OPINION:
If you weren’t sure about outside money stoking the mob scenes on our college campuses, what happened at Yale should remove all doubt. Most of the protesters were warned about arrests and expulsions. When they left, these student activists abandoned their expensive tents. After all, the mint-condition shelters weren’t theirs to begin with.
New York Mayor Eric Adams has confirmed that “outside agitators” were also calling the shots at Columbia, including the break-in and vandalism of a university administration building. Through all this madness, Columbia’s deanery has been the poster child for mishandling performative adolescent tantrums.
The top brass finally drew a line in the sand in front of the hummus bar. Doctoral student Johannah King-Slutzky, speaking for the campers, whined that the university didn’t “provide food for students who pay for a meal plan here.” Ms. King-Slutzky warned of “dehydration and starvation” to come, as though the siege would last months. She forgot to mention that protesters had been handing out what the Daily Mail described as “$12.50 sandwiches from Pret-a-Manger and $10 rotisserie chickens.” Someone paid for those, too.
Columbia also insisted that suspended protesters couldn’t continue eating at campus cafeterias. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 21-year-old daughter, Isra Hirsi, complained to Teen Vogue that after police released her, “there was no food support, no nothing” from the university. In Los Angeles, protesters demanded that UCLA provide them with vegan and gluten-free food at their campsite.
So, who’s paying for the tents, the food and everything else for these summer soldiers for Hamas? We may never know. That’s because of a tax code loophole called “fiscal sponsorship.” Ragtag activist groups can raise money through tax-deductible donations without having to register with the IRS if a larger nonprofit shares its 501(c)(3) tax status with them. Donors get a tax write-off for sending money through the larger organization. The rerouting of money makes it impossible to connect the dots through the spider web from donor to donee.
The U.S. Palestinian Community Network and Within Our Lifetime are examples. They’re both the beneficiaries of money moving through a New York charity called the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation. That organization won’t say publicly whose cash came from where. But it’s dark money, and it funds powder kegs where masked 19-year-olds pretend to demand a revolution alongside masked adults who want the real thing.
Zoom out, and the big picture gets more bizarre. Some of the Westchester group’s cash comes from a left-wing funding network in San Francisco called the Tides Foundation. Tides is a fiscal sponsor of hundreds of groups — another source of controlled sleight of hand. Mixed into that soup is more than $81 million in federal government funding over the last 18 years.
The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy has found more than $3 million moving around in these circles yearly. A group of survivors of the Oct. 7 attack sued two of the organizations last week, calling them Hamas front groups that are “intentionally extending their aid to fomenting chaos, violence, and terror in the United States.”
If all this financial misdirection feels familiar, it’s the same model that funded Occupy Wall Street, antifa riots, the violent 1990s uprising against the World Trade Organization, and the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle.
Police who patrol the campuses where these tent cities have sprung up should also provide names or, better yet, unmask the inhabitants by publishing mug shots. Colleges should expel them, refund their tuition and publish their names. Predictable lawsuits will meet juries that will give universities a pass for cleansing their campuses of students who tried to shut them down.
Some colleges have canceled in-person classes, closed campus libraries and changed the format of final exams. Levelheaded students (Jews and gentiles alike) aren’t getting their money’s worth, and they should be able to sue the agitators to recover wasted tuition. Hot spots for pro-Hamas screaming are expensive temples of learning that can cost $90,000 a year with room and board. The University of Phoenix will give you the same kind of online courses for less than $10,000.
Meanwhile, election-year politics are playing out under everyone’s noses. Liberal Democrats are twisting themselves into pretzels, trying to be supportive of both their Jewish constituents and the Palestinians. What they can’t explain is whether there’s any difference between being pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas. Polling published in March by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 70% of Palestinians approve of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre.
Worse yet, President Biden is reportedly interested in bringing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to the United States as legal immigrants. When has the pandering for votes been more nauseating?
• Rick Berman is president of RBB Strategies.
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