Israel Matzav

Played for a sucker

The Atlantic's Chris Good put up this post about J Street within minutes after Eli Lake's Washington Times article, which he obviously had not seen. Note Chris' update and what he says in a subsequent post. This is from an update.

UPDATE II: J Street seemed to distort the source of this donation and its prior openness about donations from Soros. The $811,697 indeed came from Consolacion Esdicul, solicited by Benter. "Bill raised this money for J Street," a spokesman told me, noting that if Benter hadn't solicited it, it wouldn't have been donated. The group also had posted on its website, as of last night, that Soros was not a founder or J Street's primary funder (which is true) and that J Street would be happy to receive Soros's donations should he choose to give them (which seems to imply that he wasn't donating already--which he was). Moreover, J Street had acknowledged that it would welcome Soros's donations and saw no problem with him, but still implied that he wasn't giving money. Ben-Ami had, according to a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, acknowledged Soros's donations while speaking to a small group in Florida. That seems to be the only evidence of J Street's acknowledgement of this. [UPDATE III: A sometimes columnist for the Jerusalem Post wrote, in a comment posted below an op-ed Ben-Ami placed in the paper, that Ben-Ami had acknowledged Soros funding to a small group in Florida.]

And here's what he says in his subsequent post, three hours after Lake's article hit:

Earlier today, I wrote a post about J Street's funding. There is more to the story.

A set of half-truths, non-truths and ambiguities from J Street lead a reasonable person to conclude that the group tried to conceal that George Soros has been one of its largest donors for years, and to falsely claim that it had been "open" about those donations over the past three years. J Street also seemed to distort the fact that it received a large contribution from a donor in Hong Kong. Some of this happened on the phone with me earlier today.

J Street called me up this morning and disclosed that it had successfully grown its fundraising since forming in 2007 and that Soros and his family have given the group $250,000 a year over the past three years, a fact that was in the process of being verified and reported by The Washington Times' Eli Lake.

"That was very public," J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami told me of J Street's history with Soros, explaining that Soros came to an earlier donor conference and told the group he wouldn't give money at first. "What he said was, if you get going, I'll take a look at it again."

This was after a J Street spokesman told me on the phone today that Soros's donations are something the group has "always been up front about." This point was reiterated on a three-way call with spokesman Matt Dorf and Ben-Ami. The group has been "open" about it over the past three years, J Street told me.

Last night, on its website, J Street had this to say about Soros donations: that Soros had not been a founding or primary funder of the group, and that it would be happy to take his money were he to offer it. Which implies that Soros was not giving money to J Street, even though he was.

And here are a couple of tweets of Good's earlier post a few moments after Lake's article went up:

Do you see how J Street was trying to use Good? Mideast Channel is run by some of the pro-Arab people at Foreign Policy.

I actually knew that the Lake article was going down on Friday morning. But I wasn't allowed to report on it until it was up on the Times' website and that didn't happen until a little over an hour after the Sabbath started.

/sigh

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:46 AM