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.
Exposed: 'Breaking the Silence' collects intelligence on the IDF - Does it reach their European masters?
Greetings from Boston where I have been working all week, and where the Sabbath does not start for several more hours. I will be here until Sunday morning. Sunday is a travel day, but I'm not heading back to Israel just yet. I'm heading West... (and should have WiFi access on the plane, so you may see a few more posts on Sunday). And for those who watch the weather reports, it looks like I will once again escape a serious winter snowstorm by the skin of my teeth, God Willing.
For those of you who have forgotten 'Breaking the Silence,' they are an organization that claims to be dedicated to exposing IDF abuses of 'Palestinians' in Judea and Samaria. They are funded by European governments, by the European Union (which awarded them the prestigious Andrei Sakharov prize) and by private American citizens (as well as by UNICEF and OxFam). Br'eaking the Silence' interviews discharged IDF soldiers and debriefs them regarding their IDF service. Or so they claim. It now seems that they do a lot more.
You might recall that recently, an organization called Ad Kan (Until Here) turned over video evidence to Israel's Channel 10 about human rights violations by 'human rights' groups Taayush and B'Tselem.Spreading the wealth, the group handed over material on 'Breaking the Silence' to Israel's Channel 2, which reported on it Thursday night (link and video in Hebrew). The material shows that 'Breaking the Silence' is collecting military intelligence which has no connection to 'human rights' violations in Judea and Samaria or anyplace else. And the unanswered question is 'with whom does 'Breaking the Silence' share that intelligence material?' That intelligence material could clearly and presently endanger the State of Israel.
In its investigation, Channel 2 cited unpublished testimonies from
Israeli soldiers that were obtained by the right-wing NGO Ad Kan, which
sent some of its members to join Breaking the Silence undercover. The
report claimed that Breaking the Silence collected “operational and
intelligence” information about IDF activities from both current and
former soldiers.
Channel 2 also broadcast videos of Breaking the Silence asking
soldiers “questions [that] appear to revolve more around their
operational activity rather issues regarding Palestinians and human
rights.”
While Breaking the Silence says it gathers anonymous testimonies from
Israeli soldiers about the IDF’s purported human rights abuses, these
testimonies have been previously criticized as being unsubstantiated and lacking context. In recent months, the group has come under increased scrutiny over the ethics of its practices.
In the wake of the new Channel 2 report, Breaking the Silence denied
any wrongdoing and emphasized that it works closely with Israel’s
military censor. Breaking the Silence CEO Yuli Novak added that several
organizations and members of the Knesset were trying “to silence” her
group.
And it seems that the next group to come under scrutiny may be 'rabbis' for 'human rights.'
The broadcast became headline news and the fallout
continued for weeks. Nawi was arrested at Ben-Gurion Airport when he
tried to flee the country.
A few days later, a follow-up program aired
more hidden-camera footage, this time showing Nawi with officials from
two other prominent “human rights” NGOs—Breaking the Silence (BtS) and
Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR). Both groups were shown giving money to
Nawi, who then handed out checks to Palestinians, apparently for taking
part in violent demonstrations. RHR claimed that Nawi was paid for
providing transportation services. BtS denounced everyone involved in
the program as “Stasi,” a reference to the notorious East German
intelligence service.
Steinberg observed that even before the broadcast of Nawi with
representatives of Breaking the Silence, there was growing criticism of
the group across the political spectrum in Israel.
Prior to the Uvda broadcasts, BtS and its patrons were
the particular focus of growing anger among many Israelis on the Right,
center, and even the center-Left. This anger followed a major jump in
the visibility of BtS, which reflected the group’s million- dollar
budget. BtS events in churches, universities, and national parliaments
around the world featured “anonymous testimony” that alleged systematic
immorality by IDF soldiers, with no corroborating evidence.
In response, hundreds of IDF reserve officers petitioned the Minister
of Defense, demanding that BtS activists be barred from speaking on
military bases. In parallel, relatives of terror victims and fallen
soldiers demanded that Education Minister Naftali Bennett prohibit BtS
from speaking to high school students. NGOs like B’Tselem were also
criticized. On Israel’s popular Saturday night satire program Gav Hauma,
host Lior Schleien did a ten-minute routine based on the issue,
primarily lampooning BtS and related NGOs.
I'm amazed that B'Tselem is allowed to speak on military bases.... But what Professor Steinberg says about anger coming from 'even the center-Left' is true. Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid has accused 'Breaking the Silence' of digging under the foundations of the State of Israel, and causing it both internal and external damage (link in Hebrew).
For those of you wondering why Israel feels the need to stop foreign governments from financing its NGO's, this is another data point.
In blaming Israeli policy for the fact that on many U.S. campuses, the
classmates of Jewish students “shun them for identifying with Israel at
all,” perhaps American Jewish leaders are overlooking the failures at
home, particularly among liberal progressive diaspora Jewish leaders.
Many Jewish students are stuck entirely in an American bubble, with no
understanding of the centrality of Jewish self-determination (i.e.,
Zionism) to our survival as a people. So how can they even begin to
understand Israel, let alone give us advice?
For two decades, too many American Jews have ignored or downplayed the
gratuitous post-colonial Israel-bashing from the supposedly liberal
bastions such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and which
are echoed in the mainstream media. When Israeli soldiers are
repeatedly and falsely accused of being child murderers and war
criminals, where is the outrage from the mainstream American Jewish
establishment? A couple of years ago, the federations finally
established a fund to fight boycotts, but this group is also largely
invisible and very timid.
Instead, fringe Israeli voices that polarize and demonize our society
under the façade of human rights, democracy and peace are given
legitimacy and resources in America, and the Jewish leadership is silent
or in some cases complicit. Much of the BDS war — and make no mistake,
the goal is the elimination of Israel — involves bogus peace NGOs that
received their initial funds and public relations boost via U.S.-based
Jewish groups who thought they knew better than the Israeli public. Such
groups include the Coalition of Women for Peace, the Israel Committee
Against House Demolitions, Breaking the Silence, Jewish Voice for Peace,
and many others.
And now, when the Israeli public finally demands an effective response
to the NGOs that lead to this demonization, the American Jewish
leadership condemns Israel, repeating liberal pieties about free speech,
but without addressing the real issues. In all of the criticisms of the
proposed new NGO funding transparency laws, I have yet to see any
serious understanding of the threat or alternative strategies. On this,
as on so many issues, criticizing Israel from a distance is far too
easy.
When crying out for an Israeli peace plan, “any plan,” your
interlocutor makes it seem so simple. Like most Israelis, I also hope
for a peace plan, but not any plan, and certainly not one that will
bring us yet another disaster when it fails. The reality that I see not
far from the windows in my Jerusalem home includes Hamas, Hezbollah,
ISIS, Assad, Iran and others. Our only “peace partners,” led by Mahmoud
Abbas and his Fatah group, are corrupt and stuck in the rejectionist
dead-end of 1948. So no, “any plan” that helps Israel’s PR among liberal
students, but makes our security situation even worse, is not better
than the status quo.
On this and many other issues, I understand why American Jewish leaders
want us in Israel to take risks, and probably think that this is for
our own good. But we do not see many American Jewish leaders taking many
risks in terms of criticizing President Obama and Secretary of State
Kerry when they put all of the blame and responsibility on Israel, and
patronizingly give the Palestinians a free pass. And where are your
tough decisions to exclude BDS groups and Israel bashers from the big
“Jewish tent?”
So it is not only “that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at
odds with the next generation of Americans,” but that America’s liberal
Jewish leadership is moving in a direction at odds with Israel and our
realities.
Second reporter confirms AP ordered staff to shun Steinberg
A second reporter has now confirmed Matti Friedman's charges that the AP ordered its reporters not to interview or quote Professor Gerald Steinberg or NGO Monitor.
Response to the AP Ban on NGO Monitor and Prof. Steinberg
In a November 30 article published in The Atlantic (What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel), former AP journalist Matti Friedman states that, during his time at the AP Jerusalem bureau, reporters had explicit orders “to never quote [NGO Monitor] or its director… Gerald Steinberg. In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.”
“Matti Friedman’s revelations regarding the efforts to censor NGO Monitor and me as its president are not entirely surprising,” said Professor Gerald Steinberg, president and founder of NGO Monitor. “Based on our experience in publishing detailed research on over 150 NGOs claiming to promote human rights and humanitarian objectives, we are aware of the intense efforts to maintain the NGO ‘halo effect’ and prevent critical debate. While the AP censorship was explicit, we have experienced similar silencing from other media platforms.”
Friedman also highlights the “ethical gray zone of ties between reporters and NGOs” in Israel, where journalists socializing in the same circles as NGO officials, seek employment with NGOs, and adapt to a journalistic culture in which NGOs “are to be quoted, not covered.”
This absence of critical analysis of political NGOs reinforces their biases and the lack of professional methodology. Friedman rightly criticizes, “one of the strangest aspects of coverage…namely, that while international organizations are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story, they are almost never reported on.”
Professor Steinberg continued: “When NGO Monitor was founded following the 2001 NGO Forum of the UN Durban conference, our primary objective was to open debate and provide accountability where none existed, develop systematic checks and balances, and ‘speak truth to NGO power.’ The importance of this mission has grown since then, as has the political influence of NGOs, as well as their funding and media impact, particularly in the Israeli context.”
Still haven't heard any spin on this from al-AP.
And I strongly suspect that most of the other mainstream media had similar 'rules.'
You wonder why the world hates us? Because they're told to hate us by the Leftist elites who run the media.
To make sense of most international journalism from Israel, it is
important first to understand that the news tells us far less about
Israel than about the people writing the news. Journalistic decisions
are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which,
like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude,
behavior, and even dress (the fashion these days, for those interested,
is less vests with unnecessary pockets than shirts with unnecessary
buttons). These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange
information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain
why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news
providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the
pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and
organizations, they tend to tell the same story.
The best insight into one of the key phenomena at play here comes not
from a local reporter but from the journalist and author Philip
Gourevitch. In Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa, Gourevitch wrote in 2010,
he was struck by the ethical gray zone of ties between reporters and
NGOs. “Too often the press represents humanitarians with unquestioning
admiration,” he observed in The New Yorker. “Why not seek to
keep them honest? Why should our coverage of them look so much like
their own self-representation in fund-raising appeals? Why should we (as
many photojournalists and print reporters do) work for humanitarian
agencies between journalism jobs, helping them with their official
reports and institutional appeals, in a way that we would never consider
doing for corporations, political parties, or government agencies?”
This confusion is very much present in Israel and the Palestinian
territories, where foreign activists are a notable feature of the
landscape, and where international NGOs and numerous arms of the United
Nations are among the most powerful players, wielding billions of
dollars and employing many thousands of foreign and local employees.
Their SUVs dominate sections of East Jerusalem and their expense
accounts keep Ramallah afloat. They provide reporters with social
circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment—a fact that is
more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the
disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their
Internet successors.
In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with
these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is,
seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these
were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of
an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and
international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic
corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. (There is
also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli
human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European
governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority,
the NGOs, and the UN.) Mingling occurs at places like the lovely
Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at
parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. The dominant
characteristic of nearly all of these people is their transience. They
arrive from somewhere, spend a while living in a peculiar subculture of
expatriates, and then move on.
In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be
something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry.
I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the
ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief
that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills,
particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism,
and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the
“progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European
left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including
journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into
editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering
Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass
self-replication.
...
In the aftermath of the three-week Gaza war of 2008-2009, not yet
quite understanding the way things work, I spent a week or so writing a
story about NGOs like Human Rights Watch, whose work on Israel had just
been subject to an unusual public lashing in The New York Times by its own founder, Robert Bernstein. (The Middle East, he wrote,
“is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights
records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more
condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any
other country in the region.”) My article was gentle, all things
considered, beginning like this:
JERUSALEM (AP) _ The prickly relationship between Israel and its
critics in human rights organizations has escalated into an
unprecedented war of words as the fallout from Israel’s Gaza offensive
persists ten months after the fighting ended.
Editors killed the story.
Around this time, a Jerusalem-based group called NGO Monitor was
battling the international organizations condemning Israel after the
Gaza conflict, and though the group was very much a pro-Israel outfit
and by no means an objective observer, it could have offered some
partisan counterpoint in our articles to charges by NGOs that Israel had
committed “war crimes.” But the bureau’s explicit orders to reporters
were to never quote the group or its director, an American-born
professor named Gerald Steinberg. In my time as an AP writer moving
through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and
killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was
this professor.
When the UN released its controversial Goldstone report on the Gaza
fighting, we at the bureau trumpeted its findings in dozens of articles,
though there was discussion even at the time of the report’s failure to
prove its central charge: that Israel had killed civilians on purpose.
(The director of Israel’s premier human-rights group, B’Tselem, who was
critical of the Israeli operation, told me at the time that this claim
was “a reach given the facts,” an evaluation that was eventually
seconded by the report’s author. “If I had known then what I know now,
the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” Richard
Goldstone wrote in The Washington Post
in April 2011.) We understood that our job was not to look critically
at the UN report, or any such document, but to publicize it.
Decisions like these are hard to fathom if you believe the foreign
press corps’ role is to explain a complicated story to people far away.
But they make sense if you understand that journalists covering Israel
and the Palestinian territories often don’t see their role that way. The
radio and print journalist Mark Lavie, who has reported from the region
since 1972, was a colleague of mine at the AP, where he was an editor
in the Jerusalem bureau and then in Cairo until his retirement last
year. (It was Lavie who first learned of the Israeli peace offer of late
2008, and was ordered by his superiors to ignore the story.) An
Indiana-born Israeli of moderate politics, he had a long run in
journalism that included several wars and the first Palestinian
intifada, and found little reason to complain about the functioning of
the media.
But things changed in earnest in 2000, with the collapse of peace
efforts and the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Israel accepted
President Bill Clinton’s peace framework that fall and the Palestinians
rejected it, as Clinton made clear.
Nevertheless, Lavie recently told me, the bureau’s editorial line was
still that the conflict was Israel’s fault, and the Palestinians and the
Arab world were blameless. By the end of Lavie’s career, he was editing
Israel copy on the AP’s Middle East regional desk in Cairo, trying to
restore balance and context to stories he thought had little connection
to reality. In his words, he had gone from seeing himself as a proud
member of the international press corps to “the Jew-boy with his finger
in the dike.” He wrote a book, Broken Spring, about his front-row view of the Middle East’s descent into chaos, and retired disillusioned and angry.
Read the whole thing. And yes, he also explains the genesis of that picture at the top of this post.
Video: Shalit agreement shows moral failure of 'human rights' groups
Prof. Gerald Steinberg interviewed on the IBA English News October 17, 2011 about the Gilad Shalit prisoner deal and the utter failure of Human Rights NGOs during Shalit's 5 years in a Hamas prison.
Undiplomatic behavior by a (former) American diplomat?
Oh dear me. I've gotten a report that former US ambassador to Israel and 'peace processor' Martin Indyk (pictured with Ehud Olmert - who, fortunately, was not at the conference) had a little temper tantrum at the President's Conference on Thursday. Some of the participants at the President's Conference in Jerusalem witnessed a very public display of uncivil and undiplomatic behavior from Indyk on Thursday afternoon around 5:30 pm. In the main entrance hall, in full view of at least 15 people, Martin Indyk went up to Professor Gerald Steinberg, the head of NGO Monitor, and began to shout at him. Indyk then turned around, made an obscene gesture with his finger, and stormed out.
This incident was apparently related to the New Israel Fund (NIF). Ex-ambassador Indyk joined NIF's board, and in 2010, his effort to get NIF funding in Australia was cancelled after a series of embarrassments. Indyk wrote a crude column directed at the head of NGO Monitor, Professor Gerald Steinberg, blaming him for exposing the NIF facade. NIF tried again, as NGO Monitor published new reports detailing NIF's central role and cover-up in funding BDS-supporting anti-Israel NGOs like CWP, Adalah, etc. Apparently, the Australians did not buy the NIF-Indyk line, and this explains the emotional explosion today.
For more background on Indyk's involvement in the NIF dispute go here.
Sounds like someone needs to apologize for his temper tantrum.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
