Revealed: Canary Mission blacklist is secretly bankrolled by major Jewish Federation
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haaretz.com
One
of the largest Jewish charities in the U.S. has been secretly funding a
shadowy online blacklist targeting college students who criticize
Israel.
For three years, a
website called Canary Mission has spread fear among undergraduate
activists, posting more than a thousand political dossiers on student
supporters of Palestinian rights. The dossiers are meant to harm
students’ job prospects, and have been used in interrogations by Israeli
security officials.
At the same time, the
website has gone to great lengths to hide the digital and financial
trail connecting it to its donors and staff. Registered through a
secrecy service, the site is untraceable.
Now, for the first
time, the Forward has definitively identified a major donor to Canary
Mission. It is a foundation controlled by the Jewish Community
Federation of San Francisco, a major Jewish charity with an annual
budget of over $100 million.
The federation’s
support of Canary Mission connects the American Jewish establishment
itself to a website that is facing increasing criticism from young Jews.
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Canary Mission has
been controversial since it appeared in mid-2015, drawing comparisons to
a McCarthyite blacklist. While some of those listed on the site are
prominent activists, others are students who attended a single event, or
even student government representatives suspected of voting for
resolutions that are critical of Israel.
In
recent months, it been the subject of growing backlash from pro-Israel
Jewish students and local Hillel professionals, who say it is damaging
to their own work.
Mainstream American
Jewish leaders have claimed not to know who funds Canary Mission. As it
turns out, a big chunk of the money came from within their own ranks.
In late 2016 or early
2017, the Helen Diller Family Foundation earmarked $100,000 for Canary
Mission. It made the donation to the Central Fund of Israel, a New
York-based charity that serves as a conduit for U.S. taxpayers seeking
to make tax-exempt donations to right-wing and extremist groups in
Israel. In its tax filings, the Diller Foundation listed the purpose of
the grant as “CANARY MISSION FOR MEGAMOT SHALOM.”
That
phrase, which may have been mistakenly included in the public document,
appears to indicate that the grant to the Central Fund of Israel was
intended for Canary Mission via Megamot Shalom, a hitherto-unknown
Israeli charity.
Megamot Shalom
appears to be an Israeli public benefit corporation that operates or
operated Canary Mission. Jonathan Bash, who the Forward previously
identified as the person who operates Canary Mission, signed the
charity’s 2016 financial reports.
Though
it does fund a number right-wing causes, the Diller Foundation is known
mostly as a provider of well-regarded Jewish teen programming. It runs a
yearlong Jewish leadership program for teenagers from around the world,
and sponsors the Diller Tikkun Olam awards, which honor young Jewish
volunteer workers with $36,000 cash prizes.
The president of its
board, real estate developer Jaclyn Safier, sits on the board of
visitors of the University of California, Berkeley, and is a
distinguished director of a foundation that supports the University of
California, San Francisco. Another board member, Richard Rosenberg, is
the former chairman and chief executive of Bank of America.
The Diller Foundation
is organized as a supporting foundation of the Jewish Community
Federation of San Francisco, an arrangement that confers certain
regulatory benefits. The San Francisco federation, according to its
website, appoints the majority of members of the boards of directors of
its supporting foundations. The Diller Foundation says in its tax
returns that it operates by “conducting or supporting activities for the
benefit of” the San Francisco federation. Two federation staff members
sat on the Diller Foundation’s board during its 2016 fiscal year,
including the federation’s number two executive, chief philanthropic
officer Joy Sisisky.
The federation is
among the largest and most influential in the U.S., with net assets of
more than $800 million and two seats on the board of the Jewish
Federations of North America. Neither the Diller Foundation nor the San
Francisco federation responded to multiple requests for comment.
Pigeon Droppings
Megamot Shalom’s
listed address is a padlocked building in a rundown commercial strip in
Beit Shemesh, a fast-growing city just north of Jerusalem. There are
scuff marks and footprints on the white front door, as though someone
has recently tried to kick their way in.
The building’s
vestibule is littered with pigeon droppings and random office furniture.
A window upstairs is wide open. If the building isn’t abandoned, it has
at least seen far busier days.
According to filings
with Israel’s charities registry, Megamot Shalom was set up in July
2016, just over a year after Canary Mission’s website appeared online.
Its mission, according to the filings, is to “ensure the national image
and strength of the state of Israel via the use of information
disseminated by technological means.”
The public filings
don’t mention Canary Mission by name, though they do say that the
organization paid freelancers for editing website content and a
consultant for data security. Among Megamot Shalom’s only reported
assets are computers worth around $5,000.
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Megamot Shalom’s
publicly available financial reports bear two signatures. One signature
is illegible in English and Hebrew. The other is the signature of
Jonathan Bash, a British-born Jerusalem resident who two people, granted
anonymity to speak about private conversations, told the Forward
identified himself to them as the person who operates Canary Mission, as
the Forward first reported in August.
Bash is identified in
the filing as a “member of the directorate” of Megamot Shalom. When the
Forward emailed him for comment in late September, two of his email
accounts bounced back auto responses saying he was on an extended
vacation.
Megamot Shalom has
virtually no online footprint. What does exist on the Internet was
scrubbed after the Forward began asking questions about the
organization. An Israel-based writer named Zahava Raymond previously
identified herself on LinkedIn as a “writer-researcher” for Megamot
Shalom, but removed the organization’s name from her profile after the
Forward sent her a query over Facebook. Raymond previously worked for
Honest Reporting and NGO Monitor, pro-Israel advocacy groups.
Megamot Shalom
received roughly $165,000 in the last six months of 2016, according to
its financial report. It has not yet filed its financial report for
2017, which was due at the end of August. It’s not clear whether the
donation from the Diller Foundation is reflected in the 2016 filings, or
if it came in the 2017 calendar year.
Canary Masks
In recent months,
Canary Mission’s activities have grown more aggressive. Last spring, two
men in canary masks paraded around a Washington, D.C. campus, in a
weird display meant to frighten student government representatives. On
the Israeli border, Canary Mission is being used as an intelligence
source on thousands of students and academics.
One young Jewish
student profiled on the site told the Forward that he has been afraid to
talk to pro-Israel students on campus since his profile went up, for
fear that they would report him to Canary Mission.
Meanwhile, the site
appears to be specifically targeting the growing ranks of its student
critics. In three separate instances since the spring, Canary Mission
appears to have posted dossiers or reports on its site targeting people
who had criticized it weeks earlier.
In June, Canary
Mission posted dossiers on 14 students associated with the chapter of
Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California,
Davis. The SJP chapter at Davis had not been particularly active since
2015, when the student government there passed a nonbinding divestment
resolution. But less than a month earlier, on May 24, the student Senate
at Davis had passed resolution condemning Canary Mission by name.
The resolution said
that Canary Mission, along with other blacklists, “threaten the security
of student activists, as well as create a toxic atmosphere of fear and
paranoia among fellow students, thus infringing upon students’ ability
to freely express their opinions.”
“We had known this
would definitely put us on their radar,” said the chapter’s president,
Khadeja Ibrahim. Ibrahim said that Canary Mission had posted dossiers on
a handful of core SJP activists at Davis, plus others who had just
shown up at a single rally.
Also in early June,
Canary Mission posted a report on a University of Michigan divestment
vote that had taken place seven months earlier. The report included
dossiers on some 40 Michigan students, including student government
representatives accused of voting in favor of the resolution, which was
passed by secret ballot. The report came just weeks after two pro-Israel
Jewish students at Michigan published a widely read op-ed attacking
Canary Mission for its role on Michigan’s campus, calling it
“counterproductive” and “morally reprehensible.”
And in late August, a
report by Canary Mission on a divestment vote at George Washington
University featured two Jewish students who had condemned Canary Mission
in interviews published in the Forward, one just weeks before. The
report highlights Abby Brook, who was quoted in an August story in the
Forward saying that she was frightened by two men who showed up at the
GW campus in canary costumes. It also highlights Kei Pritsker, who spoke
to the Forward in October 2017 about being profiled by Canary Mission.
The new report accuses Pritsker of, among other things, having “nodded”
in agreement with “anti-Israel and anti-Semitic” statements, and links
to a year-old video of a protest against AIPAC in which he appears in
the background.
“The tactics of the
organization are troubling, both from a moral standpoint, but have also
proven to be ineffective and counterproductive,” said Tilly Shames, who
runs the campus Hillel at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in an
interview with the Forward this summer.
Shames said that
Canary Mission’s publication of dossiers on students on her campus had
led to greater support for the targeted students and their beliefs, and
had spread mistrust of pro-Israel students, who were suspected of spying
for Canary Mission.
Additional reporting by Naomi Zeveloff from Beit Shemesh.
For more stories, go to www.forward.com. Sign up for the Forward’s daily newsletter at http://forward.com/newsletter/signup/
The Forward
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