Group That Helped Draft Anti-BDS Laws in U.S. Didn’t Disclose Grant from Israel

The IAF

There’s been a lot of talk about foreign governments intervening in our political process over the last few years, but some stories certainly don’t permeate mainstream discourse.

A case in point was on display this week. The Forward reported that the Israel Allies Foundation (IAF) received a grant from the Israeli government for more than $100,000 last year. The IAF is a nonprofit that was established in 2007 to foster cooperation between pro-Israel forces and governments around the world. In 2014, the group helped develop South Carolina’s anti-BDS law, which prohibits state entities from contracting with groups that boycott Israel. The IAF went onto lobby 25 additional states to adopt anti-BDS measures after South Carolina’s was approved.

The IAF didn’t disclose the grant (which is probably illegal), but it’s certainly not the only such organization to take money from Israel. The Forward reports that 11 pro-Israel groups have received $6.6 million from that government since 2018. There are rules designed to try to prevent this kind of stuff, like the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). However, Israel apparently uses shell companies to maneuver around these sticky details. DC Attorney Amos Jones, who works on FARA cases, told The Forward, “They can have all the shell companies they want or whatever you want to call it. If that is a foreign organization or group of people, then they can be a foreign principal, thereby requiring persons acting under their direction inside the United States to have to register.”

Let’s run a quick thought experiment. Envision a pro-Russia nonprofit accepts a grant from Putin’s government, aligns itself with U.S. politicians, and then helps pass a number of laws that prohibit you from, say, boycotting Russian vodka over LGBTQ rights. How would United States liberals react to such a development? How many hours of programming would Rachel Maddow devote to such a story?

This example is wildly inadequate of course. In order for it to make sense as a comparison, the U.S. would have to give $3.8 billion to Russia in military aid every year. The point has been made a million times before, but it bears repeating in the wake of stories like this: people in the United States can condemn the actions of foreign governments, but they can’t generally take any responsibility for them. We are all complicit in Israeli apartheid.

Morse Falls Short

Progressive challenger Alex Morse lost his bid to unseat incumbent Rep. Richard Neal in Massachusetts’s 1st district. Morse was the victim of a homophobic smear campaign orchestrated by a group of College Democrats, but how much impact did this actually have on the election? On one hand, an internal poll done by the Morse campaign found that he moved within 5 points of Neal in wake of the saga. However, multiple people have also pointed out that local media covered the accusations extensively, but failed to correct the record with the same vigor.

Morse wasn’t a BDS supporter, but he wanted to condition aid to Israel and had spoken eloquently about how his Birthright trip had exposed him to anti-Palestinian bigotry. Yesterday I got an email from the End the Occupation PAC. “Despite Alex’s loss, polls in the district show that voters agree with us,” it read. “A major plurality, 48% of voters in Alex’s district, say they support conditioning military aid to Israel upon Israel making changes to its treatment of Palestinians.”

This is an interesting stat to think about. When I spoke with Massachusetts activists about the campaign last week, they told me that foreign policy hadn’t really come up at all. It’s obviously hard to think Morse would have won if he brought up the issue more, but Cori Bush recently proved that progressives can talk about Palestinian rights without it damaging their campaign. There’s already been calls for Morse to challenge Neal again in a couple years. At that point, the space to have these kinds of discussions will have presumably opened up even more and the BDS movement will have gained popularity.

Medium Blue

On Monday, MSNBC‘s Joy Reid tried to draw a parallel between Trump’s vigilante right-wing supporters and Muslims in foreign countries.

“When leaders, let’s say in the Muslim world, talk a lot of violent talk and encourage their supporters to be willing to commit violence including on their own bodies in order to win against whoever they decide is the enemy, we in the U.S. media describe that as they are ‘radicalizing’ these people, particularly when they’re radicalizing young people,” she told a panel on her show. “That’s how we talk about the way Muslims act,” she continued. “When you see what Donald Trump is doing, is that any different from what we describe as radicalizing people?”

There’s certainly a lot going on here. A clip of her comments made the rounds on Twitter and she received criticism from a number of activists, journalists, and lawmakers. “Words matter and these words feed into the harmful anti-Muslim rhetoric & actions that we continue to see in this country,” tweeted Rep. Rashida Tlaib. “It is even more painful to hear it from someone I admire. We deserve an apology.”

Later in the week Reid offered something of a non-apology, essentially arguing that people were taking her comments out of context. “I asked that question on Monday, and there was a lot of conversation, particularly online after the segment aired, some of which was frankly not in good faith,” she said on Wednesday’s show. “But some of the conversation reflected the genuine feelings of people who have been subjected to the kind of stereotyping that I just described. And who take matters like this to heart because of it. And we should all be sensitive to that, and I certainly should have been sensitive to that.”

This mini-controversy reminded me of the time Reid’s old, homophobic blog posts were unearthed. You might recall that there was some Islamophobic stuff scattered in there too. In one post, she shares a quote from a blog called Mark in Mexico. “My feeling is that the only reason that a world war between civilizations has not already broken out is that the vast majority of Muslims living in the world today are so desperately poor that they have the time, energy and resources for only the occasional burst of AK-47 fire into the air from the garbage and sewage laden streets outside of their mud huts,” reads the quote. “Give them resources and I fear that they will come after us everywhere that they can find us, which is to say everywhere.”

Reid wrote that the blogger, “makes a salient a salient point here.”

Reid’s lawyer initially declared that she had been mysteriously hacked, but once screenshots of the posts emerged he admitted, “I’ve become aware of some methodology issues.”

Odds & Ends

?️ Here’s an interesting poll from Military Times. Trump’s support has apparently taken a hit among the troops. The magazine, in partnership with the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, surveyed 1,018 active-duty troops and found that 49.9% of them have an unfavorable view of Trump and 42% say they “strongly disapprove of him.” The numbers are even more staggering when applied to officers specifically, with over 59% of them having an unfavorable view of Trump and more than half strongly disapproving of his time in office.

?? Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden released a platform detailing his plans for the Arab-American community last weekend. There was a small section on BDS, with no real surprises in it: “Joe Biden will protect the constitutional right of our citizens to free speech. He also  does not support efforts by any democracy to criminalize free speech and expression, which is why he spoke out against Israel’s decision to deny entry to American lawmakers because they favor boycotting Israel. However, Biden has been unequivocal in condemning calls in the United States to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.”

The section on Saudi Arabia is also notable: “Donald Trump has given the government of Saudi Arabia a blank check to pursue a disastrous set of policies, including the ongoing war in Yemen, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and the crackdown on dissent at home, including the targeting of female activists. Biden will review the U.S. relationship with the government of Saudi Arabia and end support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.”

?? The Pentagon is cutting its forces in Iraq by about one-third, which the administration is touting as some kind of conclusion to the forever wars. “I have kept out of new wars and our troops are coming home,” declared Trump at the RNC. There are a variety of ways to prove this assertion false and, at the LA Times, Andrew Bacevich uses the example of Syria to do it. “Trump, who is obsessed with getting reelected, won’t be bothering with Syria between now and Nov. 3. If he wins a second term, the mindless strategic drift of the last four years will persist. The endless wars won’t end, in Syria or anywhere else,” he concludes.

?? The Trump administration is sanctioning ICC officials because the court is investigating whether or not the U.S. military committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

?? Nadia B. Ahmad, a 2020 DNC national delegate from Orlando, wrote a great piece at the site about the Biden campaign’s issues with Muslim-American activists: “Muslim votes have historically been decisive whether we vote or not. And while so many Muslims are disengaged by the Biden campaign, there are scores like me who are willing to overlook it all, because the costs to our democracy are so high for another Trump administration. And yet we want to volunteer, but are turned off by the bureaucracy of it. The Muslim Establishment Democrats question our efforts and gaslight us.”

?? My colleague Yumna Patel is doing a five-part video series on how the COVID crisis is impacting Palestine. You can watch the videos at our website.

Stay safe out there,

Michael