Antisemitic and antiwestern protests in the United States are backed and promoted by a largely decentralized network of agitators. This network is politically and financially supported by various progressive nonprofits, foundations and dark money groups ultimately backed by large donors aligned with the Democratic Party, explains Park Macdougald in a article published in Tablet in early May, during a wave of anti-Israel protests at several universities.

The university protests involved several far-left groups, including Antifa, the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) - part of the ANSWER Coalition. On April 29, Macdougald notes, shortly before masked assailants stormed and barricaded themselves inside Columbia University's Hamilton Hall, The People's Forum, a PSL-affiliated center funded by Neville Roy Singham, called for action. Singham, a wealthy businessman who "works closely with the Chinese government's media machine and is funding its propaganda around the world" according to the New York Times in August 2023, urged activists to go to Columbia to "support our students." Similar calls were made in radical networks throughout New York City.

According to a report in the New York Post, the encampment at Columbia University was organized primarily by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Within Our Lifetime (WOL).

JVP is part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. According to NGO Monitor, the group aims to create a rift within the American Jewish population to foster anti-Israel sentiment. The group's funding, notes NGO Monitor, is not all that transparent, while limited financial information is available from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Some known backers include the Kaphan Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and George Soros' Open Society Policy Center, among others. Additionally, JVP has received nearly $1,500,000 from various donor-advised funds, which enable anonymouos contributions through financial institutions.

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) describes SJP as the main student arm of the BDS movememt. JCPA stressed that SJP forms a terror-supporting antisemitic network that harasses and intimidates pro-Israel students and operates with autonomy and impunity at dozens of universities across the United States. Additionally, JCPA notes that SJP's founders, financial backers and ideological supporters have been linked to terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The JCPA highlighted that SJP is a product of the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), an organization whose leaders have ties to terrorist groups beyond Palestinians. AMP was founded in 2005 by former leaders of KindHearts, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). These organizations faced indictments from U.S. authorities between 2001 and 2011 due to connections with Islamist terrorist organizations. KindHearts, specifically an Islamic charity, was dissolved in 2012 under an agreement with the U.S. Treasury, which had frozen its assets for fundraising on behalf of Hamas.

In addition, AMP is believed to be a covert continuation of IAP, an organization founded with money from Musa Abu Marzook, a prominent Hamas leader. Both IAP and AMP were dissolved along with HLF.

Macdougald stated in his lengthy article that WESPAC currently serves as a fiscal sponsor of SJP. He explained that a fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit organization sponsors a smaller group, thereby granting the sponsor tax-exempt status and offering administrative support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsored organization's operations.

The sponsor and the sponsored being the same entity means that the sponsor is exempt from the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file appropriate documentation with the IRS. According to the Capital Research Center, this makes tax sponsorships a convenient method to mask links between donors and contentious causes.

The Influence Watch website notes that WESPAC, a center-left nonprofit organization supporting social reform advocacy, has aligned itself with the BDS movement, creating friction with the pro-Israel left, notably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL alleges that the majority of WESPAC's grants support groups that promote antisemitism. In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, the ADL criticized WESPAC and its grantees for organizing violent anti-Israel protests across the United States, which reportedloy featured pro-Hamas sentiments.

Regarding WESPAC's funding, Influence Watch reports that in 2021, the organization received just over $750,000 in contributions and grants, and it maintained net assets totaling just over $1,000,000.

WESPAC is also the fiscal sponsor of another group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), according to Macdougald. He  said that over the last eight months, WOL has emerged as the most notorious antisemitic group in the country. The organization has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. WOL has also been responsible for numerous anti-Israel demonstrations, some of which involved vandalism and traffic blockades.

According to the ADL, WOL is a radical anti-Israel organization based in New York, founded in 2015. The group consistently expresses support for violence against Israel and advocates for the abolition of Zionism.

Following the brutal Hamas terrorist massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, WOL and its co-founder and leader Nerdeen Kiswani have been sharing extreme anti-Zionist and antisemitic views on social media, protests, webinars and reports. In addition, Abdullah Akl, another prominent WOL leader is listed as a "field organizer" on MPower Change's website, an "advocacy project" run by Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour. Macdougald alleges that MPower Change, in turn, acts as a fiscal sponsor for the progressive organization NEO Philanthropy. Since 2021 alone, NEO Philanthropy and its affiliate NEO Philanthropy Active Fund have received over $37 million from Soros' Open Society Foundations, along with substantial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation and the Tides Foundation.

The Tides Foundation, part of Tides Nexus, is one of the largest progressive dark money networks in the country, overseeing assets exceeding $1 billion. According to Macdougald, major donors include Soros, Peter Buffett and his NoVo Foundation, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation and the New Venture Fund, controlled by Eric Kessler's Arabella Advisors - another Democratic dark money powerhouse. Consequently, their funding supports various radical pro-Palestinian organizations that have incited riots in streets and universities across the United States.

Macdougald explains that the progressive establishment has not only backed pro-Palestinian organizations but also heavily funded protesters like Just Stop Oil! and the Sunrise Movement. These efforts resulted in concessions from the Biden administration, such as establishing the American Climate Corps, a national service aimed at combating climate change. Additionally, Macdougald notes there were significant investments in Black Lives Matter and various bailout funds linked to the violent summer of 2020.

Fighting in the Democratic Party

Kyle Shideler, director of national security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on left-wing domestic extremism, told Macdougald that the primary aim behind funding anti-Israel protests relates more to an internal power struggle within the Democratic Party than to what is happening in the Middle East. According to Schideler, there is an ongoing power struggle within the party, pitting the progressive wing against the remnants of the old Clintonian establishment. He claims that the more left-leaning faction has already emerged victorious and is using these protests to communicate to members of the opposing Democratic camp that this is the party's new direction, demanding their adaptation to this era or facing potention elimination. 

Macdougald points out that this is where Tides' funding of the protests plays a significant role. He adds that the organization has become closely alighned with the emerging Obama faction within the Democratic Party.

Macdougald argues that it is not coincidental that an Obama-linked philanthropic dark-money empire is funding a protest movement aimed at undermining U.S. support for Israel's actions against Hamas. He further emphasizes that an Israeli victory in this war would setback the Obama-Biden project of realigning with Iran, which remains the current administration's current but unacknowledged strategy in the Middle East.

Qatar's influence

The success of the reprehensible antisemitic and pro-Hamas demonstrations on U.S. campuses is attributed to the fact that they are not spontaneous at all, but are well organized and funded from abroad, explained Dr. Yaron Friedman, a researcher at the University of Haifa in Israel, in an article published by the Israeli newspaper Maariv.

Friedman argued that to uncover the orchestrators behind the protests, one must go back to 2019, when a coalition of Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt boycotted Qatar for supporting terrorism.

During the Qatar boycott period, unlike today, Arab commentators and journalists published articles exposing the principality's propaganda in the United States and the money invested by Qataris in American schools. 

Before the reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the press in the coalition countries was actively publicizing how the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist Islamic organization, had gained influence in the U.S. education system.

Friedman recalled that in July 2020, Emirati researcher Najat AlSaied published an article in the Alhurra newspaper titled Qatar and the Funding of U.S. Universities. In her article, AlSaied described the strange alliance formed between the U.S. radical left and Muslim Brotherhood activists in Qatar. She also highloighted that an increasing number of professors and students involved in this alliance were influencing the freedom of thought in U.S. universities.

Dr. AlSaied argued that under the pretext of "political correctness" and alleged "racist thinking," academics who attempted to express an opinion differing from those held by professors and students aligned with the alliance of radical leftism and Islamism faced suppression. In her article, she mentioned shocking data from the U.S. Department of Education, which reported that in 2019 U.S. schools received more than $1 billion in external funding, nobably from Qatar.

In 2012, the Qatar Foundation, the Qatari international education institution, invested at least $1.5 billion to fund educational initiatives at 28 universities across the United States, becoming the largest external funder of education in the in the in the country. AlSaied further revealed that Qatar regularly spent $405,000,000 a year to fund activities at six U.S. universities with branches in Doha, the capital of Qatar. 

Friedman stressed in his article Qatar is currently funding activities and research as a way to spread its Islamist ideology. He added that Qatar is a country grounded in an extremist Wahhabi doctrine and that Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the current emir of Qatar, was heavily influenced by the teachings of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood who lived in Qatar until he died in 2022.

AlSaied claimed in her article that Qatari propaganda aims to glorify Qatar and defame its rivals, mainly Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. She explained that Qatari funding is intended to support the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States and the radical left. 

She further argued that Qatar strengthened U.S. progressives because conservatives opposed Doha and supported its rivals, including Saudi Arabia.

According to a recent report by the Washington Free Beacon, Qatar has invested $5.6 billion in 81 U.S. universities since 2007, including the most prestigious: Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Stanford.

The report also mentions the funding of academic activities by other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Oman and Turkey, although in significantly smaller amounts. According to the report, these activities funded by Qatar and these other Middle Eastern countries promote hostility toward Western culture values, such as freedom of speech and women's rights.

According to a 2020 U.S. Department of Education report, many of the grants given to U.S. academic institutions came from countries openly hostile to the U.S.

The Washington Free Beacon report further indicated that Middle Eastern donors, especially Qatar, funded anti-Israeli activities, even before the war in Gaza began following the October 7 massacre carried out by Hamas.

The extreme left and radical Islamism want the U.S. to change sides.

In conclusion, the fudning for the violent antisemitic and anti-Western protests originates from a network of leftist organizations and Qatar.

The goal of these demonstrations, which unite leftist extremists and radical Islamists, is to strengthen the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party and to pressure the United States to withdraw support for Israel, aligning with the enemies of the free world.

While it is understandable that radical Islamists seek the destruction of America, it is striking that the far left continues to act in a way that, if successful, would undermine the very values of freedom that sustain its existence. In other words, the extreme left does not understand that its actions could lead to its own demise.