March 20, 2024: Harvard-Educated Sarsour Employees Are Disrupting New York on George Soros’ Dime

350 terrorists captured at al-Shifa; Biden proposes securing the border—in Gaza; White House drag queen accused of rape

---

---

The Big Story

On Tuesday night, New York City Mayor Eric Adams hosted a Ramadan iftar at the New York County Surrogate’s Courthouse in downtown Manhattan, near City Hall. The event, denounced as “hypocritical” by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and others in the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood media machine, sparked an “All Out for Al-Shifa” protest organized by Nerdeen Kiswani’s Within Our Lifetime, which has organized dozens of illegal and disruptive anti-Israel protests in New York City over the past five months, most of them named after “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’ term for the Oct. 7 massacres.

In a video from FreedomNews.TV shared on X by Jason Curtis Anderson, the NYPD can be seen arresting several activists at the protest. Note the man in the black Within Our Lifetime hoodie who appears on camera around the 16-second mark:

That’s Abdullah Akl, identified as a “leader” of Within Our Lifetime in an interview clip posted by The Indypendent following Akl’s release from custody later that night. As Anderson points out in an X thread, however, that isn’t Akl’s only job. He’s also a field organizer for Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change, according to the organization’s website, which touts his experience working for the New York State Assembly and U.S. House of Representatives and lists him as a current graduate student at Harvard University. More to our point, this Harvard-educated radical has two jobs, and both of them are funded by, among others, George Soros. 

Within Our Lifetime, as we’ve previously reported, is a fiscal sponsorship of WESPAC Foundation, a 501(c)(3) headquartered in Westchester County that also sponsors the Palestinian Youth Movement, another of the main groups behind the wave of illegal anti-Israel protests in New York City, including the recent occupation of The New York Times’ Manhattan headquarters. WESPAC’s funding is opaque, but in 2022, the group received $97,000 (out of a total revenue of $750,000) from Tides Foundation. Tides is a liberal dark-money network that funds or fiscally sponsors a vast network of radical anti-Israel organizations, including Adalah Justice Project and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, the latter of which has organized a series of illegal port blockades and public school walkouts on the West Coast. Tides has received $13.7 million from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2016, according to an investigation from the New York Post, as well as funding from Bill Gates, Peter Buffett, and other progressive billionaires. Tides has also earned more than $1.2 million from New York City taxpayers since 2010, via contracts with the Department of Education and other city agencies. 

Meanwhile, Sarsour’s MPower Change—the “largest Muslim-led advocacy organization in the U.S.,” according to the Action Network—is a fiscal sponsorship of NEO Philanthropy. NEO, according to InfluenceWatch, is a “fiscal clearinghouse for left-of-center causes” that receives funding from all the usual suspects: the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Arabella Advisors-backed New Venture Fund, and Carnegie Corporation. Along with its advocacy arm, the NEO Philanthropy Action Fund, it also received some $21 million from Soros since 2000, according to a January 2023 report from the Capital Research Center. 

So, if you’re wondering who has time to get arrested on a weeknight while protesting Eric Adams’ refusal to condemn the IDF’s raid on Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants holed up in al-Shifa Hospital, the answer is professional activists like Mr. Akl, whose salaries are indirectly paid by the same oligarchs who spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting Biden into the White House in 2020, and who will no doubt spend another fortune attempting to keep him there this fall. 

That’s something to keep in mind next time you hear someone claim that the administration’s Israel policy is being driven by “Gen Z” or 100,000 voters in Michigan.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Tablet Deputy Editor Jeremy Stern on the rise of the AfD and the revenge of Germany’s deplorables

---

The Rest

→While we’re on the subject of al-Shifa: Shin Bet announced that Israeli troops had captured Mahmoud Qawasmeh, a senior Hamas operative who helped plan the 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, in a Wednesday morning raid on the hospital complex. The announcement comes only two days after the IDF killed Faiq Mabhuoch, the head of the Operations Directorate of Hamas Internal Security, also at al-Shifa. Indeed, according to a Wednesday report from Doron Kadosh on X, around 350 terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been captured at al-Shifa this week (which is probably why NYC activists are going “All Out” for the place). We’ll leave it to readers to puzzle over why so many high-level Hamas operatives have chosen to gather at the hospital that extremely credible sources assured us in November was definitely not a Hamas command and control center. 

→The Times of Israel reports on the Biden administration’s proposed alternative to an IDF operation in Rafah: securing the border. A “senior U.S. official” told the online newspaper’s Jacob Magid that “Washington envisions Israel … focusing on preventing the smuggling of weapons from Egypt into Gaza through the Philadelphi Corridor.” Maybe the Israeli government should borrow a line from Vice President Kamala Harris and inform the White House that the Rafah operation is intended to address the “root causes” of weapons smuggling across the Egyptian border. 

→Five people have accused D.J. Pierce, aka “Shangela,” a Texas drag queen hosted at Kamala Harris’s Washington D.C. residence and at the White House, of sexually assaulting them while they were “too inebriated to consent,” according to a 16-month investigation published in Rolling Stone. (Presumably some of those months were spent making sure this exposé wouldn’t meet the same fate as Sabrina Erdely’s 2014 hoax, “A Rape on Campus.”) A separate accuser, a production assistant for the HBO show We’re Here, accused Pierce last year of drugging his drink and attempting to rape him—an accusation that Pierce described as “perpetuating damaging stereotypes that are harmful not only to me but also to my entire community.” Pierce, who has appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race, gave the welcome speech at a 2022 Pride event hosted at the vice president’s residence in Washington and attended a December 2022 White House ceremony celebrating the formal repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. Pierce has denied all accusations against him, but ZeroHedge, in its write-up of the Rolling Stone report, notes that it “seems undeniable” that Pierce has “made a habit of engaging in lewd sexual acts with much younger males after allegedly plying them with alcohol.”

→Courtesy of National Review reporter Jimmy Quinn on X, here’s a chart of senior employees at ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, and their roles within the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated “united front” system. According to Quinn, the image comes from a submission to the Australian Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media:

→After being cleared for a few hours following the Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision, Texas’ immigration law, SB 4, is back on hold, thanks to a 2-1 ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals late Tuesday night. The ruling is only provisional but suspends enforcement of the law, which allows Texas state police to conduct deportations, pending a final ruling from the appeals court, which heard oral arguments today. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday, Mexico announced that it would not “under any circumstances” accept migrants deported by Texas, including Mexican nationals, and said that SB 4 would “exacerbate family separation, discrimination, and racial profiling,” according to The Daily Beast. Apparently, the Mexican government has not been keeping up with Paul Krugman’s recent columns explaining that illegal immigration fixes Medicare and Social Security, adds billions to the national GDP, and generally makes America “richer and stronger.” We’re baffled as to why Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who professes to be a man of the people, would wish to spurn Texas’ efforts to spread the wealth. 

→Image of the Day:

That cartoon, labeled “Nosfenyahu: En Route to Rafah,” briefly appeared in La Presse, the French Canadian online daily, on Wednesday, before being retracted due to outrage over its depiction of a Jewish leader as a literal blood-sucking vampire. While we can’t peer into the heart of the artist, Serge Chapleau, he is an eminent caricaturist whose politics seem to be of the milquetoast boomer-progressive variety, as far as we can judge such things in a Quebecois context about which we, admittedly, know very little. That is to say, he does not appear to be a rabid antisemite or even much of a radical, which just goes to show the extent to which paranoid, quasi-Hitlerian tropes—in which Israeli Jews appear as figures of irrational evil delighting in murder and death for no reason beyond their own perversity—have been mainstreamed under the guise of respectable progressive anti-Zionism. 

→Hours after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken landed in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday for Gaza truce talks, the Saudi government announced its plan to donate $40 million to UNRWA. The announcement came less than 24 hours after Congress struck a deal barring the United States from funding UNRWA until March 2025 over Israel’s well-documented allegations that the agency acts as a de facto Hamas front, so perhaps Riyadh was helping the White House show that it has other ways of helping its friends in Gaza. 

→Stat of the Day: $640 million

That’s how much MacKenzie Scott Bezos, ex-wife of Jeff and the 47th wealthiest person in the world, donated to more than 361 nonprofits, according to a statement she released Tuesday. We took a brief look at the recipients, and nothing jumped out to us as particularly egregious at first glance (no WESPAC donations, for instance), but we haven’t had time to really dig in yet, and our general attitude is to keep in mind Sean Cooper’s warning for Tablet: Beware the Do-Gooders. 

A list of the latest recipients of Bezos’ philanthropy can be found here: https://yieldgiving.com/essays/open-call-update/ 

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

An Inconvenient Truth, by August Hanning

A former director of German intelligence argues that neo-Nazis are not the primary source of antisemitism in Germany today. It is the intersection of left-wing activists and Muslim migrants.

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

Today’s Back Pages is an excerpt of Tablet Deputy Editor Jeremy Stern’s essay on the rise of the German far-right. The full version is available here.

Can Germany’s Far Right Be Stopped?

The question, and the answers, are more uncomfortable than you think

By Jeremy Stern

In “The New German Question,” published in the May/June 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs, the historian Robert Kagan argued that German pacifism since 1945 is the result not of a permanent transformation in the country’s nature, but of the suppression of its immutable nationalist instincts by American power. By threatening to dissolve America’s traditional support for multilateral institutions, Kagan explained, Donald Trump was risking “the return of resentful nationalism and political instability” to Germany, and “the reemergence of the economic nationalism and bitter divisions of the past.”

Kagan’s suggestion that Trump was both a would-be Führer at home and enabling the rise of a new Führer in Europe created a stir at the American Embassy in Berlin—in part because he also accused the U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell, whose office I worked in at the time, of “encouraging right-wing nationalism and the dissolution of pan-European institutions.” This was news to Grenell, who maintained a policy of nonengagement with the rising right-wing nationalist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), even as officers in the embassy’s political section urged him to engage the pro-Putin, anti-NATO Left Party. But the point of Kagan’s article was not to paint a precise picture of what was happening in Germany; it was to use Germany as an object lesson in what you get when voters deviate too much from the traditional preferences of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. After his colleagues at the The Washington Post and the Brookings Institution had spent three years warning that Trump was summoning Nazis in America, Kagan was simply layering on the claim that Trump was also conjuring “literal Nazis” back from the dead.

Yet if Kagan’s ideological pre-commitments required him to insinuate that Trump was pushing Germany to rebuild the Wehrmacht and invade Poland, they also spoiled what would have been impeccable timing for a less preposterous warning about the direction Germany was actually headed—which was alarming enough.

On May 25, shortly after Kagan’s article came out, Felix Klein, then as now the government’s “Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism,” responded to a steep rise in antisemitic crimes in the country by recommending that German Jews no longer wear kippahs in public. The next day, Germany held European Parliament elections in which Angela Merkel's centrist ruling coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats suffered major losses, while the far-right AfD came in fourth and won 11 seats.

A week later, Walter Lübcke, a civil servant in Hesse who was vocal in welcoming thousands of mostly Muslim refugees to his state, was sitting on the front porch of his village home when a 45-year-old father of two with longstanding connections to neo-Nazi groups walked up to him at close range and shot him in the head. Three months after Lübcke’s murder, the first political assassination in Germany by a member of the far right since 1945, the AfD—considered by German domestic intelligence to be a “right-wing extremist organization,” “anti-constitutional,” and a “threat to democracy”—again made sweeping electoral gains, becoming the second-largest party in the state governments of Brandenburg and Saxony. On Sept. 5, a member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany was elected mayor of Waldsiedlung, once home to the grandees of the East German Communist Party (SED).

On Yom Kippur, Oct. 9, 2019, a 27-year-old gunman livestreamed himself storming a synagogue in the Saxon city of Halle; after failing to breach the entrance by shooting the lock, he shot and killed a woman walking past the Jewish cemetery next door before driving to a nearby kebab shop and murdering a customer inside.

On Oct. 27, the Left Party, the direct descendant of the Marxist-Leninist SED—which ruled behind the Iron Curtain for 50 years and killed hundreds of people trying to escape over the Berlin Wall—became the largest party in the east German state of Thuringia. The AfD, in some ways a right-wing descendant of the SED (its platform includes leaving NATO and “dissolving” the EU) finished second.

The unnerving reality was that the deep social trust which has underpinned German society and kept it out of trouble for three generations was breaking down for reasons that had nothing to do with Donald Trump. If anything, the resurgence of populism, extremism, and even political violence in Germany was a consequence of the increasingly incoherent yet firmly anti-Trumpian policy consensus that ruled the Berlin establishment as much as it dominated Washington—a kind of open borders, Green New Deal, China-dependent mélange of politically correct ideas presented as high-minded answers to the crude populism of the unwashed.

It is no surprise, then, that four years after Kagan’s article and more than three years into the Biden administration, the AfD now polls as the largest political party in the east German states of Brandenburg, Thuringia, Saxony, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In October 2023, it became the second-largest party in the western state of Hesse and the third-largest in Bavaria, making significant gains among young voters in particular. According to all nationwide surveys, it is polling between 18% and 20% across the entire country—higher than every party in the current German government.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of 2024, Sahra Wagenknecht—a former leader of the Left Party and one of the most charismatic and telegenic personalities in German politics—announced the formation of a new, far-left populist party aimed at poaching voters not only from the populist right, but from the Social Democrats, Left Party, and Greens. Polls have put support for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW)—a cult of personality whose platform combines unfeigned communism with a hard stop to immigration and the green transition, sanctions on Russia, and aid to Ukraine—at 7%-9% of the electorate. Combined with the AfD, the potential of the “extremist” vote in the next federal elections is between a quarter and a third of all Germans. It may soon be impossible, in other words, to govern Germany—and therefore Europe and NATO—without them.

Kagan was right that Germany is the West’s canary in the coal mine, given its catastrophic 20th century and its enviable peace and prosperity since. But if there is a lesson for Americans in the resurgence of political extremism in Germany, it is something like the opposite of what Kagan warned. If centrists continue to respond to dissenting populists with outrage, legal action, and repression of reality for the sake of preserving dogma, they will turn a manageable problem into a genuinely menacing threat.

Anything could change before the eastern state elections in September, and federal elections the next fall. The Free Democrats could withdraw from the government, forcing a confidence vote that the deeply unpopular Chancellor Olaf Scholz would likely lose. A constructive vote of no-confidence could replace Scholz with Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition. Or Scholz could rebound on an "antiwar" platform, saving the Social Democrats from plummeting poll numbers by riding a wave of Ukraine fatigue and fear of Russian nuclear threats. The Greens could find common cause with the Christian Democrats over Ukraine. Or the latter could implode again like they did in 2021, as could the AfD—whose surge in popularity may prove illusory as card-carrying centrist voters balk at actually committing themselves to the party.

But for now, at least, each of these scenarios seems unlikely. Immigration has reached what German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, recently called a “breaking point.” Austerity is back, and the country is entering what could be a long recession. The costly and suddenly unpopular climate transition is splitting the political center. The longer the war in Ukraine drags on, the more it polarizes German voters. And for the AfD, the last year witnessed a run of firsts: an AfD regional president elected in Thuringia, an AfD local mayor elected in Saxony-Anhalt, an AfD governing mayor elected in the Saxon town of Pirna. In this summer's elections for European Parliament, the AfD is polling second. In east German local elections in June, and for three eastern state governments in September, the AfD is in first.

Seventy-five years after the Federal Republic of Germany emerged from the ashes of the Third Reich, the German far right is on a roll.

***

The way to understand the reemergence of the far right in Germany is by way of Franz Josef Strauss, who led the Christian Social Union (CSU) and dominated Bavarian politics from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War. “No legitimate political party,” Strauss declared in 1956, “can be to the right of the CSU.”

Strauss’ more obvious point was that Germany can never again tolerate far-right extremism in its politics. His less obvious but more important point was that the center-right alliance of the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) must do whatever it takes to absorb and temper the far right. The closest corollary to Strauss’ maxim in America’s two-party system might be Ronald Reagan’s big tent Republicanism: “The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and an ally—not a 20% traitor.”

Leading the Federal Republic for 57 of the last 74 years, the German center right has mostly had astonishing success creating conditions that leave the farther right little room to breathe. It was the CDU’s Ludwig Erhard who sired the Wirtschaftswunder, the "miracle on the Rhine," which not only transformed Germany from one of the most thoroughly smashed societies in human history into an economic powerhouse in the matter of a few years. It also ushered in the idea of the “social market” (coined by the economist Alfred Müller-Armack, also of the CDU), in which the government’s voter-approved mandate is to harness the wealth-creating power of markets to redistribute resources in the name of social solidarity, or what today we’d call “a more equitable society.”

The American right has long enjoyed scoffing at the German-style social market as a species of polite communism. But critics underappreciate the breathtaking scale of Germany’s accomplishment since 1949 in creating a society with much to admire, even from a certain right-wing American perspective. The quintessential example of this is the Mittelstand, the midsize, family-owned businesses that have historically accounted for about 80% of German GDP and employ three-quarters of the country’s workforce. As John Kampfner writes in Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country, two-thirds of successful global Mittelstand companies are based in German towns with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, where they sponsor local sports teams and social clubs and provide insurance. In the Mittelstand as well as Germany’s blue-chip companies, the practice of Mitbestimmung (co-determination) ensures that between a third and half of the seats of every company’s supervisory board are occupied by workers’ representatives.

For the most part, the result has been a country of highly skilled, high-wage industrial workers spread across hundreds of small towns with strong social capital and a deep sense of local community, and working identification with the independent family firms that employ them and look after their well-being over the course of their lifetimes. For most of the last several decades, large parts of German society have been less of a gray socialist nightmare than like television ads for the American dream circa 1959.

The problem in Germany—as in the U.S., U.K., and much of the Western world—is that this 20th-century social model has been gradually coming apart. After a relatively brief spell as the “sick man of Europe” following reunification, the Social Democratic government of Gerhard Schröder undertook welfare and labor market reforms that helped put Germany on a sounder footing. But the industrial strength which underwrote the German social market in the two decades since was also based on factors—ever-expanding export markets for manufactured goods, the integration of global supply chains, huge trade surpluses, and, most of all, the free flow of cheap Russian gas—which have since disintegrated.

Germany was already courting trouble with a 21st-century economy based on pre-digital industrial products like diesel engines, machine tools, and chemicals, and supply chains based in countries like China and Russia. At the same time, Germany has been culturally hostile to the self-employed, service sector workers, and risk-taking entrepreneurs, none of whom enjoy the higher status conferred on lifetime industrial workers. Confident it could sustain uninterrupted affluence with competitively priced, high-quality industrial exports, Germany missed the transition from an analog to an information economy, with Angela Merkel famously declaring the internet as late as 2013 to be “uncharted territory.” Today, the country’s only big software company remains SAP (founded in 1972), and its 40 largest companies are on average 146 years old.

As a result, many of Germany’s would-be tech founders, engineers, and scientists interested in large-scale commercial success left for America and the U.K. at exactly the moment the baby boomers approached retirement age—leaving behind below-replacement birth rates and a sclerotic system that has difficulty attracting high-skilled immigrants. The big debate today is not about cutting red tape or raising the status of entrepreneurs, but of transitioning to a four-day work week.

During the financial crash of 2008, moreover, Germany avoided the waves of unemployment that swept through other Western countries by suppressing wages. Accepting lower wages allowed Germans to keep their jobs throughout the financial crisis and helped keep German exports competitive at a time when memories of 1929 and the consequences of widespread unemployment were once again raw. But pay restraint has since created a public backlash, even as trade unions have expressed a willingness to accept less work over higher pay. Under Merkel, Germany also deepened its commitment to fiscal balance and fear of public debt by routinely cutting public sector investments in areas like education and infrastructure. Productivity growth began to sag, leaving even less room for investment spending, which in turn contributed to lower overall growth as the quality of German educational institutions, public transportation, and other services started to shed their older reputations for quality and efficiency.

All this provided the backdrop to the two simultaneous mass social experiments that would define the chancellorship of Angela Merkel, the standard bearer of Germany’s center right for 16 years. The first was the Energiewende, a centrally planned transition to a low-carbon, renewables-heavy, nuclear-free economy with a price tag in the hundreds of billions of euros. The second was Merkel’s decision—immortalized by her words Wir schaffen das (“We can manage it”)—to take in millions of low-skilled, mostly Muslim refugees from war-torn countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia.

When a new far-right party emerged to fill the political vacuum left by Merkel’s CDU—which by then had started to abandon any pretense to being a tent big enough to accommodate Germany’s nationalist right—the CDU/CSU responded not by broadening its right flank, as Franz Josef Strauss had advised, but by joining with Germany’s center-left parties to rig the system, erecting a firewall around the AfD and refusing to enter coalitions with it at any level of government, regardless of its electoral victories. A cordon sanitaire was thus also drawn around any Germans who voted for the AfD, many of whom felt they had no other way to register their anger at the establishment’s management of the sputtering social market, the green agenda, and immigration. Observing how badly the firewall has since backfired, more than one German commentator has likened the political isolation of specialized industrial workers, cash-poor homeowners, farmers, and other AfD supporters—who now account for 1 in every 5 German voters—to consigning them to a “basket of deplorables.”

Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/germany-far-right-stopped-afd-jeremy-stern