Israel Matzav

Who's for and against the Ground Zero victory mosque

Politico reports who's behind the funding for both sides on the Ground Zero victory mosque.

In addition to the donations from Qatar and the Saudi prince, Rauf’s nonprofits — the Cordoba Initiative and the American Society for Muslim Advancement — also received a healthy dose of funding from mainstream American foundations that bankroll countless apolitical organizations.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Deak Family Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Swanee Hunt Family Foundation and the William & Mary Greve Foundation combined to give $650,000 from 2006 to 2008, according to foundation grant reports reviewed for POLITICO by the conservative Capital Research Center. ...

But there’s also big money behind the mosque opposition, as highlighted by the relationship between [David] Horowitz’s Los Angeles-based nonprofit, Jihad Watch — the website run by Spencer “dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology play in the modern world” — and Joyce Chernick, the wife of a wealthy California tech company founder.

Though it was not listed on the public tax reports filed by Horowitz’s Freedom Center, POLITICO has confirmed that the lion’s share of the $920,000 it provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from Chernick, whose husband, Aubrey Chernick, has a net worth of $750 million, as a result of his 2004 sale to IBM of a software company he created, and a security consulting firm he now owns.

A onetime trustee of the ...Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aubrey Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network ...

The David Horowitz Freedom Center had a budget of $4.5 million last year, according to its tax filings, of which $290,000 came from the conservative Bradley Foundation, which also gave $75,000 to the Center for Security Policy last year. Horowitz has received an average of $461,000 a year in salary and benefits over the past three years, while Spencer has pulled in an average of $140,000, according to the center’s IRS filings.

Anyone want to support a poor blogger in Jerusalem? (The article goes on to claim that they support a whole lot of other people here - not me, I'm afraid).

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:18 AM