The Hidden Nexus with Iran
During his address to Congress last month, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called out Iran for funding and promoting anti-Israel protests across America, calling the protestors Iran’s “useful idiots.” A closer look at the list of left-wing billionaire donors who fund the anti-Israel protest network in the United States reveals the strong pro-Iranian leanings among these donors, and the likely source of this alignment.
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A New York City rally last week that was supposed to be a power-packed event, drawing top Democratic leaders in support of Vice President Harris, went off the rails as a mob clad in keffiyehs burst on the scene.
They set off smoke bombs, shouting anti-Israel slogans and wreaking havoc on a nearby restaurant, causing thousands of dollars in damages. NYPD moved in to restore order, arresting at least 14 of the rioters, reported the NY Post. But the rally fizzled out soon after, with Harris nowhere to be seen.
On the heels of that disaster, the NY Times ran an ominous story headlined, “Protesters are Converging on Chicago. City leaders say they are Prepared.” The article referenced the 1968 riots in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention there, with pictures capturing rioters protesting the Vietnam War violently clashing with police.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker was asked by CNN if he anticipated that anti-Israel protests at the Democratic National Convention this week would foment similar chaos.
Pritzker waved aside these concerns, saying he believed the protests would be peaceful. “The fact is that the vast majority of people who are protesting are, you know, peaceful protesters. They want to have their voices heard,” he said.
Businesses were quick to take precautions nonetheless. “Store owners have boarded up their windows, in anticipation of riots similar to those seen in 2020 following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis,” wrote Fox News.
“They know how much the left loves to window-smash, and the Hamas-lovers have won the right to do two major marches near the DNC on Monday, when President Biden speaks, and Thursday, when Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to do so,” a New York Post op-ed observed.
Democrats Apprehensive About the Far Left
In line with shop owners, Democrat leaders, too, were anxious about how violent anti-Israel activity during the national convention might play out. They feared a repeat of the infamous 1968 DNC convention that saw anti-war riots sweep Chicago, with rioters brawling with police officers, looting, burning and wreaking wanton destruction across the city.
In the weeks preceding the convention, to protect themselves from hard left activists whose ranks are filled with veterans of “violent-as-possible” protests, Democratic organizers erected a massive ‘security zone’ consisting of multiple layers of fencing to frustrate any violent or hostile group activity.
In addition, DNC leaders herded all the various groups together into a single coalition of over 200 different protest groups, all sharing an umbrella with left-wing and Arab-and Muslim-American organizations venting their fury at the Biden-Harris administration’s support for the Jewish state.
Merging with the Arab/Muslim/Palestinian groups were protesters championing abortion ‘rights;’ climate change; police reform; transgender madness; deviant lifestyles; feminist causes and most emphatically, a ceasefire in Gaza. They all marched in a single, giant parade of complaints, slated to later in the week share a single massive stage— all safely outside the Democrats’ carefully fenced security perimeter.
“These people are fighting for a whole series of causes, united only by a hatred of the America that is,” a NY Post op-ed reflected.
“This isn’t a battle between “progressives” and centrists within the Democratic Party. Instead, these protests are the product of a deeply coordinated effort by forces that represent an insidious and foreign influence,” wrote Asra Nomani in the Jewish Journal.
Top anti-Israel protest organizers had predicted a “monster turnout” of between 30,000 and 40,000 activists “but on Monday afternoon before beginning their march, they appeared poised to fall dramatically short of that,” wrote the NY Post.
“Only a few thousand were present when the march began,” the Associated Press reported. “The Chicago area has one of the largest Palestinian communities in the nation, and buses were bringing anti-Israel participants from all over the country.”
Anti-Israel protesters marched toward the site of the DNC on its opening day. As the crowd neared the United Center where the convention is being held, hundreds of rioters breached the first layer of fencing outside the DNC, setting off smoke bombs, as their fellow rioters did in New York last week.
Officers donned gas masks, restraining the rioters, arresting the rowdiest ones and keeping others at bay until reinforcements arrived.
“Law enforcement personnel were immediately on-scene and contained the situation,” Chicago PD announced in a statement.
“Biden, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide,” the marchers chanted amid the beating of drums. They also referred to him with loathing as “Genocide Joe” and lodged similar chants at Vice President Kamala Harris.
Who Are the Protestors?
News media have cast the protesters as “grassroots” people motivated by humanitarian concerns, like those who this past spring occupied university administration buildings and set up tent encampments in colleges across the country.
A deeper look at the so-called student groups, however, reveals a bizarre mix of campus progressivism, hardcore Islamism and Arab nationalism, and revolutionary anarchism and communism, including open praise for North Korea,” writes Tablet magazine in an eye-opening report.
“On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of Marxist revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks.”
The only unifying thread would appear to be hatred for Israel and its patron, the United States, senior writer Park MacDougald noted.
“34 groups [among those marching in Chicago] openly identify as some form of socialism, anarchism or communism,” attested Nomani in the Jewish Journal article. “These groups support the dictatorial governments in China, Russia, North Korea and Cuba, and they seek to replace capitalism with socialism in the U.S. and globally.”
Another 165 groups are “socialist-lite,” working closely with the openly socialist organizations and nations including North Korea. Finally, 35 groups are Muslim, Palestinian or Arab, aligned with Hamas and seeking the destruction of the state of Israel “from the river to the sea.”
The majority of these protesters are not the old-school activists in the Israeli-Palestinian debate, the author points out. They are far more radical than the “yippies” who caused chaos at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Their goal isn’t mere political reform but, as the Party for Socialism and Revolution puts it, destruction of “the American state.”
The Tablet article goes on to explain that far from anti-Israel protests being grassroots and organic, they are being orchestrated cross-country by “outside agitators—professional radicals and organizers.”
These outside forces have played a central role in coordinating the anti-Israel campus riots that began immediately after Oct. 7 and rapidly escalated across the country.
By presenting the protests as “grassroots,” the media has minimized the powerful outside forces behind incendiary messages like “HAMAS IS COMING,” during the network’s recent protests in D.C., when the American flag was burnt and replaced by the Palestinian flag.
Professional Agitators
Telltale evidence of outside orchestration comes from footage showing a known professional “protest consultant” teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall this past spring.
Moreover, recent video from inside the tent encampment at UCLA showed masked men teaching hand-to-hand combat training skills to protestors. In addition, when police in April and May cleared out encampments at the University of Texas, Columbia and City University of New York, “roughly half of those arrested had no connection with the university at which they were arrested,” Tablet writer Park Macdougald asserts.
Many will recall some of the features of the organized rioting in the George Floyd riots of 2020, such as rioters covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity; linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting to rescue arrested comrades by swarming or storming police officers.
These very same tactics have defined the campus protests including the tent encampments.
Are these resemblances accidental? All of the tactics deployed require a degree of instruction and training. Some of these strategies can be conveyed by word-of-mouth, but the evidence supports the assumption of formal training and coordination by professionals.
Billionaire Donors Connected to Upper Echelons of Democratic Party
The hundreds of anti-Israel cross-country campaigns cost millions to keep in operation, domestic terrorism experts point out. Who is holding them out? The protests rely heavily on funding from progressive donors who are connected to the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, the Tablet reports.
A look behind the scenes at ground zero of the nationwide protest movement—Columbia University—attests to the lavish funding from far-left billionaire donors.
According to Tablet, the Columbia encampment was organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). All three are supported by significant endowments from far left mega-donors.
JVP—the falsely termed “Jewish” branch of the BDS movement—received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017; $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation; $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and smaller amounts from various progressive donors. This data comes from NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute.
JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents, cited by Tablet.
According to domestic terrorism experts, WOL and SJP have emerged as two of the most notorious anti-Semitic and Hamas-glorifying groups in the country.
Students for Justice in Palestine, which has led many of the college campus protests, including those at Columbia, UCLA and George Washington University, “openly praised Hamas terrorists and the death of innocent Israeli citizens,” the American Jewish Committee reported. The group is also accused of harassing Jewish and pro-Israel students on college campuses.
SJP and WOL have been banned from certain social media platforms for glorifying Hamas.
“These groups have received extravagant funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundations to the tune of $37 million since 2021. They have also pocketed substantial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides Foundation, attests Tablet.
The virulently anti-Semitic WOL has been the central organizing force in anti-Israel protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including the blockades of bridges and highways, rioting at Grand Central Station, wreaking havoc at the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center.
The hallmarks of WOL-led protests are their annihilationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state—such as Arabic chants of “Strike, strike, Tel Aviv”; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags; and the belligerent keffiyeh-masked street thugs engaged in intimidating Jews and pro-Israel demonstrators.
The Tides Foundation and Obama
The Tides Foundation is one of largest progressive dark-money networks [where the donor is not disclosed and the source of the money is unknown] in the country, according to reporting in the NY Post. The Foundation controls more than a billion dollars in assets and has emerged as a major backer of the anti-Israel protest movement across the country.
More than any of the dark-money giants on the left, Tides has become tightly integrated with the increasingly dominant “Obama faction” of the Democratic Party, the Tablet article elaborates. The writer goes on to name at least five Tides Foundation board members who were formerly senior Obama advisors during Barak Obama’s presidency.
It is here that one begins to glimpse the nexus between the national anti-Israel protest movement and Iran.
An Israeli victory in the Gaza war would deal a crushing blow to the Obama-Biden goal of realignment with Iran. That re-alignment which would recognize Teheran’s hegemony in the region in return for various concessions, remains the current administration’s real but unacknowledged policy in the Middle East, experts say.
This perhaps sheds light on why the Biden-Harris administration has all along maneuvered to thwart a decisive Israeli victory.
The Tides Foundation, a shadowy philanthropy empire tied to Obama, is bankrolling a protest movement designed to undercut American support for Israel’s war on Hamas. That goal requires convincing the generally pro-Israel American public that Israel isn’t actually America’s “friend.”
Israel is rather an “oppressor” and “colonizer,” the propaganda goes, with a powerful lobby bent on dragging Americans into a dangerous Mideast war.
This might explain the Biden administration’s foot-dragging that governs the shipping of munitions to Israel, while exploiting the delays to leverage U.S. control over the Jewish state. The sporadic weapons shipments, while backing up Washington’s assurance of “ironclad support,” effectively holds Israel back from scoring a decisive victory.
The Real War is With Iran
“Israel is not at war with ‘the Palestinians’ and their recognized government in the West Bank,” writes Seth Mandel in Commentary. “It is at war with Iran. Throughout this conflict, Israel has been subject to coordinated attacks from four places in the theater: Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Not a single one of those places, you’ll notice, is the West Bank.”
“That is not to dismiss the Palestinian terrorism that has originated from the West Bank during this war or Iran’s attempts to gain footholds there,” the writer notes. “It is merely to point out that none of our attempts at resolving the regional conflict is geared toward anyone but Iran, and we should say so openly.”
Instead, writes Mandel, the United States has constructed a bizarre charade in which resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being billed as the overarching goal, when neither Israel nor Washington are talking to anyone who is interested in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There aren’t even any Palestinians at the ceasefire talks happening right now.
“This is a war Iran has launched against the U.S. and Israel. Gaza is a front in that war,” argues the writer in the Commentary article. Tehran has hijacked the narrative and through its proxies, is setting the terms of the conflict, the ceasefire and everything else.
“If we don’t reverse that,” writes Commentary, “We will be further than ever from peace in the region.”
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No Fear of Breaking The Law
Anti-Israel protesters know that they will suffer no consequences for breaking the law. Even if they get arrested, paid for attorneys and generous bail funds will get them released in record time.
A case in point is San Francisco where in March, the DA’s office dropped criminal charges against 78 protesters who blocked traffic on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for hours, demanding a cease-fire in Gaza.
The defendants were instead ordered to do 5 hours of community service and pay some degree of restitution, reported AP.
In another case, San Francisco prosecutors charged 26 protesters who blocked the Golden Gate Bridge for hours in April, shutting down all vehicle, pedestrian and bike traffic.
The protest on April 15 was one of many held by pro-Palestinian demonstrators who blocked roadways around the country, causing traffic jams and temporarily shutting down travel into some of the nation’s most heavily used airports.
Prosecutors said the mass protest trapped hundreds of motorists on the bridge “who had no choice but to remain imprisoned on the freeway for several hours.”
“The demonstration of the Golden Gate Bridge caused a level of safety risk, including extreme threats to the health and welfare of those trapped, that we as a society cannot ignore or allow,” District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a statement.
The protesters were charged with “felony conspiracy, false imprisonment, trespassing to interfere with a business, unlawful assembly, refusal to disperse at a riot and failure to obey the lawful order of a uniformed officer,” the AP article said.
But it seems quite likely that in soft-on-crime San Francisco, none of these charges will stick.
The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office which got all charges dropped in the aforementioned Oakland Bay Bridge case, already asked for the same leniency in the Golden Gate Bridge case and is confident of it being granted.
After all, the Public Defender’s Office, told AP, no one was even injured “and the California Highway Patrol cleared the roadway with no resistance from protesters.”
This, of course, is a completely false narrative. Hundreds of men, women and children were trapped for hours without food, drink and bathroom facilities, with all the anxiety, mental anguish and possible adverse side effects that kind of nightmarish scenario can trigger.
