They Justified Hamas Terrorism. Now Biden Is Letting Them Dole Out Taxpayer Dollars.
Climate Justice Alliance, tapped to distribute $50 mil in federal funds, has backed the 'Palestinian freedom struggle'
In the aftermath of Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack against Israel, left-wing nonprofit Climate Justice Alliance expressed "unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle" and blamed the attack on Israeli "settler-colonialism." Now, the Biden administration is entrusting the group to distribute $50 million in taxpayer funds.
President Joe Biden's Environmental Protection Agency announced the move in a Wednesday press release, which named Climate Justice Alliance as one of several "national grantmakers" tasked with doling out $50 million to local organizations in the name of "environmental justice." In order to receive the taxpayer funds, those organizations will primarily work with the alliance, not the Biden administration. As a "grantmaker," the left-wing nonprofit is tasked with awarding "subgrants"—which range from $150,000 to $350,000 each—and implementing "tracking and reporting systems."
The decision raises questions as to how Biden's EPA landed on Climate Justice Alliance for the program, given that the group has publicly condemned the administration over its support for the Jewish state. Climate Justice Alliance, a network of nearly 90 left-wing environmental groups from across the country, issued an Oct. 20 statement accusing Biden of using "US taxpayer dollars … to support a policy of genocide."
"With this newest round of genocidal attacks by Israel on the civilian population … the Israel government has defied international law," the group said. "President Biden must oppose this."
In addition to its criticism of Biden over the Democrat's handling of the war, Climate Justice Alliance has worked to justify Hamas's terror attack on the Jewish state.
The "Free Palestine" section of the group's website includes a statement from its sister organization, It Takes Roots, which calls the attack "the most recent escalation in the 75-year history of settler-colonialism and violence across historic Palestine" and expresses "unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle for self-determination and to live freely with their human rights fully intact on their lands."
Climate Justice Alliance has also made clear that it cannot separate its environmental activism from the Palestinian cause. One week ago, the group released a video titled, "The path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine," which "uses an anti-colonial framework to show how Climate Justice and the liberation of Palestine are connected."
"Our hope in creating this new resource is to mobilize additional sectors of the climate movement for the fight to free Palestine," the group said, "and to begin to shift the politics of the mainstream climate movement from carbon fundamentalism to climate justice."
In some cases, groups affiliated with the alliance have broken the law to express their contempt for Israel. One of the group's members, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, has helped organize illegal anti-Israel protests in the Capitol rotunda and other Capitol complex buildings.
Neither the EPA nor Climate Justice Alliance responded to requests for comment. Vice President Kamala Harris in the EPA's Wednesday press release said the money to Climate Justice Alliance and other groups would "put equity at the center of our nation's largest investment in climate history."
The EPA program that enlists Climate Justice Alliance to distribute taxpayer-funded "subgrants" is called the Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking program and is funded through Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. As part of the program, Climate Justice Alliance and 10 other groups will receive $50 million in taxpayer funds that they will then distribute to "community-based nonprofit organizations and other eligible organizations representing disadvantaged communities."
Climate Justice Alliance has significant control over that money. The EPA's press release notes that the group and other "grantmakers" are in charge of designing their own "comprehensive application and submission processes" before they "award environmental justice subgrants, implement tracking and reporting systems, and provide resources and support to communities."
Judge Glock, senior fellow and director of research at the Manhattan Institute, said that while the federal government "does occasionally select grantees to send out subawards," the EPA's new environmental justice program is unique given its "size and the incredible level of discretion given to the grantees to make subawards."
"Something that is on multiple levels an incredibly broad, general program with not very clear goals, and then to designate these grantmakers to make their own grants with even less clear goals, I certainly haven't seen anything like this before," Glock told the Washington Free Beacon. "And it's a lot of money—it's not a little amount of money, and they're going to some pretty extreme groups."
In addition to its anti-Israel activism, Climate Justice Alliance is a staunch supporter of the "Green New Deal movement," which it says stems from "decades of Indigenous/frontline wisdom." The group also touts its efforts to lead a "just transition" toward green energy and away from "the profit-driven ind
ustrial economy rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy."
Climate Justice Alliance announced its participation in the EPA program in a Wednesday statement, saying it is "excited and ready to serve as a bridge, model, and catalyst among organizations nationwide to … strengthen the environmental justice movement."
"We look forward to ensuring that thousands of $150,000 to $350,000 EPA grants move to marginalized, environmental justice communities to address historic harms," said Jacqueline Patterson, founder of the Chisholm Legacy Project, a Climate Justice Alliance member.
Jessica Costescu contributed to this report.
Direct Action Campaign Calls Out Pro-Hamas Campus Hate Groups
Confronting the radicals and Jew-haters on their own turf.
Visit FreedomCenterOnCampus.org.
The barbaric and atrocious Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 have brought about a pivotal moment in our nation’s self-awareness. For decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has been warning of the growing pro-Hamas, pro-Jihadist, Jew-hating sentiment on American college campuses. Suddenly, the depth and breadth of campus Jew hatred, fueled by Marxist ideology that divides us all into oppressors or their victims, is on display for all to witness.
Genocidal cries of “Globalize the Intifada,” “From the River to the Sea,” and “By any means necessary” have echoed as a constant chorus on America’s most prestigious campuses, fueled by faculty members and DEI officials who actively celebrated Hamas’s horrific crimes against innocent civilians.
Sensing our moment, the Freedom Center stepped willingly into this breach. In a stealth campaign to circumvent campus censors and reach students directly, the David Horowitz Freedom Center conducted a direct action campaign on three prestigious campuses that are home to some of the worst offenders: Georgetown University, Florida State University, and Louisiana State University. On each campus we distributed 2,500 newspapers containing our new report naming the “Top Ten Campus Hate Groups in America,” leaving copies in dining halls, student activities centers, attached to bulletin boards, and in other key locations on each campus.
The report exposes and ranks ten campus organizations that have become vehicles of resentment and hatred directed at our nation, at Jewish students and supporters of Israel, and at the founding principles that are supposed to buttress the universities themselves—open discourse and academic freedom.
The three campuses where we distributed our newspapers contain some of the worst hate groups in the nation. Georgetown University is home to the #1 campus hate group, the Black Law Student Association (BLSA) which has promoted racism, advocated for censorship, and destroyed the careers of faculty members who stand for meritocracy and fail to obey the racist orthodoxy mandated by DEI officials.
In January 2022, law professor Ilya Shapiro, who had just been hired as a senior lecturer and to head Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, was placed on administrative leave after he tweeted his opposition to Biden’s pledge to select an African-American woman to serve as the next justice on the Supreme Court.
Shapiro quickly clarified that he simply meant that Biden should not let racial preferences guide his decisions on Supreme Court nominees and should pick the best candidate regardless of race. But to the BLSA, his promotion of meritocracy at the highest level of the American judiciary was a racist thoughtcrime. The Black Law Student Association released a lengthy statement calling on the administration “to demand the revocation of [Shapiro’s] employment contract and to condemn his racist tweets.”
Nor was Shapiro’s persecution the only instance of the BLSA’s brutal repression of free expression and commitment to racial prejudices. In a separate controversy occurring in March of 2021, Georgetown Law professor Sandra Sellers was recorded speaking with her colleague David Batson, about how she felt badly that African-American students tended to earn lower grades in her course.
The BLSA released a statement which called on the university to fire Sellers without due process. “We demand nothing short of the immediate termination of Sandra Sellers as adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center,” the BLSA exhorted. “Not suspension. Not an investigation. The University must take swift and definitive action in the face of blatant and shameless racism.”
According to the skewed logic of the BLSA, merely recognizing that African-Americans have historically not performed as well in a law school class, is tantamount to racism.
At Florida State University, another of the campuses targeted by our newspaper campaign, the organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was ranked at #4 on our list of the Top Ten Campus Hate Groups. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, the group retweeted a message from the National SDS organization praising Hamas as the “Palestinian resistance” that led “attacks that utterly humiliated Israel.” FSU’s SDS added, “Victory to the Palestinian resistance!” and pledged “complete and unconditional solidarity” with Hamas and predicted the destruction of Israel.
The group’s reaction to October 7 was merely the icing on the cake when it comes to promoting Jew hatred. In April 2022, FSU SDS released a hate-filled anti-Semitic statement claiming that the organization “Stands with Palestine.” The statement demonized and delegitimized Israel, claiming falsely that “This month the israeli [sic] occupation has continued to escalate the brutality of its occupation of Palestine and its systematic genocide of Palestinians” and that “Every Ramadan the immoral and illegitimate zionist forces go out of their way to terrorize Palestinians.” It concluded by repeating the genocidal slogan, “FROM THE RIVER, TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!” The statement also contained a de-facto endorsement of Palestinian terrorism, stating “All across Palestine, the people are rising up against the Israeli occupation. SDS supports their efforts towards national liberation and a free Palestine by any means necessary!”
In addition to their anti-Semitism, FSU SDS has repeatedly attempted to censor ideas and speakers that don’t adhere to their radical worldview. In November 2021, the group released a statement demanding that Florida State University cancel a planned speech by conservative and pro-Israel author Ben Shapiro. SDS ludicrously claimed that Shapiro “has affirmed white supremacy by pushing back against ‘Critical Race Theory’ (in other words a correct telling of U.S. history) and decrying systemic racism as a baseless belief.”
At Louisiana State University, the groups targeted in our newspaper campaign were the proudly socialist organization Cooperation Rouge and the Black Student Union at Louisiana State, which jointly ranked at #5 on our Top Ten list of the worst campus hate groups.
In May of 2021, Cooperation Rouge published a letter that was signed by 11 other organizations, including the Black Student Union (BSU) promoting the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and charging Israel with “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes.” The letter quotes holocaust-denier Normal Finkelstein and Black Panther Party arms-dealer Angela Davis (described as a “philosopher”) to promote the view that Israel is an illegitimate “apartheid” state that should not exist.
The Black Student Union also worked with Cooperation Rouge and the LSU chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to organize a “March for Palestine” which was used to delegitimize and demonize Israel and promote anti-Semitic propaganda. An Instagram post from BSU showed images of members with posters expressing support for BDS as well as genocidal sentiments including “From the Land to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,” “Stop Global Colonialism, Free Palestine,” “Boycott Israel, Free Palestine,” and “Stop the Genocide in Gaza.”
The horrific behavior of these and other campus organizations all across the nation has made it clear that our nation’s universities are in crisis. As Daniel Greenfield wrote, just days after October 7: “The radicalization of universities made them into safe spaces for the worst possible extremists. Conservative faculty and all opposing voices have been banished from campuses. Pro-Israel and conservative students have learned to hide their views to avoid becoming targets. And curriculum changes have turned places of learning into Marxist indoctrination centers. Those are the conditions under which colleges can celebrate Islamic terrorism or Communism, in which the worst possible crimes, even the murder of children, meet with approval as long as they are dressed up in revolutionary language and woke dogma.”
Our campuses have become insular, closed environments where real-world concerns and truth cannot enter. Where the brutal butchers of Hamas are hailed as heroes while their innocent victims are told their mere existence justifies such savagery. Student organizations on campus—those targeted by our campaign, but also many others—play a key role in repackaging and rehabilitating failed philosophies like Jew hatred and Marxism for a new generation.
This is why direct action campaigns like the one conducted by the Freedom Center this fall are so important. We disrupt the illusion that academic life can exist in this parallel realm where up is down, where terrorists are freedom fighters. We call out the bigots and Jew-haters and promoters of terrorism and don’t allow them to hide behind leftist bromides. We paper their campuses with undeniable evidence of their Jew hatred and lies.
Sara Dogan is the National Campus Director for the David Horowitz Freedom Center. She has written extensively on issues including academic freedom and anti-Semitism on campus.
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Hamas Murdered Gad Haggai, 73: American Hostage Abducted During October 7 Attack
Hamas murdered U.S. citizen Gad Haggai, who was abducted during the October 7 terror attack, according to a press statement by Kibbutz Nir Oz, the community where he lived with his wife, Judy Weinstein, an American who remains a hostage in Gaza.
Haggai held dual citizenship in Israel and the U.S., as does Weinstein. He was thought to be a hostage, but was confirmed as having died after being wounded and abducted.
Kibbutz Nir Oz said in a press statement Friday:
With great sorrow Kibbutz Nir Oz announces the murder of Gad Haggai during the October 7th attack. Gad was 73 years old, and was a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz. A father of four, grandfather of 7.
Gad was a sharp man, a gifted wind instrument musician since he was three years old.
Gad was a man of the land, a chef, and followed a healthy and active lifestyle, and a vegan diet. He was an Israeli-American dual national.
He was abducted with his 70 year old wife, Judy Weinstein, who was also wounded during the massacre, and is still held hostage.
…
May his memory be a blessing.
Update: The kibbutz later clarified that Haggai had been murdered during the attack, but that Hamas had taken his body away.
The community of Kibbutz Nir Oz was one of the hardest hit by the Hamas terror attack of October 7.
Though over 100 hostages were released during a week-long truce last month, which Hamas ultimately broke, the terror organization says it will no longer negotiate for the release of the remaining 127 hostages until Israel ends the war, which Israel will not do.
Hamas was still thought to be holding eight American hostages; that number is now seven.
On Friday, the Israeli military reported progress on a variety of fronts — eliminating terrorists, seizing weapons, and even discovering a report that documented Hamas spending one million dollars on producing doors for underground tunnels in 2022 in the area of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Troops from the Nahal Brigade battled Hamas terrorists dressed in civilian clothing who took up a position in a civilian apartment building; after the battle, they found bodycam footage of the terrorists setting up an improvised explosive device (IED) as part of an effort to lay booby traps for advancing Israeli troops.
IDFHamas continued to fire rockets at Israel from the central Gaza Strip, the last area that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has not entered in significant numbers.
That is about to change: the IDF warned residents of Bureij, in central Gaza, to evacuate Friday.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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