LOS ANGELES, California — The sources of monetary funding for anti-Israel propaganda and movements such as boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on college campuses can be linked to taxpayer dollars, according to experts at the StandWithUs conference, a gathering of pro-Israel activists.
“The most important thing to know is Students for Justice in Palestine are highly decentralized and, in large measure, are being funded through taxpayer funding of university funds,” New York Times-bestselling author Edwin Black said in an interview with Breitbart News.
Black spoke on a panel titled “Money Trail” during StandWithUs’s anti-BDS conference in Los Angeles on Monday.
His book, Fanning the Flames, describes how jailed Palestinian terrorists were being paid salaries based on the number of people with they had killed. Essentially, the higher the number in some cases, the higher the paycheck. Black argues that the money being paid to these terrorists “comes from U.S. and European taxpayer funds. Similarly, the funding for the BDS movements on campus is hidden.”
Black notes that “many of these SJP chapters work hard to become recognized as student organizations” which allows for a certain amount of the student budget to be allocated to them as a result. “And when you’re talking about university budget, you’re talking about taxpayer money.”
Professor Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor, who also spoke on the panel explained that the source of the funding for these groups is “like finding a needle in a haystack. But when you find it, it will put them [SJP] out of business.” He later told Breitbart News that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent annually on creating a false impression about Israel through the BDS movement.
“There are hundreds of anti-Israel events throughout college campuses,” he said, such as “Israel Apartheid Week,” and a growing number of BDS efforts that are funded and organized from behind the scenes.
“These are not organized by a couple of students here and there,” Steinberg told Breitbart News. “You see the same speakers, you see the same programs, you even see the same logos and handouts….We know, for instance, that Ali Abunimah, who runs Electronic Intifada, is a key figure in all of this. And of course Omar Barghouti,” who is one of the founders of the BDS movement.
Black stated that the funding is being misused because those organizations are not devoted to “diversity,” as they claim to be. In fact, he said that “they’re devoted to adversity. They’re devoted not to peaceful coexistence but to the disappearance of the Jewish state–and they actually don’t want justice in Palestine; they want an injustice in the Middle East.”
Another point Black made is that the use of the term “narrative” should serve as a key indicator to unknowing students that the information they are being given is likely false.
“What the SJP use as a feed stock to convince all the other students who don’t have the correct historical background to be able to identify lies, is their use of false facts, false narratives, false information and false accusations. It’s an alternative universe.”
Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter @AdelleNaz