By Lieba Nesis

Howard Horowitz, Head of Westchester’s People’s Action Coalition Foundation (Wespac), a nonprofit 501(c)(3), has emerged as one of the leading funders of the pro-Hamas demonstrations across the United States. Founded in 1994, Wespac’s supposed guiding principle is “nonviolent protests against injustice, discrimination, war and the causes of climate change.” While keeping its sources of revenue’s secret its lack of transparency has raised a number of red flags. Knowing these protests have been anything but peaceful as calls to annihilate Jews, to repeat October 7th thousands of times, coupled with violent punching, stomping, and pushing of Jewish students as they are forced to flee college campuses for their lives, has made Horowitz’s orthodox upbringing all the more troubling. Wespac is the financial linchpin for dozens of Jew hating organizations including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Within Our Lifetime (WOL) a group led by Muslim Nerdeen Kiswani that has physically harassed students outside the Columbia gates. Kiswani likes to say things such as, “I hope that pop-pop is the last noise Zionists hear in their lifetime.” Wespac does not make its fiscal sponsorships public and its sole employee other than Horowitz is Nada Khader, a Palestinian who has joined Horowitz in placing the blame for October 7th on Israel.

Supporting over 15 anti-Israel groups, Wespac’s laser-like focus remains on the obliteration of Israel. A major proponent of BDS the group’s ties to antisemite Rep. Jamaal Bowman and AOC are no surprise. Wespac’s website and tax documents give no indication of its pro-Palestinian activism making it difficult to track the money that ends up in pro-Palestinian hands. The last revenue statement in 2021 revealed they had assets amounting to over $1 million-however, that amount has increased exponentially since October 7th. Wespac’s sole office is in White Plains as its traces its roots to the 1970’s as a proponent of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements. Immediately following October 7th Horowitz stated his outrage at Israel “for its ongoing implementation of genocide involving forced death marches and indiscriminate bombing of 27,000 Gazans” remarking the future of the Jewish people depends on “justice for Palestine.” Wespac has been named as one of the key funders of tent-city encampments at universities and for training protestors on how to wreak havoc after receiving hundred of thousands from George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

Horowitz’s murky origins have him claiming to have been brought up in Monticello, New York where he attended a Jewish elementary school and public high school. With an orthodox mother and father, the eighty-something year old’s undergraduate work began at NYU where he got both his degree in Psychology and his graduate degree in Political Science with a sociology degree from Bucknell University. He worked on Bill Clinton’s Arkansas governor campaign in the late 70’s and founded Horowitz Associates in 1985 as well as Horowitz Research which currently has 18 employees and which specializes in the marketing of television, computer and internet services for consumers-whatever that means. He is a member of the Israel Action Committee of Temple Israel of New Rochelle, a founding member of Westchester Jewish Coalition for Immigration and an active member of Westchester’s Jewish Voice for Peace. After several stints living in Jerusalem and on a kibbutz in the early 70’s Horowitz moved to Westchester where he became anti-Zionist having felt the partition plan robbed the Palestinians of their homes, livelihood and lands. He then met Alisse Waterston, Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College CUNY, who is also the President of the American Anthropological Association and they have three children together, Dan, Matthew and Leah, and a number of grandchildren. Howard has for years called on Jewish institutions to abandon Israel and has remained a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals as groups conducting flood-themed protests including bridge and highway blockades have been funded by Horowitz. As Congress seeks to crack down on domestic terrorist organizations its first steps must be accessing the opaque accounts of covert organizations such as Wespac.

Matthew Continetti- Free Beacon

Since May 8, when President Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett that the United States would not supply Israel with weapons if the IDF enters Hamas’s stronghold in the Gaza Strip, many of Israel’s supporters in the United States have felt a sense of shock, confusion, anger, betrayal, abandonment, and dread.

Shock at the suddenness of the policy reversal and the banal setting of Biden’s major shift. Confusion at the incoherence of a policy that denounces anti-Semitism one day and protects Hamas the next. Anger at the news that Biden tried to hide his “pause” in munitions shipments to Israel so that it would not interfere with coverage of his speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Betrayal at his threat to deny Israel the tools it needs to finish the task of ending Hamas as a coherent military force. And dread at what might befall the United States and Israel during the remainder of this presidency.

What happened to the Joe Biden who exhibited moral clarity toward Israel? Did he shuffle off the stage in search of ice cream?

For a while after the October 7 attacks, it looked as if Biden might back Israel to the hilt. As Biden said in Tel Aviv on October 18, Hamas’s despicable acts “recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world.” In America’s campaign against ISIS, we dropped heavy bombs on urban environments. Not because we wanted to. Because terrorists who burrow underground and use civilians as shields force us to.

Then the war in Gaza ground on. Media outlets amplified Hamas propaganda. Biden’s poll numbers dropped. He lost the plot. He began to waver. And he retreated to his usual corner: the Bernie Sanders left.

Sanders’s priorities have informed Biden’s governance as far back as the unity task force in the summer of 2020. Biden filled his government with allies of Sanders’s left-wing ally, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.). True, Biden repudiated Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Defund the Police, and Abolish ICE. But his “Build Back Better” agenda would transform the United States into a social democracy. His Inflation Reduction Act and electric vehicle subsidies and environmental regulations are catnip for the green movement. He’s done little to stop the millions who have crossed the southern border illegally. His regulatory agencies are anti-business. His student-loan forgiveness initiatives are an unconstitutional sop to the campus left. Biden hasn’t endorsed the Sanders-Warren program. He just dances to its tune.

Consider: On April 22, the same day Biden denounced “anti-Semitic protests” as well as “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians,” the president met with Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). Ocasio-Cortez supports illegal pro-Hamas encampments on college campuses. She has repeated the disgusting slander that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. And she belongs to the notorious “Squad” of anti-Semitic Democratic members of Congress like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman.

Biden was all smiles with the extremist AOC. “I learned a long time ago: Listen to that lady,” Biden said before the private meeting. “We’re going to talk more about another part of the world, too.”

On May 3, around the time Biden denounced the campus protests in brief remarks, Sanders told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that, like LBJ and the Vietnam war, “President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated, not just young people, but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war.” Sanders went on to say he hoped Biden “stops giving a blank check to [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, and I would hope that they understand that from a political point of view, this has not been helpful.”

Message received. Among the few lawmakers who unequivocally backed Biden’s “red line” against Israel: Bernie Sanders.

If Biden sees short-term gain in his alliance with Sanders, he is mistaken. Daylight between the United States and Israel emboldens Iran and its murderous proxies. This isn’t guesswork. It’s the story of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Obama downgraded relationships with traditional U.S. allies such as Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to withdraw America from the region under the cover of the Iranian nuclear deal. Wars in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, a supercharged global Islamist movement, and an Iran engorged on oil money and sanctions relief were the result.

No one should want to repeat this bloody history. But that is the path Biden has chosen. “We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” he told Erin Burnett. “We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”

Does he even know what “security” means? Israel is not waging war in places like Rafah for fun. Israel is fighting Hamas because Israel was attacked on October 7 and because the terrorist organization poses an existential threat. If Hamas remains in power anywhere in Gaza, it will regenerate, replenish, and plan future atrocities. Israel won’t be secure.

Worse, if Hamas survives the current hostilities, it will be seen as the victor throughout the Greater Middle East and in the Arab and Muslim world more generally—not to mention in places such as Russia and China, or inside faculty lounges and tent encampments throughout the West. The risks to Israel will multiply. The tactics used in anti-Semitic marches and protests will be legitimized. Harassment and violence against Jews will grow.

If Israel cannot achieve its aims of defeating Hamas and recovering the hostages, then Israel will suffer a tremendous blow to its credibility as a state. Israelis will lose confidence in their government’s capacity to protect them from Iran’s ring of fire. Some Israelis may look for the exits. Other Jews may think twice before migrating to the Holy Land. The foundation of Zionism—that the Jewish people will find security in their national home—will be undermined.

That is why Israel has no choice but to continue its war. That is why “walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas” is the same as walking away from Israel’s security. Weakening the U.S.-Israel alliance, pressuring Netanyahu to tamp down or pause military operations, forcing on Israel a ceasefire weighted toward Hamas, and otherwise constraining the actions of our democratic ally of 76 years serves no constructive purpose whatsoever. All it does is degrade and destroy.

Biden may think that, by listening to Sanders and to Ocasio-Cortez, he is walking away from Israel’s war. He is not. He is embracing a morally blind and strategically unsound position. And more voters will walk away from him.

Two Dozen House Dems Slam Biden on Withholding Military Aid for Israel; Say it Emboldens Hamas

Edited by:  Fern Sidman

In a striking move that reverberated through the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., more than two dozen House Democrats, led by Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, have expressed deep concerns over President Joe Biden’s decision to withhold military aid from Israel, according to a report that appeared on Friday in the New York Post.  This group of lawmakers, alarmed by the implications of such a decision, articulated their apprehensions in a forthright letter to Jake Sullivan, the National Security Adviser.

Their letter sharply criticizes the withholding of military support, arguing that such a move “only emboldens our mutual enemies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other Iranian-backed proxies, ” as was reported by the Post. The timing of their letter, coming seven months after what was aptly described as “the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the end of the Holocaust,” sheds light on the heightened sense of urgency and peril. The Post also reported that according to these lawmakers, Iranian-backed groups continue to pose severe threats, launching attacks against both Israeli and American targets. This backdrop of ongoing aggression serves to amplify their alarm.

The lawmakers’ distress is compounded by a globally rising tide of anti-Semitism, which they see as spreading unchecked, adding a layer of socio-cultural threat to the strategic and physical menaces.

President Biden’s stance, as he articulated in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, reflects a nuanced approach to the complex geopolitical and humanitarian issues at play. He declared a conditional withholding of arms, specifically if Israeli forces proceed with an invasion of Rafah, a crucial stronghold of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to the Post report. This decision not to supply arms for such an operation highlights a strategic pivot, focusing on the potential humanitarian impact on Rafah’s civilian population, estimated at 1.5 million people.

The specifics of the withheld military aid include substantial quantities of munitions, detailed by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs, the report in the Post noted.  “We are especially focused on the end use of the 2,000-pound bombs and the impact they could have in dense urban settings as we have seen in other parts of Gaza,” Jean-Pierre stated. She also noted that no final decision has been made regarding the continuation of this military aid.

Jean-Pierre’s statements further clarified that the objective of the administration’s decision is to prevent the use of American-supplied weaponry in specific types of military operations that could endanger large numbers of civilian lives.

This decision comes in the wake of a harrowing conflict that began with an October 7 invasion by Hamas, leading to the death of 1,200 people, including 33 U.S. citizens, and the kidnapping of 240 individuals. The Post report said that among those kidnapped, more than 130, including five Americans, remain held in the Gaza Strip, under uncertain conditions regarding their survival or well-being.

In a stark response to the U.S. decision, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a video message that conspicuously avoided mentioning Biden, expressed a resolute stance for his nation. “If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone,” Netanyahu declared, according to the Post report.

Critics of the U.S. decision, including more than two dozen House Democrats led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, argue that withholding such critical aid emboldens Iranian-backed terror groups and complicates efforts to secure a hostage agreement. These lawmakers contend that the pause in military support inadvertently supports the agendas of Iranian backed terrorist groups such as Hamas, characterized by chaos, brutality, and hatred.

The Democrats argue that by stalling the shipments, it could lead to increased vulnerability for Palestinians. According to them, terror groups may exploit the lack of military pressure to continue diverting humanitarian aid meant for civilian relief, thus putting innocent lives at greater risk, the Post reported. This assertion calls attention to a broader concern about the consequences of interrupting aid flows in conflict zones, where non-state actors might leverage power vacuums to their advantage.

Echoing President Biden’s previous statements, the group reminded the administration of its commitment to eliminate Hamas, which Biden emphasized after the tragic events of October 7. They argue that the administration’s current stance might contradict its earlier assertions about its commitments in the region, particularly concerning America’s closest ally, Israel.

The Post reported that the Democratic members also highlighted the potential geopolitical risks of reducing military support at such a critical juncture. “When we abandon these duties, we leave a vacuum of American leadership for our anti-democratic adversaries to fill,” they stated, suggesting that the absence of decisive American intervention could invite further destabilization by empowering regimes opposed to U.S. interests and democratic values globally.

Amidst these concerns, Gottheimer and his colleagues have sought a classified briefing to gain clearer insights into the administration’s strategy and to ensure that the significant sum of $17 billion in military aid approved by Congress for Israel is expedited, as was noted in the Post report. Their request aims to secure a timeline and reassurances that the aid will reach its intended destination promptly to support Israel’s defense capabilities in a region fraught with conflict and uncertainty.