‘We need to make it very clear that if you engage or support antisemitism, you should not be able to benefit from tax-exempt status,’ said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

By Andrew Bernard, JNS

A subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee heard testimony on Tuesday about the foreign and domestic funding of antisemitic protest groups and their exploitation of non-profit tax status and other legal maneuvers intended to avoid public oversight.

Witnesses told the Oversight Subcommittee about the vast tax-exempt network of interconnected nonprofits, which have been at the forefront of organizing anti-Israel protests across the country since Oct. 7.

Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told congressmen that the government was falling behind the private sector in scrutinizing groups with potential links to Hamas and other foreign terrorist organizations.

“Samidoun, a designated terrorist organization in Israel, which has already been banned in Germany, has expressed explicit support for those who have been convicted of terrorism and acts related to terrorism,” Segal said.

“We need to make it very clear that if you engage or support antisemitism, you should not be able to benefit from tax exempt status.”

Segal added that other institutions and industries are “responding to this, frankly, faster” than the government is.

“The credit card Discover has stopped enabling them to use their services,” he said, of Samidoun.

“PayPal has stopped them from being able to use those services. So here you have private companies that are able to take quick action. It would not be unreasonable that the IRS investigate this more closely.”

Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the committee chair, slammed Democrats on the subcommittee for not attending an event on Jew-hatred.

“I apologize to the witnesses that not one of the Democrats have showed up today,” Smith said.

“To think not one Democrat feels like it’s important enough to sit on that side to look at the 501(c)(3) tax exempt status and how money is flowing to terrorist organizations and to the Chinese is appalling and unacceptable.”

Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) was the only Democratic congressman to speak at the hearing.

The subcommittee’s ranking member, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), 87, is hospitalized with a fever. JNS sought comment from the other four Democrats on the subcommittee.

Spokesmen for Reps. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) and Don Beyer (D-Va.) told JNS that the members had conflicting prior legislative commitments.

They added that the members have previously attended hearings on antisemitism and have supported legislation to counter Jew-hatred.

“He’s been a leader for years on hate crime prevention legislation and wrote the bipartisan NO HATE Act, which was signed into law in 2021,” Aaron Fritschner, a spokesman for Beyer, told JNS.

“So it’s obviously not the case that he intentionally coordinated an absence.”

Reps. Suzane DelBene (D-Wa.) and Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) did not respond to requests for comment.

Smith, whose committee is one of several investigating Jew-hatred in American life in the aftermath of Oct. 7, said that the hearings revealed that sophisticated networks have funded the virulent anti-Israel protests across the country.

“It has become clear that the explosion of antisemitic activity on college campuses has been supported and encouraged by bad actors who, in many cases, have used tax-exempt organizations for those purposes,” he said.

“The violence and hatred directed at Jewish Americans and in support of terrorist organizations like Hamas are not some organic uprising.”

“There are well-orchestrated efforts by anti-American and anti-Jewish organizations within the United States that provide financial and logistical support to those who harass and threaten Jewish students,” he added.

Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, the Tides Foundation, and the People’s Forum were among the groups that Smith and others listed as playing a particularly pernicious and potentially illegal role in supporting both anti-Israel protests and Hamas.

“I’ve made a formal request to the IRS demanding they revoke the tax exempt status of an organization named the People Media group,” Smith said.

“This organization funds a publication by the name of the Palestine Chronicle that employed a so-called journalist, who was caught actually imprisoning Israeli hostages in Gaza.”

In June, the Israel Defense Forces rescued two hostages, who were found to be held by Abdullah al-Jamal, a contributor to the Palestine Chronicle and an occasional spokesman for Hamas.

The Chronicle stated in June that al-Jamal was a “freelance contributor,” who wrote for the publication on a “voluntary basis.”

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The hearing also probed the influence of foreign donations’ impact on American universities, questioning whether the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status intended to permit universities to receive billions of foreign dollars.

By Andrew Bernard, JNS

Experts told the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday that Congress ought to use its power of the purse to combat antisemitism on college campuses.

“We are seeing a kind of perfect storm of student violent extremism, professorial politicization, undisclosed foreign funding and often feckless and weak administration,” said Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

“Most of these institutions are tax-exempt and need to be held accountable if they do not meet the requirements of their tax-exempt status,” Marcus told the committee. “That’s true of the universities and also some of the organizations that have been fomenting hatred.”

The Ways and Means Committee, which is responsible for taxation, is one of six House committees investigating the wave of antisemitism on college campuses in the aftermath of Oct. 7.

Thursday’s hearing also included testimony from recent Cornell University graduate Talia Dror, Columbia University professor Shai Davidai, American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch and Jonathan Pidluzny, a director at the America First Policy Institute.

Thursday’s hearing was less explosive than the grillings that university presidents have received in recent months that led to the resignation of the president of Columbia and contributed to the resignation of the president of Harvard University.

The sharpest exchanges Thursday included partisan disagreements about the extent to which “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives contribute to Jew-hatred.

“DEI teaches that the world is made up of oppressors and the oppressed, victims and those with privilege,” Pidluzny said. “Jews are coded as the oppressors by virtue of their political and economic success.”

“This is what creates a kind of permission structure for students to join in with the true radicals cheering for Hamas terrorists who deliberately kill children and rape hostages,” he added.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) disagreed with that perspective.

“Such claims not only misconstrue diversity, equity and inclusion but also basically pit one minority group against another,” he said. “DEI responds to decades of systematic exclusion of people of color from higher education in states like mine in Texas.”

“It seeks to create a culture of respect and understanding for all. Both communities of color and Jewish Americans are all too familiar with the very real prejudice that they’ve endured,” he added.

The hearing also probed the influence of foreign donations to American universities, with some congressmen questioning whether the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status was intended to permit universities to receive billions of foreign dollars.

Repeated mentions of Qatar at the hearing—both as the host of the Hamas political leadership and as a multi-billion dollar donor to U.S. higher education institutions—prompted pushback from the Qatari embassy on Friday.

“Qatar has no desire or ability to influence anything that happens on U.S. university campuses,” the embassy stated. “It is flatly untrue, for example, that Qatar is the ‘largest foreign donor to U.S. universities’—a claim made to imply dark motives, and to undermine the strong U.S.- Qatar security and trade partnership.”

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) welcomed the testimony from Thursday’s panel but questioned the efficacy of congressional hearings in combating bigotry.

“It’s amazing that we think we can have a meeting of the Ways and Means Committee to come together to try to figure out what the heck is wrong with what’s going on in the world today,” he said. “The seeds of hate are sown long before the freshman year.”

“I am amazed that we think there’s a political answer to a human problem,” he added.

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