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No one familiar with the state of modern academia can be much surprised by the wave of anti-Israel tent-city occupations sweeping US campuses — but that doesn’t make them 100% “organic.”
And The Post’s discovery that lefty philanthropists are funding student “protest leaders” may be just the tip of an iceberg.
Encampments at Harvard, Yale, UC-Berkeley, Ohio State and Emory in Georgia were organized by branches of Students for Justice in Palestine, which gets cash (some direct, some indirect) from the Soros family “charities” as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and retired Wall Street banker Felice Gelman.
Gelman and the Soroses also give to Jewish Voice for Peace and Within Our Lifetime, two more groups intimately involved in the protests.
At least three organizers — Malak Afaneh (Berkeley), Craig Birckhead-Morton (Yale) and Nidaa Lafi (University of Texas-Dallas) — are paid fellows of another lefty-philanthropy favorite, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
USCPR community and college fellows earn stipends of $2,880 to $7,800 for work organizing campaigns to demand cutting ties to Israel.
Though most of the campus occupiers are themselves plenty privileged, the “charitable giving” helps explain why the demonstrators get to protest in style: sleeping in Amazon-ordered tents, enjoying delivery pizza, coffee from Dunkin’, free sandwiches from Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips and $10 rotisserie chickens.
Abby Hoffman, eat your heart out: Campus agitators never had it so good.
Cash and leadership tips may come from other sources, too: At least one expert suspects foreign assistance, funding and influence based on the simultaneous protests hitting at Passover, the appearance of common tents at the encampments and the use of talking points similar to those of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.
And of course any “progressive” protest, especially in a college town or major city, is likely to attract plenty of “careerist” lefties who hang out near campuses for years or even decades after graduation (or dropping out); some (the non-“trustafarians”) even have real jobs.
That said, the Soros foundation has a long history of funding left-wing causes, from electing soft-on-crime prosecutors to pushing drug-decriminalization; countless other foundations like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund have fallen under far-left leadership over the years.
How much of these charities’ political “work” actually qualifies for tax-favored status is something the IRS and the Justice Department ought to be looking into.