May 13: The NGO Borg Is Getting Rich Off the Border
Is the U.S. withholding intel from Israel?; Inside the Hamas police state; Christopher Caldwell on Pete Rose
The Big Story
We at The Scroll have focused a lot on the nonprofit-industrial complex—which functions as a para-governmental extension of the Democratic Party and its allied donors—and its campaign over the past seven months to create an illusion of mass domestic opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. We’ve also briefly touched on the NGO complex’s role in the lawfare campaign to disqualify or convict Donald Trump and its efforts to amplify various other elite progressive causes, from climate change to the war on “disinformation” and the fruitless witch hunt for alleged “domestic extremists” in the U.S. military. In a Monday story for The Free Press, investigative journalist Maddie Rowley offers invaluable insight into another of the NGO complex’s various rackets: facilitating mass migration into the United States—and raking in public money while doing so.
Rowley examined three of the most prominent NGOs involved in resettling unaccompanied migrant children: Southwest Key Programs, Endeavors Inc., and Global Refuge. All three partner with, and are largely funded by, the U.S. government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, a subsidiary of the Department of Health and Human Services. And the sums involved are fairly eye-popping. Between 2019 and 2022, the last year for which disclosure records are available, the combined revenue of these three NGOs grew from $597 million to more than $2 billion. The CEOs of all three organizations take home at least $500,000 each in compensation, with the head of Southwest Key taking home more than $1 million.
For all that money, it is not entirely clear what these NGOs do. Rowley notes that Endeavors, which derives 99.6% of its revenue from the federal government, offers migrant children “pet therapy,” “horticulture therapy,” and music therapy; between April 2021 and March 2023, according to an internal presentation obtained by America First Legal, the group conducted 1,656 “people-plant interactions.” In 2022, Endeavors also spent several million dollars on “consulting services,” conferences, and lobbying. The biggest line item quoted in the piece is $8 million to a hotel management company to house migrants in its hotels. Global Refuge, meanwhile, spent $30 million to house 2,591 unaccompanied children in 2019, but more than twice that amount, $82.5 million, to house only 1,443 unaccompanied children in 2022. A former aide to Janet Napolitano, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security secretary, speculated that an investigation into the groups’ finances would reveal “waste, fraud, and abuse” that “will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money.”
And, if you’ve followed our previous reporting, it won’t come as a shock to learn that many of the nonprofit executives now benefiting from Biden’s lawless border policies are connected to a certain former president. The CEO of Global Refuge, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, was the policy director for Michelle Obama during her time as first lady. The CEO of Endeavors—which received a $1.3 billion federal contract in 2022—is Chip Fulghum, who served as the chief financial officer of DHS during the last two years of the Obama administration, in which his role was to “reduce waste, fraud, and abuse” across the department.
The only one of the three without an obvious Obama connection is the CEO of Southwest Key, Anselmo Villarreal, a former Mexican government official active in the Hispanic nonprofit space. Villarreal, a longtime Southwest Key board member, was appointed as CEO in 2021 following the resignation of Juan Sanchez, the nonprofit’s founder and previous CEO. Sanchez was forced to step down amid media reports of abuse at Southwest Key’s shelters and accusations of financial self-dealing, which came to light during the controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s family separation policy. But a 2018 New York Times exposé on Sanchez—which followed months of pressure on Southwest Key by “immigrants’ rights” activists who accused the group of “complicity” in Trump’s border policies—noted that Sanchez had “worked closely with the Obama administration” to build his lucrative nonprofit empire.
Read the full article here:
IN THE BACK PAGES: The core of Jewish anti-Zionism, Andrés Spokoiny argues, is not self-loathing, but a craven and narcissistic belief that moral virtue stems from powerlessness
The Rest
→The United States is offering Israel “sensitive intelligence” to help locate Hamas’ leaders in an effort to persuade Jerusalem to hold back from a “full-scale” invasion of Rafah, according to a Friday report in The Washington Post sourced to U.S. officials. This offer quite naturally raises a question: Do the Americans have information like this that they’re withholding? Don’t expect a straight answer from U.S. officials. On Thursday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Washington “could help [the Israelis] target the leaders, including [Yahya] Sinwar, which we are, frankly, doing with the Israelis on an ongoing basis.” Asked directly whether Washington was withholding intelligence, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew said Sunday that “we’ve been helping for some time on these things” and “we’re sharing quite broadly.” Meanwhile, unnamed “officials familiar with the matter”—it is unclear from the report whether they are Israeli or American—told The Times of Israel Friday that Sinwar is likely hiding in the tunnels under Khan Younis, not in Rafah.
→Egypt will join South Africa’s ongoing lawsuit at the International Court of Justice that accuses Israel of genocide, Egyptian officials announced on Sunday. Egypt has also, in recent days, blocked humanitarian trucks in Egypt from passing through the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza, threatened to cease acting as a mediator in hostage talks, and again floated the possibility of suspending its peace treaty with Israel—all allegedly in response to Israel’s limited escalation in Rafah over the past week. Egypt receives about $1.3 billion in military aid from the United States every year, and its moves escalate the pressure on Israel to avoid a full-scale Rafah operation, in accordance with U.S. wishes. But we’re sure that the Egyptians are acting completely on their own.
→The New York Times on Monday published a story, based on documents captured by the Israelis in Gaza, on Hamas’ General Security Service (GSS), a Stasi-like surveillance and propaganda apparatus overseen by Yahya Sinwar that monitors dissent and polices morality within the Gaza Strip. The documents, part of a slideshow that Israeli intelligence officials say was prepared for Sinwar, detail the GSS surveillance of foreign and local journalists, anti-Hamas dissidents, and ordinary Gazans accused of “immorality,” as well as its propaganda efforts to discredit critics by publicizing or fabricating embarrassing private information. In addition to providing new detail on Hamas’ tactics of control, these documents would appear to raise questions about the reliability of Gaza-based journalists—who are, after all, tightly surveilled and threatened for reporting anything that draws attention to Gaza’s “shortcomings,” in the euphemistic language of the GSS. Nonetheless, UNESCO, the Pulitzer Prize committee, and the Peabody Awards have all, within the past two weeks, issued awards to Gaza-based Palestinian journalists for their coverage of the war.
→Stat of the Day: 1.62
That was the total fertility rate (TFR) in the United States in 2023, according to provisional government figures—the lowest ever recorded. Replacement-level fertility, the TFR required for a country to replace its current population, is 2.2. Estimates from the demographer Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, quoted in a Monday story in The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, put the global TFR at 2.15, making it the first time in recorded history that global fertility has been below replacement. According to an estimate from the University of Washington cited in the piece, that means that the global population will likely peak at about 9.5 billion in 2061—down from previous projections of 11.2 billion in 2100—and begin declining thereafter.
Read the rest here: https://www.wsj.com/world/birthrates-global-decline-cause-ddaf8be2?mod=hp_trending_now_article_pos1
→Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023, defended Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and offered a veiled criticism of the Biden administration’s rhetoric toward its ally in remarks last week at a panel at the Ash Carter Exchange. Asked about the politics of war and the anti-Israel protests on college campuses, a visibly agitated Milley said (emphasis in original):
Israel has a right to defend itself. They were the one who was attacked brutally on Oct. 7. Twelve hundred people were slaughtered, not just killed in the conduct of war, but slaughtered—beheaded, butchered, raped in front of their husbands. … And if you take the math and do 1200 and apply it to the United States, that’d be 50,000-100,000 people dead in a morning. Can you imagine what we would do? … War is a horrible, brutal, vicious thing. And unfortunately, because the character of [this] war is going to be in dense urban areas, the very conduct of [the] war is going to have high levels of collateral damage. There’s almost no way around it. But if there’s going to be any morality at all, you need to get into it, achieve your political objectives, get it done, get it done fast, and get it over with.
We quote Milley here not because he’s some particularly genius figure, but to note that he’s the second former top U.S. defense official to state, publicly and emphatically, that the IDF’s Gaza campaign is necessary and justified. The first was Gen. David Petraeus, who told Sky News in March that Israel “must go into Rafah” and that it was impossible to deal with Hamas through “targeted raids” and a “counter-terrorism campaign.” The unifying thread is that these are former officials, meaning they’re free to offer their real opinion without having to coordinate it with the White House.
→In an April interview on Iranian television, Foad Izadi, an Iranian academic and regime mouthpiece, praised U.S. student protesters as “our people” and expressed the hope that Iran could use “Hezbollah-style” groups in the United States to repeat its achievements in Lebanon. In a translation of the April 26 television appearance published by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Izadi said that the regime would need to rely on the protesters to “take to the streets to support Iran” in the event of heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran, but complained that Iran had not been sufficiently involved in the protests at “the operational level,” i.e., in terms of “recruiting connections and building networks.” However, Izadi said, there is “the potential to repeat in the U.S. what Iran did in Lebanon,” since “our Hezbollah-style groups in America are much larger than what we have in Lebanon.”
→The Iranian dissident filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof—whose documentary about the 2022 Iranian protest movement, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival later this month—has fled Iran for Europe, Rasoulof announced Monday on Instagram. According to Iran International, Rasoulof, who was imprisoned by the regime from 2022 to 2023, had been sentenced to eight years in prison, lashes, and property confiscation over his 2020 film, There Is No Evil, a critique of the Iranian government’s use of the death penalty that won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. In his Instagram statement, Rasoulof, who escaped by hiking on foot through Iran’s northern mountains, said that he fled in anticipation of a new sentence related to The Seed of the Sacred Fig being added to those eight years. “From now on, I’ll be one of the millions of Iranians living abroad who are impatiently waiting to bury you and your oppression system in the dustbin of history,” he added in a direct address to the regime.
→Quote of the Day:
This is a sad story about a man who was great and miserable at the same time and who was one of the first tragedies of a period when American hypocrisy was just beginning to dress itself in the woke raiment it wears today. He was not inherently malign—just obsessive, too focused, and unprotected by a bourgeois superego. In his heyday Pete Rose belonged to those whom Kerouac called “the ones that burn, burn, burn.” He once said, in fact, “I would walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball.” There was nothing phony about him. He lived for baseball in the same way certain artists live for art, ignored major problems until they were too complicated to manage, and was ultimately broken on the wheel of his obsession.
That’s from Christopher Caldwell’s review of Charlie Hustle, a new biography of Pete Rose, at The Washington Free Beacon.
Read it here: https://freebeacon.com/culture/for-petes-sake/
TODAY IN TABLET:
Saul Steinberg’s Beach House, by Bill Tonelli
The celebrated artist’s little-known imprisonment in an Italian villa by the sea during the Holocaust
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.
The Jewish Oyster Problem
The idea that Jewish virtue is rooted in Jewish powerlessness is both deeply selfish and remarkably stupid
by Andrés Spokoiny
In the Kuzari, one of the great Jewish philosophical treatises of the Middle Ages, Rabbi Judah Halevi depicts a fictional dialogue between the king of the Khazars and a rabbi. The rabbi points out that Jews are peace-loving and that they don’t kill like others. We can imagine the wink of the Khazar when he says, “This might be so if your humility were voluntary, but it is involuntary, and if you had power you would slay.” Ouch, responds the rabbi. Or more precisely, “Thou hast touched our weak spot, O King of the Khazars.” (Kuzari 115).
Judah Halevi understands that there’s nothing intrinsically more moral about Jews. It was our tribulations that made us uniquely nonviolent, and absent those, we may well revert to being like any other people and “slay” just like them. Yet, while aware of that reality, Judah Halevi didn’t oppose the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty. Rather, the opposite: There’s a proto-Zionism in Halevi that led him to emigrate to Jerusalem. In his native Spain he had experienced the vulnerability of living at the whims of both Muslim and Christian rulers. He saw powerlessness as an unmitigated tragedy, and he illustrated as a moral failing the attempt to disguise that powerlessness as a virtue.
Some modern thinkers, however, turn powerlessness on its head and present this tragedy, which has cost Jews millennia of persecution, as a virtue. In the 19th century, the Jewish Enlightenment considered the Jews a “spiritual people,” untroubled by the messy realities of political power and thus capable of developing a higher form of morality. The Jewish existentialist Franz Rosenzweig saw Judaism’s uniqueness as a result of this position “outside of history,” giving us a timelessness that other religions lack. Hannah Arendt echoed that sentiment: "Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people … which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years.”
Others note that works of Jewish genius, like the writings of Kafka, the philosophy of Spinoza, and the discoveries of Freud, are due precisely to the diasporic uniqueness of the Jewish people, their reality as fragile minorities at the fringes of society who are capable of seeing what those in the mainstream can’t. By virtue of their powerlessness, Jews could become the conscience of the world, the ultimate parameter of the morality of a human society. By sustaining a romance with powerlessness, and an idealization of the lack of agency that transforms tragedy into virtue, Jewish vulnerability in the Diaspora could be reimagined as the ultimate engine of Jewish moral and intellectual genius.
Zionism called the bluff of Jews falling in love with their own oppression, seeing it as a form of dysfunctional cowardice transformed into virtue. In Hayim Nahman Bialik’s poem “In the City of Slaughter,” written after the pogrom of Kishinev, there’s no empathy for the victims but devastating and bitter mockery:
“Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs The privies, jakes, and pigpens where the heirs Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees, Concealed and cowering,—the sons of the Maccabees! The seed of saints, the scions of the lions! Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame, So sanctified My name! It was the flight of mice they fled, The scurrying of roaches was their flight; They died like dogs, and they were dead!”
Zionism understood that Jews did not avoid all political action, but that they were forced to avoid it. “Normalizing” the Jewish people therefore paradoxically demanded a revolt against the destiny of powerlessness that characterized the Jews for 2,000 years. As David Ben-Gurion wrote in 1944, “All other revolutions, both past and future, were uprisings against a system, against a political, social, or economic structure. Our revolution is directed not only against a system but against destiny, against the unique destiny of a unique people.”
The end point of the unique Jewish destiny of powerlessness would soon become plain. Those enamored with Jewish powerlessness should have been forever chastened by the Holocaust. The Shoah proved that powerlessness is not some abstract philosophical exercise, but the very real extermination of our people. Some Jews still believe that our lack of sovereignty might have produced moral excellence—the point is a debatable one. What can’t be denied is that it produced an inconceivable amount of suffering. “How else,” I can hear the ghost of Herzl saying, “did you think this would end?”
Zionism became a majority movement, and the miraculous establishment of the State of Israel became a redemptive return of the Jews to power and the realm of history. This march back to power from the abyss of powerlessness is nothing short of one of the major transformations in human history.
Yet, for some, 6 million dead wasn’t enough proof that powerlessness kills the powerless. They have an unmitigated nostalgia for the times in which Jews could claim the purity of the mortal white shroud that gets buried without ever being soiled by the messy exercise of political action and sovereignty. According to the anti-Zionist writer Michael Selzer, for example, "Jewish ethics and purpose derive from the rejection of power, from the actual contempt of power which pervades the Jewish ethos." Judaism, for Selzer, constitutes a revolution to "radicalize the world through Jewish powerlessness and suffering." In his view, Israel represents a bad counterrevolution against the noble, eternal Jewish essence of victimhood.
George Steiner, in his article “Our Homeland the Text,” similarly feared that the creation of Israel would “normalize” the Jewish people and submerge them in the uninspiring (and dirty) business of statehood. It is the Jews' absence of a territorial patrimony that explains, in Steiner's view, their contribution to civilization. To be sure, Steiner, unlike today’s anti-Zionists, didn’t demonize Israel. He said in a speech, "Israel is an absolute miracle, a dream out of the inferno that was realized as though with a magic wand. Now it is the safe haven for Jews. Should trouble arise again—and it will arise—one day maybe Israel will give shelter to my son and my son's sons." Steiner also wrote, without equivocation, that Israel’s actions in its self-defense against fanatic, hate-filled enemies, are justified.
But he notes that over 2,000 years of persecution, Jews didn’t have the power to dominate or humiliate any other human, whereas Israel, to survive, is now obliged to dominate and humiliate neighbors. “Is this,” he wonders, “too high a price to pay?”
The one who best answered Steiner was Isaiah Berlin, who, in a witty article called “The Cost of Curing an Oyster,” compared the exile of the Jews to a disease. “A people condemned to be a minority everywhere, dependent on the goodwill, toleration or sheer unawareness of the majority, but made aware of its insecure condition, of its constant need to please, or at least not to displease … cannot achieve a fully normal development either individually or collectively.” Exile created distortions of personality: self-insulation, anxiety, aggressive defensiveness. True, the peculiar position of the Jews as a minority on the margins of society resulted in works of genius, like Kafka, Freud, or Heine. When your life depends on understanding the whims of the majority, you develop a clear and critical view of that majority, an outsider’s perspective. But that deeper insight possessed by gifted individuals was “purchased by untold suffering of entire communities” and “could not be accepted as natural or unavoidable.” Exile, in this sense, subjected Jews to mental illness and, as mental illness sometimes does, produced works of genius. But at what cost?
“Hundreds of thousands of oysters,” wrote Berlin, “suffer from the disease that occasionally generates a pearl. But supposing an oyster says to you, ‘I wish to live an ordinary, decent, contented, healthy, oysterish life; even though I may not produce a pearl. I’m prepared to sacrifice this possibility for a life free of social disease; a life in which I need not look over my shoulder to see how I appear to others.’”
Maybe Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, synthesized better the bargain that Jews needed to make. During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, “How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?” “Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,” he answered.
***
The exercise of power is messy. Always. Not a single national liberation movement in the world was neat and blameless. Thinkers like Steiner don’t deny that. In fact, they admit to the dirty nature of statehood and consider that the only way for Jews to stay “pure” is to forego political power and submit to the rule of others. This is different than universalist utopians. Anti-Zionists who long for powerlessness don’t necessarily harbor a Lennonesque dream of “no countries and no religion.” Pointedly, they see nothing wrong in Palestinians exercising political power in the context of a Palestinian national state and even oppressing Jews—or killing them. It’s Jewish power that bothers them; it’s Jewish sovereignty that they disdain and rage against for exposing their own pretensions to moral superiority as fallacious.
That their supposed moral excellence is acquired by trading on the bodies of dead Jews doesn’t bother them, since they’ve established that playing the victim is by definition a morally superior posture. Jews need to be oppressed to produce their best.
Under the layers of intellectual distortion and self-righteousness, this pretension of moral superiority is, paradoxically, morally rotten. The carefully crafted self-image of privileged Jewish academicians, who observe the world from the heights of their tenured positions, seems ruined by Jews who refuse to be at the mercy of others. “How dare those plebeian oysters deny me the right to be a pearl? Don’t they know that they must die so that I can be an ethical beacon to the world?”
Those who criticize Israel for pushing “Jewish supremacy” are, in fact, advocating for another type of Jewish supremacy, probably more racist and self-righteous than the former. But more important than the question of whether being a Jewish oyster with or without a pearl is better, the argument that powerlessness is necessary for “the Jewish genius” to develop is factually false.
Yes, the diasporic persecution produced Freud and Kafka, but Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel produced the Bible and the Mishnah. Israeli Jews win more Nobel Prizes and gain more patents than French Jews or Russian Jews. The truth is that a people, any people, can develop its greatness only by being the master of its own destiny. True, you mess up bigger and more noticeably if you run an economy, an army, and a police force than if you run a corner store or a physician’s office. But avoiding power to avoid the problems of power is like starving to death to avoid obesity.
The anti-Zionism of powerlessness is deeply cowardly. It avoids the real challenges of power, its messiness, its insolvable moral dilemmas, and its endless shades of gray. Diasporism is a facile escape, for which someone else is expected to pay the tab. Easier to sit in judgment in an air-conditioned room at Columbia University writing about the virtues of powerlessness than to work hard to make prophetic visions a reality.
Zionism’s Israel presents a historical opportunity for Jews to deploy the values we developed in the Diaspora and move them from the abstract realm of books to the arena of real life. It may not be so pristine and pure as Steiner wanted, but that’s okay. Our values were never meant to be theoretical. They were meant as a practical guide to life in the here and now, not in the hereafter.
Refusing the opportunity and rejecting the challenge is craven. Doing so while putting other Jews at risk so that our unearned sense of our own superiority can remain intact is a morally criminal act.
Who do you think has more expertise Petraeus and Milley or the woke Secretary of Defense and chair of the JCS ?
When you have academia many appointees in the current administration and the radical left populated by open supporters of Hamas that is per se infiltration by Hamas in the most important sectors of the U.S.