[ Americans who give money to Canary Mission are potentially
committing a serious crime by acting as agents of a foreign power.]
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WHO IS FUNDING CANARY MISSION? INSIDE THE DOXXING OPERATION TARGETING
ANTI-ZIONIST STUDENTS AND PROFESSORS  
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James Bamford
December 22, 2023
The Nation
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*
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*
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_ Americans who give money to Canary Mission are potentially
committing a serious crime by acting as agents of a foreign power. _

A pro-Palestinian protest of Harvard students and their supporters,
ends on the lawn behind Klarman Hall, at Harvard Business School,
after starting in the Old Yard by Massachusetts Hall., Pat Greenhouse
/ The Boston Globe via Getty Images

 

It was a scene reminiscent of the Red Scare days, of grainy
black-and-white television images of political witch hunts by the old
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). But rather than hunting
for disloyal communist sympathizers, committee members at early
December’s hearing
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the House Committee on Education and the Workforce were instead
hunting for university presidents disloyal to Israel. “Are you now,
or have you ever been, an anti-Zionist?” quipped
[[link removed]] _New
York Times_ columnist Michelle Goldberg. “You can see the trap.”

What is missing from Congress are hearings into the decades of illegal
anti-Palestinian espionage, covert action, and blacklisting of
Americans within the United States by the Israeli government and its
domestic collaborators—actions far more serious and damaging than
campus semantics. As noted in my earlier articles for _The Nation_,
they range from dispatching a secret agent
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interfere in a presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump;
to launching a covert operation
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the US targeting academics and others who support a boycott of Israel;
to conducting a massive
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to spy on and “crush” pro-Palestinian students throughout the
country; to establishing a secret Israeli-run troll farm
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the US to harass anyone critical of Israel; to hiring Americans
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secretly spy on American students and report back to Israeli
intelligence. And then there is Canary Mission, a massive blacklisting
and doxxing operation directed from Israel that targets students and
professors critical of Israeli policies, and then launches slanderous
charges against them—charges designed to embarrass and humiliate
them and damage their future employability. All secretly funded
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wealthy Jewish Americans and Jewish American foundations.

Following the October 7 Hamas attack and the launch of Israel’s war
in Gaza, members of Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee (HPSC)
sponsored a letter
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the conflict. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” it
said. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza
have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials
promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza
have already commenced.” The letter was cosigned by 33 other student
organizations and published in _The Harvard Crimson_, the campus
newspaper. Almost immediately, Canary Mission created online profiles
for members of the _Crimson_’s editorial board (though a few likely
already had one from when the _Crimson_ endorsed divestment), along
with profiles of the leaders of the HPSC and other campus clubs that
cosigned the letter. The goal of the blacklist was to dox those named,
encourage their harassment, and limit their future employment
prospects.

“The Mission didn’t stop at creating profiles for student
leaders,” notes
[[link removed]] Owen
Ray in the _Massachusetts Daily Collegian_.

They doxxed anybody even remotely involved in the publication of the
letter. One listed student was a member of the Pakistani Students
Association, a club which had co-signed the PSC statement. They were
indirectly involved at best, but their membership with a cultural club
was enough for the Mission to brand them as hateful antisemites.

Another student was a member of the South Asian Law Students
Association (SALSA), which also co-signed the controversial letter.
They were placed on the website for no reason besides their SALSA
membership.

And once on the blacklist, it is nearly impossible to get off.
“They’re publishing personal information and holding it over
people’s heads,” writes Ray. “It’s political extortion, it’s
dystopian and it discourages political discourse.”

Not content with online slander and blacklisting, Canary Mission
agents have also been involved in physical intimidation. At George
Washington University in 2018, on the eve of a vote on a
student-government resolution calling on the university to divest from
companies profiting from Israeli violations of Palestinian human
rights, two powerful men in yellow canary outfits suddenly turned up
in the lobby of the building in which the vote was to take place. They
then engaged in a strange and frightening dance. Their purpose was to
dramatically reinforce Canary Mission flyers that had been posted
around campus advising students to vote against the resolution and
attacking the student activists. “THERE ARE NO SECRETS. WE WILL KNOW
YOUR VOTE AND WILL ACT ACCORDINGLY,” said
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threatening Canary Mission message. Abby Brook, a Jewish student at
the school who was active in pro-Palestinian groups on campus, found
the event “pretty unbelievably terrifying
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These two fully grown, muscular men in these bird costumes,
strutting.” On the walk home that night, she said, she was careful
to watch her back. In‑your-face intimidation of students is the
objective.

Like its campus spy operation, Israel on Campus Coalition, Canary
Mission acts as a key intelligence asset for the Ministry of
Strategic Affairs
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a highly secretive intelligence organization that is largely focused
on the United States, and the Shin Bet security service. Not only is
it intended to silence anti-Israel dissent; its list of names is also
used to prevent those individuals from entering Israel and attempting
to visit family, including both Jews and Palestinians, and professors
as well as students. Among them was Lara Alqasem
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a 22-year-old Palestinian American student who was planning to study
in a master’s program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Although she had a valid visa, she was dragged in for interrogation
shortly after landing at Tel Aviv’s airport.

During the process, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs sent over a
document marked “Sensitive.” It contained a profile from Canary
Mission that listed her crime: She had served as a local chapter
president of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of
Florida. Even worse, her chapter had called for a boycott of some
Israeli hummus. Afterward, she was placed in detention for weeks
pending deportation procedures. But following a protest letter signed
by over 300 professors and other academics from the US and around the
world “who reject all forms of racial profiling
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an Israeli court granted her appeal
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enter the country.

Another victim was Columbia University Law School professor Katherine
Franke
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who at one time sat on the academic advisory council steering
committee for Jewish Voice for Peace. Upon her landing in Tel Aviv, an
official at the airport showed her what appeared to be her Canary
Mission profile. After being kept in detention for 14 hours, she was
deported
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informed that she would be permanently banned from the country.

Like all of Israel’s espionage and covert operations in the United
States, Canary Mission’s links to Israeli intelligence—and the
Mission’s American financiers—are well hidden. But as a result of
a slipup on a tax form a few years ago, those links began to be
revealed. And in the process was exposed the role played by one of the
wealthiest families in California, headed by publicity-shy billionaire
Sanford Diller, a major Trump backer who had donated $6 million to a
pro-Trump
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committee. Diller was also a pro-Israel extremist, supporting a long
list of right-wing Islamophobic organizations. They included
the American Freedom Law Center
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founded by a man who even the Anti-Defamation League said
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a “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry,”
and Stop Islamization of America, which “has sought to rouse public
fears about a vast Islamic conspiracy to destroy American values,”
according to the ADL.

For donations to a variety of causes, the Diller family maintains the
Helen Diller Family Foundation. But in order to get a tax break, they
turn the funds over to a much larger trust, the Jewish Community
Federation of San Francisco, which then channels the Diller family
donations. According to _The Forward_ (formerly _The Jewish Daily
Forward_), in 2016 the Diller Foundation donated $100,000
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the Jewish Community Federation to an obscure Israeli nonprofit called
Megamot Shalom. Untraceable, off the grid, unheard of, Megamot Shalom
was actually the front for Canary Mission.

Confident that their dark donations would never be revealed, other
donors around the country poured cash into Megamot Shalom via similar
charities, among them the Jewish Community Foundation (JCF) of Los
Angeles. There, a contributor, whose name remains legally hidden by
the foundation’s rules, donated another quarter of a million
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to Canary Mission’s front. The JCF of Los Angeles manages assets of
more than $1.3 billion and, like San Francisco’s Jewish Federation,
has distributed millions to right-wing pro-occupation groups. Yet at
the same time, it turns down donations to human rights groups opposed
to the occupation, as foundation board member Lisa Greer discovered.
When she attempted to donate $5,000 to IfNotNow, a Jewish group
against the occupation, the foundation rejected her contribution.
“I’d never heard of this happening before,” she said
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“I was beyond shocked. I really did start shaking.”

There was a key reason for so much secrecy. Those Americans who were
financially supporting Canary Mission were potentially committing a
serious crime, acting as agents of a foreign power. They were
financing a clandestine foreign organization with ties to Israel’s
Ministry of Strategic Affairs, an Israeli intelligence agency—which
was using Canary Mission to identify, detain and deport Americans
entering the country, like Lara Alqasem and Professor Katherine
Franke.

Not content to secretly fund Canary Mission to carry out its spying
and intimidation on American college campuses, many of the wealthy
donors also wanted generous federal tax breaks for their donations.
The problem was that tax breaks are not allowed for donations to
foreign charities, just those in the United States, and Megamot
Shalom’s being in Israel would rule out the deduction. To solve the
problem, years ago a family living in Israel’s illegal settlements
came to the United States and set up shop in New York City as a
nonprofit “charity,” calling itself the Central Fund of Israel.
Therefore, the Diller family, through San Francisco’s Jewish
Community Federation, actually “donated” their money to the
Central Fund in New York, and in return received a substantial tax
rebate. And then the Central Fund simply transferred the money to
Megamot Shalom’s bank account in Israel. Under the scheme,
billionaires and their foundations got richer while American taxpayers
subsidized the blacklisting and terrorizing of their own children in
college.

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In addition to Canary Mission, the Central Fund also directs millions
of donations to a wide range of racist and extremist settler groups.
Among them is Lehava, a far-right Jewish supremacist group
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in Israel that has staged marches chanting “Death to Arabs.” Last
year, a group of 19 rabbis signed a letter to one of the Central
Fund’s key supporters, the New York–based Jewish Communal Fund,
with assets of more than $2.4 billion, protesting the donations.
“Incitement and violence are not legitimate political
positions,” they wrote
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and requested a meeting. But officials from the Jewish Communal Fund
simply rebuffed the rabbis and declined to meet with them.

Nearly invisible, the Central Fund for Israel was hidden in the back
room of a fabric company
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midtown Manhattan. It has since moved into a back room of J. Mark
Interiors [[link removed]] on Central Avenue
in Cedarhurst, Long Island. The family business is run by Jay Marcus
[[link removed]],
a gray-haired settler with a kippah on his head and a second home in
Efrat, an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank. From the
textile company, the Diller family’s $100,000 was wired to the
Israeli bank account of Canary Mission’s front
organization, Megamot Shalom
[[link removed]].
Unsurprisingly, the actual physical address for Megamot Shalom
appeared to be a run-down abandoned building in Beit Shemesh, a city
west of Jerusalem. Near a few broken chairs and a scattering of pigeon
droppings—or perhaps those of a canary—was a heavily scuffed
powder-blue door from which hung a rusty padlock.

Hidden deep in the shadows, the man behind both Megamot Shalom and
Canary Mission was a smiling, pleasant-looking, middle-aged rabbi with
receding dark brown hair beneath a black felt fedora, Jonathan Jack
Ian Bash
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Although he has denied involvement, Bash signed the 2016 financial
reports for Megamot Shalom, and two people separately confirmed
to _The Forward_ that he was in charge of Canary Mission. Megamot
Shalom is what is known in Israel as a “public benefit
corporation,” and documents seem to clearly describe its work: to
“ensure the national image and strength of the state of Israel via
the use of information disseminated by technological means.”

While Bash has long run Canary Mission’s operations, the man with
the money pulling the strings appears to be multimillionaire Adam
Milstein, a convicted felon
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close associate of the late multibillionaire Israel supporter Sheldon
Adelson. In 2016, during an investigation by Al Jazeera television,
Tony Kleinfeld, an undercover investigator, discussed Milstein with
his then “boss,” Eric Gallagher, fundraising director for the
Israel Project, a Washington-based pro-Israel media organization. At
the time, Gallagher believed that Kleinfeld was a like-minded
pro-Israel advocate. Asked about Canary Mission on Kleinfeld’s
hidden camera, Gallagher said, “It’s him, it’s him
[[link removed]],” to which Kleinfeld
asked, “Adam Milstein?” Gallagher replied, “Yeah, I don’t know
who he hired to oversee it. Adam Milstein’s the guy who funds it.”
Milstein has denied funding the organization, and Gallagher reportedly
told Milstein that Al Jazeera had selectively edited his quote to make
it appear that he was saying Milstein backed the operation.

But it should not be up to a foreign television program to investigate
secret Israeli intelligence and covert operations in the US, along
with their clandestine American funders. That is what the FBI is paid
to do. And rather than drag university presidents up to Capitol Hill
for a replay of the Red Scare/HUAC hearings, it’s time for the White
House and Congress to at last rip the cover off Israel’s vast
network of spies, collaborators, and funders in this country. Even if
it means giving up millions in donations and political support from
AIPAC—the key reason Israel remains immune from any investigation.

_JAMES BAMFORD is a best-selling author, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and
winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. His most recent
book is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of
America's Counterintelligence
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from which much of the material in this article has been adapted._

_Copyright c 2023 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* Israel
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* Zionists
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* Anti-Zionism
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* students
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* professors
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* doxxing
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* pro-Palestine protests
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* spying
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* covert operations
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