First off, Soros is a modern day Trotsky. Talk about a subversive dude who's trying to dismantle this country.
As for paying someone to protest. It's not against the law to do that, no matter how ridiculous their message and promoting Hamas is as ridiculous as it gets. On the other hand, a reasonable person can certainly disagree with Israel's actions in Gaza.
If you protest illegally or trespass you should immediately get escorted to the paddy wagon and to jail. Why elite college as monkeying around with this is beyond me.
Some Anti-Israel Protesters Are Paid
Rockefeller and Soros grants are subsidizing those who disrupt college campuses.
By Ira Stoll, WSJ
April 24, 2024
Since at least the Vietnam War, exasperated observers of student protests have rolled their eyes and thought: Get a job. In some cases today, activism is a job. Two of America’s largest philanthropic foundations are behind a group that has paid some of the anti-Israel activists for the kind of antics disrupting campuses across the country.
Consider Malak Afaneh, a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, and Craig Birckhead-Morton, a senior at Yale. Ms. Afaneh went viral this month for disrupting a dinner at Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s home. This week the Yale Daily News reported that Mr. Birckhead-Morton had been arrested for trespassing—and then re-emerged to address an anti-Israel crowd blocking an intersection in New Haven.
Ms. Afaneh and Mr. Birckhead-Morton have both been “youth fellows” of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, whose website identifies them by their first names. As of April 4, the campaign was soliciting applications for a new cohort, whose “campus-based fellows” would receive stipends of $2,880 to $3,360 for three-month terms of roughly eight hours of work a week. That “work” could include aiding campaigns that “demand federal or state politicians cut US military, financial, or diplomatic ties with Israel.”
The corporate entity behind these fellowships is Education for Just Peace in the Middle East. Where does it get its funding?
George and Alexander Soros’s Open Society Foundation has put $700,000 into Education for Just Peace in the Middle East since 2018, most recently with a two-year grant in 2022, according to the Open Society Foundation’s website. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given Education for Just Peace in the Middle East $515,000 since 2019, most recently with a three-year grant for $225,000 awarded in August 2023.
While some policymakers have wondered whether activists receive money from overseas, it turns out that there’s a clear paper trail of funding at home. That ought to have policy implications. In considering whether to discipline students for rule violations, university administrators might more harshly punish activism done, at least in part, for pay.
Do the Rockefeller and Soros families want their money to be used to advocate for Hamas’s war aims? They should consider that themselves. Meantime, Congress and the Internal Revenue Service might want to examine whether the grants fit the charitable purposes defined in the tax code.
Mr. Stoll writes at TheEditors.com.