Last Saturday, a group called DC Leaks posted over 2,500 documents hacked from the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a group run by leftist billionaire George Soros. The leak reveals Soros’ funding of a wide range of activities: the Black Lives Matter movement, influencing the European elections in 2014, swaying a Supreme Court decision, smearing political activists, and attacking the nation of Israel.
But you likely haven’t heard about these key “dark money” revelations. Soros has given $7 million to the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA and has dedicated $25 million to support Democrats and their causes. His fundraising matters politically, and should be a big story.
But The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, CBS News, and other major media outlets did not even report on the leak, much less the stories revealed by it.
To rectify this coverage gap, PJ Media is presenting 5 of the biggest stories released so far. Enjoy!
1. Influencing the Supreme Court to open the immigration floodgates.
According to an OSF memo from February 2016, the Soros-funded organization directly tried to influence Supreme Court justices to support President Obama’s amnesty executive order.
“Grantees are seeking to influence the Justices (primarily via a sophisticated amicus briefs [sic] and media strategy) in hopes of securing a favorable ruling in U.S. v Texas,” the memo reads. A “favorable ruling” would have upheld Obama’s executive order.
The memo also emphasized that USF was preparing for such a “favorable ruling.” It reported that the organization was “positioning the field to move swiftly on a large-scale implementation effort in the event of a favorable ruling—efforts complicated by lagging implementation capacity at the federal level.” In other words, the group wasn’t just hoping that the immigrants included in the executive order would be able to stay in the U.S., it was also preparing to bring more into the country.
OSF also reported an interest in possible “collaborations with Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern and South Asian partners.”
The memo, written by OSF U.S. Programs Director Ken Zimmerman and Deputy Director Andrea Batista Schlesinger, addressed the 14 advisory board members of the organization’s U.S. operations. The board includes Soros, his sons Alexander and Jonathan, Harvard University scholar and Washington Post columnist Danielle Allen, Georgetown Law professor and Foreign Policy magazine contributor Rosa Brooks, and Steve Coll, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, as well as New York University Law professor Bryan Stevenson and Columbia University Senior Fellow Andy Stern.
2. Influencing European Elections.
Another memo, called the “List of European Elections 2014 Projects,” lays out the efforts of Soros’ global network to manipulate electoral outcomes across the continent. This document lists over 90 projects, one of which is called “Radical Europe — The populist challenge.” Interestingly, this particular project aimed to create a “political-fiction experiment built with journalistic elements: an imaginary state” based loosely off of France, Slovakia, and Hungary.
One program, “Fighting Political Islamophobia,” requested nearly $50,000 to organize “a national day against Islamophobia, … run a monitoring website to track Islamophic hate speech,” and get more Muslims in Europe to vote.
Another proposal requested $261,619 for “Radical Democracy for Europe” to “involve the creative media-making community (video and animation artists and other creative media-makers) in the debate around the elections and European politics in line with” OSF’s European objectives.
“Changing the Rules of Finance in Europe is Essential for Democracy” asked for $175,000 to launch a four-part agenda including lobbying for finance reform and ensuring “that media coverage of the EU elections reflects their priority of ‘making finance serve society.'”
You can see the full list here.
Next Page: Israel and Black Lives Matter.
3. Anti-Israel initiatives.
As the Jerusalem Post‘s Michael Wilner reported, the hack revealed the OSF’s efforts “to accuse the Israeli government of state-sponsored racism, to form civil society organizations that can serve as rapid-response opposition to Israeli policies, and to create an NGO environment in Washington and across Europe that would make criticism of Israel more politically palatable — to ‘hold Israel accountable,’ using the words of one report, for its violations of international law.”
The foundation’s 2013 portfolio summary of the Middle East conflict reported that “space for reasonable, unbiased discussions in the policy deliberations, including criticism of Israeli policies, is opening,” under the Obama administration.
The hack revealed several organizations which received OSF grants actively deny Israel’s right to exist. The foundation gave over $1 million to I’lam, an anti-Zionist organization, and over $1.5 million to Adalah, which frequently accuses Israeli forces of war crimes, Wilner reported.
Documents also revealed Soros’s support for organizations working toward a two-state settlement involving Israel and Palestine. While Soros distanced himself from the original founding of J Street, a lobby working toward a two-state settlement, in 2007, he has since donated annually to the organization. J Street itself acknowledged in 2010 that 7 percent of its fundraising came from the Soros family.
In a 2007 New York Review of Books article, Soros attacked the policy of U.S. and Israeli leaders to avoid negotiations with Hamas (a group both nations consider a terrorist organization). The billionaire wrote that “no peace agreement would hold without Hamas’ support.” He also attacked the “pro-Israel lobby’s” alleged success in “suppressing divergent views.”
OSF has also given tens of thousand of dollars to the National Iranian American Council, an organization tied to the Iranian regime, Wilner added. He accused the council of working “to explain Tehran’s positions to a skeptical American public,” stating that NIAC was “instrumental” in selling the Iran Nuclear Deal.
NGO Monitor first reported OSF funds to NIAC in 2013, as negotiations between the U.S. and Iran began in earnest.
4. The Black Lives Matter movement.
An OSF board meeting agenda in October 2015 revealed that the foundation board approved $650,000 “in Opportunities Fund support to invest in tecnical assistance and support for the groups at the core of the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter movement.”
The foundation said the movement needed more organizational muscle. “While these emerging groups had mobilized communities with a force that captured the nation’s conscience, behind the scenes, they had invested much less time in reflection, strategy development, and future planning.”
OSF announced that the organization not only supports “these convenings,” but has “provided the groups and attendees of the convenings described here [BLM movements in Cleveland, Ohio, and in New York City, New York] with technical assistance.”
Many Black Lives Matter protests have turned violent, most notably in Ferguson, Missouri, and recently in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Next Page: George Soros’s smear campaign against conservative activists.
5. A $200,000 smear campaign against conservative activists.
A 2011 document, entitled “Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civil Discourse,” suggested a $200,000 grant to the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank founded in 2003 by John Podesta, who is now Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. In the document, reported by the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross, OSF executives lamented that progressive groups lacked “high quality opposition research” to combat “anti-Muslim xenophobia and to promote tolerance.”
The memo named prominent critics of radical Islam, including Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, and Robert Spencer, as targets for opposition research.
The “Examining Anti-Muslim Bigotry Project” aimed to engage progressives and journalists to raise awareness about these critics of Islamism. In addition to Geller, Gaffney, and Spencer, the project intended to “research and track” David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Cliff May, and even Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“CAP’s first step will be to interview and engage journalists, researchers, academics, and leaders in the anti-hate movement who are researching and writing on Islamophobia, and to develop a roster of knowledgeable and credible experts to whom journalists and policymakers can turn for information,” the memo reads. OSF did indeed fund the CAP project, 2011 tax filings show. In addition to this particular $200,000 grant, it gave the organization two others totaling $500,000.
The document also encouraged CAP to explore the interactions of conservative think tanks, pundits, and politicians it considered part of the “Islamophobia” movement. “We need a clearer understanding of what by all indications is a well orchestrated and well financed system by which right-wing think tanks, pundits, and politicians are able to produce false narratives and flawed research into the media cycle and use their misinformation to manipulate public opinion and thwart progressive counterterrorism policies.”
As if this Orwellian interpretation of conservative ides were not enough, the memo also promised that “CAP will approach its work with an appreciation of the connections between the Islamophobia movement and related forms of xenophobia.”
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