, and the like). What portion of the $1 million it received in 2021 went to SJP does not have to be disclosed. (Nor do the names of the donors, except privately to the IRS.) Since grantmaking foundations, like Ford or Rockefeller, are required to report the names of and amounts they give to their grantees, the Ways and Means Committee should consider requiring other kinds of grantmaking organizations, including “fiscal sponsors,” to do likewise.

Those are reasonable starting points, but as I’ve also noted in the past, the tax code is quite clear that funding any illegal activity, including illegal protests, is a violation of tax-exempt non-profit status.

The IRS had previously found that the tax code bans funding of anti-war groups or any organization whose “primary activity is the sponsoring of…protest demonstrations in which demonstrators are urged to commit violations of local ordinances and breaches of public order.”

Such organizations don’t “qualify for exemption under section 501(c)(3) or (4) of the Code.”

IfNotNow and other anti-Israel protest groups are one of many leftist organizations whose very existence is a violation of IRS regulations. But above and beyond the tax code, Soros is knowingly funding riots and illegal activities by hate groups with a long history of such activities.

On Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, anti-Israel protesters were arrested for blocking traffic at an event cosponsored by Adalah, a BDS group which helped produce the BLM platform calling for a boycott of Israel, and has received $1.5 million from Soros, as well as by JVP and IfNotNow.

In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Hamas supporters gathered for a “Flood Brooklyn for Palestine” hate rally whose name echoed “Al Aqsa Flood”: the Hamas name for its butchery in Israel. 19 were arrested after NYPD officers were assaulted and hit with fireworks and bottles by the hate filled mob. Participating groups included Linda Sarsour’s Arab American Association of New York, which received $60,000 from the Soros network, as well as Samidoun: a terrorist front group banned by Israel and Germany, whose fiscal sponsor the Alliance for Global Justice received $250,000 from Soros in 2020. (This money may have been intended for AFGJ’s BLM groups.)

All of this is illegal. Dismantling the nonprofit terror network would simply be a matter of enforcing the law.

Sadly, no one is enforcing the law.

The IRS continues targeting conservative groups, like the Freedom Center, while letting rioters run loose.