Consider the New Israel Fund.......

[Mediocrates]

A small NGO has tracked back the sources Goldstone uses in his Gaza war report and 92% of the anti Israeli sources that come from Israeli organizations are groups funded by NIF. Makes you wonder, or maybe it doesn't

http://www.examiner.com/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner~y2010m1d31-New-Israel-Fund-finances-most-Israeli-antiZionism

From news article:

This weekend’s Maariv exposes the New Israel fund for financing anti-Israel propaganda groups in Israel. The expose is based on a study by Im Tirtzu, a Zionist student group. The study found that the New Isreal Fund finances most of the Israeli anti-Zionist organizations. The group also discovered that the UN Goldstone report took 92% of its anti-Israel material from organizations funded by the New Israel Fund.

The New Israel Fund chairlady is Naomi Hazan, former Member of Knesset for the semi-Marxist Meretz Party.

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=167441

From news article:

The report states that the above NGOs contributed “hundreds” of testimonies and other materials to the Goldstone Report, and that while Palestinian and UN sources inside Gaza were also consulted during Judge Richard Goldstone’s investigation in the Gaza Strip last summer, the bulk of the damage was done using the material provided by the Israeli NGOs.

“The Goldstone Report looks the way it does because of these 16 groups and the quotes they provided,” a spokesman from Im Tirtzu told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. “In that vein, our goal is to remove the NIF’s mask and show the public what they really are – which is a fifth column, plain and simple.”

http://imti.org.il/en/
http://imti.org.il/
http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/2...of-speech.html
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/046/583.html

[Mediocrates]

http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archiv...ng/index.shtml

From news article:

The NIF has been circulating what can only be called one of the whinier emails I've read by a major group in response to Im Tirzu's expose of the types of groups they've been funding and the use that funding has been put to. [h/t: Seva] An Urgent Message from the New Israel Fund

When a right-wing group with a destructive agenda and a lot of money taps into the Israeli public's anger, the results are usually not pretty.
That's what happened last week when a new organization made a big splash in Israel by accusing the New Israel Fund and its grantees of being behind the Goldstone Report. Timed to capitalize on the anger many Israelis feel about the Goldstone conclusions, andpersonalized with a particularly despicable attack on NIF President Naomi Chazan, the attack was the latest salvo in a coordinated attempt to de-legitimize civil society, repress the activities of the human rights community and weaken Israeli democracy. It comes as no surprise to discover that this new group is funded by the same abundant money that flows to extremist settlers' organizations, including a sizable contribution from John Hagee's "Christians United for Israel" - a group that once stated that Hitler was carrying out God's will."...

What a disgusting inference. Snip a bunch of other victim stuff, then:
...The ugly language and personal threats against NIF and our President are all too reminiscent of the atmosphere of incitement and hatred that preceded the Rabin assassination. Sadly, these vicious attacks are being launched against the very organizations that protect Israel and its international reputation as a vibrant democracy...

Puh-lease. Draaama. Sounds like the NIF just can't take some very well deserved criticism. For NIF & Co., it's OK to demonize anyone to the right of Rosa Luxemburg...Christians, "settlers"... but heaven forfend someone should look in to what they've been up to...

And speaking of criticism, it sounds like NIF's friends can dish it out, but they sure can't take it. NGO Monitor has a must-read: On Free Speech and Informed Public Debate: An Open Letter to NIF and Affiliated NGOs
To ACRI, Bimkom, B'Tselem, Gisha, PCATI, Yesh Din, HaMoked, PHR-I, Rabbis for Human Rights, and New Israel Fund (NIF):

The recent attacks directed against NGO Monitor's detailed research represent a dangerous attempt to prevent free speech and informed public debate on the political role of some NGOs. In particular, in your February 1, 2010 letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, you tendentiously referred to NGO Monitor as an "extreme group" that "unleashed an unrestrained and inflammatory [attack]," and implied that we are the "rotten fruits" of Israeli democracy; B'Tselem's US representative, Mitchell Plitnick, labeled us "extremists" and "right wing"; and, a few months ago, an NIF employee posted an indecent graphic on his blog (which was later removed) to illustrate his opinion of NGO Monitor's publications.

These characterizations are inconsistent with claims to uphold the mantle of human rights and democracy in Israel. Contrary to the implications of your letter, NGO Monitor has never contested the right of civil society organizations to exist or to criticize. And if your rhetoric about upholding free speech in Israel were matched by your policies, you would uphold our right as an independent research organization, and the rights of NGOs that do not share your political views, to do the same...[The rest.]

[Mediocrates]

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/bl.../pollak/229916

They advocate fascism as a response to democratic 'threats'.

[Mediocrates]

http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archiv...-p/index.shtml

http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=167740

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/135849

[Mediocrates]

http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=47132

[Yala]

Nothing will happen to the NIF. Too many European countries funding and protecting it. It is a foreign agency on Israeli soil.

[Aliyah1995]

Even Kadima MK's have called for NIF to be investigated. I am glad those traitors in our midst have finally been exposed for what they are.

[Mediocrates]

http://www.jstreetjive.com/2010/02/i...g-promise.html

Have Naomi Chazan and The NIF, in effect, become the stone and the tree informing on their fellow Jews to a genocidal, radical Islam? Through its partner, Adalah, "The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel" and more than a dozen other Arab NGO's in The Middle East, The New Israel Fund has been energetic in supplying the notorious Goldstone Report compiled for the United Nations with questionable "evidence" concerning alleged Israeli human rights violations during the 2008 Gaza Operation Cast Lead. New Israel Fund's affiliated groups like Adalah make no bones about its lack of objectivity and their political motives in a statement presented to the Goldstone Commission:

"the enclosed material does not address suspected violations of the laws of war by Hamas, but rather offers our own distinct perspective – human rights violations for which Israel must be held accountable."

In addition to the spurious "evidence" supplied in its report, Adalah characterizes Israel as a “colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.” Moreover, Adalah has for years advocated "the one state solution" for Israel, in effect, signaling the end of The Jewish State, which, apparently, is just fine with the NIF.

Another NIF supported group is Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP), which runs Machsom Watch whose mission is to harass IDF and Border Police at checkpoints, whose job is to ensure that terrorists do not enter Israel. On a tour of the United States a few years ago, when they were questioned about the danger of suicide bombers crossing into Israel they discounted the facts and found only the "humiliation" of the checkpoints. When the case of Wafa al-Biss, who, in 2005 attempted to cross the Erez checkpoint in Gaza with 20kg of explosives hidden in her pants was cited to Machsom Watch members, it was dismissed as a "forgery" in spite of scores of photographic evidence available on the internet. Also branded a forgery was the case of 14 year old, Hussam Abdu, who was apprehended at the Hawara checkpoint with a belt of explosives.

Again, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary, Machsom Watch spokespersons claimed the incident never happened.

NGO Monitor, the Jerusalem based watchdog group. has compiled voluminous and damning information concerning the political and financial aid supplied to a variety of Arab NGO's whose ultimate aim is to end the Jewish State:

"The New Israel Fund (NIF) supports more than 100 organizations involved in a wide range of areas in Israel, including political activism related to the Arab-Israeli conflict."

As NGO Monitor recently reported,

"NIF-funded groups and their publications (from groups such as The Palestinian Center for Human rights) were featured centrally in the Goldstone report, which focused on alleged Israeli “war crimes” in the 2009 Gaza war. During the fighting, as shown in NGO Monitor analyses, these NGOs issued daily reports claiming to document Israeli “human rights” violations. NGO officials, widely quoted in the media, lobbied intensively for an international inquiry."
Read more...

Physicians for Human Rights Israel, another NIF affiliated group, receives hundreds of thousands of dollars to highlight only alleged Israeli violations of "international law." Its director, Dr. Dani Filc, speaking recently at Harvard's Kennedy School, was asked why his group did not bring attention to the scores of incidents in which Palestinian Red Crescent and UN ambulances were used to ferry arms and fighters in clear violation of international law. He provided no answer.

Larry Garber, NIF's Executive Director and before that, USAID's Director for Gaza and the West Bank (1999-2004), speaking at Harvard in 2005, indicated that, under his direction of USAID, was required to administer executive order 13224 (requiring financial disbursements to Palestinian NGO's comply with anti-terrorist certification). He indicated that such compliance was not well-enforced. What better career move from USAID to the NIF?

Writing this week in The Jerusalem Post, Jonathan Rosenblum, offers some clarifying insights into NIF's activities.

Naomi Chazan and her cohorts most likely do not consciously wish to see Israel destroyed, but the actions of The New Israeli Fund are helping, if unwittingly, to accomplish this aim.

[Mediocrates]

http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/2...ic-at-nif.html


Eventually the NIF got around to publishing a rebuttal to the Im Tirzu report. You can download the full report here, but it's in Hebrew only - which is odd, since these organizations publish almost all their documents in English.

It's important that the NIF responded, because their initial reaction was to use legal measures to shut down the Im Tirzu campaign, hardly an honorable response that, and then to concentrate their ire on the form of the criticism against them, not its substance. Yet their responses now are hardly satisfying.

I haven't read the entire 112-page ImTirzu report. My understanding of their thesis, however, was never "absent NIF there'd have been no Goldstone Report", which would have been a silly idea. What they were claiming was that the NIF-NGOs, unlike the other Israeli entities cited by the Goldstone Report, set themselves firmly in the critical-of-Israel camp. This claim is so obviously true it's hard to see why anyone would even try to refute it; may I remind us all that back in June 2009, as the Goldstone team was just beginning to operate, a coalition of these Israeli NGOs essentially said this themselves in a document they submitted to Goldstone and put on their websites (here's the ACRI version, and here's my reading of that document, from August).

The English version of the NIF response is here, and a synopsis of the 29-page rebuttal report is here. It just so happens that I responded to the synopsis on February 10th, the very day it was posted, and my response is still there, so I don't need to repeat it here. As for the NIF response, it seems to me mostly irrelevant. No-one is claiming the NIF does nothing of any value in Israel, rather that they do good and bad simultaneously; enumerating the good is therefore besides the point. Except here:

We challenge Im Tirtzu, NGO Monitor and other NIF critics to demonstrate the value of their contributions to Sderot.

Why are the actions of their critics relevant? It's the NIF that needs to respond, not their critics.

Since the NIF response enumerates fine things they've done in and around Sderot, however, they do open themselves to an additional line of questioning: Have any of their NGOs ever, at any point since 2001 when the attacks on Sderot began, demanded of the Israeli government that it protect the Sderotians from the infractions of their human rights? The NGOs under attack produce an endless stream of reports, court petitions, demonstrations and so on demanding that Israel treat the Palestinians better; have they ever taken similar action so that the Israeli government protect Israeli citizens?

[Mediocrates]

From Jonathan Rosenblum

http://www.jewishmediaresources.com/...ts-comeuppance

The late Saul Alinsky, author of Reveille for Radicals, is the patron saint of community organizers, such as President Obama in his early days. J Street, the lobbying group that describes itself as pro-Israel, but has never been able to identify any policy of the Israeli government that it supports, refers to Alinsky as their "rabbi." But I must confess that there is one Alinsky dictum that is supported by numerous examples: "Immoral enemies make stupid mistakes."

A case in point would be the New Israel Fund (NIF). NIF's last annual budget was $32,000,000, and, according to its website, the organization has distributed over $200,000,000 to more than 800 "cutting-edge" organizations since its inception. The NIF claims credit for building Israel's civil society from scratch, and through its action arm SHATIL, mentoring and training Israeli civil society "in an ongoing struggle to empower the underprivileged." Most of the NIF's funding comes from contributions by American Jews and Jewish federations drawn to its expressed mission of advancing religious pluralism and aiding minority and other downtrodden groups in Israeli society. Between 2003-2008, it also received $20,000,000 in funding from the Ford Foundation.

Donors to the NIF are told that the organization supports Israel as a Jewish state and opposes the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees. What donors are not told is that many of the organizations supported by NIF call for the "right of return" and denounce Israel as a Jewish state.
The Coalition of Women for Peace, an NIF grantee, recently sponsored a speech by Naomi Klein in support of the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BSD) against Israel. NIF grant recipients – including CPW, Mossawa, and Machsom Watch – petitioned the Norwegian government for economic sanctions against Israel.

Ittijah, an umbrella group of Israel Arab NGO's, issued a statement prior to its attendance at Durban II in Geneva, in which it charged that "the Jewish character of the state of Israel contradicts international law" and referred to the "racist character" of the State. The draft constitution prepared for Israel by Adalah, the Legal Center for Minority Arab Rights in Israel, another NIF grantee, calls for Israel to recognize responsibility for the Nakba of its creation and to acknowledge the Palestinian "right of return." Adalah actively participated in the preparations for the U.N. sponsored Israel-bashing fest at Durban I and in the drafting of the conference resolutions.

The director until recently of I'lam – the Media Cener for Arab Palestinians in Israel, Balad MK Hanin Zoabi, was one of the signatories of the Haifa Declaration calling for the negation of Israel's Jewish character. She supports Iran's quest for nuclear weapons and has participated in Israel Apartheid week activities in the United States. The organization's Empowerment Coordinator calls for the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes and its director of International Relations describes Hamas as "a genuinely emancipatory liberation and resistance movement."
Zochrot, another organization supported by the NIF, is described by Ma'ariv's Ben-Dror Yemini, as openly calling for the destruction of Israel through exercise of the "right of return."

While the directors of NIF may not actually wish for the destruction of the State of Israel, they apparently believe that the "justice" of Israel's existence can only be maintained by a return to the 1949 armistice lines, and that the best means of achieving that goal is international pressure on Israel. To that end, delegitimization of Israel is justified as serving Israel's real interest. The NIF has joined in an unholy alliance with the EU, various European governments, the Ford Foundation, and George Soros's Open Society Institute to portray Israel as an apartheid, warmongering state. (Soros was the major early backer of J Street). Many NIF grantees are also funded by the latter groups.

NIF also tells donors that it does not fund organizations that engage in propaganda or support boycotts of Israel. That claim is blatantly false, as the above examples make clear.

I have been writing about the NIF since 2001. In a March 30, 2001 piece in the Jerusalem Post, I described some of the NIF's then recipients:
"One of NIF's beneficiaries is the Israel-Palestine Friendship Center in Tel Aviv. The Center actively promotes the Palestinian "right of return" to their pre-1948 homes. Two weeks ago, Russian language journalist Israel Shamir told a largely Jewish audience, "Jews only exist to drip the blood of Palestinian children into their matzas." No one protested.

Another NIF recipient is Bat Shalom. From 1994 to 1996, Bat Shalom campaigned for the release of Abi Waheidi, who led a terrorist cell that murdered Zvi Klein after stopping his car and dragging him from it. After her release, Waheidi, who was praised by Arafat as the model Palestinian woman, vowed to continue her terrorist activities and refused to express regret for murdering Klein.

[Mediocrates]

Jeffrey Halper of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions, an NIF recommendee, travels throughout American with a Palestinian colleague denouncing the "Nazi" and "apartheid" house demolition policies of the Israel. Halper speaks sympathetically of his Palestinian allies who cannot agree to accept a two-state solution for fear of foreclosing a unitary state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean." (Halper is no longer supported by the NIF.)

THIS INFORMATION has been readily available for at least a decade in reports produced by the Center for Near Eastern Policy Research and more recently NGOMonitor. Unfortunately, few have bothered to pay attention. Last week, however, a Zionist student group, Im Tirzu, succeeded in finally getting the Israeli public and Jewish supporters of Israel abroad to pay attention, with a series of ads showing Naomi Chazan, the chairman of NIF in Israel, with a horn on her head (a pun on the identity of the Hebrew word for horn and that for fund). Simultaneously, Im Tirzu released a study showing that the Goldstone Report relied very heavily on the testimony and "research" of NIF-sponsored NGOs, a debt fully acknowledged by Judge Goldstone himself in his final report. According to the Im Tirzu report, 92% of the negative citations concerning Israel army conduct during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza from Israeli sources were drawn from reports of 16 NGOs supported by the NIF.

Another report produced by NGO Monitor listed 56 citations to B'Tselem, 38 to Adalah, and 27 to Breaking the Silence in the Goldstone Report. All are funded by the NIF. Public Committee Versus Torture, Adalah, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel participated in the planning sessions for the Goldstone Commission in Geneva under the sponsorship of the notorious United Nations Human Rights Council, an organization dominated by the world's worst human rights abusers and which rarely, if ever, finds any human rights abuser other than Israel to condemn. Seven other NIF-sponsored organizations submitted a statement to the Commission in which they referred to "Palestinian martyrs" and the "collective punishment" imposed on Gaza. In addition, they charged that Israel had no military goal in Operation Cast Lead.

Im Tirzu succeeded in drawing attention where others had failed. In part, that is a result of the great damage done by the NIF through the Goldstone Report and its aftermath. The Im Tirzu report revealed that "major NIF organizations signed a letter calling on Britain to prosecute senior IDF officials for war crimes." The threat of being arrested under warrants of universal jurisdiction has already forced Tzippi Livni, foreign minister at the time of Operation Cast Lead and opposition leader today, to cancel one planned visit to Britain. And many senior IDF commanders fear to travel to Europe at all for the same reason. Neither the IDF nor the Israeli political echelons take kindly to being treated as common criminals if they travel abroad.

More important, the Goldstone Report constitutes a very grave threat to Israel. If Israel's actions in Operation Cast Lead constitute "war crimes," as the Goldstone Commission found, relying in large part on NIF-sponsored NGOs, then Israel simply cannot defend itself without incurring international opprobrium and possible sanctions. Israel re-entered the Gaza Strip in force only after thousands of missiles had been fired from Gaza at Israeli civilians in the wake of Israel's total withdrawal from the Gaza Strip two years earlier. As Professor Asa Kasher, who drafted the Code of Ethics for the IDF, points out, every nation has a right to defend its citizens from attack and a duty to its own citizens to do so.

Not only was Israel duty-bound to defend its citizens, but it took extraordinary steps to protect Palestinian civilians in doing so. Colonel Richard Kemp, the former British high commander in Afghanistan, says that no nation in history has ever gone to the extraordinary lengths Israel did to protect civilians. Among those steps were 150,000 warning calls to evacuate neighborhoods in which terrorists were holed up, the dropping of leaflets, and the firing of dummy ammunition in advance of operations. It was Hamas terrorists, not the IDF, who elected to carry out their terror assaults from amidst civilian areas and to hide in them.

Professor Kasher compares Israel's actions to the American assault on Fallujah in Iraq to rout out 3,000 insurgents. Six thousand Iraqis were killed in the latter operation, of whom only one-fifth to one-third were insurgents, ten thousand buildings destroyed (one-fifth of the buildings in the city), including 60 mosques in which ammunition was stored. The destruction in Gaza was far, far smaller, and of the 1,400 Palestinians killed (according to their own notoriously bloated figures) most were armed combatants.

Every Israeli territorial withdrawal since the beginning of the Oslo process has resulted in Israeli civilians being subjected to new terror attacks. In addition, each of those withdrawals has resulted in further damage to Israel's international standing, as the IDF is eventually forced to act against the terrorist attacks, as in Operation Defensive Shield (2002) and Operation Cast Lead, only to find itself accused of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."

The NIF has played a major role in that process. Last week, however, there were for the first time signs that the Jews of the world are finally awakening to the menace of the NIF. Naomi Chazan was pointedly disinvited from giving a speech by a Reform temple in Melbourne. And Jerusalem Post editor David Horowitz informed her that the paper would no longer publish her bi-weekly Friday column.

It could not have happened to nicer people. And the young activists of Im Tirzu deserve a great deal of credit.

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