Who bankrolled the antisemitic campus chaos that swept America?
More than half of the protesters arrested at New York University on April 22 were not students, faculty, staff, or people otherwise affiliated with the school. And 45 of the 79 protesters arrested at the University of Texas at Austin were not associated with the school in any way, shape, or form. Tulane University officials announced most of the protesters on campus were not affiliated with the school, while New York City Mayor Eric Adams stated that “outside agitators” had “co-opted” the Columbia University protests.
NYPD released footage showing 62-year-old “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian instructing Columbia students on how to securely bar the doors and block police from entering the building they had seized. Fithian has a long history of being involved in protests, has been arrested more than 80 times, and was dubbed by the magazine Mother Jones as “the nation’s best-known protest consultant.”
Meanwhile, at campus encampments across America, row after row of freshly delivered tents stood neatly positioned on university lawns. These weren’t mismatched tents the students brought from home but were identical as if they were bought in bulk from a single source.
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At UCLA, live video from Fox News of the temporarily dispersed encampment showed a huge mess left behind, including piles of abandoned Yeti coolers, as well as brand-new power tools and stacks of plywood for the protesters to build walls. At UCLA in particular, the nights of glamping while dining on gourmet food apparently fueled the crowd into beating a Jewish girl unconscious, who had to be rushed to the hospital.
These lawless, anti-Israel encampments are a far cry from the ragtag bands of peaceniks of the 1960s. The debris alone reveals these protesters are extremely well-funded, and it is evident this lawless insanity is being bankrolled and coordinated by an outside source.
So, who is paying professional rioters like Lisa Fithian and catering, facilitating, and supplying their riots across the country?
Multiple nonprofits around the country have been linked to these destructive protests.
These groups have abused their nonprofit status to advocate for the overthrowing of not only America’s ally Israel but also of the United States of America itself — a violation of the U.S. Code.
The protests are not random, independent occurrences; neither are they exclusively “student-led.” Instead, a network of anti-Israel groups, many with direct ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, are directing the chaos. At least one of these organizations is directly paying protesters, with some receiving a $24-28 per hour stipend.
Documented below are some of the groups funding and orchestrating the antisemitic animosity on college campuses this spring:
Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation (WESPAC), located in White Plains, New York, appears to be a small-town charity focused on “local” Westchester County initiatives. In reality, the group serves as a pass-through organization, slipping massive amounts of money to organizations whose activities — including violence — prohibit them from receiving charitable donations. In what some have described as money laundering, the group collects tax-exempt contributions and forwards those funds to protest groups that promote antisemitism.
National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is the most visible leader of the nationwide protests. Founded at the University of California Berkeley, SJP is just one of the so-called “student organizations” that WESPAC funds. Because SJP hides behind WESPAC’s charity status, no one knows its budget or the extent of its expenditures. SJP has chapters on some 200 college campuses.
Almost immediately after the October 7 massacre, SJP sent out a “tool kit” to jump-start pro-Palestinian protests. In the days following October 7, SJP released an official statement declaring the attack to be a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” SJP also officially declared that “this is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.”
Within Our Lifetime (WOL) is another WESPAC-funded group connected to campus protests. Within weeks of the October 7 massacre, WOL fueled attacks on American Jews by publishing a map of Jewish organizations and instructing its members to “make these locations a stop in your protests. picket and leaflet outside of them, make supporters of genocide uncomfortable.”
The United States Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) is similar to WESPAC. The USCPR also serves as an umbrella organization, funneling money to anti-Israel protest groups that can't get nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. The organization has repeatedly been tied directly to Hamas and funds many anti-Israel, antisemitic organizations, the most visible of which is the deceptively named Jewish Voice for Peace, which has also been front and center at the protests.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) founded in 1996, has the stated goal to drive “a wedge” within the American Jewish community, with aims to alienate Americans from Israel.
But where are these so-called “charities” getting their money?
Each of these groups have multimillion-dollar budgets with which they have funded the riots — including paying people to protest. Their funding is coming from two prominent billionaire families — namely the Rockefeller and Soros dynasties.
John D. Rockefeller and his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., were eugenicists who believed in eliminating Jews and other “undesirables” for the “betterment” of humankind. Close associates of Planned Parenthood founder and fellow eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the Rockefellers didn’t just talk the talk, they funded the people willing to walk the walk.
By the mid-1920s, for example, the Rockefellers had donated $410,000 to German “eugenics” researchers studying how to create a master race. In 1929, the Rockefellers gave an additional grant of roughly $317,000 to fund experiments on Jews, gypsies, and others by Hitler’s medical experiment architect, Ernst Rüdin.
After the war, the Rockefellers, who simply renamed their “eugenics” campaigns as “genetic” research, later funded some of the most antisemitic, anti-Israel organizations on the planet, including the present-day pro-Hamas protests.
George Soros, who was born to nonreligious Jewish parents in 1930, managed to escape World War II death camps by posing as the Christian godson of a Hungarian who helped in the confiscation of Jewish properties in Nazi-occupied Hungary.
Since at least 2009, Soros has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into “Palestinian” causes to “influence Congress, reporters and government officials.” His funding has been used to attack and malign the Jewish state, support the boycott Israel movement, fund links to known terror organizations like Hamas, and support various groups that spout antisemitism.
Combined, these families donated a stomach-twisting $3.36 million (at least) to the anti-Israel protest groups, according to The Washington Stand, including:
- The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), officially named Education for Just Peace in the Middle East, received $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 2018-2023, and over $700,000 from 2018-2022 from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF).
- JVP received $775,000 from Soros’ OSF from 2017-2022 and another $490,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 2019-2023.
- If Not Now (INN) received $400,000 from OSF in 2019-2021.
- Adalah Justice Project received $550,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (via Democrat-funded pass-through Tides Center) in 2020-23.
- The Arab American Association of New York received $60,000 from OSF in 2018.
- Desis Rising Up and Moving received $30,000 from OSF in 2020.
Anti-Jew protests bankrolled by Arab nations
During WWII, Muslims joined German Nazis in the “final solution” to wipe Jews from the face of the earth. Hitler capitalized on Muslim hatred, and tens of thousands of Arab Muslims fought for the Nazis. Certain Muslim muftis or legal experts met with Hitler to help the effort, and some Muslim rulers would broadcast Nazi propaganda from his palace to further encourage Muslims to help the Nazis kill Jews.
Fast-forward some 80 years, and an Arab nation is pouring billions into universities as so-called “student groups” chant Hamas slogans against Israel, destroy universities, and harass Jewish students.
Rioters at George Washington University demanded the beheading of university officials, referencing a common and brutal Sharia (Islamic law) form of punishment as students at New York University chanted “Death to America” and “Long live the intifada.”
The source of the propaganda these so-called “student organizations” are gleefully chanting should be quite clear: Muslim terrorists.
- The Qatari International Education Institution (“Mu’assasat Qatar”) has allegedly spent at least $1.5 billion funding Islamic radicalism at 28 universities, as revealed in 2012.
- The nation of Qatar spends roughly $405 million a year funding six other American universities to host campuses in Qatar, according to Najat Al-Saied, a researcher from the United Arab Emirates, in a July 2020 article.
- Yet more research reveals Qatar dumped another $5.6 billion into 81 other American universities since 2007, including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Stanford, according to Raymond Ibrahim, a Middle East and Islam expert.
Ibrahim said the funding is used to perpetuate hatred of American culture while promoting radical Islam. The same nations funding terrorists are pouring billions of dollars into the universities to disseminate radical Islamic ideology and denigrate Jews and Israel.
Dangerous antisemitic insanity cannot continue
This is just a glimpse into the dark underbelly of the well-coordinated effort to pervade higher education and American culture with destructive antisemitic ideologies.
It is dangerous when slogans from the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s are repeated. It is dangerous when pro-Hamas agitators are advocating the overthrow of the United States. And it is dangerous when Iran praises the violence and says that when Iran attacks America, these “students” will side with the ayatollahs.
If we were successful in uncovering the facts about who is bankrolling the pro-Hamas rallies terrorizing Jewish students and destroying taxpayer-funded colleges and universities, so can Congress.
University presidents have chosen Muslim Brotherhood blood money over Jewish students’ safety and American law. Congress must fully investigate and hold accountable the university presidents, the violent jihadi student organizations, and the anti-Israel billionaires funding and enabling the antisemitic riots destroying our colleges.
The coordinated chaos is linked to a history that should never be repeated and must be stopped.
Mat Staver is founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, chairman of Liberty Counsel Action, Faith and Liberty, Covenant Journey and Covenant Journey Academy. He has more than 350 legal opinions, authored eight scholarly law review publications, and many articles and books.
Mat has argued in many federal and state courts, including three landmark cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, which includes a 9-0 precedent-setting victory in Shurtleff v. City of Boston. This case unanimously rejected the 1971 Supreme Court opinion of Lemon v. Kurtzman that did incredible damage to the First Amendment for 51-years.
Mat hosts two daily radio programs, "Freedom’s Call and Faith and Freedom," as well as a weekly television program, "Freedom Alive."
