IRS allows PFLP terrorists to fundraise through leftist nonprofit

While the IRS is warning waiters to report their tips, it allows terrorists to benefit from tax deductible money.

By Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Magazine

Rabbi Eitan Shnerb was hiking to a spring with his son Dvir and his daughter Rina when the bomb went off. For a moment, as he described it in the hospital, everything went black. Then, badly wounded, he saw that the two teenagers were bleeding.

Rabbi Shnerb was a trained paramedic. He saw that Rina, his 17-year-old daughter, had absorbed most of the blast. He kissed her on the forehead. And then he turned his tzizit, the biblical garment that Orthodox Jewish men wear, into a tourniquet for his 19-year-old son to stop the bleeding.

Dvir told his father that he couldn’t breathe and passed out. His daughter was already dead.

“I wanted to believe it was just a dream,” Rabbi Shnerb said from his hospital bed. “I have experienced several bombs in my life and been saved, thank God, but this one got us,..I immediately called to Rina, shouting ‘Rina, Rina,’ I looked down and saw that she was not alive.”

Rabbi Shnerb had stopped a terrorist attack earlier this year by two armed attackers. This time he had not seen the explosion coming.

The terrorist group behind the 2019 terrorist attack was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And the IRS is accused of allowing it to fundraise through a leftist nonprofit group.

Humanitarian pretext

One name that keeps coming up in the Freedom Center’s investigations of nonprofits is the Alliance for Global Justice. AFGJ was spun off from the Nicaragua Network which had been set up to support the Sandinista Marxist terror regime. It went on to operate the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign in support of the narcosocialist Maduro regime in that country.

While the IRS has harassed pro-Israel groups and interrogated them about their views, it has apparently never found the time to ask the AFGJ about its support for enemy nations. It currently features a commemoration of Chavez’s legacy in support of a regime whose bosses are wanted criminals for their role in a cartel smuggling cocaine into the United States.

AFGJ’s backers include George Soros, Tides, the Ben and Jerry’s Foundation, and other wealthy leftists, and it has used its status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to offer fiscal sponsorship to some of the worst of the worst close to home. The 130 groups it sponsors include several Black Lives Matter chapters, the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition in support of a cop killer, pro-illegal alien groups, as well as several brail funds whose mission is freeing rioters and criminals.

Some of these groups might not be able to obtain nonprofit status on their own, but benefit from the fiscal sponsorship of the Alliance for Global Justice, which allows them to accept tax-deductible contributions. When Refuse Fascism, a group linked by some to Antifa and which has defended Antifa violence, solicits donations, it does so using the Action Network, a platform utilized by both Antifa and the DNC, and directs tax-deductible donations through AFGJ.

The same is true of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network which asks supporters to direct checks to AFGJ. Samidoun does not bother to disguise what it is. It describes terrorists as “resistance fighters” and “martyrs”, and urges support for the “resistance.” The cheerleading for terrorists is accompanied by a call, “Make your US tax-deductible donation today, and donate safely and securely from around the world.”

The AFGJ states, “Fiscal sponsorship services are offered to grassroots non-profits that agree with the AFGJ vision and mission statements.” Does that include terrorists?

After the murder of Rina Shnerb, Israel arrested members of a PFLP terror network embedded inside nonprofit groups. Israel designated Samidoun as a subsidiary of the PFLP terrorist organization. Multiple PFLP figures have been accused of serving leadership roles in Samidoun including its executive director, former vice chair, and multiple coordinators.

PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and other financial services have cut off access to Samidoun and the latest also cut off AFGJ. Currently, AFGJ and its various sponsorees warn donors that they can only take paper checks.

“AFGJ cannot accept credit donations—and neither can the 140 organizations that rely on AfGJ to provide them with fiscal sponsorship,” the leftist group cautions.

While AFGJ is running low on online sites willing to process donations to them, the IRS has yet to take any action. The Zachor Legal Institute, a pro-Israel group fighting BDS, filed an IRS complaint and directed a letter to the DOJ noting that the “PFLP has built a financial system supported by an infrastructure of the Seven PFLP Proxies who raise money on various humanitarian pretexts” while “directing money to the PFLP.”

IRS has yet to act

And yet the odds of the IRS taking action are slim. Even though the PFLP was designated as one of the terrorist groups listed by President George W. Bush after September 11, it was less difficult for Zachor and conservative media to persuade financial services companies to stop processing donations for AFGJ than to get the IRS to enforce tax code regulations and the law.

AFGJ informed the IRS that its mission is to “achieve social change and economic justice”. In reality it has helped unleash violence at home and abroad. The beneficiaries include BLM’s Louisville Community Bail Fund, which bailed out Quintez Brown, a Black Lives Matter activist, who walked into the campaign office of a Louisville political candidate and opened fire.

While payment processors have cut off the Alliance for Global Justice, the IRS has yet to act. After over two decades, the IRS has shown no interest in taking action even as the AFGJ continues to act as a fiscal sponsor for groups that would not qualify for nonprofit status. The fiscal sponsorship loophole continues to be abused to fund everything including terrorism.

The Freedom Center’s pamphlet, Internal Radical Service by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, has exposed how the IRS routinely allows leftist nonprofits to violate tax codes and the law. The fiscal sponsorship loophole is widely used by radical leftists to make illegal activity tax deductible.

Tax code regulations state that “exempt purposes may generally be equated with the public good, and violations of law are the antithesis of the public good. They warn that “violation of constitutionally valid laws is inconsistent with exemption under IRC 501(c)(3)” and that “planned activities that violate laws are not in furtherance of a charitable purpose.”

Terrorism is one of the most blatant possible examples of behavior at odds with the public good.

While the IRS is warning waiters to report their tips, it allows terrorists to benefit from tax deductible money. Payment processors have shown that they have a higher level of compliance with the law than the IRS. When the IRS refuses to enforce the law while demanding that everyone abide by it, that is a culture of lawlessness and, in this case, it’s costing lives.

AntifaBlack Lives MatterNGO transparencyPalestinian terroristsPFLPradical leftRina Shnerb