Nicole Lampert in the Telegraph – Foreign donors ‘funding hate on Britain’s streets’.
Pro-Palestine marches are being funded by a complex web of foreign donors and state actors, a report reveals.
The report by the US charity watchdog NGO Monitor found examples of Iranian and American far-Left groups bankrolling anti-Israel groups in the UK, creating an “ecosystem” of disruption.
It also found cryptocurrency was increasingly being used to hide funding sources for organisations accused of anti-Semitism, with gift aid also being used by these organisations.
The report’s authors also accuse organisations of deliberately targeting young people with anti-Israel material.
Lord Walney, a former government extremism tsar, will release the report in the House of Commons later on Wednesday.
He will say: “A phenomenon widely portrayed as spontaneous and grassroots is, in significant part, the product of a coordinated and internationally financed network” and “a troubling number of the organisations within it either fall outside any meaningful regulatory framework or maintain connections to actors that no democratic state should tolerate”….
“That organisations can solicit substantial sums from the British public for years, even decades, while disclosing little or nothing about where their money comes from or where it goes, is not a technicality; it is a standing invitation to abuse.”…
The report looked at 40 of the organisations who have sponsored some of the main pro-Palestine demonstrations from the well-known Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Amnesty UK to less-known Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). As The Telegraph has previously reported, the IHRC has links to Iran but in the space of five years collected £458,000 in public funds via gift aid in the last six years.
Several other groups, including Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders (MSF), receive hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money either through direct government funding or Gift Aid.
The report found that at least 11 of the 40 either have links to extremist organisations or have officials who have met extremist actors.
It’s the same ecosystem of NGOs and charities that Gerald Steinberg was warning us about the other day, together with Iranian-backed and far-left groups. We – and the government – take them to be impartial organisations fighting for justice and freedom on behalf of suffering humanity. Well….they’re not. Not any more.
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