Étiquettes
On March 22, tenured English professor Anthony Alessandrini was startled to see a photo of himself in the New York Daily News. The picture accompanied an article by reporter Larry McShane. The headline was damning: “Kingsborough professor, during campus event, urged donations to group with alleged ties to Palestinian terror group.”
Alessandrini (who is this reporter’s colleague at Kingsborough Community College) had not been contacted by either McShane or other Daily News staffers before the article was published and says that it is riddled with inaccuracies. What’s more, he sees the article as part of a pervasive campaign to silence critics of Israel — including many progressive Jews — that is being orchestrated by a network of conservative organizations that are firmly embedded in both the Evangelical Christian and Jewish Zionist right wings.
One of the most prominent groups is the Lawfare Project, a well-funded legal group whose website claims to have “350 attorneys dedicated to upholding the civil and human rights of the Jewish community.” The site further boasts that the Project provides legal counsel to “members of pro-Israel communities who have been targeted and harmed based on their ethnicity, religion, citizenship and nationality.”
Mondoweiss, a website devoted to “news and opinion about Palestine, Israel and the United States,” and created by progressive Jews, reports that the Project launched in 2010 with start-up money from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Jewish Communal Fund and the MZ Foundation.
Since then, money has continued to flow into the Lawfare Project’s coffers. Charity Navigator reports that in December 2017 (the most recent year for which filings are available), the group had assets of $1,082,069; that year’s income was a similarly hefty $1,392,062. This has enabled the Project to go after dozens of people and organizations, from the Olympia Food Co-op in Olympia, Washington; to the National Lawyers Guild; to professors like Alessandrini and students across the U.S. who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on campuses. Beyond Kingsborough, schools as diverse as Connecticut College, Boston University, Rutgers, San Francisco State University, Temple University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been caught in the Project’s crosshairs.
Lawfare’s Conservative Connections
The Lawfare Project’s founder, Brooke Goldstein, is close to other conservative movers and shakers, and the Project’s work and speaking engagements often overlap with Zionist entities, such as Canary Mission, StandWithUs and the Zionist Organization of America. But Lawfare’s tentacles also reach into the broader right wing and include alliances with Brigitte Gabriel’s Act! For America; Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (also known as Stop Islamization of America); David Horowitz’s Freedom Center; Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum (where Goldstein once worked as a director of the group’s legal project); Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice; and David Yerushalmi’s Society of Americans for National Existence. Goldstein has also been a frequent guest on Fox News. (Neither Goldstein nor Lawfare Project staff attorney Lori Tucker responded to Truthout’s repeated requests for an interview.)
Groupe Gaulliste Sceaux 