The group took credit for releasing a horde of maggots and other insects inside the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., during Netanyahu’s July 2024 stay.

By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon

Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) on Friday formally petitioned the IRS to investigate the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)—a “virulently antisemitic” activist group that released maggots into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hotel room last year—for potential violations of the U.S. tax code, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Cotton, chair of the Senate Republican Conference, wrote in a letter to acting IRS commissioner Scott Bessent that the PYM has flouted U.S. law by receiving tax-exempt donations through a third-party nonprofit called Honor the Earth.

“PYM receives funding from Honor the Earth, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization,” Cotton wrote.

“PYM’s website states, ‘We also accept checks payable to ‘Honor the Earth’’ and says U.S.-based donations are tax deductible. I believe PYM’s activities, particularly its support for terrorist organizations such as Hamas, should prevent it from receiving tax exempt donations.”

The activist group, the senator alleged, “is clearly operating outside of the acceptable scope of activities” permitted under U.S. tax code, “as is Honor the Earth by sending funds to PYM.” Consequently, Cotton contended, the IRS must immediately probe the PYM’s “funding sources for violations.”

The PYM has been under the congressional microscope for more than a year, owing to its role as one of the most prominent organizations spearheading the pro-Hamas movement on college campuses across the country.

The group took credit for releasing a horde of maggots and other insects inside the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., during Netanyahu’s July 2024 stay.

The organization posted a video of bugs crawling across a table adorned with U.S. and Israeli flags on Instagram with the caption, “BON APPETIT!! MAGGOTS REPORTEDLY RELEASED ON THE CRIMINAL ZIONIST’S WAR TABLE!”

The stunt led Reps. James Comer (R., Ky.) and Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) to request that Biden administration Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen investigate the PYM and 20 other anti-Israel organizations for suspected links to money laundering and terrorism financing, as the Free Beacon first reported.

The lawmakers noted at the time that the group’s primary financial support came from the Westchester Peace Action Committee (WESPAC) Foundation, which bankrolled numerous anti-Israel groups before a number of lawsuits exposed the nonprofit as a chief underwriter of the nationwide campus protest movement.

The PYM—which the Israeli government has accused of maintaining “close ties” with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group—directed its donations through the WESPAC until May 2024, when both groups were named in a lawsuit for blockading Washington, D.C., traffic during an anti-Israel demonstration.

As legal pressure mounted on the WESPAC, the PYM “began soliciting donations via Honor the Earth, an ‘Indigenous-led organization fighting to dismantle settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism,'” according to a report from watchdog group NGO Monitor.

Cotton highlighted this relationship in his letter to the IRS, noting “it is the PYM’s receipt of tax exempt donations that likely violates U.S. law.”

“An organization that supports terrorism, breaks U.S. law, and sows antisemitic discord should not receive any benefits from the American tax system,” Cotton wrote. “I ask you to immediately investigate both PYM and Honor the Earth and to take any actions necessary to remedy this situation.”

Honor the Earth has not been without scrutiny, either. The group’s cofounder, Winona LaDuke, acknowledged in 2021 that an Honor the Earth community organizer named Michael Dahl “probably” had sex with a Native American minor during his time as a camp counselor but that LaDuke was “not to judge,” the Free Beacon reported at the time.

LaDuke ultimately resigned after a judge ordered Honor the Earth to pay $750,000 to a subordinate who alleged Dahl had sexually harassed her and accused the group’s leadership of attempting to cover it up.

Honor the Earth then replaced LaDuke as executive director with a woman named Krystal Two Bulls.

Cotton sent a copy of the letter to FBI director Kash Patel, who could authorize a parallel investigation into the PYM’s “public statements in support of terrorist groups, and activities and support for anti-Israel protests in America.”

In addition to maintaining alleged ties to the PFLP, the PYM is also closely aligned with Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus organization with student leaders across the country who harass their Jewish classmates and call for “intifada” against Jews and Americans writ large.

The PYM has also organized “events with the U.S. designated terrorist entity Samidoun,” a front for the PFLP, Cotton wrote in his letter.

The organization issued a statement two days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror spree in which its leadership praised the violence.

“On October 7th, Gaza broke free,” the PYM’s statement read.

“Palestinians in Gaza crossed the illegitimate border fence and reentered 1948 lands for the first time in many of our lifetimes. Since that time, we have witnessed resistance efforts and protests spread to all of historic Palestine, including the West Bank … We have a right to resist on our own land. May the memory of our martyrs continue to guide us on the steadfast path to liberation.”

The senator separately petitioned the IRS in August to investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations for violations of its tax-exempt status, citing the group’s “ties to terrorist organizations, including Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood” and its leader’s celebration of the Oct. 7 massacres.

The post Cotton to IRS: Investigate terrorist-supporting Palestinian Youth Movement appeared first on World Israel News.

Those unions typically represent graduate students who work for their universities—a far cry from the high-paid administrators who determine school rules, and yet, they’ve increasingly provided institutional support for controversial activism.

By Lexi Boccuzzi, The Washington Free Beacon

The average United Auto Workers training session involves discussions on how members can negotiate strong health programs, meet federal safety standards, and investigate work accidents.

For UAW chapter 4811, which serves the University of California, it involves a panel with the Palestinian Youth Movement, a leading anti-Israel group that’s organized protests across the country condemning the “brutal US-Israeli genocide.”

The chapter held that panel last summer as part of “four days of classes, conversations, and workshops” through which “members learned about the critical tasks ahead of us: winning strong contracts, helping hundreds of thousands of new workers form unions, and continuing to fight for justice in Palestine.”

Those classes came in the wake of a UAW-backed strike within the UC system that centered not on wage or working hour disputes but rather on the arrests of illegal anti-Israel protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles, months prior.

A judge halted the strike in June, roughly two weeks before the UAW chapter’s summer workshops.

The ordeal reflects the growing influence unions like the UAW and American Federation of Teachers have on anti-Israel campus unrest.

Those unions typically represent graduate students who work for their universities—a far cry from the high-paid administrators who determine school rules. And yet, they’ve increasingly provided institutional support for controversial activism.

“You basically have auto workers across the nation subsidizing these trust fund graduate students who happen to be members of the UAW,” said Ted Frank, the director of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which represented a Jewish graduate student within the UC system who filed an amicus brief opposing the “Palestinian Solidarity Encampment” strike.

Those grad students, Frank notes, launched a strike in 2022 to obtain significant increases in wages, childcare subsidies, and paid leave—provisions that he said are “bankrupting the University of California.”

Shortly thereafter, “they tried to go on strike again, but this time, it’s for the right to discriminate against Jews with these protests.”

A similar dynamic has emerged at the University of Michigan. There, the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), which also represents grad student workers, has promoted and endorsed anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns on campus.

It’s done so in part thanks to support from the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers’ union, which provides the GEO with legal defense and strategic support and collects 18 percent of union dues in exchange.

Last March, the GEO campaigned on behalf of “SHUT IT DOWN,” a student political party that aimed to halt all Central Student Government activity until the University of Michigan agreed to divest from Israel.

The party won control of that government and promptly withheld funding for all student groups and activities, leaving “an Ultimate Frisbee team without money to compete” and “a ballroom dance team unable to rent rehearsal space,” the New York Times reported at the time.

Student government officers voted in October to restore the funding. They also voted against a “SHUT IT DOWN” measure that would have sent funds to a Hamas-associated university in Judea and Samaria.

When that measure failed, protesters stormed the student officers, calling them “f—ing Zionists” and “race traitors,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The GEO endorsed “SHUT IT DOWN” through a statement that read, “If central student government cannot be used to support our pursuit of divestment, we will take decisive action to disrupt the status quo.”

Such rhetoric is par for the course for the GEO, which has directed its members to participate in “die-in demonstrations” meant to “remind [the] admin of their complicity in genocide” and push them toward “complete divestment from the zionist entity.”

It was in Michigan, meanwhile, that the UAW rose to power representing the state’s once-thriving auto industry. Now, the union is undergoing a seismic shift.

Roughly 100,000 of its registered members—about 25 percent of the UAW’s total membership—are academic workers. The graduate students and postdocs have helped revive the union, which has consistently bled members since the 1970s.

“The UAW is shifting its focus from blue collars to white ones,” said Jarrett Skorup of the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy. And while that shift can be seen at the national level—the UAW as a whole endorsed an Israeli ceasefire just weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack—its University of California chapter has taken its activism further.

During the 2023 strike, for example, the union’s website hosted pages that read, “How can UC engage in the broader protest movement?” and alleged that UC “unilaterally changed its policies to crush” illegal encampments.

The union nonetheless maintained that its strike centered on working condition concerns, arguing that new protest restrictions violated its contract with the UC system. Tenured professors like Gabriel Rossman disagreed. Though Rossman said faculty members generally supported the union’s strikes in the past, they reacted differently during the anti-Israel strike.

“I was hearing a lot of like, ‘This is bulls—t,’ kind of quiet grumbling, you know, about the second strike,” Rossman told the Free Beacon. “It was not about [labor]. It was about basically having the university drop all charges against SJP,” a reference to the notorious anti-Israel group, Students for Justice in Palestine.

The UAW has significant influence on the UC system, particularly at UCLA. UAW 4811 boasts 48,000 members across the 11 UC system campuses, including 36,000 student employees, 7,000 postdocs, and 5,000 academic researchers.

“They have a huge amount of power at the university,” Rossman said. “You know, whenever you look at official communications from the university administration, they always refer to our partners at the UAW.”

“There’s a recognition that—given the reality that TAs, post-docs, RAs will generally follow a union vote on striking or not, and given the realities of labor law, that can cause a lot of legal trouble for the university if the university pushes back against that in some way—the UAW has a lot of power.”

UAW Chapter 4811, UAW national, GEO, AFT, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Michigan did not respond to requests for comment.

The post In California and Michigan, a surprising force drives anti-Israel campus activism: Labor unions appeared first on World Israel News.