Why Are Liberal Jewish Groups Defending Non-Profit Status Of Terrorist Supporters?

This is a moment in history when antisemitism—and support for and enabling of terrorists seeking the genocide of the Jews—is not only rising; it’s been normalized. A year of often violent pro-Hamas demonstrations on the streets of American cities and college campuses that targeted Jews, and were often excused or rationalized by leading Americans like Vice President Kamala Harris, was evidence of that. So, too, is the outrageous decision of the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. It is part of a lawfare campaign that seeks to criminalize the efforts of the sole Jewish state on the planet to defend itself against genocidal Islamist terrorists and radical extremists.

At such a time, you might think that the organized American Jewish world would put partisanship aside to support measures aimed at combating antisemitism. Legislation that would strip the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that support terrorism and are part of the effort to target Jews in the United States and elsewhere is an idea that objective observers might assume would garner across-the-board backing from Jewish groups. But you’d be wrong about that.

A coalition of 55 liberal and left-wing groups, including those representing the two largest Jewish religious denominations, oppose the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” which was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on November 21.

Why would they do that?

As has been made clear in a number of articles in liberal publications like The New York Times, Slate, The New Republic and The Forward made clear, the answer is partisanship. They believe giving the executive branch the power to make it harder for antisemitic pro-terror groups to operate is a bad idea while Donald Trump is president and the Republicans are in power in Washington.

Prioritizing partisanship

Having convinced themselves that Trump and the GOP are evil authoritarians, the same people who often have no trouble with censoring dissent against liberal orthodoxies and conservative political speech on the Internet, silencing non-liberal speakers on campuses, and using lawfare to bankrupt and imprison the leader of the party they oppose have rediscovered a belief in civil liberties. They now claim that efforts to curb those who back genocidal terrorists and who are financed by dark sources like Iran are the thin edge of the wedge of tyranny that will soon be turned on ordinary Americans who vote for the Democrats.

This is nonsense on stilts. Cutting off groups that back terror against Jews abroad and that seek to intimidate them into silence here from funding is no threat to ordinary political speech and mainstream liberal advocacy groups. Nor are efforts to prevent countries like Iran from financing antisemitism in the United States. Given the safeguards and due process built into the bill, it cannot be used in the manner its critics claim. The “slippery slope” towards political repression that is obvious in efforts to shut down free speech on social media platforms like X in the name of combating neo-Nazis just isn’t present here.

Part of the problem is that a growing number of political liberals and leftists have accepted the sophistry about contemporary anti-Zionism, which singles out the Jews and their state for delegitimization not accorded any other people, not being antisemitism. The big lie about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza, a monstrous inversion of the truth about the war on Hamas that falsifies what is happening on the ground and the intentions of both sides, has also gained support.

In this way, the pro-Hamas mobs on campuses are depicted as idealists protesting injustice. The truth is that they are coalitions of malicious antisemites and their useful idiots who have been indoctrinated into believing a key tenant of fashionable critical race theory and intersectionality teachings that Jews and Israelis are “white” oppressors.

A similar measure gained the support of 55 House Democrats earlier this year, but with the Trump 2.0 administration looming in January, only 15 Democrats could be persuaded to try to defund supporters of terrorism this past week. That’s because liberal groups pressured them to change their minds since they truly believe Republicans are a greater threat to American Jewry than Tehran.

Some liberal Jews have been waking up to the fact that their traditional political allies on the left are ambivalent or actually supportive of the surge in antisemitism that has exploded on these shores since the Hamas massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But whether or not that shifted a significant number of Jews to vote for Trump earlier this month, some of their leading organizations are still trying to convince them that the Republicans who have stood with the Jewish people and Israel during the last 13 months of terror, war and the explosion of American antisemitism from the left are the real problem.

Demonizing ‘Project Esther’

That’s been made clear by the attempt to demonize the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” which puts forward a comprehensive plan to “ensure that U.S.-based antisemitic movements are incapable of threatening U.S. citizens with violence” and to “dismantle the pro-Hamas support network’s infrastructure across America.” Unlike the toothless and largely symbolic U.S. National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism put forward by the Biden administration last year, the current bill would seek to prevent those who wish to isolate and harm Jews from using the tax laws to enable funneling money from Iran, and international groups and sources, that seek Israel’s destruction into the country.

But because Heritage is associated with Project 2025, a think-tank paper about reforming the federal government that was libelously demonized for partisan purposes during the 2024 campaign as a plot to install a GOP tyranny, liberal Jews are claiming to be horrified by “Project Esther,” which helped inspire the bill passed by the House.

The same groups that are appalled by such anti-terror efforts were satisfied with the Biden plan. It not only proposed very little genuine action against the hatred of Jews but allowed antisemitic groups like the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to be part of its process. It was also equally concerned with combating the mythical threat of Islamophobia—an idea whose only real purpose is to silence critics of the hate that sadly emanates from American Muslim groups. That turned the entire effort into a transparent political farce fronted by Harris’s Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff.

Yet so strong is the pull of partisanship among liberal Jews that sensible and timely ideas such as the ones that Heritage’s paper proposes have been rejected out of hand by many groups.

The election results have not ended the effort to portray Trump as an antisemite. His first administration was notable for its efforts to combat antisemitism on campuses as well as for being the most pro-Israel since the founding of the modern Jewish state. And as the announcements of his choices of personnel to serve in his second administration have made clear, it will at least be as philo-semitic and pro-Israel as the first.

Yet leading liberal outlets like The Atlantic are still trying to sell us on the idea that “Trump Is Building the Most Anti-Semitic Cabinet in Decades,” as the headline of a misleading article by Franklin Foer read. His sole evidence consisted of quotes by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which can be balanced by others from the former presidential candidate that demonstrate that, whatever his other failings, he is an opponent of antisemitism and surely a more reliable supporter of Israel than The Atlantic.

Lawfare against Israel

Right now, the stakes in the battle against international antisemitism couldn’t be higher.

Western governments that could once be relied upon to stand against Jew-hatred are becoming accomplices. That was the most discouraging aspect of the outrageous decision of the International Criminal Court this week to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. Instead of joining in the condemnations issued by the government of the United States and decent people everywhere, the leaders of nations like the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands and Ireland stated that they would honor the warrants. In doing so, they were treating the Jewish state, which was infiltrated and brutally attacked on Oct. 7, as morally equivalent to the terrorists who carried out the barbarous atrocities and launched a war that they still refuse to abandon.

While the decisions of the ICC kangaroo court are represented as a form of international law, beneath the thin veneer of legal procedure is open antisemitism. If the one Jewish state is to be stripped of its right to defend itself and smeared as a practitioner of genocide—a trick only achieved by not only shedding the word of its meaning but by ignoring the fact that only party to the conflict that seeks genocide are Israel’s Iranian-funded foes—and reduced to the status of a pariah nation, what else can we call this farce but an insidious example of Jew-hatred?

Like so much else produced by a morally bankrupt international community and its multilateral organizations, this was an example of how Jew-hatred has become normalized.

The willingness of as many as 19 Democrats in the U.S. Senate (some 38% of their caucus in the current lame-duck Congress) to support efforts to ban weapons sales to Israel on the same bogus grounds that were the foundation of the ICC effort is indicative of the way the virus of Jew-hatred promoted by Hamas propaganda, albeit disguised by a thin veil of alleged concern for the welfare of Palestinian Arabs, is spreading.

What are their priorities?

The siege of Jewish students on many college campuses in the last year, if not the war being waged on Israel by Iran’s terror proxies, should have alerted the organized Jewish world that the need to do more than stage rallies that are fiascos that serve as a metaphor for their failure to respond to the crisis. Yet supposedly mainstream groups like Hadassah, the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism’s leading organizations and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, as well as others firmly on the left like J Street, the New Israel Fund, the National Council of Jewish Women and dozens of smaller groups, all signed a letter opposing the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.”

To its credit—and going against its recent history of partisanship—the Anti-Defamation League backed the legislation, as did AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition.

The bill’s fate in the Senate, which is, until January, still controlled by the Democrats, remains unclear. But there is little doubt that a similar bill will be easily and quickly passed by the next Congress, in which both the House and Senate will have GOP majorities. The same is true for much-needed congressional action to place sanctions on the ICC.

Nevertheless, the opposition of most Democrats and the liberal Jewish groups that follow their lead to this effort is discouraging. Given the opportunity to prioritize the security of American Jews, and especially students, they have instead doubled down on campaign rhetoric about Trump and the half of the country that voted for him earlier this month as fascists who wish to install an authoritarian state. Given the anti-democratic banana republic measures that the same party and groups backed to prevent Trump from running, this is a case of one side of the political spectrum projecting its own mindset onto its opponents.

That’s bad enough. But for Jewish groups to act in this manner at a time when antisemitism is surging everywhere is more than irresponsible. It is a disgrace that illustrates the need for new leadership that is both willing and better able to speak up for the interests of an embattled Jewish community.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).