Foundation Watch
Left-Wing Financiers Stand by CAIR After Pro-Hamas Remarks
Nihad Awad, co-founder and executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), speaking at American Muslims for Palestine convention on November 24, 2023, saying he was "happy" about the October 7 attack on Israel. Closed captioning shown. Credit: American Muslims for Palestine/Fox News.
The top foundations financing the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are refusing to rule out future support of CAIR even after the Capital Research Center alerted them to its executive director’s public celebration of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the Biden Administration’s subsequent disavowal of CAIR.
CAIR’s Funders
In December, the Capital Research Center collaborated with Focus on Western Islamism to determine which nonprofit organizations have provided the most funding to CAIR based on public records from 2010 to 2022. Our research identified the 20 biggest providers, almost all of which are left-wing and one has an Islamist background.
Last month, we contacted those financiers with the exception of the MarJac Foundation because it does not have an online presence or public form for contacting the organization. The group is closely linked to the U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood network, so it’s unfathomable that it would permanently sever its financial ties to CAIR.
We asked each organizations for an official statement about whether they’d continue to fund CAIR in light of the recent developments. Only one responded, and even that response was a dodgy non-answer: The San Francisco Foundation said it “works with donors to support approximately 3,000 nonprofit organizations each year.” Our follow-up question asking for a direct answer was ignored.
These grantors and donor-advised funds are now fully aware of how CAIR’s leader celebrated the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping of approximately 250. They know that the Biden White House condemned CAIR for it. Still, they refuse to rule out financing the pro-Hamas group in the future. They won’t even answer inquiries about the issue.
Ignorance can no longer be an excuse.
CAIR’s Top 20 Funders
Below are the top 20 grantors to CAIR:
- American Online Giving Foundation: $1,637,087
- Silicon Valley Community Foundation: $1,499,447
- Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund: $1,474,868
- California Endowment: $785,604
- Schwab Charitable Fund: $782,178
- California Community Foundation: $781,065
- Sierra Health Foundation: $637,558
- Tides Foundation: $631,300
- Weingart Foundation: $602,950
- WK Kellogg Foundation: $500,000
- San Francisco Foundation: $494,000
- Network for Good: $489,800
- MarJac Foundation: $450,000
- Charities Aid Foundation: $406,000
- California Wellness Foundation: $350,000
- All Hands on Deck Network (now named Movement Voter Project): $348,240
- Columbus Foundation: $336,250
- American Endowment Foundation: $315,600
- Levi Strauss Foundation: $310,000
- Orange County Community Federation: $301,255
Double Standard
The shockingly immoral (and illiberal) stances of these mostly left-wing funders reflect a disturbing double standard.
If these organizations were pressed to stop funding groups that openly and indisputably espouse white supremacism or that celebrate the killing of blacks or transgenders, does anyone doubt that they would accede to the demand?
Yet in this case, these funders give a pass to a group with a history of ties to Islamist extremists and that celebrates the killing of Israeli civilians by a Jew-hating genocidal terrorist organization.
Why is anti-Semitism considered more tolerable than racism or anti-LGBT bigotry?
