The Media Research Center has labored hard to blame George Soros for Hamas instigating a war against Israel, despite that narrative being dishonest and counterfactual. The MRC then tried to blame Soros personally for protests against the war, despite such things being guilt-by-association at best. Tom Olohan served up one such drive-by attack in an April 18 post:
First on MRC Business: A vicious anti-Israel group that occupied Google until their arrests was created by two organizations that Soros poured massive amounts of money into.
No Tech for Apartheid, a tech worker campaign that frequently accuses Israel of “genocide,” occupied the Sunnyvale, California-based office of Google Cloud’s CEO for the crime of doing business with Israelis. No Tech for Apartheid refers to itself as a project of the anti-Israel groups Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and MPower Change. Strikingly, Soros’ Open Society Foundations’ gave at least $525,000 to JVP between 2017 and 2022, while also giving $350,000 to JVP Action, an affiliated 501(c)(4) “sister organization” of JVP. Soros gave at least $2,205,555 to MPower Change from its founding in 2016 to 2022.
[…]Radical anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour is the executive director and co-founder of MPower Change. Sarsour is famous for her radical hatred of Israel. According to the Committee For Accuracy in Middle East Reporting, Sarsour strongly opposes the existence of Israel. Sarsour is a supporter of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to impoverish, isolate and destroy Israel, the homeland of the Jewish People. Both Sarsour and MPower Change promote a radical anti-law enforcement agenda and viciously smear both American law enforcement and Israel as collaborating oppressive forces.
Olohan offered no evidence that any Soros money is currently funding any of the group’s protests — and he can’t, given that he apparently has no data newer than 2022. Still, Olohan rehashed his employer’s previous bogus attack:
Soros has a long track record of funding radical anti-Israel groups like MPower Change and JVP. After last year’s brutal terrorist attack on Israel, MRC President Brent Bozell and MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider called Soros out for giving $550,000 to Pro-Hamas groups between 2017 and 2022 alone.
In fact, much of Soros’ previous support of Hamas came at a time when it was seen as a reform group that could supplant the do-nothing Fatah party that previously ran Gaza — something the MRC refused to tell its readers.
Olohan returned for an April 29 article:
The New York Post has unearthed some important information about some of the anti-Semitic pro-Hamas campus protests across the nation.
In an April 26 article, New York Post reporter Isabel Vincent broke down not only the funding behind anti-Israel groups involved in campus protests but also revealed that some of the activists were trained to lead such protests by a Soros-funded group. “At three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are ‘fellows’ of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR),” Vincent wrote.
She added, “USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based ‘fellows’ in return for spending eight hours a week organizing ‘campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.’ They are trained to ‘rise up, to revolution.’” Vincent went on to say that the USPCR received $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Just one problem: A couple days earlier, the Washington Post blew up the New York Post article’s premise that Soros is paying student activists:
By itself, this is a reflection of the idea that student activism is necessarily insincere or a function of young people being hoodwinked. Claims about Soros being the engine behind political or social movements have also been identified as being intertwined with antisemitism or explicitly antisemitic, given historical tropes about wealthy Jewish people controlling the world.
Here, then, this antisemitic framework is being deployed to undermine protests on college campuses … that have been repeatedly cast as being antisemitic.
More importantly, it’s simply not true. Or, more accurately, the connection between the protests and funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) is so tenuous as to be obviously contrived.
One might begin by asking what Soros is theoretically paying for. After all, this is just kids setting up tents on a college campus. Is the allegation that Soros is planting students at Columbia University (for example) and fronting the $68,000 tuition?
[…]At no point does the Post article demonstrate how this purported cash has been critical, instead simply listing organizations that have been involved in the protests to some extent and tracing their funding back to OSF.
Olohan censored any mention of the collapse of the premise behind his article, of course. Instead, he whined that Soros himself discredited the article: “Soros did not react well to the exposé. In a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter), the Open Society Foundations accused the New York Post of continuing ‘its practice of mixing distortion and unsubstantiated insinuations in attacking George and Alex Soros and the Open Society Foundations.’” Olohan didn’t prove anything Soros said to be wrong.
Rather than correct the falsehoods in his post, Olohan peddled another Soros funding conspiracy theory in a May 7 post:
First on MRC Business: George Soros’ Open Society Foundations sunk massive amounts of cash into several universities—most of which have been a breeding ground for radical anti-Israel students and whose administrations responded poorly to protestors, agitators and rioters trespassing, breaking into and occupying buildings and harassing Jewish students.
Both the New York Post and Politico have reported on Soros’ connections to the groups leading the anti-Israel protests. And now, an MRC Business investigation exposed how Soros has also given at least $34,638,060 to the nine universities that have made headlines for their slow response to anti-Semitic protests and riots, as well as their ineffectual or possibly even sympathetic administrators.
Among the recipients of Soros funding connections were Columbia University, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of North Carolina (UNC), University of Southern California (USC), City University of New York (CUNY), the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and, of course, the University of California Berkeley from 2016 to 2022.
Olohan offered absolutely no evidence to back up his framing that Soros is explicitly paying off universities to stay silent about anti-Semitism — it’s just more lazy guilt-by-association, and it ignores that Olohan’s employer has engaged in anti-Semitic attacks on Soros. When others pointed out those right-wing attacks on Soros, Alex Christy was the designated whiner in a May 8 post:
After former President Donald Trump gave some remarks to reporters assembled outside of his New York trial on Tuesday, CNN’s host of The Lead, Jake Tapper, brought on the network’s resident fact-checker, Daniel Dale, to assess the accuracy of Trump’s claims. In one instance, Dale shamed Trump for calling D.A. Alvin Bragg a Soros-backed prosecutor, even going so far as to claim Soros is a frequent victim of anti-Semitism.
Tapper began, “Let’s bring in CNN’s Daniel Dale, who fact-checks what we just heard from Donald Trump. He started off criticizing the case, what happened on the case. Daniel, then he turned to protests on college campuses, then he turned to inflation, then back to the case. What’s — what caught your notice?”
[…]He elaborated, “So, Mr. Soros, who’s a liberal billionaire philanthropist, also a frequent target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, did not make any direct contributions to Mr. Bragg’s election campaign. He also says he’s never spoken once to Mr. Bragg. What did happen was he donated to a liberal PAC that then in turn donated to Mr. Bragg’s campaign, as well as other reform-minded prosecutors. So, this is at best a one-step removed relationship.”
As Dale would say, “there was a lot there.” First, with anti-Semitism surging on college campuses, labeling criticisms of Soros’s political donations to far-left causes, including those anti-Israel encampments, as anti-Semitic is as nonsensical as it is appalling. Second, Dale wants to pretend as if Soros giving money to an organization, which in turn donates it to a candidate, is somehow evidence that Soros doesn’t financially support Bragg. Soros doesn’t need to have spoken to Bragg to support him. Plenty of people donate to organizations, who in turn donate to candidates because they support those groups’ missions and trust them to donate to candidates who support that mission. Soros just does so in great quantity. Third, “reform-minded” is a convenient way of hiding their soft-on-crime progressivism.
Unsurprisingly, Christly censored any mention of the MRC’s anti-Semitic attacks on Soros or its portrayal of Soros as a Jew that right-wingers are allowed to hate. Also, as we pointed out, tying Soros to Bragg in an attempt to distract from the charges he was filing against Donald Trump — something the MRC enthusiastically did — was very much an anti-Semitic dog whistle.