This includes one that is both ironic, given the context, and highly misleading.
The New York Post offers the most useful summary of this claim in the headline of an article published Friday: “George Soros Pays Radical Students Fueling Nationwide Explosion of Anti-Israel Hate Protests.” This claim that the students are being funded by Soros – a Holocaust survivor who is one of the right’s favorite bogeymen thanks to his huge donations to left-wing groups – has been repeated and repeated. somewhere elseAlso.
In itself, this reflects the idea that student activism is necessarily insincere or is due to young people being deceived. Claims that Soros is the driving force behind political or social movements have also been identified as closely linked to anti-Semitism or explicitly anti-Semitic, given historical tropes of wealthy Jews controlling the world.
So here, this anti-Semitic framework is being deployed to undermine protests on college campuses…which have repeatedly been characterized as anti-Semitic.
More importantly, it’s simply not true. Or, more precisely, the connection between the protests and the funding of Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) is so tenuous as to be patently artificial.
One might start by asking what Soros is theoretically paying for. After all, they’re just kids setting up tents on a college campus. The allegation that Soros sends students to Columbia University (for example) and covers the $68,000 tuition?
The New York Post article suggests other ways this largesse apparently manifests itself.
“Money from Soros and his cronies was crucial in the protests in Colombia that sparked the nationwide copycat protests,” it read, later describing the scene at Columbia: “Students sleep in tents apparently ordered on Amazon and benefit from the delivery of pizzas and coffees from Amazon. Dunkin’, free sandwiches worth $12.50 at Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips and rotisserie chickens for $10.
The “tents from Amazon” line is a nod to a theory circulating on right-wing social media that someone is buying all these tents for students, as if it were otherwise impossible for a student to buy a $20 tent on your own. . Please note, there is no proof that the other products mentioned were purchased by a billionaire donor, but the New York Post recently had fun calling the food “luxurious” by asking “(who) who or what organization is behind this food. food delivery.” Obviously, no average person could have purchased Dunkin donuts.
But let’s get back to this “money from Soros and his acolytes”. At no point does the Post article demonstrate how crucial this alleged money was, simply listing organizations that were involved to some extent in the protests and tracing their funding to OSF.
Take the American Campaign for Palestinian Rights group. According to the New York Post, it has a scholarship program that includes three people who have participated in rallies on college campuses. In one illustration, the three are identified as “paid protesters,” suggesting that their motivation for participating is money and not the opinions that led them to apply for the scholarship in the first place.
“George Soros and his far-left acolytes are paying off agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at universities across the country,” the story hyperventilates. Finally, he describes how.
The American Campaign for Palestinian Rights is registered with the IRS as Education for a Just Peace in the Middle East (EJP). And EJP received grants from OSF.
The largest amount was $300,000, paid in 2018. In that fiscal year, EJP generated just over $1 million in revenue. She spent about $1.3 million, meaning she operated at a loss. In fiscal year 2019, its net assets were approximately $165,000, meaning much of that OSF grant had already been spent.
EJP also received a $150,000 OSF grant in 2021 and a two-year $250,000 grant in 2022. The New York Post’s suggestion (echoing one published earlier in the week) by the Wall Street Journal) is that this money went to these “paid protesters”. But money is fungible. During those years, the organization also spent $2.4 million, at least $2 million of which did not come from OSF.
If the campus fellows identified by the New York Post receive the same salary as those currently eligible to apply for these positions, the total one-time cost to the American Campaign for Palestinian Rights is approximately $10,000. The scholarship holders identified in the article are also not always scholarship holders. A spokesperson for the organization confirmed in an email to The Washington Post that the people in the New York Post article were from last year’s class. In other words, they are no longer “paid” at all.
The New York Post article also accuses Students for Justice in Palestine of being “funded by Soros” and fundamentally involved in the protests. (The fact that the protests metastasized nationally only after police raided the Columbia encampment calls into question the idea that this is top-down, but so be it.) So where does Soros’ money come from?
Well, the story claims that Students for Justice in Palestine is funded by the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, or WESPAC. And WESPAC received $132,000 from the Tides Foundation at one point. And the Tides Foundation has received millions of dollars in funding from OSF over the years.
It is true that the Tides Foundation has received more than $11 million in OSF grants since 2017. It is also true that the Tides Foundation reported $298 million in revenue…in fiscal year 2017 alone. ‘OSF totals less than 0.3% of Tides’ revenues from 2017 to 2022.
Regardless, Students for Justice in Palestine denies receiving money from WESPAC, and there is no public indication of this. In a statement to the Washington Post, a representative for the group said the foundation “does not fund or influence our organization’s political activity, but rather extends its legal tax-exempt status to us in order to support our mission.”
“We refuse to respond to baseless claims regarding our funding in the midst of a U.S.-financed, militarily and politically supported genocide,” the statement concluded.
The group Jewish Voice for Peace, also identified in the New York Post article, has received OSF grants in recent years, both for its 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) , the latter being able to engage in political advocacy. But again, the problem is one of scale. From 2017 to 2022, the two organizations received $875,000 from OSF and, over that period, spent $19.6 million. OSF money represented less than 5 percent of the total spent.
It’s all very vague, as we must be when evaluating specific claims. With hindsight, the allegations do not become more convincing. Soros (or rather the foundation he created) gave money to organizations a few years ago to influence the protests that emerged in response to the six-month war in Gaza? Even if OSF money directly funded the $3,300 stipends of these three campus scholars, we’re supposed to ask: What? That even though none of them attend Columbia, this is all their fault? That this is intentional in some way?
What we’re supposed to think, of course, is something simpler. Soros is a nefarious character determined to use his wealth to reshape the world in his image, an impulse that manifests here by being something of a driving force behind the protests (or, at least, the donut giver). These are just vague insinuations leveraging hackneyed rhetoric and a pre-existing visceral response to the Jewish billionaire.
There is a term for allegations like that.
This article has been updated with information from the American Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
washingtonpost
