A Slush Fund for Radical Protesters?

The profusion of identical green tents at this spring’s anti-Israel protests struck many as odd. “Why is everybody’s tent the same?,” asked New York mayor Eric Adams. Like others, the mayor suspected “a well-concerted organizing effort” driving the protests. More recent reporting shows a concerted push behind the Gaza protest movement. But it is not as simple as a single organization secretly rallying protesters or buying tents. Instead, the movement’s most determined activists represent a network of loosely linked far-left groups. Some are openly affiliated with well-known progressive nonprofits; others work in the shadows.

As the Gaza protests spread across U.S. college campuses, many observers noted an eerie uniformity among them.

From one campus to the next, protesters operated in disciplined cadres, keeping their faces covered and using identical rote phrases as they refused to talk with reporters.

At Columbia University and elsewhere, protesters formed "Liberated zones," from which "Zionists" were excluded.

We've seen these tactics before-notably during the "Mostly peaceful" Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, when full-time agitators helped ignite riots, set up a police-free zone in Seattle, and laid nightly siege to Portland, Oregon's federal courthouse.

In a remarkable work of reporting, Park MacDougald recently traced the tangled roots of organizations backing pro-jihad protests, both on and off campuses.

As the Columbia protests intensified, the center urged members to head uptown to "Support our students." Following the money trail of other protest groups, MacDougald finds connections to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and-surprising no one-the George Soros-backed Tides Foundation.

Of course, the current wave of anti-Israel protests also involves alliances with pro-Hamas organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.

At Columbia, the New York Times spotted a woman old enough to be a student's grandmother in the thick of the action as protesters barricaded that school's Hamilton Hall.

The CJA website proclaims: "The path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine." MacDougald notes that the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, one of CJA's affiliated groups, "Organized an illegal anti-Israel protest in the Capitol Rotunda in December at which more than 50 activists were arrested." The CJA website also includes a section dedicated to the cause known as Stop Cop City.

With graduation behind them, most of the anti-Israel college protesters have stowed away their keffiyehs and moved on to summer vacations or internships. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-slush-fund-for-radical-protesters