Ok, I had a look at the NY Post article and it seems like the standard tabloid hatchet job on leftist protest groups they don't like, claiming insincerity, dubious source of funds, and (as happened with Occupy and the outrage of them going into Starbucks) making a big deal out of what they spend their money on - or maybe even get given to them for free by hidden billionaires??

'At the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” students sleep in tents apparently ordered from Amazon and enjoy delivery pizza, coffee from Dunkin’, free sandwiches worth $12.50 from Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips and $10 rotisserie chickens.' - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/george-soros-is-paying-student-radicals-who-are-fueling-nationwide-explosion-of-israel-hating-protests/ar-AA1nHXet

This Wapo article puts the claims about Soros/Rockefeller funding in context, basically very indirect and a very small proportion of their over all budget:

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/26/dishonest-ironic-push-blame-campus-protests-george-soros/

[...] the connection between the protests and funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) is so tenuous as to be obviously contrived.

One might begin by asking what Soros is theoretically paying for. After all, this is just kids setting up tents on a college campus. Is the allegation that Soros is planting students at Columbia University (for example) and fronting the $68,000 tuition?

No. The New York Post article suggests other ways this largesse is apparently manifested.

“The cash from Soros and his acolytes has been critical to the Columbia protests that set off the national copycat demonstrations,” it reads, later describing the scene at Columbia: “Students sleep in tents apparently ordered from Amazon and enjoy delivery pizza, coffee from Dunkin’, free sandwiches worth $12.50 from Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips and $10 rotisserie chickens.”

The “tents from Amazon” bit is a nod to a theory floating around on right-wing social media that someone is buying all of these tents for students, as though it would be otherwise impossible for a student to buy a $20 tent on her own. Mind you, there’s no evidence that the other stuff mentioned was bought by some billionaire donor, but the New York Post has been having fun recently referring to the food as “luxurious” as it wonders “[w]ho or what organization is behind the food delivery.” Clearly no average individual could have bought Dunkin’ doughnuts.

But back to that “cash from Soros and his acolytes.” At no point does the Post article demonstrate how this purported cash has been critical, instead simply listing organizations that have been involved in the protests to some extent and tracing their funding back to OSF.

Take the group U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. It, the New York Post alleges, has a fellowship program that includes three people who have been at rallies on college campuses. In an illustration, the three are identified as “paid protesters” — suggesting that their motivation for participation is the money and not the views that led them to seek the fellowship in the first place.

“George Soros and his hard-left acolytes are paying agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country,” the story hyperventilates. Eventually, it describes how.

U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights is registered with the IRS as Education for Just Peace in the Middle East (EJP). And EJP has received grants from OSF.

The largest was $300,000, given in 2018. During that fiscal year, EJP took in just over $1 million in revenue. It spent about $1.3 million, meaning it operated at a loss. In fiscal 2019, it had net assets of about $165,000 — meaning that a big chunk of that OSF grant was already spent.

EJP also received a grant from OSF for $150,000 in 2021 and a two-year grant for $250,000 in 2022. The New York Post’s suggestion (echoing one published earlier in the week by the Wall Street Journal) is that this money went to those “paid protesters.” But money is fungible. During those years, the organization also spent $2.4 million, at least $2 million of which wasn’t OSF money.

If the campus fellows identified by the New York Post are being paid the same as those who can currently apply for those positions, the total one-time cost to the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights was about $10,000. Nor are the fellows identified in the article still fellows. A spokesperson for the organization confirmed in an email to The Washington Post that the individuals featured in the New York Post article were from last year’s class. In other words, they are no longer “paid” at all.

The New York Post story also accuses Students for Justice in Palestine of being “Soros-funded” and fundamentally involved in the protests. (That the protests metastasized nationally only after police raided the Columbia encampment undercuts the idea that this is driven from the top down, but so be it.) So where does the Soros money come from?

Well, the story alleges, Students for Justice in Palestine is funded by the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, or WESPAC. And WESPAC received $132,000 from the Tides Foundation at some point. And the Tides Foundation has received millions in funding from OSF over the years.

It’s true that the Tides Foundation has received more than $11 million in OSF grants since 2017. It is also true that the Tides Foundation reported $298 million in revenue … in fiscal 2017 alone. The reported grants from OSF total less that 0.3 percent of Tides’ revenue from 2017 to 2022.

Regardless, Students for Justice in Palestine denies that it receives any money from WESPAC, nor is there any public indication that it does. In a statement to The Washington Post, a representative for the group indicated that the foundation “neither funds nor influences our organization’s political activity but instead extends its legal tax-exempt status to us in order to support our mission.”

“We refuse to engage with baseless claims regarding our funding in the middle of a genocide funded, militarily supported, and politically backed by the United States,” the statement concluded.

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Admittedly it is of interest where groups like this get their funding from, and worth investigating their likely motives for doing so. Also an odd, potentially suspect situation when people are paid thousands of dollars for their activism. But people making that the main focus of response as Wolf does IMO shows that they're looking for how to dismiss the significance or basic validity of the protests and are only interested in distracting people away from the cause they're addressing.

Another sign the protestors are on the right track is the apparently universally negative response they are getting from the media and political class in the US, manifested by the brutality of militarised police being called in to crack their heads in time-honoured fashion. Rubber bullets too by the looks of things (0:20):





cheers,
I