Funding Dissent
How Foreign Money Leads to Decentralized Protests
Since the terrorist attack of October 7th, NYC has been hit with a wave of constant protests, sometimes reaching upwards of five separate protests per day. Large crowds wearing masks and keffiyehs have shut down Grand Central Station, blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, and occupied a building at Columbia University.
Confusion is widespread regarding what is happening, who is in charge, who is funding these protests, and the various pipelines of influence. While the bigger picture is a convergence of foreign and domestic influences, U.S. education is one of several pipelines into this mess that has a direct influence on young minds.
Foreign Influence in Education
A story from the Free Press serves as a perfect canary in the coal mine to understand the role of foreign donations into American schools and how it plays a direct role.
In Early January, the Free Press broke a story about a Brooklyn public school who had a map of the Middle East displayed in a classroom that did not include the State of Israel.
As Middle Eastern dollars have flowed into the US education system over the last two decades, our education system as a whole has become more anti-Israel, anti-Western, and even more pro-Middle East. Student activist groups like Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP) serve as the incubator for the “adult” organizations who are blocking our bridges, vandalizing the NY Public Library, and recently targeted Memorial Sloan Kettering (a children’s cancer hospital), for the crime of accepting a donation from a Jew who supports Israel.
The map that erased Israel from existence was produced by Ruman, an Arab education company, and found in a classroom for an “Arab Culture Arts” program that was directly funded by the Qatar Foundation International (QFI), the American branch of a nonprofit owned by the ruling family of Qatar. QFI has donated more than $1M to NYC’s Department of Education since 2019, and within this scope were $241K in donations to fund Arabic language programs split across two schools including the one in question.
Qatar, the country that serves as the safe haven for Hamas leadership, and the main source of the majority of the world’s terrorist propaganda, now provides materials directly to NYC’s children that deny the existence of Israel. By providing misleading information about the Middle East to NYC schools, the seeds of doubt are planted directly into the minds of our children. Not only are young, impressionable minds being forced to grapple with the heated debate on whether Israel has a right to exist, but in this case, if Israel even exists at all. Nonetheless, all of this is happening in the home of the largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel, and in the borough that serves as home to nearly half of NYC’s Jewish population.
If you think Qatar’s influence on a Brooklyn public school is where it stops, I have a bridge to sell you.
The map story is merely a symptom of the much larger cancer that has taken hold of our education system. A report from the American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) shows that the top donors to American Universities are now Middle Eastern countries with Qatar being the top donor with roughly $5B in donations, followed by Saudi Arabia with $3B.
Carnegie Mellon (who has a branch in Qatar) has received the lion's share of these donations, topping in at $1.4B. Georgetown University has received $831M. Harvard and NYU have received a combined $400M.
The Middle Eastern donations to college campuses have a surge period from 2014-2020 representing 29% of all foreign donations that planted the seeds for the growing anti-Israel sentiment and confusion regarding the intentions of Jihadists that we are seeing today on college campuses across the country.
Donations of this scale obviously risk coming with strings attached, and are clearly being used to influence both teachers and their students’ opinion about Israel with great success.
While we will never know if establishing Middle Eastern Studies programs was a condition of foreign donations, or if staffing those classes with teachers with anti-western values were also part of the deal, it is apparent that the broader shift in America’s position on Islamic extremism has softened dramatically in the decades post-911, especially on college campuses.
America’s Post-911 Cultural Shift
After 9/11, college campuses across the country rapidly shifted gears into Islamophobia mode, and interest in Middle Eastern Studies exploded. That demand was then filled by the type of Islamic radical apologists that are now completely common in academia today. One Harvard Scholar writes:
“America is ill served by the way in which the Middle East is studied and presented at institutions of higher education across the nation. The academic understanding of the Middle East is framed not by the realities of the region, but by the fads and fashions that have swept through the disciplines. Many practitioners are members of the “left- over left,” infused with third worldist biases. Many of the academics who hail from the region are still caught up in the passion of its discredited causes. There is a widespread sympathy for Middle Eastern radicalism and an abiding suspicion of America’s global role.
As Dr. Kramer demonstrates, these biases have produced a distorted perception of change in the Middle East. If one had read only the analyses of academics over the last two decades, one would have concluded that Islamic movements were moderate forces of democratization, and that “civil society” was about to sweep away authoritarian regimes.”
In 2020, as foreign donations poured into American universities, the federal government finally passed a much-needed law to require schools to report all funding streams but many colleges have failed to comply with their request. While the intentions of the bill were good, it failed to yield 100% compliance. This lack of transparency is problematic on a multitude of levels, not just regarding the influence of the Middle East, but with all countries who have an adversarial relationship with the United States.
We might not have a full accounting of all of the Middle Eastern money in education, or know how it was spent, but we do know what has trended on college campuses post-9/11 because we can see it with our own eyes.
Foreign Studies programs (including Middle Eastern Studies), and student activist groups have become all the rage in recent years. Middle Eastern studies classes coincidentally foster more interest in Middle Eastern student activist groups, and new Middle Eastern students join the Middle Eastern activist groups in search of community.
Political trends in America are never set in stone, they drift towards whatever powers have the most gravitational pull at the moment. That power is determined by funding, growth of influence, and support from the White House and the mainstream left. Since 9/11, the mainstream American positions on Middle Eastern issues were framed by CAIR, largely due to their partnership with the White House.
The messaging put forwards by CAIR were centered around the themes that Muslims are victims of the West, both in America and abroad, and that in the wake of 9-11, we must remain focused on the biggest problem: Islamophobia. This partnership recently came to an end, when the White House publicly disavowed CAIR for their support of the October 7th attacks.
The Rise of Student Activist Groups
Student activist groups across the country serve as the incubation stage to the larger pro-Palestine organizations and nonprofits, which are the current rising stars of the social justice industrial complex. Take for example, CUNY Student Justice for Palestine. In 2014, the co-president of Students for Justice in Palestine at CUNY Staten Island was none other than Nerdeen Kiswani, the co-founder of Within Our Lifetime, both of which are the prominent organizations in NYC’s current wave of disruptive pro-Palestine protests.
While at college, student activist groups get to use school resources and channels to amplify their reach, practice political organizing, and grow the support for their cause. Once these same people graduate and can no longer use those school resources, they join other existing political organizations or create their own. In CUNY’s case, school resources helped Nerdeen Kiswani found Students For Justice in Palestine. Over time, Nerdeen pushed farther into the extremes and her own organization was not radical enough for her worldviews, forcing her to found her own group, Within Our Lifetime, which could operate outside of school boundaries. The trajectory of this project is that the student group becomes the adult social justice org, which once out onto the center stage of social justice nonprofits has the ability to access government funding by the millions and politically aligned-NGO money by the billions.
Social Justice Industrial Complex
To quote retired NYPD homicide detective Pete Pannuccio: “NYC’s Social Justice Industrial Complex is the Miracle-Gro of political corruption.”
The Metro area currently has 1,044 civil rights organizations that employ 6,511 individuals, have over $4B in assets, and receive funding from City and State Grants, City Council discretionary funds, and the largest NGOs in the country including, of course, the Ford Foundation, Open Societies, and the Tides Foundation.
Social justice nonprofits don’t have the same type of restrictions and supervision of corporate jobs that keep employees at their desk. In the case of pro-Palestine organizations like Linda Sarsour’s M-Power Change, or “Jews Against Israel” organizations like JFREJ or Jewish Voice For Peace, protesting is actually part of their jobs because it helps grow support for their stated goals. This affluent group of social justice professionals have salaries that pay higher than average, often work from home, have very few clear deliverables for their job, and are in a sense, paid protesters whose salary comes from a combination of NGO money, State and City grants, and private donations. To be more blunt, “Advocacy” organizations at large do not have clear deliverables that require them to work, protesting and influencing young people’s perception about a subject is their job (climate activist groups, criminal justice advocacy groups, immigrant advocacy groups, etc).
How Decentralized Protests Work
While the events of October 7th were still happening, a since deleted tweet from NYC’s chapter of the DSA posted that they would be gathering in Times Square in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid. However, upon my arrival at the event, there were no DSA banners present, no way to know how many of their 49,000 followers showed up, and no way to know if any of their elected officials were in attendance because so many people were wearing masks.
This largely attended event, as well as the other protests we are seeing in NYC are not organized in the traditional sense, but aggressively promoted by 25+ organizations and an infinite echo chamber of secondary and third groups.
By promoting the event but not waving their own banner, many of the larger groups are able to maintain plausible deniability if someone waves a Nazi flag, property gets destroyed, or a Jew is assaulted. They have figured out a way to hack the system where a network of 25+ organizations can promote the same event, yet none are held responsible for the damages.
The best way to describe the current protest movement is America’s rising socialist political movement has converged with CCP-affiliated groups, far-left NGO dark money groups, Islamic militants, and homegrown revolutionaries.
Who else shows up?
As social justice has become social currency and this cause in specific is AOC approved, a lot of people are showing up to the NYC protests. Besides the members of the aligned organizations that you see on all of the flyers, many people in the crowds are employees of NYC’s Social Justice Industrial Complex that are technically at work if they are protesting.
Others are best described simply as people who have been infected with the rampant antisemitism that has taken hold of academia in recent years, ranging from college professors at all of NYC’s top schools to permanent protestor types like the smug anti-white activist Rudy Martinez, who was spotted blocking the road to JFK only days after being spotted at another protest as it marched toward Union Square. The faction of the protests that cosplay as jihadists appear to be disenfranchised young Muslim men who are openly sympathetic toward Islamic extremism.
Conclusion
I know it’s hard to make sense about how Qatari money influenced our schools, who influenced our youth, who then become social-justice obsessed student activists, who then become nonprofits that sympathize with Islam’s war against the West, but subversion projects by foreign governments that have no timeline aren’t supposed to make sense to the average person. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
The quote “The Americans have the watches, but we have all the time” by Taliban Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi reminds us that we are too caught up in our bubbles to comprehend the long term strategies of our enemies, especially America’s liberal elites who are uncomfortable even admitting that enemies exist.
The question we need to be asking ourselves is how do we stop this?
NYC needs to seriously begin enforcing laws regarding protests without permits, without fear of backlash for being aggressive.
More serious charges need to be filed against all who organize and promote protests that break federal laws like blocking interstate travel and purposefully trying to disrupt air travel at airports.
NYC’s social justice industrial complex is heavily funded by discretionary funds provided by the City Council, a report by Seth Barron from 2019 shows that each of the 51 NYC Council members received $2M in discretionary funding that they could then spend on whatever they want. Whatever portion of this money that goes towards far-left social justice nonprofits that encourage their employees to protest are in fact leading to taxpayer funded protests.
The City Council needs to pass a bill that for every nonprofit that receives city funding, it gets immediately listed on a website along with the 990 so the public can see how the funds are disbursed. This way when we see employees of social justice nonprofits protesting during work hours while being funded by tax dollars, we can finally shine a light on this harmful practice. Our tax dollars are being used to pay handsome salaries for pseudo-government workers to make life hell for taxpayers who just want to get home but can’t because nonprofit workers have occupied the Brooklyn Bridge.