WELL, WHO ELSE? THE BOOGEYMAN HIMSELF!
AND DON’T YOU DARE PLAY THE ‘ANTI-SEMITE’ CARD BECAUSE I’M JEWISH!
From townhall.com
Pull back the curtain, and you’ll invariably find that all roads lead to Soros.
We were told by the language police that any and all criticism of Democrat mega-donor George Soros, a Jewish-born Holocaust survivor and champion of left-wing causes, is inherently “anti-Semitic” and fuels the conspiratorial trope that Jews control society.
What is anti-Semitic, though: the 21st-century robber baron’s so-called philanthropy is financing (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars) anti-Israel activism aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish state—and with it, the expungement of its people.
Wednesday’s storming of a congressional building situated on the U.S. Capitol complex, where a mob of allegedly violent Hamas sympathizers infiltrated the Cannon House Office Building rotunda, resulting in multiple arrests for assaulting police officers, was organized by two Soros-backed, nominally “Jewish” non-profits: the radical Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and far-left agitator IfNotNow.
Through Soros’s philanthropic work, JVP was awarded several grants totaling $650,000 that bankrolled its “human rights” campaign and “social welfare activities” in the Middle East, according to a grant database maintained by the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, the central hub of the financier’s anti-capitalist, redistributionist network. The Soros-branded Open Society Policy Center Inc. — once the second-largest spender on federal lobbying after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — donated $150,000 and $200,000 in 2021 and 2019, respectively, to the Jewish Voice for Peace Action Incorporated, JVP’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3). And, in 2017, Soros’s primary grant-giving vehicle, the Foundation to Promote Open Society, gifted JVP $300,000.
Jewish Voice for Peace grants | Source: Open Society Foundations website
As Spencer points out, like its Orwellian title, JVP does not act in good faith. The Jewish-in-name-only JVP is not Jewish, nor is it peace-seeking; JVP is as opportunistically “Jew-ish” as George Santos and as peaceful as the fiery Black Lives Matter protests.
“Deploying its ‘Jewish’ identity in attacking Israel is JVP’s métier, one might say its purpose. The cutting edge of this work […] is to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism…” Commentary contributor Joshua Muravchik explains in a deep-dive on JVP’s duplicitous nature. “Were it not for the strategic advantage of speaking ‘as Jews,’ it is likely that some of the self-described ‘progressive and leftist’ activists who constitute JVP’s membership would have little interest in belonging to a Jewish organization.” Indeed, some JVP’s members are not Jews. Rather, it’s a collection of radical-left ideologues “who realize that their lineage affords special leverage in attacking Israel,” Muravchik puts it. “Nowhere does JVP evince any genuine interest in Judaism or in the well-being of the Jewish people or any reverence for the accouterments of Jewish life — holidays, prayers, ceremonial garments, Hebrew words — that it appropriates as props or adornments in its impassioned campaign for Palestinian vanquishment of Israel.”
On its old FAQ page, prior to revisions, JVP acknowledged, “No you don’t” “have to be Jewish to join.” Simply, JVP is “inspired by Jewish values and traditions.”
“JVP misappropriates Jewish tradition by adapting Jewish rites and texts to fit its extreme political message,” Honest Reporting illuminates. Still, self-identifying as the “Jewish wing” of the “Palestinian solidarity movement,” JVP purports to represent “a mainstream” consortium of Jews, and so it seems to the untrained eye. However, JVP supports boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to undermine Israel’s legitimacy, explicitly desiring to drive “a wedge” within the American Jewish community to cause division, generate polarization, and weaken U.S. support — economic, military, and political — for Israel. JVP’s executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson admitted to the tactic at a 2013 Stanford University forum: “So, I think that the more and more we can sort of put that wedge in, saying the Jewish community’s not agreeing on these issues, the more we’ll make progress.”
JVP’s board has officially adopted the declaration: “We unequivocally oppose Zionism…” Well, what does it mean to oppose Zionism? It means opposition to Israel’s existence, specifically its existence as a Jewish state a.k.a. Israel’s abolition. Striking an Ibram X. Kendi-esque tone, JVP campus coordinator Ben Lorber equated “anti-Zionism” with “anti-racism, plain and simple. So if you don’t support anti-Zionist causes[,] then you are enabling racism.” JVP deputy director Cecile Surasky took it a step further in a 2015 blog post, arguing that “settler colonialism and white supremacy is [sic] the right, holistic frame with which to understand Israel” and that Israel’s “mythical national narrative” makes “ethnic cleansing, even genocide…divinely justified.”
JVP at-large posits that Zionism is fundamentally racist. In 2016, JVP convened a panel, entitled “The Toxic Stew: Zionism, Antisemitism, and White Supremacy.” One of the speakers asserted that Zionism “means white supremacy.” Another claimed there’s a “real and conceptual connection between Zionism and American white supremacy and Jim Crow white supremacy.”
Accordingly, JVP has established a Network Against Islamophobia (NAI) as a major project. NAI offers workshops and modules committed to “Challenging Islamophobia and Anti-Black Racism.” JVP’s project has commissioned the creation of merchandise, selling apparel like T-shirts, hoodies, onesies, aprons, boxers, baseball caps, tote bags, keychains, and dog jackets, which are emblazoned with bumper-sticker slogans, such as “Stop Profiling Muslims,” “Standing with Muslims Against Islamophobia and Racism,” “Free Palestine,” and “Property of Allah,” an eyebrow-raising sweatshirt decal for a group professing to be Jewish.Even the leftist Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has denounced JVP as a political actor “Increasing Anti-Israel Radicalism.”
JVP’s insistence that commentary critical of Israel cannot be anti-Semitic “gives cover to anti-Semites who couch their malice toward Jews as mere anti-Zionism,” ADL assesses. When it comes to the scourge of Jewish hatred, JVP oft-spreads anti-Semitic canards. Last year, JVP featured on its Instagram account a political cartoon by Bahraini artist Sara Qaed that conjured “anti-Jewish blood libel of the Middle Ages.” The crude illustration depicts Israel Defense Forces soldiers drinking blood to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day, raising blood-filled glasses in a toast as the bodies of Palestinians are strewn across the blood-soaked ground. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum encylopedia definition, the term “blood libel” refers to ritual-murder imagery falsely claiming that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish victims, usually Christian children, for ritualistic purposes. Nazis historically employed the anti-Semitic propaganda to demonize, dehumanize, and persecute Jews.
At its 2017 national conference, JVP “honored” convicted Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted for her involvement in a bombing of an Israeli supermarket that killed two Hebrew University students.
In 2019, JVP stood by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a member of the derisively dubbed “Hamas Caucus” and “Jihad Squad,” with the hashtag “#IStandWithIlhan” amid uproar over the congresswoman’s 2012 tweet, in which Omar wrote: “Israel has hypnotized the world.” Omar’s antisemitic comment culminated in the passage of a U.S. House resolution condemning “religious hatred.”
Also in 2019, JVP’s political and advocacy arm Jewish Vote for Peace, hosted “Shabbat in the Park” with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), whom the organization praised as a “hero for justice,” after the lawmaker refused to travel to Israel, opting to grandstand instead of visiting her own elderly grandmother despite being granted permission by Jerusalem on humanitarian grounds. Tlaib was offered the exception as long as she would not promote boycotts against Israel during the PR stunt masked as a family trip.
IfNotNow
As for IfNotNow, Soros’s grant-making Foundation to Promote Open Society handed $200,000 in 2019 and another $200,000 in 2021 to the 501(c)(3) IfNotNow Education Fund for growing membership, visibility, and impact around “general support” to end Israeli “occupation in the Middle East” (meaning the eradication of Israel), Open Society Foundations grant recordsshow.
IfNotNow grants | Source: Open Society Foundations websiteSimilarly, IfNotNow claims to be an “American Jewish establishment,” also co-opting Jewish rituals, but it’s a fringe movement focused on antagonizing real Jewish organizations by staging sit-down demonstrations outside major U.S. Jewish institutions nationwide while, at the same time, it refuses to engage in dialogue with Jewish leaders to actually discuss the issues at hand.
Along with an ambivalent attitude toward the threat of terrorism targeting Israeli citizens, IfNotNow has a history of blurring the line between terrorist and civilian fatalities, plus providing a platform for terrorists and the terror-minded (via Honest Reporting):
In both 2014 and 2021, INN held public readings of the Kaddish mourner’s prayer for Israelis and Palestinians killed during Israeli counter-terror operations in Gaza. However, listed among the names of those whom they were mourning were members of the internationally recognized terror groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Similarly, in May 2019, INN responded to a tweet about five Palestinians killed during an Israeli operation to counter a rise in Gazan rocket attacks, saying that it was “heartbreaking.” Among those Palestinians listed in the tweet was Mohammad Nseir, a member of the small Islamist group Kataeb Humat al-Aqsa’s rocket-launching unit.
[…]
As part of its education initiative, INN released its “Liberation Syllabus,” providing a list of books from both Palestinian and Israeli writers for integration into Jewish education systems.
One of these recommended books was authored by Ghassan Kanafani, a spokesperson for the internationally recognized PFLP terror organization.
INN has also teamed up with American Muslims for Palestine, a Chicago-based organization that endorses anti-Israeli violence and terrorism as legitimate forms of “resistance.”
IfNotNow’s Detroit chapter reportedly shared an event graphic containing an image of a paraglider, a reference to the armed Hamas terrorists using the aircraft to paraglide across the Gaza Strip border and mass murder hundreds of attendees at an Israeli music festival. Executed on the spot, droves of innocent victims were gunned down in fields, ditches, roads, and portable toilets attempting to flee the open-air Tribe of Nova rave near Gaza. 260 bodies were initially found on the site of the Oct. 7 massacre.
Back in 2019, IfNotNow was also a participant in the #StandwithIlhan efforts.
