Israel Matzav

JPost discovers 'exclusively' that only Left-wing NGO's receive money from foreign governments - UPDATED

JPost is shocked, just shocked, to discover that nearly all the NGO's being targeted by the new NGO transparency bill being debated in the Knesset are Leftist.

On Thursday, The Post exclusively obtained the list of NGOs which show that 23 out of the 25 organizations are left-wing, with only two being centrist or non-affiliated. There are no right-wing organizations.

The Justice Ministry bill in question, which returned to the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee on Wednesday after passing a first reading in the plenum, requires any NGO receiving more than half its funding from a foreign political entity identify itself as such in any publications and any meetings with public officials, and has been controversial because most of the organizations under the bill’s purview were predicted to be left-wing. The list, obtained on Thursday, confirms that that suspicion.

...

The organizations listed included, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, the Economic Cooperation Foundation, Yesh Din and The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.  According to the Justice Ministry report, Yesh Din, for example, receives NIS 4.7 million of its NIS 5.3 million budget from foreign political entities. B’Tselem gets NIS 6.2 million of its NIS 9 million budget from foreign sources as well.

On Wednesday, Nonprofits Registrar representative Yafit Shemer told the Knesset committee that the legislation on transparency for organizations getting most of their budgets from foreign governments will affect 27 NGOs.

Committee chairman Nissan Slomiansky (Bayit Yehudi) prohibited Shemer from presenting the list to the MKs, arguing that he wants the bill to be “clean” of being drafted in a way that would target specific NGOs, sparking vocal debate among lawmakers. The Justice Ministry did not respond to requests for the list.

The reason the Left needs funding from foreign governments is because most Israelis have turned Right after the Oslo debacle, and will not support Leftist NGO's.

But don't worry. This bill will eventually go to the Supreme Court which will undoubtedly find an excuse to strike it down. Maybe then we can have a rational discussion about the balance of powers and the Supreme Court's dictatorship in this country. But probably not.

Funny how no one bothered to interview Professor Gerald Steinberg, the director of NGO Monitor and the country's leading expert on this issue, for this article.

UPDATE 4:31 PM

Professor Steinberg is quoted in an earlier article on this issue. 

NGO Monitor President Prof. Gerald Steinberg said donations of more than NIS 100m. per year from foreign governments “distort Israeli democracy and dangerously damage its sovereignty.”

But this should be mitigated by dialogue with lawmakers in Europe, many of whom oppose their government’s donations to political organizations.

Of course, those European lawmakers seem to be having trouble stopping those contributions....

Oh and here is another interesting tidbit from that earlier article.

Also on Wednesday, the Knesset approved in a preliminary reading the “V15 bill,” meant to make American- style Super PACs illegal. The measure proposed by MK Yoav Kisch (Likud) would limit political organizations’ ability to raise funds in an election year by making the limitations on NGOs involved in elections similar to those on a political party.

The legislation is nicknamed “V15” after an organization that campaigned against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the last election using advanced data methods to target voters door-to-door. 

V15 was sponsored by Obama cronies and US tax dollars, and staffed by the Obama administration. 

Labels: Gerald Steinberg, Knesset elections 2015, NGO funding, NGO Monitor, NGO's, V-2015

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:47 PM