(JNS) A subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee heard testimony on Tuesday, July 23 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, 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. “
