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The Campus Kill-The-Jews Riots: Paid Professional Agitators Funded By Democratic Party Big Wigs, Or Well-Meaning Kids?

Francis Menton

Several days ago, after the New York police broke up the kill-the-Jews occupations at Columbia, NYU and other universities, it emerged that close to half of the arrestees were not students or otherwise affiliated with the schools in question. At a news conference on April 30, Mayor Eric Adams adopted the term “professional outside agitators” to describe the main organizers of the protests (“What should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators.").

The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents seem to spring up on almost no notice. Did hundreds of young people on shoestring budgets just happen on their own initiative to place orders from the same website at the same time and all pay with their own money? That seems implausible. But if there is professional organization, who are the organizers? And who is paying them? You would think that this is an issue where the public would have a huge interest in knowing the answer — particularly if the answer should turn out to be that the main sponsors of the protests are also big funders of one of the major political parties. But this is a subject where the sponsors have a strong interest in concealing their role as much as possible, and where uncovering and exposing that role takes some significant effort.

Several news organizations have been doing serious digging to get to the bottom of this. In this post I’ll highlight the work of three of them:

And then we have the beyond-ridiculous New York Times. Their May 6 piece by five reporters (Amy Julia Harris, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Nicole Hong, Joseph Goldstein, and Erin Nolan) has the headline “Outsiders Were Among Columbia Protesters, but They Dispute Instigating Clashes.” Somehow it took five reporters to locate and interview only the handful of people who could be portrayed as the most innocent possible of participants in the riots and protests, and otherwise to conceal or minimize everything important about the situation.

I’ll start with the Shia Kapos piece in Politico. Politico is most definitely not a right-wing news site, and deserves credit for devoting resources to reporting honestly on this situation. This is the lede:

[S]ome of the groups behind the [anti-Israel] demonstrations receive financial backing from philanthropists pushing hard for [President Biden’s] reelection. The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.

Here are a few examples of some detail from the Politico piece:

Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. . . . Another notable Democratic donor whose philanthropy has helped fund the protest movement is David Rockefeller Jr., who sits on the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It has given nearly $500,000 directly to Jewish Voice for Peace, which explicitly describes itself as anti-Zionist, over the past five years. Rockefeller Brothers has separately given grants to both the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center.

And don’t forget the Pritzkers:

Several other groups involved in pro-Palestinian protests are backed by a foundation funded by Susan and Nick Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotel empire — and supporters of Biden and numerous Democratic campaigns, including $6,600 to the Biden Victory Fund a few months ago and more than $300,000 during the 2020 campaign.

For those unfamiliar with the Pritzker family tree, Nick is a cousin of both Jay Pritzker (Governor of Illinois) and Penny Pritzker (former Obama-era Commerce Secretary and current Board Chair of Harvard, the person most responsible for promoting Claudine Gay to President of that institution).

MacDougald’s piece at Tablet is even more deeply researched. Some key excerpts:

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 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.

National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. . . . The largest single donor to WESPAC, however, appears to be something called the Eutopia Foundation, which donated $550,000 in 2022. . . . Eutopia appears to be the project of Albert Wenger, a German American computer scientist and managing partner at the New York venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, and his wife, Susan Danziger. . . .

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.

The New York Post has undoubtedly made the biggest contribution of all to the unmasking of the organizational structure and funding of the protests. There’s way too much in its many articles for me to cover all of it here, but one important element has been putting a human face on a few of the reprehensible characters who draw salaries from well-funded non-profit groups to train and organize the protesters.

For example, the Post has reported (on May 6) that one of the main organizers of the protests at Columbia is a 35 year-old non-student by the name of Manolo de los Santos, who runs a non-profit called The People’s Forum. De los Santos seems to have nothing but time on his hands to participate in and organize protests, which gives rise to a strong inference that he is being well paid by somebody. Here is a picture of de los Santos from the Post via de los Santos’s own X account:

According to the Post, TPF has received substantial funding from the philanthropic arm of Goldman Sachs. This excerpt begins with a quote from de los Santos himself:

“When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel, when the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism in our lifetime,” De Los Santos said in January in front of a cheering crowd in a now-viral video. His remarks were so vicious that South Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) denounced the speech as “Nazi rhetoric,” and called for Goldman Sachs, whose philanthropy arm used to direct funds to TPF, to cut ties with the organization.

And last but not least, we come to the New York Times version of the same events. Here’s the overview:

A New York Times review of police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the protest at Columbia found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university had also participated in other protests around the country. One man who was taken into custody inside Hamilton Hall, the occupied campus building, had been charged with rioting and wearing a disguise to evade the police during a demonstration in California nearly a decade earlier. But the examination also revealed that far more of the unaffiliated protesters had no such histories. Rather, they said, they arrived at Columbia in response to word of mouth or social media posts to join the demonstration out of some combination of solidarity and curiosity.

And then it is one example after another of decent, innocent people just trying to express their deep-felt feelings:

One of the people arrested at Columbia University this week was a middle-aged saxophonist who headed up to the campus from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment after learning about the protests on social media.

Another was tending his sidewalk pepper patch a few blocks from the student demonstrations when he learned the police were moving in and, grabbing a metal dog bowl and a spoon to bang against it, rushed to the students’ aid.

A third had been active in other left-leaning protests across the city but also happened to work as a nanny nearby. She went to the university gates on Tuesday and linked arms with other protesters in an unsuccessful attempt to thwart the advancing officers, she said. . . .

There was little evidence to suggest [the arrested non-students] had helped organize or escalate the protests, and many were arrested without having ever set foot on campus.

Somehow, the Times manages to avoid any mention of de los Santos. As to Lisa Fithian (subject of the May 1 piece in the Post), the Times makes only brief mention to say that although she is a “career activist” who “was captured on video Tuesday apparently urging counterprotesters to step aside so that Hamilton Hall could be barricaded,” she “denied playing any larger role in organizing the Columbia protests” and “was [not] present during the police sweeps on Tuesday.” Well, New York Times, of course the paid organizers and trainers aren’t stupid enough to join the building occupations and get themselves arrested.

I am reminded that the majority of the jurors on the Trump Manhattan criminal jury listed the Times as their main source of news.