NCRI Exposed: Israel Lobby-Linked Group Tied to Illegal Settlements and Campus Censorship
MintPress uncovers the web of influence connecting NCRI to the Israel lobby and the US national security state
Even as Israel pounds Gaza into rubble, carrying out what has been described as a genocide in the process, many of its supporters are attempting to change the subject, instead decrying a supposedly new wave of dangerous antisemitism across American universities.
Their evidence for this is a new report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI). Entitled “The Corruption of the American Mind,” the study alleges that Middle Eastern funding of U.S. universities has helped unleash a torrent of anti-Jewish hatred. Yet, as we shall see, not only does the report contain numerous methodological issues, but the NCRI itself is deeply connected to the Israel lobby, as well as the U.S. national security state, and regularly publishes thinly sourced reports in service of Israeli interests and U.S. imperialism.
CAMPUS PROPAGANDA WARS
The NCRI report claims that American universities have accepted billions of dollars from authoritarian countries and that those institutions that accepted Middle Eastern cash saw 300% more antisemitic incidents than those that did not. U.S. universities, they conclude, are hotbeds of Jew-hatred. The report bemoans a:
[M]assive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”
The study was widely cited in the media, particularly by pro-Israel partisans eager to change the subject from Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Bari Weiss, for example, wrote that “the explosion of antisemitic hate” on campuses had been “fueled by Middle Eastern money.” As she explained:
[F]or several decades a toxic worldview—morally relativist, anti-Israel, and anti-American—has been incubating in ‘area studies’ departments and social theory programs at elite universities. Whole narratives have been constructed to dehumanize Israelis and brand Israel as a ‘white, colonial project’ to be ‘resisted.’”
The clear implication in both the NCRI study and Weiss’ report is that domestic opposition to Israeli (or other Western nations’) actions cannot be organic. Instead, it must be funded by nefarious foreign actors – a notion that, as we shall see – is a central recurring theme in the NCRI’s work.
SHADY CONNECTIONS
The Network Contagion Research Institute describes itself as “the world’s foremost expert in identifying and forecasting the threat and spread of misinformation and disinformation across social media platforms.” Yet its connections to a wide range of controversial organizations raises questions about its neutrality. For one, the primary funder of its $1.7 million budget is the Israel on Campus Coalition, a group that describes its mission as to:
[U]nite the many pro-Israel organizations that operate on campuses across the United States by coordinating strategies, providing educational resources, sharing in-depth research, and increasing collaboration.”
“We envision the American college campus as a place where…the anti-Israel movement is marginalized, and where the entire campus community appreciates Israel’s contributions to the world,” the Israel on Campus Coalition writes on the “about us” section of its website.
If it were not apparent enough that this is a nakedly pro-Israel propaganda group fighting a war on America’s college campuses, the Israel on Campus Coalition is, in turn, bankrolled by the Jewish National Fund, a group that works hand-in-hand with the Israeli Defense Forces and builds illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.
The NCRI has also partnered with (i.e., was financed by) the Charles Koch Foundation and the Open Society Foundation – groups that have been involved in funding regime change operations abroad.
It has also collaborated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL is a group in the United States that, under the guise of fighting anti-Jewish racism, has long acted as a semi-official spying agency for Israel. Throughout its long history, it has infiltrated or surveilled virtually every progressive American organization, including Greenpeace, the NAACP, the United Farm Workers, the AFL-CIO, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and a host of leftist Arab- and Jewish-American organizations. It even spied on figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela and was known to be passing much of the information on to the Israeli government.
An internal FBI memo noted that the ADL was very likely breaking the Foreign Agents Registration Act by acting as an arm of the Israeli state. Indeed, the memo alleged that the group was almost certainly secretly funded by Tel Aviv. In 2019, the ADL announced it was partnering with the NCRI to “produce a series of reports that take an in-depth look into how extremism and hate spread on social media – and provide recommendations on how to combat both.”
The ties to the ADL go even deeper. NCRI co-founder Joel Finkelstein started the organization while holding down a job as a research fellow at the ADL and continued to work at both organizations simultaneously for nearly two years, further blurring the line between the two.
Meanwhile, NCRI lead intelligence analyst Alex Goldenberg is a former fellow at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the primary and most influential Israel lobbying group in the United States. Richard Benson, the NCRI’s director of European operations, was formerly chief executive of Community Security Trust (CST), a British Israel lobby group with deep ties to the Israeli state. The CST compiled a secret list of “extreme” (i.e., anti-Zionist) Jewish groups and sent it to the U.K. government and successfully lobbied to block Palestinian activists from being allowed to enter Great Britain.
Many key figures of the NCRI’s leadership team also have close links to the U.S. national security state. This includes its CEO, Adam Sohn, who served as Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s communications director before becoming vice president of the Koch Foundation.
Paul Goldenberg, meanwhile, was a senior figure in the Department of Homeland Security and led its attempts to counter extremism and radicalism at home. He was appointed by President Obama and reappointed by President Trump as a senior advisor to the DHS. Today, he is a strategic advisor to the NCRI.
The NCRI’s strategic advisory council also includes two senior military figures: Loree Sutton, a former brigadier general in the U.S. Army, and (formerly) John Allen, a retired four-star Marine Corps general who was commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Other contributors to NCRI reports include Kelli Holden, a 28-year CIA veteran who rose to become chief of counterintelligence operations at the agency, and Brian Harrell, whose previous roles included Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection, Department of Homeland Security and Assistant Director for Infrastructure Security, U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
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