Earlier this week, Edwin Black revealed that the New Israel Fund (NIF) received more than $1 million from the U.S. State Department. This week I can reveal that the governments of Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have also funded the extremist activities of NIF-funded organizations.
The far-left bogus “humanitarian” group known as the Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat (the “Secretariat”) is based in Ramallah, a center of the Palestinian jihad against Israel. It is funded by Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. In 2014, the Secretariat pledged $10.5 million toward 24 Israeli and Palestinian NGOs, “including groups that engage in legal warfare against Israeli officials and companies that do business with Israel, promote BDS campaigns, and exploit the false and libelous ‘apartheid’ analogy to demonize Israel,” according to NGO Monitor.
NIF-funded organizations are amongst their grantees. Those with their fingers in the till include leftist Jewish organizations such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem. The latter received special funding from the Secretariat to investigate violations of human rights and international law during Operation Protective Edge – not, mind you, violations of human rights and international law by the Palestinians, but by Israel.
Adalah, another NIF-funded organization, created a report on Operation Protective Edge and sent the report’s findings directly to the United Nations commission investigating this issue, despite the fact that Israel decided not to cooperate with the commission because of its relentless and unshakable anti-Israel bias.
This “Secretariat” also funds Palestinian organizations that support the prosecution of IDF officers, and organizations that cooperate with the terrorist group known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
All these facts led the Likud, the ruling political party in Israel and the party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to issue this declaration:
The Likud, as a nationalist ideological party, will not cooperate with bodies that are constantly busy with blackening the face of Israel. The NIF funds dozens of radical, leftist organizations, such as B’tselem, Breaking the Silence, Adalah and Machsom Watch, and it is one of the main bodies behind the Goldstone Report.
Nonetheless, the New Israel Fund still has all too many financial partners, all of whom should hang their heads in shame for dealing with this organization at all. These include the United States State Department, Palestinian organizations in Ramallah, and now the governments of Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands – along with far-left Jews such as Alisa Doctoroff of UJA-Federation and Karen R. Adler of Jewish Communal Fund.
Those who fund the New Israel Fund stand against Israel. NIF is a radical left-wing organization that is inveterately anti-Israel. Its lawyer, Michael Sfard, once testified as an expert witness for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Sfard has provided paid testimony for the PLO. He is also an attorney for a number of organizations that are funded by the New Israel Fund.
Like the Likud, many Jewish groups, such as Birthright, will no longer work with the radical, extremist organization. Activist Ronn Torossian revealed this in Truth Revolt in February:
One wonders how many JCRC or UJA donors support the viewpoints of Alma Biblash, the Executive Director of the Human Rights Defenders Fund (HRDF), an organization to which the NIF authorized grants worth $332,625 from 2011-2013. HRDF has called Israel “racist,” and “murderous,” and described the country as a “temporary Jewish apartheid state.” Biblash supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns and promotes the Palestinian ‘right of return.’ While there are Knesset members who have accused NIF of “lobbying and funding activities that are all part of a campaign to destabilize the IDF,” one wonders during times like these how many of their donors are actually aware of their partner organizations calling Israel a “temporary Jewish apartheid state.”
All that should have been scandal enough. But now that NIF is receiving funding from several European governments, it has only burnished the illusion of its legitimacy, and pushed Europe farther down the ugly, evil path of anti-Semitism that it seems determined to travel once again.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.
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