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eretzyisrael · 5 days

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BY PARK MACDOUGALD

The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.

JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.

SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.

Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.

Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and the sister of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.

WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting. In addition to their confrontational tactics, WOL-led protests tend to have a few other hallmarks. These include eliminationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state—such as Arabic chants of “strike, strike, Tel Aviv”; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags and other insignia of explicitly Islamist resistance; the presence of masked Arab street muscle; and the antisemitic intimidation of counterprotesters by said masked Arab street muscle.

WOL’s role appears to be that of shock troops, akin to the role played by black block militants on the anarchist side of the ledger. WOL is, however, connected to more seemingly “mainstream” elements of the anti-Israel movement. Abdullah Akl, a prominent WOL leader—indeed, the man leading the “strike Tel Aviv” chants in the video linked above—is also listed as a “field organizer” on the website of MPower Change, the “advocacy project” led by Linda Sarsour. MPower Change, in turn, is a fiscal sponsorship of NEO Philanthropy, another large progressive clearinghouse. NEO Philanthropy and its 501(c)(4) “sister,” NEO Philanthropy Action Fund, have received more than $37 million from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2021 alone, as well as substantial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides Foundation.

#tides foundation #national lawyers guild #within our lifetime #jewish voice for peace #students for justice in palestine #dark money #rockefeller brothers fund #funding for terrorism #lisa fithian #occupy

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2 Episode 1 Review: Strange Energies

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This STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1.

With very few exceptions, each new season of any given Star Trek series always feels like a moment for the specific show to change things up. Riker grew a beard in Next Generation Season 2. Worf crashed Deep Space Nine in season 4. Archer started unbuttoning his collar and mussing up his hair in Season 3 of Enterprise. Discovery has literally had a different captain and premise every season. Even in The Original Series, the crew got themselves some Chekov. after their first year. You get it. A new season of Trek usually means one question: What’s new? What’s the same?

But, with the debut Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2, that question doesn’t work. The show doesn’t feel remotely different, retooled, or radically changed from Season 1. If anything is different it’s simply that it’s even funnier and nerdier than Season 1. In 2020, Lower Decks was still novel and strange, but, now that we’re used to it, the show is proving to be better than perhaps anyone gave it credit. The debut Season 2 episode — “Strange Energies” — is hilarious, but it’s also deeply layered, so much so, that each part of itself is like a tiny replica of itself. Like a hilarious member of a funny, and thoughtful Borg collective.

The episode begins with Mariner playing out a badass fantasy on the holodeck, in which she is such a kickass Starfleet officer, that she escapes a Cardassian prison without really even trying. In this world, like last year’s “Crisis Point,” Mariner is god. She even leaves a hologram of Boimier because she’s “still pissed” at him for ditching her on the Cerritos in Season 1. Mariner has let her privileged status as Captain Freeman’s daughter go to her head, which is an arrangement neither of them likes and is pissing everyone off, including Ransom. So, when Ransom accidentally gets hit with the titular “Strange Energies,” and turns into a faux space god, the idea of someone else becoming a control freak takes over the plot. On top of this, Tendi is convinced that Rutherford isn’t his most authentic self, because — following a memory erasure in Season 1 — he now likes things he didn’t use to like, including eating pears and dating Ensign Barnes.

This layered theme works in all three storylines: Mariner and Freeman aren’t being their authentic selves and abusing their authority. Tendi is accusing Rutherford of not being himself and abusing her authority. Meanwhile, Ransom isn’t being his authentic self — actually, no, Ransom is totally being himself! But, of all the people “playing god” in this episode, Ransom has an excuse — he’s been imbuded with some “sci-fi stuff,” which Dr. T’ana likens to Gary Mitchell’s glowy eyes flip-out, a great callback not only to the famous TOS pilot episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” but also a reference to the very first episode of Lower Decks, “Second Contact.” In that episode, Mariner hit Boimler with a litany of famous Trek characters, including Gary Mitchell, who Boimler had never heard of. Lower Decks isn’t just content to reference other Trek, now with this new season premiere, it’s also referencing itself. Mariner feels a sense of faux-déjà vu when she asks Rutherford questions about his date with Barnes which is exactly what happened last year. The ship runs into a crisis because a second contact mission uncovered something the first contact mission missed. And, it all ends up with Mariner getting busted, even though she tried to do the right thing.

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The only thing missing is Boimler. At the very end, we see our wayward Bradford on the USS Titan, freaking the fuck out because whatever this crew is up to it’s way more hardcore than what’s happening on the Cerritos. Or is it? What’s great about Boimler losing his cool over a chase sequence on the Titan is it allows Lower Decks to make a statement about Star Trek’s bizarre ability to vary tone and style within the same narrative framework. The Next Generation arguably perfected this kind of thing in an episode like “Data’s Day,”; most of Data’s famous day is spent learning to tap dance, feeding his cat, and trying to not screw up Miles and Keiko’s wedding. But, the subplot also involved a Romulan spy who was gaslighting Data, stealing intel from the Federation, and was probably a secret member of the Zhat Vash! We don’t think of “Data’s Day” as an episode that sets up the dark Romulan action in Star Trek: Picard, we think of it as a goofy, heartfelt little Trek ditty. But that’s the trick. Ransom turning into a space god and trying to eat the ship, is, on paper, 100 times scarier and more dangerous than whatever “fluidic” action was happening with Boimler and the Titan at the end of this episode. The Titan is doing run-of-the-mill Star Trek stuff and so is the Cerritos. Kirk and Picard were always being hassled by space gods, who yes, were sometimes members of their own crew. The joke of Lower Decks is that the spectacular things that happen in Starfleet are treated as run-of-the-mill. This lets the show refine a formula created by TNG, use the sci-fi backdrop to tell a heartwarming character story. And in this way, Lower Decks has captured the essence of why so many people love Trek in general, that unique combination of likable characters, who are good people, doing “sci-fi stuff.” In this way, “Strange Energies” is near perfect. The only reason it can’t get five stars out of five is Boimler isn’t in it enough. Let’s hope he Boims-up next week.

The post Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2 Episode 1 Review: Strange Energies appeared first on Den of Geek.

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