Israel’s UN ambassador slams Soros for donations to ‘pro-Hamas groups’ seeking destruction of Jewish state
Fox News
Left-wing activist billionaire George Soros is facing intense criticism from Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. for pumping over $15 million into a network of nongovernmental organizations that allegedly support Hamas.
“George Soros’ donations to organizations that seek the destruction of the State of Israel as a Jewish state is shameful. However, I am not surprised,” Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan told Fox News Digital.
Hamas launched a full-blown invasion into southern Israel Oct. 7, resulting in the mass murder of 1,200 people, including over 30 Americans. Hamas also took more than 200 hostages. American citizens were among civilians kidnapped by the jihadi terrorist entity.
“For years, Soros has backed and transferred money to organizations supporting BDS that want to isolate Israel,” added Erdan, who has been leading the diplomatic campaign at the U.N. to spell out Hamas’ crimes against humanity. “They have never been about real peace or any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
BDS is an abbreviation for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign targeting the Jewish state. The German and Austrian parliaments classified BDS as an antisemitic movement that resembles the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses during the nascent phase of the Holocaust.
Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of “The Soros Agenda,” told Fox News Digital, “Support of pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian groups in the U.S. is not limited to foreign entities. It also comes directly and indirectly from U.S.-based foundations. George and Alexander Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) is one of them.”
“Soon after he settled in the White House, Biden appointed Robert Malley as his special envoy to Iran,” Ehrenfeld wrote in her book. “Malley is the former president and CEO of the Soros-funded, Brussels-based International Crisis Group, which, like Soros, has been criticizing Israel and praising Hamas. “
The U.S. and the European Union have designated Hamas a foreign terrorist organization. A number of recent probes claimed to show OSF funneled significant funds into virulently anti-Israel NGOs that are allegedly pro-Hamas.
Fox News Digital reported in October on Biden’s now-suspended Iran envoy Malley for his push to engage with the U.S.-designated terrorist movements, Hamas and Lebanon-based Hezbollah.
“There’s so much misinformation about them. … I speak to them and my colleagues speak to them [Hamas], and now we may disagree with them, but they have their own rationality … none of them are crazies,” Malley said in the film “Cultures of Resistance.”
The New York Post noted last month that Soros has funneled over $15 million to groups who are anti-Israel and carry water for Hamas’ agenda.
OSF donated $13.7 million to the California-based Tides Center, a number of whose recipients are nonprofits who reportedly justify the obliteration of the Jewish state.
Tides supports the Illinois-based Adalah Justice Project, which posted a photograph on Instagram of a bulldozer demolishing Israel’s security fence on the day of Hamas’ bloody slaughter with the caption, “Israeli colonizers believed they could indefinitely trap two million people in an open-air prison… no cage goes unchallenged.”
When pressed in a number of Fox News Digital press queries if Soros’ philanthropic empire, OSF, considers Hamas a terrorist organization, a spokeperson for the OSF based in London refused to answer.
The OSF spokesperson, however, said the “Open Society Foundations utterly condemn the brutal attacks on Israeli citizens on Oct. 7. We grieve for the lives lost and injured and those taken hostage and their families. Like so many others around the world today we also feel the same pain for the Palestinian citizens whose lives are now being lost in tragically mounting numbers because of the conflict.”
The OSF spokesperson added, “There must be accountability for the war crimes and breaches of humanitarian law that have occurred.”
When asked about the accusations that OSF funds pro-Hamas NGOs, the OSF spokesperson noted, “Any of our grantees have different perspectives and routinely disagree with each other, but our funding strategy, which has evolved over 20 years, is targeted towards working towards a secure future where rights and freedoms are respected.
“There is strict U.S. anti-terrorist legislation that determines which organizations a foundation like OSF can fund. We devote a lot of effort to ensuring full compliance.”
In 2007, Soros wrote an opinion article for the Financial Times in which he slammed the U.S. and Israeli governments for not recognizing Hamas as the legitimate government of the Gaza Strip.
OSF has also funded two progressive NGOs called Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow. On the day Hamas massacred 1,200 people, JVP issued a statement that “the source of all this violence” was “Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression.”
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The names of the Jewish NGOs are misleading, mainstream experts on antisemitism argue. The Jewish NGO Anti-Defamation League wrote that “Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a radical anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activist group that advocates for the boycott of Israel and eradication of Zionism.”
Zionism is the founding philosophy of the Jewish state.
The ADL added, “JVP does not represent the mainstream Jewish community, which it views as bigoted for its association with Israel.” OSF has pumped at least $650,000 into the JVP’s coffers since 2017.
According to the ADL, the Detroit chapter of IfNotNow circulated a flier that showed an image of a paraglider, a clear reference to the Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel as part of their aerial campaign to wipe out Jews. IfNotNow is one of the principal organizers of the U.S.-based campaign against Israel since Oct. 7, noted the ADL. According to reports, IfNotNow received $400,000 from Soros’ OSF.
JVP, which was founded in California, supported the Hamas-animated “Great Return March” in 2018, a precursor to Oct. 7, which was a series of attempts by Palestinians in Gaza to invade Israel by breaching its security border barrier.
OSF provides funds to obscure Jewish NGOs whose mission is to exploit their Jewish identity to turn the bashing of Israel (and support for terrorism) into a politically and socially correct campaign, according to critics like Joshua Muravchik.
Writing in the Jewish magazine Commentary, he noted, “Deploying its ‘Jewish’ identity in attacking Israel is JVP’s métier, one might say its purpose. The cutting edge of this work, as the episode of SJP’s tweets illustrates, is to deflect accusations of antisemitism.”
Soros’ son, Alex, recently took over the reins of his father’s $25 billion fortune. In June, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs and social equality, Amichai Chikli, told Fox News Digital, it “looks like the son is a replica of his father. We have no expectation that his son will be a big Zionist.“
Fox News Digital reached out to JVP, The Tides Center and IfNotNow for comment. They did not immediately respond.