From Paper Bird, a human-rights blog:
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest US gay organization, is going international. It’s just been given at least $3 million to spread the word of marriage equality to benighted countries that treat gays badly. Unfortunately, there’s a catch… HRC is receiving its money for gay rights in the Third World from the man who “virtually invented vulture funds”: a form of speculation that’s one of the worst contributors to Third World poverty ever.
Paper Bird is referring to Paul Singer. The other benefactor is another conservative hedge fund guy, Daniel Loeb. The Human Rights Campaign announces the big gift:
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities around the world face stigmatization, harassment, violence and blatant human rights violations. To combat these horrific acts and to advance the cause of LGBT justice internationally, The Paul E. Singer Foundation is teaming up with the Daniel S. Loeb Family Foundation to award the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRC), the education and research arm of United States’ largest LGBT civil rights organization, major grants over three years.
Both Singer and Loeb are rightwing Jewish devotees of Israel. As we wrote last year in knocking the Times for leaving Israel off Singer’s resume:
Singer is… a neoconservative who… sits on the boards of Commentary magazine and formerly on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. He is chairman of the Manhattan Institute board, which includes Bill Kristol. That thinktank has a neoconservative line on foreign policy. As Alex Kane writes in tipping me off, “I bet [NYT’s Frank] Bruni will not be running any columns on rich donors keeping the Democrats and the GOP to the Likud line.”
Daniel Loeb is the money behind Bill Kristol’s extremist Emergency Committee for Israel that aims to blacklist criticism of Israel has called for bombing Iran. Here are some of Loeb’s comments in giving that money to HRC:
“The challenges the LGBT community faces are acute in many countries, where discrimination takes violent and sometimes deadly forms. As we witnessed in its successful campaign to advance marriage equality in the United States, HRC is a uniquely effective organization that achieves what it sets out to do. I am confident this new program will have an enormous impact in helping to end persecution and enforcing civil rights for LGBT people across the world.”
I don’t doubt for a minute that these guys care a lot about gay rights internationally. Well, for a second, maybe. But the point is that they support violent and sometimes-deadly discrimination, persecution and the denial of civil rights in Palestine. And all their beneficence can’t wash that away.
This won,t please Mike Konrad.
He hates LGBT as well as Arabs.
Bringing LGBT rights to the Muslim world is going to be pretty destabilizing. While they’re at it, though, they should target the haredim and the settlers.
Apparently Israel supporters or Zionists can’t do a single good deed.
Phillip this kind of thinking leads to a really bad place.
If Israel cares so much about gay rights why doesn’t it offer Palestinian gays political asylum? And why don’t people like Loeb press them to do so?
And, yes, that question was rhetorical.