Fatima Kurtic is a Muslim Bosnian-born public school teacher in Luxembourg who was dismissed from her job last October after Luxembourg’s education authorities took issue with her social-media activity. Kurtic says she “was punished for speaking out for Palestinians and against Israel’s war in Gaza.”

But this is not simply a story about a teacher being punished for saying “Free Palestine.” It is a story about a Luxembourg public-school teacher whose record extends far beyond criticism of Israel and into conspiracy theories about “Jewish power,” allegations of “Israeli organ harvesting,” imagery invoking blood libel, political activism involving children, and material calling for armed jihad.

There are two very different versions of Fatima Kurtic. One is the tearful teacher speaking for Palestinian children. The other is the activist who has spent years building an influential platform, cultivating relationships with Islamist and anti-Israel influencers, and sharing increasingly extreme material with a large audience.

Kurtic isn’t just a teacher, she has built a substantial online audience, with an Instagram account of nearly 150,000 followers. She has spent the past several years turning her activism into an international social-media brand, making her one of the more prominent anti-Israel influencers in Luxembourg.

The second version has been almost entirely absent from the coverage of her dismissal.

Al Jazeera reported on demonstrations supporting Kurtic in July, describing her as a teacher fired over pro-Gaza posts. Turkish Anadolu Agency has similarly presented her as a “Bosnian refugee who was fired over posts supporting Palestine.” Iranian state media has repeated the same basic narrative, reporting that she was “dismissed for supporting Palestinians and condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza.” While Pakistani media reported on how she will be challenging her dismissal.

It is an emotionally powerful story: a teacher, herself a refugee from the Bosnian war, speaking out for Palestinian children and supposedly “losing her career for doing so.”

But there is a basic question that has received remarkably little attention:

What exactly was she posting?

Kurtic’s social-media activity contains a recurring theme: claims that Israel, Jews or Jewish organizations secretly control governments and international affairs.

She has shared material claiming that Israel controls American foreign policy, that the United States is effectively an “occupied country,” and that the Rothschild family “owns every central bank in the world” and financed both sides of wars. Kurtic also shared material promoting the conspiracy theory that Israel was somehow responsible for the September 11 attacks. In doing so, she added the words “Remember the Dancing Israelis?” to a post about an Israeli woman filmed in New York on September 11, 2001. And claimed “the Zionists” could openly discuss their “evil plans” because they “control the world,” explicitly presenting Jews not just as evil, but also as a hidden force “manipulating global affairs.”

The record becomes still more disturbing when it comes to spread of modern forms of medieval blood libels. Blood libel is one of the oldest forms of antisemitic propaganda: the false accusation that Jews murder non-Jewish children for ritual purposes. Historically, such accusations contributed to violence against Jewish communities throughout the centuries.

Modern versions have taken different forms, including allegations that Jews or Israel deliberately murder children or harvest their organs. Kurtic’s public posts contain multiple examples of this type of allegation.

In February 2025, Kurtic shared a post alleging that Palestinian bodies had been returned with organs missing. The post juxtaposed images of corpses with images from the grotesque Hamas-organized ceremony accompanying the return of the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two murdered children. The following day, she posted about Shiri Bibas and her children in a manner that appeared to justify their abduction, falsely describing Shiri as a soldier and claiming that Hamas had taken the children so that “they would not be separated.”

She subsequently shared another video alleging that Israel steals organs from Palestinian prisoners and “resistance fighters.” To support the claim, the video recycled a 2009 Guardian headline reading “Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs,” while omitting the rather important fact that The Guardian itself corrected the headline the next day, calling it a “serious editing error.”

Fatima Kurtic also shared a fabricated screenshot purporting to show Zohran Mamdani saying that Israel admitted to stealing Palestinian organs. The screenshot came from an Instagram account named “factchecking1488,” an account identified as a neo-Nazi source.

The underlying story concerned the actions of one particular doctor, Yehuda Hiss, the former director of Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute, who acknowledged removing organs from Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers alike without permission during the 1990s. The article also explicitly stated that there was no evidence that Israel had killed Palestinians to obtain their organs or that the practice was an Israeli state policy.

The issue goes beyond social-media posts.

For an anti-Israel demonstration in September 2024, Kurtic instructed participants to smear their clothes with red paint, bring empty strollers and school bags, and carry dolls without body parts or wrapped in shrouds.

The resulting demonstration featured bloodied dolls, red-painted clothing, Netanyahu depicted with devil horns and covered in blood, and Kurtic herself holding up a hand covered in red paint.

The imagery deliberately invoked blood, mutilated children and the portrayal of Jews and Israelis as murderous predators.

The record does not stop with antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Kurtic also shared material that goes beyond political advocacy.

On April 6, 2025, she shared a fatwa calling for Muslims to participate in “armed jihad” against Israel. and in August 2025, she appeared in a video calling for violence and for the murder of Jews “Yallah, yallah Intifada…”

And then there is the classroom. This may be the most important part of the story.

Kurtic was not simply a private citizen with an Instagram account.

She was a teacher in Luxembourg’s public education system.

And her own public activity shows how her political activism didn’t remain separate from her professional role.

The Luxembourg Education Ministry states teachers “are not authorized to express their personal convictions in the exercise of their functions.” The ministry describes this as a duty of neutrality.

In March 2025, Kurtic posted a photograph apparently taken at school while wearing a “Free Palestine” sweatshirt. Another photograph showed her with a pupil while wearing clothing displaying the word “Palestine.” In a separate classroom video involving national flags, when a pupil identified her as being from Palestine, Kurtic corrected the child, she is Bosnian, but then told the pupils that she “always” has a pro-Palestinian message on her T-shirts.

At a demonstration in May 2025, Kurtic brought a girl whom she introduced as “my other student” onto an improvised stage and encouraged her to recite political slogans including:

“down with occupation, up with liberation, free Palestine, free Gaza!”

The video was also shared by a controversial Instagram account @europe.palestine.network with one million followers. The video was subsequently deleted from Kurtic’s Instagram after her dismissal, according to the available record.

A similar scene occurred during a September 2024 demonstration, when Kurtic held a microphone in front of a child while displaying a red-painted hand. The imagery has been compared to the infamous photograph from the 2000 Ramallah lynching of two Israeli reservists.

Her posts are not confined to her own audience. They have been amplified by much larger accounts and activist networks, allowing her posts to reach audiences far beyond Luxembourg. One of the most prominent is Palestinian influencer Saleh Atia, whom Kurtic describes as a close friend, and who have appeared together repeatedly at demonstrations and events in Luxembourg. Atia has hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers and millions of TikTok followers. His significance goes beyond his audience size. Atia has built his online presence around political activism, using his platforms to promote support for terrorism and similar conspiracies as those spread by Kurtic.

But Fatima Kurtic case raises a broader question about Western education. Public schools are supposed to educate children, not politically mobilize them, yet schools and educational programs across the West are increasingly engaging children in political activism, while teachers are spreading antisemitism, Holocaust distortion, and presenting terrorism or political violence as “resistance.” What we are seeing across the West can no longer be considered education; it is indoctrination from an early age.

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A few days ago, following the mass invasion of thousands of migrants into Ceuta and Melilla, a familiar narrative quickly resurfaced, describing Ceuta and Melilla as “Spanish colonies in Africa,” while arguing that Spain has no legitimate claim to territory on the African continent.

The phrase is getting repeated so often that many now assume it is an established historical and legal fact.

It is not.

Describing Ceuta and Melilla as products of European colonialism ignores more than a millennium of history.

Both cities existed long before the emergence of the modern nation-states of Spain or Morocco. In antiquity, they were part of the Roman Empire. After the fall of Rome, they came under the rule of the Vandals and later the Byzantine Empire before becoming part of the expanding Islamic caliphates during the Muslim conquest of North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries. For centuries thereafter, control over the cities changed hands among various Muslim dynasties.

The modern history of the cities began well before Europe’s colonial expansion.

• 1415: Portugal captured Ceuta from the Marinid Sultanate.

• 1497: The Crown of Castile occupied Melilla.

• 1580–1640: During the Iberian Union, both Portugal and Spain were ruled by the same monarch.

• 1668: Under the Treaty of Lisbon, Portugal formally recognized Ceuta as Spanish land.

These events occurred centuries before the era of European colonialism in Africa. In terms of International law, The United Nations Charter established a framework for the decolonization of Non-Self-Governing Territories. Today, the UN maintains an official list of territories that remain subject to that process.

Ceuta and Melilla are not included. Neither city has been classified by the UN Special Committee on Decolonization as a territory awaiting decolonization, but Gibraltar is.

By the time France began building its African empire in 1830 and Belgium acquired the Congo, Ceuta had been under Iberian rule for nearly 470 years and Spanish sovereignty for more than two centuries. Melilla had already been under Castilian and later Spanish sovereignty for almost four centuries.

The false claim about Ceuta and Melilla rests on a misunderstanding of both Spain’s history and the modern law of decolonization. Spain certainly possessed a vast overseas empire, and historians commonly refer to it as the Spanish colonial empire. However, much of that empire, particularly in the Americas, was organized under a constitutional and administrative system that differed significantly from the colonial models later developed by Britain, France, Belgium, and other European powers.

More importantly, Ceuta and Melilla do not fit the historical or legal definition of colonies. While their history predates Europe’s nineteenth-century colonization of Africa by centuries, and neither the United Nations nor international law classifies them as territories awaiting decolonization.

Spain had an empire. But not all empires were organized the same way.

Unlike many later European empires, Spain did not administer its American possessions merely as overseas dependencies governed by a colonial ministry. Instead, they formed part of the Spanish Monarchy and were organized into kingdoms, viceroyalties, audiencias, and captaincies general under the authority of the Crown.

The principal viceroyalties included:

• Viceroyalty of New Spain

• Viceroyalty of Peru

• Viceroyalty of New Granada

• Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata

Rather than governing these territories as distant possessions administered solely for extraction, the Spanish Crown recreated the institutions that existed in the Iberian Peninsula. Each viceroyalty developed its own Royal Audiencias (high courts), municipal councils (cabildos), universities, bishoprics, treasuries, military commands, and administrative bureaucracy. The viceroy served as the King’s representative, exercising executive authority much as the monarch’s government did in Spain itself.

Legally, the inhabitants of the Spanish Indies who were recognized as Spaniards were subjects of the same monarch, not citizens of a separate colonial dependency. A Spaniard born in Mexico City, Lima, or Santiago belonged to the Spanish Monarchy just as one born in Madrid or Seville did. While important differences remained in practice, particularly regarding appointments to the highest offices, where those born in the Iberian Peninsula were often favored, the legal framework treated the overseas kingdoms as constituent territories of the Crown rather than foreign possessions.

This constitutional structure differed markedly from the nineteenth-century colonial systems later developed by France, Britain, and Belgium, where colonies were administered through dedicated colonial ministries, governed under separate legal regimes, and generally regarded as possessions of the metropole rather than parts of the state.

None of this diminishes the realities of conquest, forced labor, discrimination, or the suffering experienced by Indigenous peoples. Those events are well documented. However, acknowledging them should not obscure the fact that the institutional and legal organization of Spain’s overseas territories differed in significant respects from the colonial empires that emerged centuries later.

France’s African empire provides an instructive contrast.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, France established colonies across North, West, Central, and East Africa, including Algeria, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, and numerous island territories.

Colonial subjects were governed under separate legal regimes, including the Code de l’Indigénat, which imposed restrictions that did not apply to citizens in metropolitan France.

The colonies were administered through the French colonial ministry and existed primarily as overseas possessions, and not as part of France.

Although the French system evolved over time, it represented the classic model of nineteenth-century European colonial administration.

Spain’s American viceroyalties were simply not structured in the same way.

This distinction is more than a matter of terminology. The way an empire organizes and governs its territories can have consequences that last for centuries. Spain transplanted many of its own institutions to the Americas, establishing cities, universities, Royal Audiencias (high courts), municipalities, bishoprics, and administrative structures that continued to function after independence. Much of Spanish America inherited these institutions as the foundation of its modern states.

By contrast, many nineteenth-century European colonies in Africa were administered through colonial ministries whose primary objective was to serve the interests of the metropole. Colonial administrations invested less in representative institutions, higher education, or local systems of government, leaving newly independent African states with weaker administrative structures than those inherited by much of Latin America.

This distinction is reflected in the long-term economic and stability trajectories of the two regions. While Latin America has faced persistent challenges, including political instability, inequality, and economic crises, it generally entered independence with established capitals, universities, courts, municipal governments, and legal institutions that had existed for centuries. Much of Africa, by contrast, emerged from nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial rule with comparatively fewer locally rooted institutions and state structures developed for self-government, making it more challenging for newly created states in Africa to develop and maintain stability.

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Spain is experiencing what can only be described as a mass invasion of its sovereign territories. Tens of thousands of mostly military-aged men stormed into Ceuta and Melilla in a matter of days, turning one of Europe’s external borders into chaos.

In response, Pedro Sanchez visited Ceuta, he promised the Spanish government will provide emotional support, help with security in Ceuta, and with the coexistence with Ceuta’s new inhabitants. In no part he spoke of deportations, of restoring the sovereignty of Spain, or demanded Morocco to take back its invaders. His best offer was “emotional support” and “coexistence.”

While most highlight how the invasion is mostly of military-aged men, watch the videos of the invasion. Look at the crowds. A remarkably large percentage of those entering are not just military-aged men, but appear to be under the age of eighteen, or, at the very least, visually look young enough to claim to be.

In response to the invasion, The Ministry of Youth and Children announced that the government intends to transfer those classified as unaccompanied “minors” across autonomous communities in mainland Spain. In other words, the first major policy announcement concerning thousands of Moroccan “children” was not how Spain would identify their parents and facilitate family reunification, but how it would redistribute them hundreds of miles across the country.

That announcement is extraordinary because it reverses the very logic of international child-protection law. If these are truly children, the first question should not be, “Which region of Spain has available capacity?” It should be, “Where are their parents, and how quickly can they be safely returned?”

And this is where everything suddenly becomes backwards.

Where is UNICEF?

Where is António Guterres?

Where is Volker Türk?

Where is Save the Children?

Where are the thousands of NGOs, child advocates, UN experts, special rapporteurs, and human rights organizations that have spent decades insisting that children belong with their families?

Save the Children, for example, has called for “more accommodation,” coordination between Spain's autonomous communities, and individual assistance for every “child.” Yet one striking omission runs through the organization's entire statement. Nowhere does it mention what the Convention on the Rights of the Child treats as the starting point: identifying parents or legal guardians to return children home, all in the child's best interests.

Think about how backwards that is.

If these are Moroccan "children," then the humanitarian and legal objective should not be to house them and disperse across Spain, it should be to reunite them with their families.

The institutions that have spent decades telling the world that family unity is paramount appear remarkably comfortable skipping over the very principle they have always claimed comes first.

For decades, the United Nations, UNICEF, the European Union, and virtually every human rights organization have insisted that children belong with their families, that separating children from their parents should be the exception rather than the rule, and that every decision concerning a child must begin with one question: What is in the child’s best interests?

Yet when thousands of Moroccan that Spain see as “minors” cross into Ceuta, the very first discussion isn’t about finding their parents.

It is about where in Spain to send them.

Not, “Who are this child’s parents?”

Not, “Can they be located?”

Not, “Can this child be safely reunited with his family?”

Instead: Which autonomous community has available capacity?

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, the European Convention on Human Rights, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the EU Return Directive all start from the same premise: protect the child while preserving or restoring family unity.

Which brings us back to the obvious question.

If these are Moroccan “children,” where are the demand Spain searches for their parents and for Morocco to help?

Legally, the priority should not be deciding which autonomous community in Spain has room to accommodate them. Legally, should be establishing who they are, identifying and contacting their parents or legal guardians, and arranging for those “children” to be returned to their families.

That should be a relatively straightforward administrative process. Parents can be reached and safe reunification can be arranged, the border itself is only a few steps away.

International child-protection law was not written to encourage the redistribution of foreign children across a country.

It was written to protect children by preserving and restoring family unity.

These Moroccan “children” belong with their parents.

According to international law, if Spain insists on treating these migrants as “children,” then it must also uphold the responsibilities that come with that designation. The priority should not be to distribute them across the peninsula, but to “protect” them, reunite them with their families, and facilitate their safe return home.

That is the point anyone who wants to challenge Sanchez’ policy needs to understand: if Spain wants to call them “children,” then demand that it actually treats them as children, not as a migrant population to be relocated and absorbed. Demand their protection. Demand that they be sent home.

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One of the biggest propaganda lies since October 7 has been the claim that Israel “systematically targets journalists” to silence the truth and hide evidence of its alleged crimes. The accusation has become a cornerstone of the broader “genocide” narrative, repeated by media outlets, NGOs, and international organizations like the United Nations with little scrutiny of who was actually being counted as a journalist.

The claim that Israel systematically targets journalists depends on the public accepting that everyone labeled a “journalist” actually was one, and that they were killed because of their work. UNRWA video editor Abdulhadi Habib and his cousin, Al Jazeera photojournalist Mustafa Ayyad, are just two more examples of so-called “journalists” with ties to Hamas. In their case, the publicly available evidence points to deep generational and familial ties to Hamas’ top leadership.

Al Jazeera photojournalist Mustafa Ayyad, who was killed on May 6, 2024, in a targeted strike on his home, was the son of Al-Qassam field commander Hatem Khader Ayyad, killed in a strike by Israel in 2008. In addition to serving as an Al-Qassam commander, Hatem Khader Ayyad was also a bodyguard for senior Hamas leader and Hamas Minister of the Interior Saeed Siam. Siam, who was killed in an Israeli strike in 2009, had also worked as a teacher for UNRWA from 1980 to 2003. He was also among the hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members deported by Israel to Lebanon in 1992, alongside Ismail Haniyeh and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi.

In addition, Al Jazeera photojournalist Mustafa Ayyad's maternal grandfather was Mustafa Munib Sarsour, one of Hamas' top leaders and an original member of the organization. Sarsour also served as one of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's bodyguards and was killed alongside him in the same Israeli strike in 2004. According to Mustafa Ayyad's mother, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was a close friend of Mustafa Ayyad’s grandfather, and he was not merely Yassin's bodyguard, but his "inseparable shadow."

Al Jazeera photojournalist Mustafa Ayyad's familial ties to Hamas leadership also include his uncle (mother’s brother), Al-Qassam field commander Mohammed Sarsour. Mohammed Sarsour also served as the bodyguard of Hamas commander Wael Talab Nassar. Both were killed in the same Israeli strike in 2004 after multiple assassinations attempts over the years. According to Al-Qassam’s website, Mohammed Sarsour was among the first to shelter wanted members of the Al-Qassam Brigades in his home, including commanders Imad Aqel, Tariq Dukhan, Marwan al-Zayigh, Bashir Hammad, and, most notably, Mohammed Deif, the longtime head of the Al-Qassam Brigades, whom he sheltered in his home for five years.

Mustafa Ayyad’s mother’s Facebook is mostly filled with images glorifying the “martyrdom” of his father, grandfather, uncle, and brothers, but it also includes many images of Mustafa when he was as a child where he is dressed as a Hamas terrorists carrying weapons.

Mustafa Ayyad appears to have had at least two brothers who were also affiliated with Hamas. His eldest brother, Tariq, was killed during “March of Return,” and Raed who was killed during the current war. Based on his mother’s eulogies, Raed appears to have served as a cameraman in Al-Qassam’s media unit.

Mustafa Ayyad’s mother’s Facebook posts also provide additional insight into the family’s longstanding ties to Hamas. According to posts published on her account, she appears to have adopted and raised her nephew, the son of Hamas commander Saad Al-Arabid, raising him as one of her own children after his father’s death in 2003.

Saad Al-Arabid was among the first members of Hamas' Al-Qassam Brigades. He was a senior commander in Hamas's Al-Qassam Brigades and one of Mohammed Deif's closest aides and trusted military associates. He developed various types of Qassam rockets, as well as Banna rockets, hand grenades, and was involved in manufacturing of small, highly explosive devices. In addition, Saad Al-Arabid participated in and helped lead numerous terrorist attacks against Israel. One of those operations was the 1994 kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldier Nachshon Wachsman, an operation led by Hamas commander Salah Jadallah. Salah Jadallah was the brother of Bilal Jadallah, the Chair of Press House Palestine and "godfather of Palestinian journalism," as well as Suhaib Jadallah, the head of visuals for Reuters in Gaza. He was also brother to Ali Jadallah, a photojournalist for Turkish Anadolu identified by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center as one of the “journalists in the service of Hamas.”

In addition, Mustafa Ayyad’s mother’s Facebook posts also indicate that she was a close personal friend with Reem Saleh al-Riyashi, the Hamas female suicide bomber who carried out the 2004 attack at the Erez Crossing that killed four Israelis.

Mustafa’s grandmother also appears in her mother’s Facebook in different posts where she is not only dressed using Hamas’ green scarf, but it is also holding heavy weapons at what appears to be a Hamas event.

We are able to confirm that Salam Ayyad is Mustafa Ayyad’s mother through two Arabic media reports and one of her Facebook posts. The first report shows her in an Al Jazeera Arabic video filmed before Mustafa’s funeral. A second report, published by the Palestinian outlet Felesteen on April 19, 2026, includes an interview in which Salam Ayyad identifies Mustafa as one of her sons while speaking about the many “martyrs” in her family, including her father, brother, and husband, Al-Qassam commander Hatem Ayyad, who was killed in 2008. The third confirmation comes from Salam Ayyad’s own Facebook where she posted a picture of Mustafa’s face wrapped before his funeral.

Through Mustafa’s mother Salam Ayyad’s Facebook posts we are also able to further connect Mustafa and his Hamas family to UNRWA video editor Abdulhadi Habib. Habib was killed on October 16, 2023, in a targeted strike on his home and was eulogized by numerous friends and relatives. One of those eulogies came from Mustafa’s mother, who mourned Abdulhadi Habib as her “nephew.” In addition, according to Airwars, Habib was also killed alongside his mother-in-law, Buthina Al Tatar (Sarsour). Mustafa’s mother Salam Ayyad also eulogized Buthina as her “sister-in-law” and “congratulated” her on her “martyrdom,” further confirming the close family ties to both the Ayyad and Sarsour families.

UNESCO’s Director-General, Audrey Azoulay, “deplored” Abdulhadi Habib’s and Mustafa Hatem Ayyad’s deaths. In the case of Abdulhadi Habib stating that he “was a journalist for Al-Manara News Agency and HQ News Agency.”

While Abdulhadi Habib is described by CPJ and other’s as a journalist for Al-Manara News Agency, he was not employed by Al-Manara News Agency at the time of his death. According to his own Facebook profile, although he had served as the Head of Editing and Design at Al-Manara News more than a decade earlier, he was working for the United Nations itself as a Digital Video Editor in UNRWA’s communications department when he was killed.

CPJ claims it only includes journalists killed while on assignment, caught in crossfire, or in reprisal for their journalistic work. Yet, as with many entries in the CPJ’s database, a closer examination tells a very different story. According to CPJ, both Abdulhadi Habib and his cousin Mustafa Ayyad, just like nearly 70 others, were allegedly killed in a “dangerous assignment” while CPJ explicitly also acknowledges they died in their home from targeted strikes. Apparently, only in Gaza can “journalists” be in their own homes and still be classified as on a “dangerous journalistic assignments.”

Nearly three years later, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) announced it would review its Gaza database after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad identified many of the so-called journalists as members of their military wings. While CPJ has removed a handful of names after overwhelming evidence showed that some individuals were either directly participating in combat or were not journalists at all, many cases remain. One of them is Issam Bahar, whom CPJ continues to list as a journalist despite evidence linking him to Hamas and showing that, at the time of his death, he was serving as an imam rather than working as a member of the press. Other cases include female journalists such as Wafa Al-Udaini and Salam Mema, both of whom were killed in strikes to their that also killed their husbands, who were members of the military wings of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. All labeled as killed while in a “dangerous assignment.”

The story of Abdulhadi Habib and Mustafa Ayyad is not simply about two names in a database. It illustrates a broader failure by international organizations, media watchdogs, and news outlets. Since Hamas hasn’t confirmed to the CPJ that Mustafa and his cousin Abdulhadi were members of their military wing, both will remain in their database after CPJ’s “review.”

CPJ’s board, with Fox News casting the only dissenting vote, decided to keep employees of terrorist-linked media outlets in its database as long as they had “not directly participated in combat” or engaged in “incitement with imminent effect.” Although CPJ calls this a “longstanding” policy, it has never applied the same standard to “media workers” working for ISIS, al-Qaeda, or Boko Haram. Instead, it has been applied exclusively in conflicts involving Israel.

When organizations fail to distinguish between journalists, employees of terrorist organizations, or individuals whose deaths have never been shown to be connected to their journalistic work, to try and delegitimize and vilify Israel, they do more than undermine their own credibility. They erode the protections afforded to genuine journalist, placing real journalists around the world at greater risk.

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The United Nations International School (UNIS) has repeatedly drawn controversy, most recently after swastikas, antisemitic messages, racist remarks, homophobic slurs, and other forms of hate speech were discovered throughout dozens of junior-school yearbooks. Yet the significance of UNIS extends beyond these incidents. The school does not merely educate children adjacent to the United Nations; the $50,000-a-year elite private school functions as a training ground whose graduates regularly ascend to influential positions in media, academia, diplomacy, international organizations, and government.

Its humanities curriculum replaces traditional history with frameworks of power, conflict, and “social justice.” From an early age, students are taught to view nation-states, particularly Western ones, as drivers of global injustice. With Middle Eastern history filtered through a narrative portraying Jews as “colonizers” who “stole Palestinian land.” Most troublingly, public records show the school, at minimum, tolerates student comparing Israeli statehood to Nazi Germany and the use Nazi-inspired cartoons and antisemitic imagery depicting Israel in school projects.

Prominent UNIS alumni go on to influential careers in media, academia, diplomacy, and international organizations, often advancing anti-Western and anti-Israel positions similar to those promoted within aspects of the school's educational environment. And because UNIS’s governance, programming, and student body are deeply intertwined with UN official activities and institutional culture, many alumni enter the UN system as prominent staff members and independent experts, reflecting the same UN institutional biases.

A prime example is spokesperson for the UN Secretary‑General, Stéphane Dujarric. He is not just an alumni of UNIS, he is also a long standing member of the UNIS Board of Trustees. Stéphane occupies the pinnacle of global communication, serving as the literal voice of the UN’s institutional output. His daily briefings are a reflection the UNIS pipeline feeding directly into the UN’s global communication apparatus. His dual role as both a UNIS alumnus and longtime UNIS trustee illustrates the close overlap between the school and the UN system.

While Stéphane Dujarric is the UN’s verbal face, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Coomaraswamy became one of the most influential figures within the United Nations system. Coomaraswamy helped shape UN reporting frameworks that applies strict, hyper-granular double standards to democratic countries fighting terrorism and non-state actors, in particular Israel. Coomaraswamy served as the first UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women from 1994 to 2003. Position held today by Reem Alsalem. Coomaraswamy expanded her influence as Under-Secretary-General, and UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. This high-level oversight mandate is occupied today by Malta’s Vanessa Frazier. NGO Monitor's May 2007 report documented that Radhika Coomaraswamy' fact-finding mission to the region was compromised by a reliance on anti-Israel and terror-linked NGOs. After Gaza escalations in 2008–2009, Coomaraswamy issued sharp condemnations of the Israel Defense Forces’ “disproportionate force,” demanded Israel open Gaza’s crossings.

In academia, Rashid Khalidi, a former Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine highlights the long‑term impact across generations. Khalidi’s work presents Zionism as a settler-colonial project and has become influential in shaping anti-Israel scholarship. From his prestigious chair he institutionalizes the historical distortions and publicly defends radical campus anti‑Israel activism and encampments, illustrating how UNIS alumni have reached the highest levels of Western academia. In 2024, the day after New York police cleared the student encampment at Columbia University, Khalidi addressed a crowd of faculty and students through a bullhorn. He praised the students, stating: “We were the conscience of this nation when we opposed the Vietnam War and racism... Students have been on the right side of history at Columbia and other universities ever since the 1960s." Khalidi also defended the protesters' actions, arguing that the younger generation feels a "moral imperative" to oppose the war. He further criticized university leadership, stating that administrators would "go down in infamy" for calling the police to dismantle the camps.

The late Richard Lachmann, Professor of Sociology at SUNY Albany, illustrates how some UNIS alumni have become active participants in political and activist debates within academia. He supported Jewish Voice for Peace and BDS campaigns, opposed U.S.-Israeli defense cooperation, and signed petitions challenging Israeli policies. In 2019, he signed Jews Stand Against the Smearing of Ilhan Omar, which defended Rep. Ilhan Omar’s criticisms of AIPAC, supported the BDS movement, and characterized U.S. support for Israel as support for “apartheid.” In his academic work, Lachmann “analyzed” the political and social effects of military conflict. His paper Israel’s Death Hierarchy: Casualty Aversion in a Militarized Democracy critiqued Israel’s defense structure. In a 2019 Newsweek interview, he criticized pro-Israel politicians for invoking Holocaust memory in political debate and argued that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comparison of U.S. migrant detention centers to “concentration camps” was historically accurate, defining such camps as places where groups are confined based on identity rather than individual conviction, ignoring the fact that illegally entering a country is a criminal offense worldwide.

UNIS’ alumni impact in academia is not constrained in humanities fields, it also reaches the hard sciences too; even internationally recognized scientists have engaged in political activism, using scientific prestige to target Israel. Andrea Brand, Professor of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, signed a prominent 2015 manifesto published in the Guardian calling for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel and isolation of Israeli universities and researchers. The text of the manifesto accused Israeli universities of being "deeply complicit" in state violations of international law.

UNIS public materials suggest students are exposed to a relatively narrow set of media and analytical frameworks. Introduced to a narrow set of mainstream outlets for understanding global “power structures,” with graduates later entering influential newsrooms and shaping foreign affairs narratives. Ishaan Tharoor, a former senior editor at Time and current foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post, writes the “Today’s WorldView” newsletter. He received the 2021 Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy of Diplomacy and served as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Media watchdog CAMERA has repeatedly criticized his coverage, arguing it minimizes terrorist groups while portraying Israeli military actions negatively. After Hamas’s October 7 attack, Tharoor tweeted on October 25, 2023, “It’s quite striking how many people seem to lack the moral imagination to see that, even though a bad thing happened, it’s perhaps not great to do other bad things,” which critics said downplayed the massacre while equating it with Israel’s response. CAMERA’s report Dear Media, Hamas Couldn’t Do It Without You cited his Gaza coverage, arguing it amplified genocide accusations against Israel while downplaying Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure and human shields. CAMERA also challenged his portrayal of activist Issa Amro as a “non-violent dissident” and “Palestinian Gandhi,” citing his record of sharing antisemitic material and praising terrorist organizations. In another report, The Washington Post’s Israel Problem, CAMERA argued Tharoor disproportionately focused on Israel, writing thirteen columns on Israel in one year compared with seventeen on China and three on Brazil, while omitting key historical context and placing primary responsibility for the conflict on Israel.

Outside newsrooms, in the creative and performing arts, UNIS alumni also includes American-French actress and writer Pauline Chalamet, who in March 2024, actively collaborated with UNICEF USA on social media to “draw attention to the escalating threat of famine” and what she termed an "enforced starvation" policy in Gaza, urging followers to donate money to the United Nations. In early 2025, she continued supporting radical public pro-Palestinian movements, including publicly backing Mahmoud Khalil following what she called his "unfair jailing."

Joining Chalamet in the creative and performing arts are several other alumni who have voiced critical stances against Israeli policies. Tony Award-winning playwright, actress, and UNIS alumna Sarah Jones has long aligned her artistry with progressive activism. She served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and spokesperson. Jones has continuously leveraged her public platform to condemn Israeli military actions in Gaza. Her advocacy also included actively fundraising and hosting events to support the campaign of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Additionally, she joined the Artists4Ceasefire coalition, adding her name alongside hundreds of artists and advocates demanding an “end to violence, a permanent ceasefire, and unrestricted humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza.”

UNIS graduates also shape the highest levels of power worldwide. Antonio de Aguiar Patriota illustrates how UNIS alumni have gone on to play influential roles in shaping foreign policy. During his rise into becoming Brazils’ Foreign Minister, Patriota helped steer Brazil’s foreign policy toward a more explicitly pro-Palestinian position. Under his diplomatic influence, Brazil formally shifted its position in December 2010 to recognize a Palestinian state, departing from its earlier emphasis on negotiated settlement. This policy direction continued into Brazil’s support for UN General Assembly Resolution in 2012, which granted Palestine non-member observer state status. He has consistently emphasized multilateralism and UN-centered approaches to conflict resolution, arguing that disputes such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict should be addressed through international law and UN mechanisms rather than bilateral negotiations. In written testimony to the UK Parliament, he argued that unilateral or bilateral approaches weaken the rules-based international order and that conflicts in Gaza and the Middle East require an “universal and unflinching commitment” to the UN Charter. In public lectures, including at ODI Global, he has also advocated for a multipolar world order and stronger reliance on UN-based collective security over traditional Sovereign-led security.

Beyond foreign ministries, UNIS alumni have also reached the highest levels of state power, with some ascending to heads of state and advancing foreign-policy approaches that emphasize multilateral institutions and international governance. For example, Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, heavily utilizes and coordinates the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) voting bloc to establish unified regional positions in international forums like the United Nations and hemispheric summits. By transforming isolated, small island nations into a cohesive diplomatic force, she champions these global stances alongside initiatives like the "Bridgetown Initiative" for climate finance reform and a regional campaign for slavery reparations. Under her leadership, this internationalist framework has been applied directly to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mottley successfully coordinated the bloc to establish a unified regional front, leading Barbados and the remaining CARICOM member states to officially recognize the State of Palestine and collectively condemn Israeli military actions in Gaza.

A new cohort educated within the UNIS climate are now entering universities, media, advocacy groups, and policy institutions carrying far more radical views than earlier alumni. Lawsuit against UNIS alleges students were allowed to create campus “peace walls” with QR codes linking to organizations accused of supporting or legitimizing Hamas. UNIS humanities courses explicitly teach children that designated terrorist groups are actually legitimate “resistance movements” fighting for “liberation” against Western “oppression.” This systemic conditioning risks creating a dangerous wave of the next generation of global policy shapers who will treat terrorism as a justifiable response to sovereign defense. This dynamic is further compounded by the school's substantial financial ties to foreign state donors, such as Qatar.

The true reach of UNIS does not end at graduation; it continues to reshape the very architecture of the institutions its alumni enter, where its skewed worldview is endlessly reproduced and amplified at the highest levels across media, academia, state diplomacy, and international governance. As these graduates seamlessly transition from K-12 classrooms into influential boardrooms, newsrooms, foreign ministries, and multilateral bodies, this continuous pipeline ensures that the ideas and assumptions cultivated within the UNIS environment continue to exert influence far beyond the school’s physical campus.

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A new controversy surrounding swastikas, antisemitic messages, racist remarks, homophobic slurs, and other hate speech written throughout dozens of junior school yearbooks at the United Nations International School (UNIS), a private school in New York whose annual tuition averaging $50,000, is just the latest example of the culture being cultivated inside what is considered one of the world’s “most prestigious” international schools.

But, as Secretary General Antonio Guterres would say, the yearbook incident did not happen in a vacuum. In January, swastikas were discovered carved in the school’s locker rooms. The school is also currently facing legal scrutiny with a lawsuit alleging antisemitic conduct against a Jewish teacher. Reports of posters associated with an organization that supports Hamas being placed in the school without consequences. And Jewish parents expressing concern about whether their children are safe, are among the latest controversies surrounding the United Nations International School (UNIS). Taken individually, each incident might be dismissed as an isolated controversy. Taken together, they highlight a troubling culture inside the United Nations International School (UNIS).

The deeper one looks into the school’s curriculum and activities, the more troubling, yet not surprising, the picture becomes: there is a pattern in which students, from a very young age, appear to not just getting exposed to narratives that demonize Jews, Jewish history, and Israel, but also the West, and in particular the United States. The school’s curriculum also shows students being exposed to narratives that frame terrorism as a “human right” while describing terrorist organizations as “resistance movements,” among other troubling subjects. In addition, and probably the most disturbing, publicly available materials highlight students using Nazi-inspired and antisemitic imagery as part of their school projects.

Beginning in the early elementary years, small children, as part of their humanities studies, are introduced to units primarily centered on concepts of advocacy, activism, identity, social justice, and Indigenous populations, where students are defined as global citizens expected to take and create “sustainable action” within their communities, embedding activism as the central theme of the humanities curriculum from an early age, rather than focusing on the traditional subjects most children encounter at that age.

By the time students reach middle school, the curriculum expands beyond these themes to include material that portrays the United States and the broader West in overwhelmingly negative terms, framing them primarily through the lenses of colonialism, oppression, exploitation, and historical injustice. In the first year of middle school, for example, maps and geography is taught through the framing of “the expansion of the United States” and its “impact on Indigenous peoples,” explicitly framing it as Indigenous rights to land versus European colonization.

Another unit focuses on civil rights, focused on U.S. history of segregation, voting rights, and how activist movements such as Black Lives Matter “fight racism” in the United States. The curriculum also includes “Immigration studies,” similarly framing the unit around restrictive U.S. policies and their effects on migrants, while land and resource units such as water access highlight “inequalities in access and distribution.” Overall, these topics are consistently explored through frameworks of power, inequality, and social conflict, particularly in relation to the United States and Western societies.

Across Middle School, Western societies, particularly the United States and Europe, appear repeatedly as central case studies for examining “historical injustices” and “social outcomes” within a comparative and conflict-based framework around refugees, migration policies, and indigenous rights.

In high school, students in their humanities course appear to also be getting introduced into supporting violence and terrorism, disguised as “human rights.” In 10th grade, the curriculum shows how an entire unit is focused on "identity and resistance," learning about how evil the U.S. and the West is, about different "resistance" movements, and the "factors" that "drives them." In addition, another unit is focused in teaching children that nation states in general are the root cause of “injustices, racism and the lack of human rights” of people around the world.

Early in middle school, students also appear to be gradually introduced a narrowed understanding of which sources are considered “trustworthy” in shaping their worldview. An entire year of humanities explicitly centers around media influence as a foundation for understanding “power structures” and global issues, and while critical thinking is presented as the goal, the structure of assignments and external inputs raises questions about how that critical lens is actually being applied.

Visiting speakers have included journalists from major outlets such as CNN, while student work on sensitive geopolitical topics, including the Israeli-Arab conflict, appears, in the limited publicly available examples, to rely mainly on a narrow set of pre-approved sources from The New York Times. The curriculum’s media component appears to be shaping students toward a constrained information ecosystem, one in which “credible” knowledge is filtered through a limited set of recognized outlets that align with the institution’s pre-selected narratives.

While there is limited publicly available information on specific classroom materials at the United Nations International School (UNIS), available public reports and documented programming show that Israel, “Palestine,” and the broader Middle Eastern conflict are a significant part of the school’s curriculum and a recurring topics within the related school activities.

The limited publicly available material showcases a one-sided and distorted narrative with guest speakers such as presentations by the Egyptian Ambassador/Consul-General to speak on the Arab-Israeli conflict, talks by figures such as the founder of the Bard Palestinian Youth Initiative, and structured seminars like “Change in the Middle East,” which incorporated the Palestinian conflict into a drama class presentation through what they referred to as The Gaza Monologues, a collection of stories from teenagers in Gaza describing their “quality of life.”

School projects aren’t widely available, but unsurprisingly, what becomes evident from a set of old humanities projects from 2011 is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just presented through a consistent set of narratives and framing where Jews are portrayed as “European colonizers” that “stole Palestinian land” to create Israel, backed by the United States and Europe, but also occupies a significant portion of the school year, with entire units dedicated to the subject.

In 2011, students appear to have spent months focused on “Israel-Palestine” as part of their humanities studies, with an entire unit dedicated to the subject. According to a video from a humanities class, 9th grade middle school students appear to have been presented with a set of New York Times articles and what the teacher referred to as videos and images of “historical timelines and maps” about Israel’s creation and the broader conflict. Students were tasked with analyzing the “root causes” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and producing video presentations summarizing their conclusions and “suggested solutions” to the conflict.

Several student presentation framed Israel’s creation through analogies that compared Jewish statehood to Nazi Germany. One group argued that Israel should provide reparations to Palestinians in the same manner that postwar Germany compensated Holocaust survivors, “because it would show” that “they did something wrong,” just like Germans did. Others asserted that financial compensation could never be fair because “Israel has killed so many people” and “Palestine must be given back,” while another student argued that Israel would never agree because “it has nuclear weapons.”

To illustrate the conflict, students also compared it to a child having candy stolen from them, arguing that monetary compensation would never be fair because the stolen candy could not be returned and “you would still be left without your candy.”

In the final project videos, a recurring set of visual themes and narratives appears across all student presentations. These include narratives and animated maps depicting Jews arriving in “Palestine” from Europe after “thousands of years” as a result of the Holocaust, while omitting the continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel over thousands of years. The presentations also make use of the widely known green “shrinking map” visualizations falsely illustrating “Palestinian land loss” over time. The videos heavily rely on imagery that consistently portrays Israelis as the primary aggressors in the conflict, including Nazi-inspired and antisemitic imagery. In addition, imagery and narratives justifying terrorism against Israelis, including the glorification of known terrorists, appear as part of the students’ school projects.

Across multiple student presentations, the exact same visuals are used, raising serious questions not only about the school’s acceptance of the use by nearly all students of Nazi-inspired and antisemitic imagery in the projects, but also about the source of the materials used to produce the videos and whether they were resources provided to the children by the school itself.

With this limited publicly available educational material, it is evident that, for years, the United Nations International School has demonized Israel by teaching students a distorted version of history that removes Jewish historical and UN-recognized indigenous rights to the land of Israel, omits discussion of how Arabs received political and territorial rights through the creation of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, and appears to ignore the multiple wars of extermination and directed against Jews and Israel since the state’s creation. Instead, it frames Israel and Jews as aggressors, while “Palestinians” are portrayed as the helpless victims of the Jews who “stole Palestinian land” with the help of the United States and Europe.

The significance extends beyond the curriculum itself. Unlike most private schools, UNIS does not merely educate children in proximity to the United Nations; it exists within a unique ecosystem that is deeply intertwined with the UN’s culture, personnel, agenda, and institutional network. The students being exposed to these narratives are not only the children of some of the most influential diplomats, international civil servants, and political elites, but are also children getting trained in an insular bubble to become future policymakers, activists, and international officials.

UNIS students constantly participate in events and presentations at official United Nations forums. Graduation ceremonies take place in the United Nations General Assembly’s main hall. In addition, school events feature visiting diplomats and UN representatives, all organized by the UN’s Secretary-General himself. The school is also tied to the Model United Nations program, where young students simulate diplomatic roles and engage in structured debates modeled on UN proceedings at the UN’s headquarters in New York. These are just some examples underscoring the operational proximity between the school and the UN system.

The school’s governance and funding structure also raises serious questions. According to publicly reported information, UNIS relies not only on tuition revenue but also on substantial private donations and pledges from foreign governments. Reports indicate that, since approximately 2011, the school has received more than $110 million in donations, with some of the largest contributions coming from the State of Qatar and the Sultanate of Oman. Publicly reported figures indicate that Qatar pledged approximately $60 million in 2023, while Oman had contributed more than $55 million cumulatively by 2020. At the same time, the permanent representatives of both countries have served as honorary trustees of the school.

While such arrangements may be lawful, they nevertheless raise legitimate questions about governance, transparency, and the degree of influence major foreign donors exercise over the school’s curriculum and operations, in particular when considering how private donations account for 10% of the schools revenue, according to the last publicly available annual report from 2021. In addition, while the school calls itself “secular,” according the lawsuit, regular communication material to parents are embedded with Islamic Religious imagery.

Originally founded in 1947 as a small nursery school by a group of United Nations parents who wanted to provide an international education for their children, it soon expanded into a comprehensive pre-K through 12th-grade private institution located outside, but adjacent to the United Nations’ headquarters and system. Today, children of United Nations diplomats and UN staff continue to make up a significant portion of the student body, reinforcing its status as an institution closely tied to the UN ecosystem itself, where the children of some of the world’s most influential figures attend and have graduated from. According to the last public annual report from 2021, most students enroll in elite universities around the world, with the majority of them attending American universities after graduation.

The close relationship to the United Nations raises serious questions about the blurred boundaries between an independent private institution charging parents $50,000 in yearly tuition and the publicly funded United Nations. While UNIS is formally a private school, its systemic use of UN facilities, access to UN-affiliated programming and staff, as well as the participation of UN employees in its core activities, warrants official scrutiny from Western governments into how publicly funded resources, institutional access, and public-facing UN platforms are being utilized in support of the activities of the UN’s private educational institution.

Unlike most private schools, UNIS operates within an ecosystem that is deeply intertwined with the United Nations itself, providing students with unique access to UN resources and platforms funded by taxpayers around the world. As a result, the question is no longer simply whether the educational material is historically accurate or politically balanced, or questionable donations, governance, and funding sources. Rather, it is also whether a private institution that enjoys extraordinary access to the United Nations system should be permitted to use publicly funded UN facilities, personnel, events, and institutional prestige into its core educational activities. The issue is therefore not confined to a private classroom or school.

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A new congressional memorandum has dramatically expanded the scope of what may become one of the largest scandals involving U.S. taxpayer funding, foreign political interference, and terror-linked NGO networks in recent history.

What began in 2025 as an investigation into whether Biden administration funds were used to support anti-Netanyahu judicial reform protests in Israel has now exploded into something much larger: a sprawling web of U.S.-funded nonprofits, donor-advised funds, protest organizations, anti-Israel activist groups, and entities accused of maintaining ties to designated terrorist organizations.

On May 29, 2026, the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees released Part II of their investigation into “The Biden-Harris Administration’s Funding of Anti-Netanyahu Non-Governmental Organizations.” The new memorandum reveals over 1,256 documents reviewed across nine NGOs and paints a picture not merely of foreign aid abuse, but of an ideological ecosystem funded in part by American taxpayers.

According to the report, millions of dollars flowed through organizations like Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA), Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), the Tides Network, Jewish Communal Fund (JCF), and PEF Israel Endowment Funds into anti-Israel activism in both Israel and the United States, including groups involved in radical campus protests, anti-government demonstrations, BDS campaigns, and organizations alleged to have ties to Hamas, the PFLP, and other terror entities.

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Emerges as Central Financial Hub

One of the report’s biggest revelations is the role of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), which the committees say provided nearly $4 million to anti-Israel and extremist-linked groups since 2019.

According to the memorandum, RBF funded:

• Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)

• Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ)

• Breaking the Silence

• Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP)

• Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network

• New Israel Fund projects tied to anti-government protests in Israel

The report alleges that while RBF itself did not directly receive federal grants, its affiliate Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors received over $50 million from USAID and the State Department between 2021 and 2024. Congressional investigators argue that the fungibility of money means taxpayer-funded grants may have indirectly subsidized political activism and extremist-aligned causes.

Jewish Voice for Peace and the Radicalization of Campus Protests

The memorandum dedicates an entire section to Jewish Voice for Peace, describing it as “the largest and most influential anti-Zionist Jewish group in the United States.”

Between 2019 and 2024, RBF reportedly gave JVP approximately $440,000.

The report highlights JVP’s activities following the October 7 Hamas massacre, including statements blaming Israel and the United States for the violence, partnerships with Samidoun-linked activists, and participation in radical anti-Israel demonstrations on American campuses.

The committees also note that Columbia University suspended JVP and Students for Justice in Palestine after unauthorized protest actions involving intimidation and threatening rhetoric.

Congressional investigators further cite JVP’s past honoring of convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who participated in the 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two Israeli civilians.

Alliance for Global Justice and Samidoun

The report also expands heavily on Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), a U.S.-based nonprofit previously linked to Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.

Samidoun has since been sanctioned by multiple Western governments and accused of operating as a fundraising and propaganda arm for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

According to the memorandum:

• RBF provided $100,000 to AFGJ.

• AFGJ continued publicly supporting Samidoun even after donor withdrawals and IRS scrutiny.

• The House Ways and Means Committee referred AFGJ to the IRS over concerns regarding its tax-exempt status.

• Congressional investigators are now also seeking documents related to alleged connections between AFGJ and Antifa-affiliated groups.

The report describes AFGJ as part of a broader network of U.S.-based organizations funding anti-Israel demonstrations while simultaneously promoting anti-American activism and extremist causes.

Tides Network and Palestine Legal

The Tides Network, already controversial for its role in financing progressive political infrastructure, receives extensive scrutiny in the new memorandum.

According to investigators, Tides received roughly $30 million from USAID between 2016 and 2022 for overseas civil development initiatives while certifying that it would not provide material support to terrorism-linked entities.

Yet the report alleges that Tides entities funded:

• Palestine Legal

• Adalah Justice Project

• Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF)

The committees claim these organizations either defended Hamas-aligned activism, partnered with extremist groups, or worked directly with entities tied to terror organizations.

The report specifically focuses on Palestine Legal’s support for anti-Israel campus protesters following the 2024 university encampments and legal actions involving Columbia University activists.

The memorandum also claims that Adalah Justice Project publicly defended October 7 as “the oppressed rising up” and organized demonstrations inside the U.S. Capitol complex.

The Return of Protest Infrastructure in Israel

The report revisits the anti-Netanyahu protest movement in Israel but now presents it as part of a much broader transnational funding structure.

Congressional investigators allege that:

• Jewish Communal Fund sent over $41 million to PEF.

• PEF distributed funds to protest-linked groups including Standing Together, Women Wage Peace, Darkenu, and Sikkuy-Aufoq.

• New Israel Fund-backed projects funded “pro-democracy protests” across Israel.

• Additional organizations launched media campaigns portraying judicial reform as a “regime coup.”

The report also adds new scrutiny on the Bereshit Initiative and Kaplan Force activists connected to anti-government demonstrations against Israel’s military draft policies.

According to the memorandum, several of these organizations may have violated U.S. tax law by engaging in foreign political activity while operating under 501(c)(3) charitable status.

Congressional Investigation Broadens Into NGO Financial Ecosystem

Unlike the first memorandum, which focused largely on judicial reform protests in Israel, the new report attempts to map an entire ideological and financial ecosystem spanning:

• U.S. campus activism

• donor-advised funds

• anti-Israel protest movements

• tax-exempt foundations

• BDS organizations

• Gaza-linked NGOs

• legal defense networks for anti-Israel activists

The committees argue that many of these organizations operate within interconnected funding structures that obscure how taxpayer money ultimately flows through activist networks.

The report repeatedly raises concerns about “fungibility,” the idea that even if federal grants are technically earmarked for unrelated projects, they free up organizational resources that can then be redirected toward political activism, ideological campaigns, or groups with extremist affiliations.

The Real Scandal Isn’t Just the Money, It’s the Infrastructure

This investigation is no longer simply about grants.

It is about the emergence of a taxpayer-subsidized ideological infrastructure that spans governments, universities, NGOs, donor-advised funds, activist coalitions, media campaigns, and legal defense operations.

For years, Americans were told that anti-Israel campus unrest, BDS campaigns, and “grassroots” protest movements were entirely organic.

Congress is now documenting something very different: a sophisticated network of tax-exempt organizations, international NGOs, and federally connected grant pipelines that helped finance and sustain those movements across both Israel and the United States.

Whether any of these activities ultimately violated federal law remains for investigators and courts to determine.

But one thing is already clear:

The scale of coordination, funding overlap, and ideological alignment exposed in this memorandum is far larger than most Americans were ever told existed.

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The modern United Nations refugee and migration system functions less as a temporary humanitarian mechanism and more as a permanent global governance structure managing mass migration across borders and continents. Normalizing long-term dependency, institutionalizing refugee populations, and increasingly blurring the line between humanitarian relief and population management inside sovereign states.

Rather than focusing on rapid repatriation or durable integration, the system increasingly revolves around the long-term administration of displaced populations through a vast network of NGOs, contractors, aid agencies, and political organizations that become economically dependent on the continuation of displacement crises.

These concerns have long surrounded UNRWA, the UN agency dedicated specifically to Palestinian refugees. Where unlike all refugee frameworks, UNRWA recognizes refugee status across generations and borders, transforming it from a temporary humanitarian condition into a permanent inherited political identity tied to long-term dependency on UN-administered aid systems. Alongside it, thousands of NGOs, contractors, advocacy groups, and international aid programs now operate throughout Gaza and Judea and Samaria under the framework of “assisting Palestinians,” creating an entire institutional ecosystem economically and politically tied to the continuation of the conflict.

Similar concerns are now emerging within broader UN migration governance structures. With the United States formally rejecting the UN’s Replacement Migration program. During the latest International Migration Review Forum, António Guterres framed migration as a permanent global reality requiring deeper international coordination rather than temporary crisis management. In his opening remarks, Guterres argued that migration should be governed through expanded international systems, stronger labor mobility frameworks, and broader social protections for migrants, including portability of benefits.

The broader direction of these discussions points toward a UN migration-management infrastructure in which migrant identification systems and portable social protections, including welfare, healthcare, and education, follow migrants across borders regardless of where they relocate in the world.

The model increasingly points toward permanent UN-administered asylum centers embedded within Western societies, where asylum seekers could be housed, educated, medically treated, socially managed, and economically supported for years or even generations through parallel administrative structures operating alongside, and increasingly independent from direct state control.

Combined with the push for “portable social protections” and “global migrant identification systems,” this framework suggests allowing migrants to move from one country to another, or from one UN-administered asylum center to another, without losing access to benefits, housing assistance, healthcare, welfare support, education, or administrative status, independently of the nation-state hosting them.

And if this would be implemented, the implications would be profound.

Under such a framework, migrant support systems would become portable and detached from any single nation-state, allowing benefits, services, and administrative identity systems to follow migrants across the world through interconnected UN-managed networks rather than solely through national governments.

Instead of Western states directly administering housing, healthcare, education, and welfare systems for asylum seekers through national institutions and policies, these functions could increasingly become integrated into UN-coordinated migrant-management networks operating across multiple countries simultaneously inside Western nations.

Over time, this risks creating parallel societies and governance infrastructures operating outside democratic accountability and outside the direct administrative control of the states hosting them. This would also transform refugee governance from a temporary humanitarian response into a permanent transnational bureaucracy managing populations across borders and generations through UN-administered welfare, identity, education, and aid systems. Increasingly resembling the institutional model pioneered by UNRWA, which evolved beyond temporary relief into a parallel quasi-governmental structure administering housing assistance, healthcare, education, welfare distribution, employment programs, and social services for a multi-generational refugee population.

This is not theoretical, in many conflict regions and migration corridors, UN-managed refugee camps and migrant-processing centers already function as semi-permanent parallel societies with their own informal economies, political structures, black markets, aid dependency systems, and security challenges. Many are no longer temporary transit camps, but effectively permanent tent cities and sprawling aid-dependent settlements where migrants and displaced populations remain for years, and in some cases across generations. Research compiled in the Oxford Refugee Studies Centre Policy Brief shows the average duration of displacement for a refugee or internally displaced person (IDP) is 20 years, effectively cementing these settlements as permanent fixtures.

Governments, intelligence agencies, and international investigations have repeatedly warned that some of these camps and transit corridors have also become hubs for criminal exploitation, human trafficking, ideological radicalization, militant recruitment, and terror-financing activities and sexual exploitation operating under broader UN-administered humanitarian infrastructures.

Since 2015, IOM operates migrant reception and support centers in Europe, in particular, in major entry and transit zones, particularly in Greece, Italy, Spain, and the Balkans, providing accommodation, registration, documentation, healthcare access, food distribution, psychosocial support, legal assistance, relocation services, and integration programs for migrants and asylum seekers.

Increasingly, these facilities function not merely as emergency processing sites, but as long-term administrative hubs managing migrant populations through internationally coordinated systems and long-term integration assistance.

UN agencies, including IOM, UNHCR and the World Food Programme, already use biometric registration systems inside refugee camps and displacement zones, including fingerprinting, facial recognition, and iris scans tied to digital identity profiles used for food distribution, cash assistance, healthcare access, and movement tracking. In several refugee operations, refugees cannot access aid without biometric verification through UN-administered systems.

The IOM’s biometric data collection extends beyond refugee or camp populations through its Migration Information and Data Analysis System (MIDAS), developed in 2009 and deployed at border crossings across Africa and the Americas. MIDAS captures all travelers’ biometric and biographic data, such as fingerprints and facial images, at land, air, and sea entry points using scanners, webcams, and document readers, meaning routine international travelers are included in the UN’s system, not only registered migrants. While the IOM states governments retain ownership of the data, MIDAS effectively embeds large-scale biometric data collection and channels this information into broader UN analysis systems. Now you know, if you have ever traveled to a country using MIDAS, your biometric data is already in the possession of the UN.

Therefore, the expansion of permanent UN-managed migrant infrastructures across Western nations would not represent an entirely new system, but the institutional expansion of an already existing network of camps and population-management structures. Allowing migrant populations to retain administrative status, benefits, and service access as they move between camps, asylum centers, and host nations.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) operates a global network of Migration Health Assessment Centers providing mandatory medical screening for resettlement, labor migration, and visa pathways across multiple destination countries. These services are delivered through standardized, fee-based systems in which costs re typically covered by receiving states, sponsoring programs, or applicants depending on the migration channel, creating a structured incentive model for the UN directly tied to migration processing volumes.

Public procurement data and country program budgets indicate that individual national migration health assessment systems can generate annual flows in the tens of millions of dollars, with aggregate global activity across IOM’s clinic network reaching a low hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars scale annually. As a result, migration health assessment infrastructure functions as a monetary inflow for the United Nations embedded within international migration systems.

This trajectory also intersects with a lesser-discussed area of UN policy: the institutionalization of Islamic Financing as a parallel funding for social-services and governance infrastructures in partnership with The Islamic Development Bank, headquartered in Saudi Arabia.

IsDB is known for having funded families of Palestinian suicide bombers and Hamas terrorists, transferring over $600 million to families of Palestinian terrorists, as of 2006. Despite its terror financing history, The Islamic Development Bank influence inside the broader international system expanded dramatically in 2007, when the United Nations General Assembly granted the Islamic Development Bank Group official observer status at the UN.

The resolution invited the IsDB to “participate in the sessions and the work of the General Assembly in the capacity of observer,” allowing the institution to engage directly in UN proceedings, meetings, development discussions, and multilateral policy coordination alongside other international organizations. What was once primarily a regional Islamic financial institution tied to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation became embedded inside the core architecture of global development governance, participating in debates surrounding migration, development, infrastructure financing, climate policy, and the Agenda 2030 implementation itself.

The issue becomes even more sensitive when examining the bank’s ownership and voting structure itself. Iran remains one of the Islamic Development Bank’s most influential stakeholders. Today, the Islamic Republic controls roughly 8.25% of the bank’s capital and approximately 7%–8% of its voting power, making Tehran the institution’s third-largest shareholder after Saudi Arabia and Libya.

In September 2025, The Treasury Department sanctioned current board member Gebreil Ibrahim Mohamed Fediel for collaborating with Iran and his involvement in human rights abuses that resulted in the deaths of 150,000 people in Sudan. Another board member, Anwar Ibrahim, allegedly allowed Hamas to operate and raise funds in Malaysia.

Despite its record, the Islamic Development Bank is the partner of choice by the UN for its Islamic Philanthropic funds, continues to operate freely in the United States and functions as one of the largest financiers of Islamic development and Islamic education projects worldwide.

This raises a fundamental national security, geopolitical and sanctions question: Why has the Islamic Development Bank never faced serious restrictions, sanctions scrutiny, or designation by the United States when it has a proven history of terror financing, and one of its largest and most influential stakeholders is the Islamic Republic of Iran?

In 2015, the UN released a study examining how zakat and other Islamic charitable mechanisms were integrated into long-term governance and welfare systems. The study explored how Islamic charitable networks already functioned within Palestinian society as major providers of housing assistance, healthcare, education, welfare support, and social services, while the Palestinian Authority focused more narrowly on bureaucratic administration and municipal governance.

While the UN had for years conducted studies on zakat systems in various countries, this was the first and only UN study focused specifically on how an existing society operating through charitable infrastructures could be institutionalized and expanded into a durable self-funded parallel social-service model.

Following these studies, the UN increasingly moved from researching Islamic charitable governance models to institutionalizing them directly inside its refugee and migration infrastructure.

Beginning in the mid-2010s, multiple UN agencies launched dedicated zakat and Islamic philanthropy initiatives designed to integrate sharia-compliant financing into long-term humanitarian and displacement operations. UNRWA was the first UN agency to formally launch Islamic charitable fundraising structures.

This was followed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which launched its Refugee Zakat Fund, institutionalizing a global sharia-compliant financing mechanism for refugee and displacement operations across multiple continents. UNHCR registration and cash-assistance systems, as described in Tabah Foundation analysis, incorporate structured beneficiary profiling that includes self-declared religious affiliation alongside identity, household composition, and vulnerability indicators. This data is integrated into biometric-enabled aid delivery systems, including iris-scanning payment infrastructure, allowing different funding streams, such as zakat-based allocations, to be administered within the same underlying digital welfare architecture based on predefined eligibility criteria.

Soon after UNHCR, UNICEF and, most recently, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) also expanded Islamic philanthropy partnerships, Ramadan campaigns, zakat donation systems, and sharia-compliant humanitarian financing initiatives connected to migrant, refugee, and child welfare programs.

What emerged was not simply charity fundraising, but the gradual construction of a parallel financing architecture capable of sustaining long-term governance systems increasingly independent from donor governments oversight. For example, UNRWA’s Islamic giving reached $41 million, with ~70,000 donors and a record $2.1 million single gift. Zakat fundraising alone surged from under $300,000 in 2018 to over $26 million in 2024. UNRWA itself labeled it a “rapid shift into a core funding stream.” Most of this money was mostly distributed in cash.

The next stage in this evolution has been the growing integration of Islamic endowments, or waqf structures, into UN-linked humanitarian financing models. Unlike zakat, which functions as recurring charitable redistribution, waqfs are perpetual Islamic endowments designed to generate long-term revenue through assets, investments, land holdings, businesses, and financial instruments whose profits continuously fund religious, educational, welfare, and social-service activities.

UN agencies have increasingly and systematically studied how waqf systems could be incorporated into refugee, migrant, and humanitarian operations as a form of “sustainable financing.” Rather than relying primarily on government contributions or periodic humanitarian appeals, waqf-based financing models are designed to create permanent self-sustaining revenue streams capable of funding the UN operations.

This moved the model beyond temporary humanitarian aid into something far more institutionalized: the creation of autonomous financing systems that allow the UN and affiliated humanitarian structures to increasingly sustain their own parallel social-service and governance networks independently of direct member-state control and oversight. By tapping into an estimated $1 trillion dollar pool, expecting to generate long-term revenue streams through integrated Islamic financing mechanisms rather than relying solely on state contributions, these systems provide the foundation for a self-financing international organization operating across borders and generations accountable to nobody.

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At the same time, the UN is focused on what was once described as the coming “Great Wealth Transfer,” in which millennials are expected to inherit between $84 trillion and $124 trillion in assets from the Baby Boomer and Silent Generation cohorts by 2045. UN-linked estimates and sustainable finance discussions projected that as much as $30 trillion could already transfer to millennials by 2030 alone, largely through real estate, equities, retirement assets, and cash holdings.

UN-linked sustainable finance initiatives, philanthropic campaigns, ESG investment structures, and global development partnerships increasingly framed this incoming generational wealth as capital that could be redirected toward “sustainable development,” climate financing, migration governance, social-impact investing, and UN systems.

This highlights the broader long-term strategy aimed not simply at attracting voluntary charitable donations, but at gradually centralizing private generational wealth into global governance and development structures by targeting younger generations viewed as more ideologically aligned with internationalist and financial redistribution-focused agendas, while often lacking historical and financial understanding.

What makes the integration of Islamic financing mechanisms into UN migration and refugee governance even more concerning is not only the discriminatory structure embedded within many of these systems, where aid distribution is restricted to Muslims, administered through newly created Islamic governance frameworks, and monitored through religious compliance structures and bodies, but the fact that the UN’s own studies and policy papers repeatedly acknowledge serious risks associated with these mechanisms.

The integration of Sharia-compliant financing instruments, including zakat-based funding mechanisms, into publicly influenced humanitarian programming needs to prompt governance discussions regarding regulatory compatibility with secular public funding standards in Western states. Their increasing incorporation into internationally coordinated aid delivery systems with public funds is inconsistent with domestic legal standards on non-discrimination, transparency, and equal access to publicly supported services and hiring practices.

Multiple UN studies and several national counter-terrorism financing cases and sanctions regimes have identified instances in which charitable organizations that collected zakat and other religious donations were exploited or diverted for illicit purposes. Warning how operating zakat in conflict regions can become vulnerable to terror financing, militant diversion, and exploitation by extremist organizations operating inside humanitarian environments.

These risks are not theoretical, nor external to the United Nations system. The United Nations Security Council, through its counterterrorism architecture, including the UN Security Council 1267 Committee, has designated individuals and entities for exploiting charitable and zakat-based networks to finance terrorism

In addition, for example, in Palestinian society, the definition of an “orphan” was broadened beyond the internationally recognized definition of a child who has lost both parents, to include children who have lost only their father. UN-linked research examining zakat distribution inside Palestinian society noted that a substantial portion of zakat was directed toward “orphans” as a primary beneficiary category. In practice, zakat appears to function as an indirect “pay-for-slay” mechanism, now embedded inside UNRWA’s zakat program.

Other UN-linked research has acknowledged that long-term dependency on zakat-based assistance can create incentives for displaced populations to remain inside refugee systems out of fear of losing access to welfare, housing assistance, food distribution, and charitable support structures if they return to their home after conflict has passed. According to a IOM household survey conducted in 2018 across Iraq among camp and non-camp. Systems of charity in areas of displacement allow to afford displacement in the immediate term. For example, widows in east Mosul remain displaced in part because they are receiving donations and zakat from their neighbors, which they believed they would not be able to receive if they returned.

Additional studies have also documented cases in which vulnerable non-Muslim populations in conflict zones faced religious coercion tied to zakat donations, where zakat is mandated, it is tied to access to food, shelter, medical assistance, or social support became intertwined with pressure to convert to Islam.

At the same time, waqfs was also discussed in UN research as a tool used by terror-linked organizations to bypass financial restrictions, sanctions environments, and anti-terror financing controls that can complicate the international transfer of funds into terrorists controlled territories.

Despite these risks and documented concerns, the UN system has increasingly moved not away from these financing structures, but toward their institutional expansion across the broader United Nations system as a main source of funding the UN’s Agenda 2030 “Sustainable Development Goals.”

Taken together, the infrastructure, administrative models, and alternative financing systems are no longer theoretical concepts. Large portions of the framework already exist. The broader concern is that these systems are gradually being expanded, interconnected, and normalized into a permanent transnational architecture for managing mass migration and populations outside the traditional nation-state framework. While at the same time, the broader UN system has increasingly partnered with a wide network of Muslim Brotherhood-linked NGOs.

This includes partnerships with groups such as “Muslim Charity,” “Human Concern International,” Islamic Relief Worldwide, and “Muslim Hands.” Muslim Hands is reported as a member of the “Union of Good,” a Saudi-based umbrella network of charities with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. Treasury designated the “Union of Good” in 2008 as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) entity, describing it as “an organization created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization” and stating that “the Union of Good acts as a broker for Hamas by facilitating financial transfers between a web of charitable organizations.”

In parallel, UN migration and development policy has increasingly prioritized the scaling and normalization of remittance flows as a structural component of global migration systems. Significant emphasis has been placed on reducing transfer costs, digitizing payment infrastructure, and increasing the volume and efficiency of cross-border remittances from migrant-hosting economies to countries of origin. This includes the creation of “The Global Forum on Remittances, Investment and Development (GFRID),” a UN-led informal process bringing together stakeholders involved in the field of remittances, migration & development.

These transfers UN documents acknowledge frequently support household consumption in countries of origin and, in many cases, contribute to savings pools used to finance additional migration, including family reunification and subsequent migratory movements. Over time, this reinforces multi-generational and network-based migration patterns, while also contributing to sustained outward financial flows from host economies as increasing volumes of income are transferred abroad rather than retained within domestic economic cycles.

Alongside this, as part of broader efforts to mobilize private charitable capital, the UN has developed dedicated zakat fundraising campaigns and outreach strategies designed to engage Muslim donors globally, in particular diaspora communities in Western countries, through structured digital platforms and coordinated appeals during religious periods such as Ramadan. This included IOM introducing the concept of zakat as part of “The role of the diaspora (incl. remittances)” towards migrants.

In practice, this consolidates a policy environment in which a substantial share of migrant earnings or tax benefits generated within host states is routinely transferred abroad on a continuous basis, embedding sustained outward financial flows into the economic structure of migration itself. Contributing to a model in which a large portion of income generated within host economies is increasingly directed into cross-border charitable flows rather than retained within domestic economic cycles.

In addition to engaging diaspora donors directly through zakat fundraising mechanisms, UN humanitarian agencies have developed partnerships with local Islamic charitable organizations in a number of contexts to channel religiously mandated donations into UN structured humanitarian programming. In these arrangements, zakat contributions are often pooled or aligned with UN-administered cash assistance systems, where distribution is governed by UN standardized vulnerability and needs-based assessments.

What is emerging is not a series of isolated reforms, but a converging institutional architecture governed by Sharia law, with discriminatory and religious frameworks, linking population management, cross-border mobility, and externally directed financial transfers into a single operational continuum. In this context, Western governments face growing responsibility to ensure that the expansion of such mechanisms do not continue. Careful regulatory scrutiny is necessary to assess mandate expansion, and institutional overreach by the United Nations and maintain clear jurisdictional control and sovereignty.

The defining characteristic of UNRWA was the transformation of refugee status from a temporary humanitarian condition into a multi-generational, borderless administrative system operating parallel to the nation-state. Followed by Hamas’ infiltration into the agency’s operations. Increasingly, many of those same structural characteristics are now appearing within broader UN migration governance policies.

Rather than resolving displacement as a temporary emergency, the trajectory increasingly points toward the construction of a globalized UNRWA-style system managing permanent transnational migrant populations across borders and generations through UN-administered systems of housing, welfare, education, healthcare, identity management, and social services inside Western nations and outside the control of the nation-state hosting them.

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For years, the United Nations’ migration agenda presented itself as humanitarian policy while steadily evolving into something far larger: a multinational system for restructuring demographic, economic, and governance realities across the Western world under the language of “global cooperation,” “mobility,” and “sustainable development.”

Now, the United States has officially drawn a line.

Last week, the U.S. refused to participate in the UN’s review of the Global Compact on Migration. And now, Washington formally rejected the latest UN review framework tied to the Global Compact for Migration, distancing itself from what many increasingly recognize as a model of demographic redistribution into Western nations while framing opposition as “extremism,” “xenophobia,” or “racism.”

“The United States has persistently objected to the United Nations’ efforts to advocate and facilitate replacement immigration in the United States and across the broader West.  In 2017, President Trump rejected the Global Compact on Migration.  The intervening years have confirmed the wisdom of that opposition.    

As Secretary Rubio said, opening our doors to mass migration was a grave mistake that threatens the cohesion of our societies and the future of our peoples.”

For years, senior UN officials portrayed resistance to mass migration not as a legitimate political concern, but as a moral failure rooted in “intolerance, nationalism, or racial hostility.” One of the clearest examples came in 2015, when António Guterres, then serving as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, delivered remarks at the Opening Session of the 66th Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme during the peak of Europe’s migration crisis.

In the speech, Guterres framed opposition to accepting large numbers of migrants as not only morally wrong, but as a direct driver of global jihadist radicalization itself. He condemned what he described as the “backward narrowness of xenophobia” and argued that Europe had a duty to defend “tolerance,” “diversity,” and “openness” by accepting refugees. Most strikingly, he warned that rejecting Muslim refugees would become “the best propaganda tool” extremist groups could hope for in recruiting future terrorists.

In Guterres’ own words:

“A Europe that defends its founding values of tolerance and openness by welcoming refugees of all religions will weaken the arguments of extremist groups, but rejecting Muslim refugees because of their religion is the best propaganda tool those actors could wish for to attract new followers for terrorism.”

The implication was extraordinary: if Western populations resisted large-scale migration, the resulting terrorism would ultimately become their own responsibility. That logic became deeply embedded across broader UN migration discourse, where skepticism toward mass migration was increasingly associated with racism, xenophobia, populism, or extremism itself.

But, Washington’s rejection should go far beyond immigration politics. Over the last decade, taxpayer money flows heavily into the United Nations system, international refugee agencies, migration coordination bodies, the UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goal initiatives, multinational development banks, and humanitarian programs that increasingly operate as one interconnected network. Increasingly, those same systems also intersect with Islamic finance structures and Sharia-compliant aid mechanisms operating inside, and beyond, the broader humanitarian ecosystem. Over the last decade, UN agencies and international aid institutions dramatically expanded partnerships tied to Islamic charitable financing, zakat programs, and Sharia-compliant funding models.

One of those examples is United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Through its Islamic philanthropy and zakat initiatives, UNHCR has spent well over a billion dollars of western taxes to operate Sharia-compliant aid structures operating under Islamic charitable governance principles, including in Latin American countries. Since 2024, UNHCR operates “Muslim only” aid in Brazil and Colombia, and since 2025, it expanded its “Muslim only” programs to Mexico.

Under traditional zakat rules, not only aid eligibility is restricted to Muslims, the aid itself is expected to be delivered through Muslim-administered systems compliant with Sharia governance standards. Compliance documents tied to UNHCR’s Islamic philanthropy programs acknowledged the legal and reputational risks of discriminatory hiring if the UN directly imposed such standards, proposing instead the use of third-party organizations to hide the practices. But the practical effect remains the same: Western taxpayer-funded humanitarian systems directing contracts, aid distribution authority, operational control, and employment opportunities toward religiously exclusive Muslim-operated networks.

But UNHCR is far from alone. International Organization for Migration (IOM), UNICEF, and UNRWA, have also developed their own dedicated Islamic financing initiatives, zakat-based aid programs, or Sharia-compliant humanitarian funding mechanisms. In Gaza, a report surfaced involving a girl allegedly being denied entry to a UNICEF-operated school for not wearing a hijab. Western taxpayers are helping fund these discriminatory and coercive system. This creates profound ethical and legal issues for Western taxpayers whose money is supporting the UN’s infrastructure administering these discriminatory and coercive programs.

The UN’s latest partners should have drawn attention due to their historical or alleged links to Muslim Brotherhood-associated networks. It should have raised formal questions about the UN’s due diligence and how taxpayers are funding terror-linked organizations through the UN. This includes partnerships with groups such as “Muslim Charity,” “Human Concern International,” Islamic Relief Worldwide, and “Muslim Hands.” Muslim Hands is reported as a member of the “Union of Good,” a Saudi-based umbrella network of charities with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. Treasury designated the “Union of Good” in 2008 as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) entity, describing it as “an organization created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization” and stating that “the Union of Good acts as a broker for Hamas by facilitating financial transfers between a web of charitable organizations.”

And these are not isolated programs, they are components of the broader Agenda 2030 and UN Sustainable Development Goals framework. As a result, Western taxpayer money no longer funds isolated humanitarian or migration programs, but an interconnected system coordinated across governments, UN agencies, development banks, NGOs, sovereign wealth funds, and private-sector partners.

And that is where the story becomes even more disturbing. While Americans and Western nations are focused on how our taxes are being used to facilitate illegal mass migration, the same international financing architecture is helping exclude American and Western companies from a growing portion of the global development economy. At the center of that sits the Islamic Development Bank.

The Islamic Development Bank, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, is known for having funded families of Palestinian suicide bombers and Hamas terrorists, transferring over $600 million to families of Palestinian terrorists, as of 2006. Despite its terror financing history, The Islamic Development Bank influence inside the broader international system expanded dramatically in 2007, when the United Nations General Assembly granted the Islamic Development Bank Group official observer status at the UN.

The resolution invited the IsDB to “participate in the sessions and the work of the General Assembly in the capacity of observer,” allowing the institution to engage directly in UN proceedings, meetings, development discussions, and multilateral policy coordination alongside other international organizations. What was once primarily a regional Islamic financial institution tied to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation became embedded inside the core architecture of global development governance, participating in debates surrounding migration, development, infrastructure financing, climate policy, and the Agenda 2030 implementation itself.

The issue becomes even more sensitive when examining the bank’s ownership and voting structure itself. Iran remains one of the Islamic Development Bank’s most influential stakeholders. Today, the Islamic Republic controls roughly 8.25% of the bank’s capital and approximately 7%–8% of its voting power, making Tehran the institution’s third-largest shareholder after Saudi Arabia and Libya.

In September 2025, The Treasury Department sanctioned current board member Gebreil Ibrahim Mohamed Fediel for collaborating with Iran and his involvement in human rights abuses that resulted in the deaths of 150,000 people in Sudan. Another board member, Anwar Ibrahim, allegedly allowed Hamas to operate and raise funds in Malaysia.

Despite its record, the Islamic Development Bank continues to operate freely in the United States and functions as one of the largest financiers of Islamic development and Islamic education projects worldwide. This raises a fundamental national security, geopolitical and sanctions question: Why has the Islamic Development Bank never faced serious restrictions, sanctions scrutiny, or designation by the United States when it has a proven history of terror financing, and one of its largest and most influential stakeholders is the Islamic Republic of Iran?

But terror financing, and the Islamic Republic of Iran avoiding sections are not the only issues. The deeper problem lies in the procurement eligibility framework embedded inside IsDB itself. Procurement systems determine who may bid, who may participate, who may receive contracts, and who is excluded from economic opportunities. The Islamic Development Bank’s procurement regulations require compliance with boycott frameworks tied to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Arab League, and the African Union.

Those rules apply not only to projects fully financed by the IsDB, but also to partially funded projects where Western governments and taxpayers are co-financing the same initiatives. For Western businesses, the situation becomes a no-win scenario: either comply with boycott-linked eligibility conditions that may violate their own nation’s anti-boycott laws, or refuse to comply and be excluded from international development contracts financed in part by their own nation’s taxes.

But the issue extends far beyond indirect co-financing arrangements or parallel development partnerships. Taxpayer money is also flowing into the Islamic Development Bank directly. One of the clearest examples is the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Joint Fund, where the IsDB operates as an official UN partner institution within the broader SDG financing architecture. Public UN funding records show that nearly $140 million was allocated to the Islamic Development Bank as part of the SDG Joint Fund, with Norway as its top contributor, but also included over $13 million from the United States, in a single year alone.

The implications are not limited to development projects overseas. Questions have already emerged surrounding a Texas-based school project reportedly financed through the Islamic Development Bank, raising broader concerns about how institutions partially influenced and financed by stakeholders such as the Islamic Republic of Iran are funding Islamic educational projects inside the United States itself.

One example involves Brighter Horizons Academy in Texas, a school founded and staffed by Hamas-operatives and their families, where educational materials include teachings describing non-Muslims as “the worst of creatures” and portraying “jihad as a religious duty.”

And Brighter Horizons is not an isolated case. As of 2024, the Islamic Development Bank had reportedly financed more than 80 educational projects across the United States, spending over $22 million on Islamic schools, educational institutions, and related development initiatives inside America itself, making the U.S. the top recipient of IsDB funded projects.

Based on the procurement requirements, a formal investigation should be launched on contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, or affiliated firms involved in these projects to determine if they were exposed to boycott-linked compliance conditions inside the United States itself and failed to report it. American anti-boycott laws do not apply only overseas. U.S. companies are required to report certain boycott-related requests connected to foreign boycott regimes under regulations administered by the Department of Commerce and the Treasury Department, and failure to disclose qualifying requests can carry significant legal and financial consequences.

The issue becomes even more sensitive in states like Texas, where anti-BDS laws prohibit many government entities from contracting with companies engaged in boycotts targeting Israel. If firms operating on projects tied to Islamic Development Bank procurement structures were required to comply with boycott-linked eligibility standards, it raises a fundamental question: were those conditions properly disclosed under federal and state law?

And this is not theoretical.

Major multinational corporations have already navigated these procurement systems in practice. One example involved Siemens and a railway project in Turkey linked to Islamic Development Bank financing structures. Reports surrounding the project indicated that contractors, including Siemens, were required to comply with boycott-related eligibility conditions. Despite Siemens’ corporate history which includes well-documented involvement in forced labor in its factories to support Nazi Germany during WWII, and Germany’s anti-boycott laws, Siemens allegedly agreed to boycott Israel in order to participate in the project.

Under German foreign trade regulations, companies participating in boycott-related activities can face severe financial penalties reaching hundreds of thousands of euros. Yet the economic incentives embedded inside multinational development financing structures can create immense pressure for companies to quietly accommodate such conditions in order to secure access to lucrative infrastructure markets.

That is what makes the issue so explosive. The procurement contradiction is not theoretical. It is operating across multinational development projects tied to international financing institutions. And as global governance systems become increasingly interconnected through UN partnerships, development banks, climate financing mechanisms, and cross-border infrastructure initiatives, the pressure placed on Western companies to navigate these boycott-oriented procurement ecosystems will only continue to grow.

While the U.S. imposed sanctions on UN official Francesca Albanese for targeting American companies through her BDS campaign against Israel, the United States is simultaneously helping finance global projects and procurement structures that can those same American companies from infrastructure, technology, healthcare, construction, telecommunications, and development projects around the world unless they comply with boycott eligibility mandates tied to OIC and Arab League frameworks.

So the deeper issue is not simply mass migration. It is how Western taxpayers are not only funding the demographic transformation of our own societies, but are also financing a systems that exclude our own companies from worldwide infrastructure, IT, healthcare, energy, construction, telecommunications, and all sort of development contracts around the world, slowly financing our own exclusion from the world’s economy.

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The new U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy directly names the Muslim Brotherhood as “the root of all modern Islamist terrorism predicated on recreating the Muslim Caliphate and killing or enslaving non-Muslims.” At the same time, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation targeting Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR financing into nonprofits, while Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered a cease-and-desist against TexAM, an Islamic university accused of operating unlawfully. In both Texas and Florida, CAIR is “declared a foreign terrorist organization.” While these actions suggest that some officials are beginning to understand the scale of the problem, they still do not amount to an actual enforcement strategy.

These networks do not operate openly under the name “Muslim Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood itself does not maintain some public membership registry identifying who is or is not officially part of the movement. Under the U.S. Constitution, ideologies themselves cannot simply be banned, and proving material support for terrorism is often legally difficult and evidence-intensive.

Much of this infrastructure already evolved decades ago, particularly after the collapse of the Holy Land Foundation network. Some organizations were shut down, some individuals were convicted, but many of the broader institutional structures simply reorganized, rebranded, fragmented into new nonprofits, or continued operating through overlapping leadership networks, advocacy groups, charities, educational institutions, and financial structures. That is why symbolic policy does not work. Declaring the Muslim Brotherhood dangerous or threatening to designate CAIR may generate headlines, but if officials are serious, the focus must move toward investigating nonprofit operations, financial relationships, regulatory compliance, tax filings, grant structures, and institutional coordination networks already operating inside the United States.

In Texas alone, three separate cases recently went viral within weeks of each other: TexAM allegedly operating an illegal Islamic university tied to a network of Muslim Brotherhood-linked nonprofits, the “Muslim-only” event at a publicly funded water park connected to MAS-linked figures and nonprofit infrastructure, and court battles forcing Texas to include terror-linked private Islamic schools in the Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA) program after the state was unable to provide sufficient evidence to support its exclusion efforts.

“Guilt by association” or “Islamophobia,” often used to shut down scrutiny before scrutiny even begin, but in all three cases, publicly available information already appears substantial enough to justify formal investigations into potential nonprofit abuse, tax violations, financial misconduct, regulatory noncompliance, discriminatory practices, improper use of tax-exempt resources, grant-related issues, and possible fraud, regardless of ideology or terror ties. The question is whether authorities are willing to investigate them using the same financial, regulatory, and institutional enforcement mechanisms routinely applied to every other sector of American society.

TexAM’s ecosystem includes direct operation support from the Islamic Seminary of America, the Turkish American Religious Foundation (TARF), Mercy Without Limits, and the Muslim American Society (MAS). These organizations are connected through shared addresses, and fundraising infrastructure, recruitment events, and institutional cooperation tied to the operation and promotion of the illegal university. All while the network further direclt overlaps with some of the most influential Muslim Brotherhood-linked nonprofits in the United States, including CAIR, ISNA, IIIT, Islamic Relief, Yaqeen Institute, ICNA Relief, EPIC Mosque, MAS, and Turkish government-linked Diyanet institutions.

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Another example raising both potential tax and civil rights concerns is the viral “Muslim-only” waterpark event in Texas. Ticket payments were directed to “Ascend in Faith LLC,” an entity connected to Islamic travel programs for Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Jordan led by Imam Muhammad Abdullah and Dr. Aminah Knight, the same individuals tied to the event itself.

Muhammad Abdullah is an Imam at Masjid Al-Islam in Dallas, whose nonprofit entity, Masjid Al-Islam-Dallas Texas, Inc. (EIN 75-2941409), operates as a registered 501(c)(3) organization and has links to the Muslim American Society (MAS), the same Muslim Brotherhood-linked network repeatedly appearing across these cases.

The issue extends far beyond a single discriminatory event. Dr. Aminah Knight publicly acknowledged that at least one prior “Muslim-only” event had already been organized and hosted at the same water park, meaning the park itself appears to have already violated civil rights and anti-discrimination laws and should face the corresponding legal and financial consequences.

The broader investigation, however, should also focus on whether a possibly nonexistent or improperly registered LLC was used to process payments. It should expand into whether Masjid Al-Islam in Dallas and MAS nonprofit resources or tax-exempt infrastructure, were used to organize, subsidize, or financially support activities potentially violating federal or state law, including civil rights violations. The investigation should also determine whether these practices extend far beyond a single event in Texas.

Any investigation should also compel full financial disclosure regarding who funded the trips organized through Ascend in Faith LLC, where the money originated, who traveled on those programs, whether nonprofit resources were involved, and how revenues from both the travel operations and discriminatory events were processed and reported.

The lawsuits surrounding Texas’ Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA) program expose a much larger problem than school choice alone. As courts move toward forcing Texas to include terror-linked private Islamic schools in taxpayer-funded education programs, institutions like the Islamic Services Foundation (ISF), running Brighter Horizons Academy. ISF-produced curricula and textbooks are reportedly used in nearly 500 Islamic schools across the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, with investigations identifying passages teaching that non-Muslims are “the worst of creatures” and describing “jihad as a religious obligation.”

But the issue is not ideological. The apparent financial irregularities alone surrounding ISF Endowment appear serious enough to justify immediate IRS and Texas investigations into whether nonprofit law, tax regulations, fiduciary obligations, grant rules, disclosure requirements, or fraud statutes were violated. Public filings from ISF Endowment (EIN: 99-3472431) contain major inconsistencies involving revenue reporting, governance structures, endowment classifications, investment disclosures, and the organization’s claimed public-charity status.

More broadly, the rapid expansion of waqf-style Islamic endowments tied to these networks reflects a long-term strategy aimed at making each institutional node financially self-sustaining through untaxed investment income while operating behind nonprofit protections. This creates two immediate issues. First, regulators should investigate whether nonprofits operating waqf-style endowments are improperly using public-charity status to avoid the taxes, payout requirements, and disclosure obligations normally applied to long-term investment and capital-preservation structures.

Second, legislators and Congress need to clarify within the Internal Revenue Code and IRS framework that permanent capital preservation funds do not automatically qualify for public-charity treatment simply by adopting nonprofit labels while functioning primarily as perpetual investment vehicles.
At the very least, all nonprofits operating waqf-style endowments should face formal audits and comprehensive reviews of their tax filings, governance structures, investment reporting, and IRS classifications before receiving taxpayer-supported benefits through programs like TEFA.

Based on these cases alone, there is already enough publicly available information to justify immediate federal and state investigations. The publicly available evidence already warrants real enforcement action. The question is no longer whether enough red flags exist to justify investigations, but whether officials are willing to actually initiate them.

In addition, if state officials, legislators are serious, they must stop advancing symbolic policies they already know sophisticated networks can easily adapt around through rebranding, restructuring, or financial rerouting. Ron DeSantis says he is banning CAIR and Muslim Brotherhood-linked funding from flowing into Florida organizations. The collapse of the Holy Land Foundation network already demonstrated an important reality decades ago. Shutting down one organization does not eliminate the infrastructure behind it. What is needed is not selective legislation targeting one movement, but broad structural reform applying equally to every nonprofit operating in the United States.

The problem is far larger than the Muslim Brotherhood alone. Foreign adversaries, extremist movements, influence networks, and ideological organizations across the political and religious spectrum increasingly exploit the same nonprofit structures, fiscal sponsorship systems, pass-through grants, shell entities, donor-advised funds, LLCs, and opaque funding chains to move money, build influence, and avoid scrutiny.

If lawmakers are serious, they should implement universal transparency and enforcement standards for all nonprofits, including mandatory disclosure of foreign-linked funding chains, audits of fiscal sponsorship arrangements, transparency for pass-through grants and donor-advised funds, disclosure of overlapping leadership structures, and severe penalties for concealed funding routes or coordinated financial activity between affiliated entities.

This could be done federally through Congress and applied nationwide, or through state-by-state legislation. In fact, because many of these organizations operate across multiple states through interconnected nonprofit networks, disclosures and audits mandated in one state could expose improper financial activity, undisclosed relationships, or regulatory violations occurring in others. The goal should not be symbolic “whack-a-mole” shutdowns of individual organizations after scandals emerge, but a durable legal framework capable of exposing and dismantling opaque influence networks before they become fully entrenched.

Lawmakers must also can take meaningful steps to prevent nonprofit rebranding and the recycling of leadership networks, but only through laws grounded in conduct, evidence, and due process rather than identity or association. The most effective approach would be to strengthen successor-entity enforcement so regulators can deny or revoke tax-exempt status when there is proven continuity of control, funding pipelines, governance structures, or operational direction from a previously sanctioned or dissolved organization.

Congress must also require full beneficial-control disclosure, forcing nonprofits to identify not just formal board members but any individuals who exercise real decision-making authority through intermediaries or affiliated entities. Where prior misconduct has been legally established, lawmakers can expand disqualification rules to bar those individuals from nonprofit leadership role. To address concerns about hidden continuity, legislation can also impose strict anti-nominee and anti-proxy provisions that penalize the use of intermediaries to conceal control or recreate organizations under new names.

The infrastructure already exists. The public records already exist. The overlapping leadership structures, financial relationships, tax filings, fiscal intermediaries, endowments, and institutional coordination networks already exist in plain sight. What is missing is not evidence sufficient to justify scrutiny, but the political will to apply existing financial, regulatory, tax, and nonprofit enforcement mechanisms consistently and aggressively. In addition, if lawmakers continue relying on symbolic declarations while avoiding structural reform and real investigations, these networks will continue adapting faster than the policies designed to stop them.

The question now is whether officials intend to merely acknowledge the problem publicly, or finally begin dismantling the institutional infrastructure sustaining it.

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A new “Islamic University” in Dallas, Texas, recently opened its doors. Combining STEM degrees with Islamic studies, marketing itself to international students, and promoting a tuition-free model funded by donations, TexAM shares the same location as both the Dallas Diyanet Mosque and The Islamic Seminary of America. The direct network surrounding TexAM includes links to both the governments of Turkey and Pakistan and a network of the most influential terror-linked of non-profits in America, including CAIR.

This is not simply a case of “guilty by association.” The issue is not that individuals involved with TexAM merely know each other, attended the same conferences, or belong to overlapping circles. The issue is the direct operational involvement of these organizations and their leadership in materially supporting the illegal university’s operation.

The university received an warm public welcome from Richardson’s mayor, Amir Omar, the city’s first Muslim mayor. In a video posted to social media, Omar praised TexAM’s plans, joked that he had already “picked out” future office space for a second campus, and framed the university as “a major opportunity for the city.” He further signaled willingness to help connect TexAM to local industry for internships and hiring pipelines, suggesting that supporting the school’s growth could be part of what would define a “successful” tenure in office as mayor.

And rightly, Governor Greg Abbott announced that he directed the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to issue a cease-and-desist order against “TexAM University,” describing it as “an unauthorized Islamic educational institution operating illegally in Texas.” But if the state itself believes TexAM was operating illegally, a cease-and-desist order alone cannot be the end of the matter. Texas authorities should now move beyond simply ordering the institution to stop operating and launch a broader investigation into the nonprofit networks, financial infrastructure, recruitment operations, donor pipelines, and affiliated organizations that enabled and supported TexAM’s activities in the first place.

TexAM “University”

TexAM claims to operate through a Texas-registered nonprofit called the Texas American Technologies Foundation. However, there do not appear to be publicly identifiable IRS records showing the organization registered as a recognized 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity.

Public information show the following organizations directly connected to TexAM’s operational, fundraising, and recruitment ecosystem.

• The Islamic Seminary of America: Shares address with TexAM, registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, EIN 45-3207248. Tied to some of the most influential Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations operating in the United State.

• Turkish American Religious Foundation (TARF): operates the shared location between TexAM and Dallas Diyanet Mosque, directly linked to the Turkish government’s Presidency of Religious Affairs; registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, EIN 13-4194912.

• Mercy Without Limits: tax-exempt nonprofit organization used as TexAM’s donation intermediary and fundraising infrastructure, EIN 46-1407605.

• Muslim American Society (MAS): registered nonprofit organization, EIN 36-3943350; hosted events and convention spaces where TexAM appeared to conduct student recruitment, community outreach, and fundraising efforts.

TexAM CEO is Shahid A. Bajwa. Before TexAM, he was the director of ICNA Relief USA between the years of 2018 and 2024. ICNA Relief USA has long been associated with both the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, a South Asian Islamist movement sharing Muslim Brotherhood ideological framework. The institution explicitly promotes initiatives targeting Pakistani students, positioning itself as a pathway for international enrollment and diaspora engagement.

While there is no evidence that TexAM is directed by or formally linked to the Pakistani government, TexAM CEO Shahid A. Bajwa assisted the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) and Pakistan’s IT Ministry in formulating IT policies and governance frameworks.

The Islamic Seminary of America

The Islamic Seminary of America, which shares a location with TexAM, has a Board of Trustees, advisory structure, and faculty that include senior figures tied to some of the most influential Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations operating in the United States, including The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), CAIR, Yaqeen Institute, Islamic Relief, and EPIC Mosque

Among them are:

• Iqbal Unus — Chair of the Board of Trustees; former ISNA Secretary General and former IIIT official.

• Abdul Alim Khandekar — Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees; former longtime Chair of ISNA’s Founders Committee.

• Yasir Qadhi — Dean of Academic Affairs; resident scholar at EPIC Mosque.

• Roula Allouch — CAIR National Board Chair; seminary advisory board member.

• Omar Suleiman — Founder of Yaqeen Institute; seminary advisory board member.

• Abed Ayoub — Board of Trustees member; former Islamic Relief USA executive.

• Siraj Wahhaj — Board of Advisors, Unindicted co-conspirator for 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.

Turkish American Religious Foundation (TARF)

Turkish American Religious Foundation (TARF), which operates the Dallas Diyanet Mosque and also shares a location with TexAM, is directly connected to the Turkish government’s Presidency of Religious Affairs, known as Diyanet. Diyanet functions as a state religious authority under the Turkish government and has faced repeated scrutiny internationally over allegations that its global mosque network has been used to advance the political and ideological interests of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. Through its affiliation with Diyanet America and the broader Turkish state-backed religious infrastructure, TARF is part of an international network of Turkish government-linked Islamic institutions operating across the United States.

Among those connected to the broader TARF and Diyanet America leadership structure are:

• Fatih Kanca — Chairman of the Board of the Diyanet Center of America; Social and Religious Affairs Counselor at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C.; former member of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) Fatwa Committee.

• Nurullah Çelebi — President and Imam of the Diyanet Center of America, the main umbrella institution overseeing Diyanet-affiliated mosque networks across the United States.

• Hülya Esin Eroğlu — Secretary-General of the Diyanet Center of America and part of the organization’s executive leadership structure.

• Sinan Dedeler — Former Vice Chairman and senior TARF official whose listed address corresponded to the Turkish Consulate in New York, reflecting direct institutional overlap between TARF leadership and Turkish state diplomatic infrastructure.

• Dilaver Usmanov — TARF-linked director associated with the Ahiska Turkish Mosque network connected to Diyanet-affiliated Turkish religious institutions in the United States.

Through Diyanet America, these figures operate within a centralized Turkish government-backed religious infrastructure overseeing mosques, religious education, imam appointments, outreach programs, and Turkish Islamic institutions across the country.

Muslim American Society (MAS)

TexAM was publicly promoted at events connected to MAS (Muslim American Society), where the institution appeared to engage in both fundraising and student recruitment efforts. Promotional materials and event appearances tied TexAM to MAS-linked convention spaces and community outreach initiatives. Muslim American Society (MAS), described by the U.S. Government as being “founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.” Ayman Hammous, executive-director of the Muslim American Society (MAS), in 2019 called for the proliferation of Islam in America, saying that it is “needed at the spiritual level, at the social level, at the political level” at the at the Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA) annual convention in Philadelphia.

Mercy Without Limits

Mercy Without Limits publicly markets itself as a humanitarian charity focused on “helping women and children,” with orphan sponsorships, food aid, water projects, medical assistance, refugee support, and international disaster relief. Nowhere in its public-facing mission, charitable campaigns, or organizational descriptions does the organization advertise that it functions as a fundraising intermediary for TexAM University.

Today, much of Mercy Without Limits’ work is based out of Turkey and has repeatedly collaborated with terror-tied Turkish charity IHH, which funds Hamas. Mercy Without Limits former CEO Dr. Mohammed Hassan previously served as National Director of Outreach and Resource Development for ICNA Relief USA between 2008 and 2014, before becoming Vice President of Outreach and Development at Baitulmaal, Inc. from 2014 to 2016. Investigators and watchdog groups have alleged links between Baitulmaal and the Union of Good, a coalition led by Yusuf al-Qaradawi that the U.S. Treasury designated in 2008 as supporting Hamas.

The organization’s Chairman of the Board, Mohamad Albadawi, also serves as Chairman of MAS (Muslim American Society) and previously served as Executive Director of the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA).

The payment and donation infrastructure is embedded directly into the TexAM website itself, creating the appearance that donors are contributing directly to TexAM rather than routing funds through Mercy Without Limits. Likewise, publicly available IRS filings do not appear to disclose any role as a fiscal sponsor or donation-processing entity for an unapproved higher education institution.

Additional financial transparency questions also surround Mercy Without Limits. Public IRS filings from the organization do not appear to report government grants as a source of revenue. However, at least the organization received a COVID-related government grant of $8,000 that does not appear to be reflected in its tax returns. Given that Mercy Without Limits operates as a tens-of-millions-of-dollars-per-year nonprofit organization, investigators should examine whether all government grants, public funds, or state-related financial assistance were properly disclosed in IRS filings and other regulatory reporting documents, and whether additional grants or public funding sources may have gone unreported.

The legal questions surrounding TexAM extend far beyond accreditation issues alone. Investigators should examine whether nonprofit organizations and Richardson’s mayor, Amir Omar improperly provided financial sponsorship, operational infrastructure, facilities, fundraising services, staffing, immigration support, or tax-exempt resources to facilitate the operation of an allegedly unauthorized university. Regulators also need to determine what these organizations, their leadership, and Richardson’s mayor, Amir Omar knew about TexAM’s legal status. Questions of knowledge, intent, internal communications, and institutional coordination is especially important to determine if they knowingly helped sustain or legitimize an operation declared illegal.

Potential consequences could include state enforcement actions, revocation of tax-exempt status, civil penalties, donor fraud investigations, immigration scrutiny related to international student recruitment, and possible criminal liability tied to financial misrepresentation, unauthorized degree operations, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, or broader nonprofit compliance violations.

The question is not whether these institutions and people are connected, but about how these nonprofit resources, facilities, tax-exempt infrastructure, donor funds, personnel, and religious institutional networks were being used to support or facilitate an illegal higher education institution.

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Across the world, Islamic institutions are increasingly shifting away from traditional year-to-year fundraising models toward long-term financial self-sufficiency. To achieve this, organizations are launching permanent Islamic endowments called Waqfs, designed to hold core capital perpetually, invest it in things like real estate, financial markets, etc., and use the generated revenue to fund continuous operations and/or specific projects.

The Islamic Services Foundation (ISF) (EIN 75-2352043).and Brighter Horizons Academy are no different in this baseline financial objective. In their case, they created a separate non-profit registered as ISF Endowment (EIN: 99-3472431) whose stated goal is to build a permanent, self-sustaining $30 million capital pool in the next five to ten years to not only fund its Islamic Dallas schools, but scale them across the United States. However, while the structural pursuit of waqf endowment model matches a broader global trend, the specific tax execution of the ISF Endowment requires and immediate and formal compliance investigation into the public tax filings of the ISF Endowment and its parent organization Islamic Services Foundation (ISF) by the IRS and Texas officials.

ISF Endowment’s 2024 Form 990, the only one filed as of today, reveals not only a series of mathematical impossibilities, but what also appears to be false governance structures, and certifications. Considering how the Islamic Services Foundation (ISF) and Brighter Horizons Academy have extensive ties to individuals and entities linked to Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the convicted Hamas operatives from the Holy Land trials, these errors cannot be treated as a simple “clerical error.” The filing exhibits a highly strategic use of incorrect tax codes designed to bypass IRS automated screening, minimize public disclosure, obscure its funding sources, and secure improper tax benefits, among other serious red flags.

First I will start by explaining the fundamental operational and tax differences between the primary classifications under Section 501(c)(3):

• Private Foundation: This is the default status for entities funded by a narrow source, such as a single wealthy family or corporation. Because these governance model lack broad public oversight, the IRS subjects them to strict transparency demands, and legally mandates a minimum 5% annual payout of their assets to prevent untaxed accumulation of wealth.

• Public Charity: This status is designed for organizations that rely on broad public support or run active community programs (e.g., churches, schools, and hospitals). They face lower regulatory scrutiny, allow higher donor tax deductions, and are exempt from mandatory payout requirements.

Under federal tax law, all new 501(c)(3) entities are classified as private foundations unless they can demonstrate that they qualify as public charities. During the application process, ISF Endowment appears to have applied for and was granted public charity status from the outset.

According to its own website, the ISF Endowment operates as an independent 501(c)(3) entity, ). It claims to have a dedicated board of directors, and ISF as the exclusive member, with the sole purpose of creating an investment fund where only the revenue generated will be spent. If the organization’s publicly stated goals and its governance, lack of independent board members, and its intent to act as a locked investment fund under the total control of a single parent entity had been disclosed properly, the IRS would have automatically rejected the 509(a)(2) public charity request, which suggests the screening agents might have received an entirely different narrative of the group’s intended operations during their application process.

Without even looking at any tax fillings, this already raises massive red flags regarding how the ISF Endowment was actually presented to the IRS in its initial Form 1023 exemption application. This isn’t semantics, the “public charity” classification is a complete legal mismatch. It is legally impossible for a permanent investment endowment to fit this definition. But, by getting approved for this incorrect category, the organization secured immediate financial advantages that can’t be ignored.

In terms of immediate financial advantages, ISF Endowment secured:

• Elevated Donor Deductions: Donors giving to a 509(a)(2) public charity can deduct cash contributions up to 60% of their Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). If classified correctly as a private foundation, donor deductions are capped at 30%. For wealthy backers and foreign entities moving heavy capital into the fund, this improper classification doubles their immediate US tax incentive.

• Tax Elimination: True private foundations face a mandatory 1.39% excise tax on all net investment income and capital gains. By claiming public charity status, the ISF Endowment would pay 0% on its investment portfolio growth.

As for regulatory advantages, ISF Endowment, in reality, operates under what is known as a “Sole Corporate Membership model.” This is because the parent entity, ISF, is the exclusive member and elects all board seats, meaning zero board members are independent. Had they accurately reported this parent control, the IRS would have forced ISF Endowment to register as a 509(a)(3) Supporting Organization. That designation mandates a very restrictive filling schedule, requiring exhaustive disclosure of internal command chains, board-appointment pipelines, and relationships with inside managers. Claiming 509(a)(2) Public Charity status allowed them to bypass this primary oversight entirely.

Since ISF Endowment is a newly registered organization, the only available tax filing to evaluate is its 2024 Form 990. In that form, there are multiple red flags that can’t be ignored or considered “clerical errors.” Starting from, the fact that the math is simply not mathing, and the filling appears to include deliberate false statements, warranting an audit not only of ISF Endowment, but also of its parent organization, Islamic Services Foundation (ISF).

Let’s start with the most basic mathematical issue in the filing: a totally irreconcilable mismatch between the total revenue of $565,660 reported across the entire filling, and the support schedule, which show a higher value of $580,962, leaving an unexplained $15,302 difference in reported revenue. This cannot be explained as “clerical error.”

Any standard modern tax preparation software would have instantly flagged this data entry error, generated a critical validation failure, and blocked the return from electronic transmission. This discrepancy becomes even more troubling when you consider how the filing also explicitly certifies that a professional accountant reviewed the form before submission. This out-of-balance return appears to have been pushed through deliberately, and if that is the case, the reason must be investigated.

Now, let’s move to the source of the reported revenue. According to the filing, 100% of ISF Endowment revenue originated from “government grants,” while public registry tracking also shows that no direct federal or state grant has ever been issued to the EIN or legal name of ISF Endowment. This contradiction has only three possible answers, and every single one of them deserves serious, immediate scrutiny by federal and state oversight officials.

Option 1: There is no government grant involved. If public tracking registries are accurate and no government agency authorized any government grant to ISF Endowment, it raises critical, alarm-bell as to the true source of revenue. Falsely reporting it as a “government grant” under penalty of perjury introduces deep regulatory exposure regarding dark money tracking, money laundering compliance, and material misstatement on a federal tax instrument, among many other violations.

Option 2: The organization did, in fact, receive direct government grants. If this is true, and I simply wasn’t able to track it in public databases, it still triggers severe compliance and legal issues under federal grant covenants. Public agencies award operating grants to non-profits to fund things like immediate community services, educational programming, etc. Public agencies do not hand out six-figure chunks of taxpayer money to be locked up in an investment portfolio. If the over half-million dollars came directly from a government treasury and was ISF Endowment parked it into a money making investment fund, the organization would be in direct violation of standard federal grant use restrictions, exposing them to immediate grant reclamation and structural contract fraud penalties.

Option 3: The money was a Pass-Down transfer from its parent organization. Given the structural setup, it is possible that the parent entity, the Islamic Services Foundation (ISF) literally deposited a direct government operating grant awarded to them into ISF endowment. However, doing this creates an entirely different legal minefield. Intercompany transfers from a parent to a subsidiary cannot simply be re-characterized as a fresh government grant on the subsidiary’s standalone forms. It is legally required to be reported as an Intercompany Contribution from a Related Organization and explicitly detailed, something this filing doesn’t do.

Beyond the reporting category error, passing down government grants to a secondary organization instead of utilizing them for their legally mandated purpose constitutes a severe breach of federal and state law. Government grants are strictly bound by explicit performance covenants, scope-of-work agreements, and statutory restrictions. Furthermore, an organization cannot unilaterally sub-award or transfer public grant funds to a subsidiary without explicit, prior written authorization from the granting agency.

Unauthorized pass-down structures violate anti-diversion laws and trigger immediate federal or state audits for grand misappropriation of public funds. If the Islamic Services Foundation (ISF) received public grants to run its schools, but instead passed that cash down to build the capital reserves of a non-operational endowment, both entities are exposed to severe statutory penalties. This includes the immediate reclamation of the entire grant amount, the potential revocation of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for both organizations, and formal debarment from ever receiving public taxpayer funding again.

In addition to the very serious questions on ISF Endowment reporting 100% of its revenue originating from “government grants,” the return also logs $1,008 in processing fees under the expenses. Here once again, the math isn’t mathing. Government agencies don’t disburse grants by swiping public funds on a credit card processors. This suggests tens of thousands of dollars in public capital moved through the ISF Endowment entirely unrecorded. If we used standard nonprofit processing rates, anywhere between $30,000 to $45,000 was generated from credit card transactions. However, every possible category of revenue, except “government grant” is zero.

In simple terms, it is impossible to have $1,008 in processing fees, while not generating any revenue from such transactions, suggesting deliberate unrecorded, off-books donations, carrying severe civil and criminal exposure for the organization and its board. Potential legal consequences for this include felony charges for material misstatement under penalty of perjury, IRS fraud investigations, revocation of 501(c)(3) status, and personal board liability for knowingly submitting inaccurate filings..

The expense also reports the ISF Endowment spent $37,909 on a “Fundraising Dinner Costs” and another $8,323 on “Professional Fundraising Services.” Considering how they claim 100% of their revenue was “government grants,” looking into the veracity of this expenses is critical. Since nonprofits do not spend $46,000 on telemarketers and fundraising dinners to secure a government grant, fundraising dinner expenses suggests engagement with potential public donors. Yet, the corresponding revenue lines for fundraising events or public contributions is zero. While it is entirely possible to host a fundraiser dinner, and receive zero donations, it is highly unlikely.

In addition, the filling includes other extremely serious issues. According to the filling’s balance sheet, the organizations existing cash is currently held in two separate types of accounts. $256,937 is cash-non-interest-bearing account, while it claims that exactly $250,000 is under savings and temporary cash investments. But unless the $250,000 in savings and temporary investments generated a grand total of zero dollars in return, the math again isn’t mathing. Any temporary cash investment or savings account would have reliably generated thousands of dollars in interest, even if the money sat in that account for just a few months. By reporting nothing in investment income, the organization presents yet another mathematical impossibility.

Under standard IRS accounting rules for 501(c)(3) organizations using the accrual method, and even under standard financial tracking, any interest generated from a savings account, cash investments, or even by a Certificate of Deposit (CD) must be reported in the tax year it is earned, regardless of whether the CD has matured or the term has ended.

Banks legally issue a Form 1099-INT at the close of every calendar year detailing the exact interest accrued during those 12 months. A non-profit is required to log that amount on Part VIII, Line 3 (Investment Income) of the Form 990. Not reporting this income would be an accounting violation.

Either the accountant completely failed to report taxable accrued income that the bank recorded, or the $250,000 “temporary investment” is sitting in an completely stagnant, zero-interest vehicle. If the latter is true, it represents a direct breach of fiduciary duty. Under the Texas Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA), a board managing an endowment fund is legally mandated to invest capital prudently to protect it from inflation. Leaving a quarter-million dollars of a permanent fund completely idle and generating 0% interest violates state-mandated fiduciary standards.

In addition, while ISF Endowment exists for the exclusive propose of accumulating endowments that will generate revenue, the IRS filling claims that none of the funds it holds are endowments, while simultaneously claiming that the alleged government grants it received as its only source of revenue were endowment donations.

It might sound like a minor error, but it is not. The legal implications of this specific concealment are profound. Under federal tax law, any 501(c)(3) organization that answers “Yes” to holding permanent, term, or quasi-endowments on its primary checklist is legally mandated to complete Schedule D, Part V. This specialized schedule forces the organization to pull back the curtain on its financial engine, requiring a detailed, multi-year table tracking the exact beginning balance of the endowment, the precise amount of new contributions added, the net investment earnings generated, and, most critically, the exact dollar amounts distributed for both programmatic grants and administrative expenses.

By falsely checking “No,” ISF Endowment completely bypassed this entire reporting mechanism. This effectively shields its investment strategies, asset management fees, and internal capital allocations from the automated risk-assessment algorithms the IRS uses to identify abusive tax shelters or improper wealth accumulation.

From a regulatory and asset-protection standpoint, this omission creates immediate legal exposure at both the state and federal levels. When a donor contributes money to an endowment fund, or when an organization designates funds as a permanent endowment, those assets become subject to strict legal restrictions under the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA), which is codified under Texas state law.

UPMIFA legally binds the board of directors to manage and spend those funds under a strict standard of prudence, ensuring the core principal is preserved according to the donor’s intent and the institutional charter. By telling the IRS that none of its funds are endowments, the organization is caught in a legal paradox: either they lied on a federal tax return under penalty of perjury to avoid strict transparency schedules, or they are mischaracterizing restricted, donor-intended permanent capital as ordinary, unrestricted operational cash.

If state or federal auditors determined someone is intentionally masking its restricted asset pools as general unrestricted funds, the legal consequences are severe. It signals a deliberate attempt to evade the specific disclosure requirements designed to track how untaxed investment wealth is being hoarded or deployed.

For Texas state officials, this misrepresentation provides an immediate mandate to review the entity’s corporate charter, as mislabeling permanent capital assets can compromise the organization’s property tax exemptions and franchise tax status under the Texas Tax Code. For the IRS, bypassing mandatory schedules through false reporting can be interpreted as a material misstatement, exposing the organization to heavy compliance penalties, a retroactive full-scale field audit, and the potential revocation of its tax-exempt status.

Now, even if the tax filing was perfect, there is a fundamental underlying fact that must be addressed: under the current Internal Revenue Code, there is no tax category that allows any non-profit organization to comply with standard US non-profit regulations, while simultaneously honoring the strict requirements of Sharia law on an endowment fund.

Under IRS rules, a public charity, not only cannot literally park its revenue perpetually and manage it as an investment fund, it must also continuously pass a mathematical public support test, proving that at least 33.3% of its total incoming revenue comes from a broad base of small public donations, government grants, and related program sales over a rolling five-year period. Conversely, its gross investment income, such as interest, dividends, and capital gains, is also legally capped and cannot exceed 33.3% of its total support. For an independent endowment fund, this mathematical threshold creates an immediate statutory conflict. Because an endowment’s entire operational model is designed to hold large pools of capital and generate passive investment yields, its investment income will eventually outpace public donation over time.

If the organization had been classified correctly from the start based on its actual operations and governance structure, it would have been labeled a Private Foundation. However, a private foundation classification fundamentally conflicts with the Sharia law of Waqf. Under Section 4942 of the Internal Revenue Code, the IRS legally enforces a Mandatory 5% Annual Asset Payout Rule on all private foundations, forcing them to distribute roughly 5% of their total net asset value each year. If investment yields drop or the market experiences a downturn, the board is legally compelled by federal tax law to dip into and liquidating its core principal to meet this mandatory payout. This creates a direct violation of the foundational Islamic law of Waqf preservation, which strictly forbids the spending, liquidation, or depletion of the core endowed asset.

By utilizing the 509(a)(2) classification, they might be trying to also build a temporary fix, but it is one with a definitive expiration date. Because the ISF Endowment is new, it is currently shielded by a 5-year initial “safe harbor” window during which the IRS does not enforce the 33.3% public support math. However, by Year 6, the rolling history of the fund must be calculated. Because the fund does not meet the legal requirements of a public charity by any legal standards, the entity is mathematically guaranteed to eventually fail the public support test and will automatically “tip” into Private Foundation status.

The consequences of this wrong filing are severe and entirely retroactive. If the IRS determines during an audit that the organization misclassified itself from the outset to evade foundation rules in order to be sharia compliant or secure higher donor deductions, it will not simply apply the private foundation rules moving forward. The IRS will retroactively strip the organization of its public charity status back to its day of inception.

This means the 1.39% excise tax on all investment gains will be applied retroactively, the 5% mandatory payout penalties will accumulate for all prior years, and, most critically, the tax deductions claimed by their wealthy donors will be retroactively slashed from the public charity 60% limit down to the private foundation 30% cap, exposing their financial backers to massive back-tax liabilities and audits.

In summary, Islamic endowments are incompatible with the United States, not ideologically, but legally. There is no path for Muslims to setup independent endowment funds, enjoy tax benefits as non-profit, and comply with sharia law.

Given all of these red flags, and the documented ties between the organization’s leadership and entities linked to global extremism, the IRS and Texas state regulators must launch an immediate, comprehensive audit into the ISF Endowment’s (EIN: 99-3472431) and its parent organization Islamic Services Foundation (ISF) (EIN 75-2352043).

However, the implications of Islamic endowments extend far beyond a these organizations. As Islamic institutions across the United States increasingly pivot toward the Waqf model to secure long-term income sources, it is imperative that federal and state officials re-evaluate the entire sector’s use of the public charity status.

Regulators must ensure that these permanent capital pools are not being misclassified to evade the mandatory payout rules and transparency requirements that the law explicitly imposes on private foundations. Without rigorous enforcement, the 501(c)(3) framework risks being weaponized as a permanent, untaxed, and opaque financial engine for ideologies that remain hidden behind a veil of public charity.

To prevent this exploitation, lawmakers should also consider amending the Internal Revenue Code to explicitly define “permanent endowment funds” as private foundations by default, removing the 5-year “safe harbor” loophole that currently allows these organizations to accumulate untaxed wealth without immediate verification.

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A private Islamic school in Texas didn’t just receive nearly $1 million in foreign funding from a Saudi-based financial institution linked to Iran and known for funding families of Palestinian suicide bombers and Hamas terrorists. According to a new Middle East Forum investigation, a top private Islamic school in Texas was founded and staffed by Hamas members and their families.

According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), Brighter Horizons Academy, a K–12 school in Garland, Texas, received nearly $1 million for construction and expansion from the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB).

While the funds to Brighter Horizon in Texas were transferred through the Islamic Development Bank, Iran holds a seven percent voting share in it, and according to its website, Iran is the third-largest shareholder, contributing about 8.25 percent of total capital. This raises serious questions about the possibility of the Islamic Republic of Iran financing schools in America through the Islamic Development Bank, which as of 2024, had spent over $22 million across over 80 “educational projects” in the United States.

The Islamic Development Bank, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, is known for having funded families of Palestinian suicide bombers and Hamas terrorists, transferring over $600 million to families of Palestinian terrorists, as of 2006.

In September 2025, The Treasury Department sanctioned current board member Gebreil Ibrahim Mohamed Fediel for collaborating with Iran and his involvement in human rights abuses that resulted in the deaths of 150,000 people in Sudan. Another board member, Anwar Ibrahim, allegedly allowed Hamas to operate and raise funds in Malaysia.

Despite its record, the Islamic Development Bank continues to operate freely in the United States and functions as one of the largest financiers of Islamic development and Islamic education projects worldwide. This raises a fundamental question: why has the Islamic Development Bank not been designated, restricted, or formally sanctioned by the United States, not only due to its history, but particularly when its structure may allow the Islamic Republic of Iran to circumvent existing sanctions?

But the foreign funding is only one piece of a much larger report examining the school’s operations, curriculum, and personnel and their connections to Al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Brighter Horizons operates under the Islamic Services Foundation (ISF), a U.S.-based non-profit, whose textbooks are used not only at the Brighter Horizons school, but across nearly 500 Islamic institutions across America and are sold openly online. All while ISF and Brighter Horizon ties to terrorism extend back to the school’s founding in 1989.

Despite its ties to terrorism since its founding, and the fact that ISF textbooks describe non-Muslims as “the worst of creatures” and jihad as a “religious duty,” Brighter Horizons maintains accreditation since 2006.

Both the ISF and Brighter Horizons list Rasmi Almallah as a founder. Rasmi Almallah also served as a board member of the Holy Land Foundation, and was listed by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial. Rasmi Almallah was also listed in incorporation documents for the Islamic Association of Palestine, whose co-founders included Hamas politburo leader Mousa Abu Marzook. In 1997, a federal court convicted Eyad Ismoil, an employee at one of Almallah’s Texas businesses, for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Eyad Ismoil was found to have “driven an explosives-laden van that blew up under the twin towers, killing six and injuring more than 1,000 others.”

Mufeed Abdulqader, a convicted Holy Land Foundation terrorist financier and brother of one of Hamas’s leader, Khaled Mashal, is listed as vice-president in ISF’s 2001 tax returns. While his daughter, Sarah Abdulqader, is currently a teacher at Brighter Horizons.

Natalia Suleiman, who taught at ISF’s Brighter Horizons between 2002 and 2010, also worked for the designated Islamic African Relief Agency, was the administrative assistance for convicted terror financier Shukri Abu Baker, former CEO of the Holy Land Foundation, and testified in support of Holy Land Foundation officials during their 2007 federal trial.

Majida Salem is an Islamic studies teacher at Brighter Horizons and the wife of convicted Holy Land Foundation chairman Ghassan Elashi. In addition to teaching, Salem also served on the Islamic Services Foundation (ISF) curriculum design team responsible for producing ISF’s textbooks. Her co-author is Nabil Sadoun, former board member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was deported from the United States in 2010 after concealing Hamas-related affiliations on immigration documents. Yet ISF lists Sadoun as a lead author and director of its 2018 textbook Islam in America, eight years after his deportation.

One ISF textbook, Islam in America, promotes “charities” such as the Benevolence International Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation as “humanitarian organizations helping Muslims in need.” Never mentioning how those organizations had been shut down by the U.S. government since early 2000s for financing Al-Qaeda. The same textbook also praises the Islamic African Relief Agency, despite its designation for ties to Osama bin Laden.

ISF textbooks also present terror linked figures as exemplary “Muslim scholars,” including Jamal Badawi, despite being a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, a body linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Badawi’s public statements describe suicide bombers as “martyrs” and supports “spousal discipline” under “certain conditions.”

Similarly, the curriculum praises Siraj Wahhaj, an imam known for insulting non-Muslims and advocating strict interpretations of Islamic law, including support for jihad. Siraj Wahhaj was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.

The same ISF textbook also encourages the work of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its head, Nihad Awad. The textbook describe CAIR as a “civil liberties group” which “represents a new level of political participation for the Muslim community” and helps Muslims “fight discrimination” and “hate crimes.” In 2025, the state of Texas designated CAIR as a terrorist organization, because of its leadership’s reported links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Beyond receiving nearly $1 million in potentially Iranian funding through the Islamic Development Bank, the Islamic Services Foundation has also established a long-term financial structure designed to permanently accumulate and reinvest donations into more Islamic institutions like Brighter Horizons. The stated goal of the “Islamic Services Foundation Endowment” (Waqf), is not short-term fundraising, but the creation of a self-sustaining capital pool projected to reach $30 million within the next five to ten years, to build additional Islamic schools and replicate its indoctrination model across the United States.

The “ISF Endowment” operates as an independent 501(c)(3) entity (EIN 99-3472431) since June 2025, with a dedicated Board of Directors, and ISF as the exclusive member. However, it remains unclear what level of scrutiny the Internal Revenue Service applies to the this accumulated wealth, such as donor origins and downstream financial pathways, or whether IRS fillings are accurate. According to ISF’s website, nearly $3 million was accumulated/raised in 2024–2025, while its 2024 IRS fillings only reports a fraction of that amount.

The investigation places Brighter Horizons and ISF within a wider network of U.S.-based Islamic schools currently seeking to receive public funding. Brighter Horizons operates under the Islamic Services Foundation (ISF), a U.S.-based non-profit, whose textbooks are used not only at the Brighter Horizons school, but across nearly 500 Islamic institutions across America. In Texas, this includes the Houston Quran Academy (HQA). Houston Quran Academy’s founder and principal, Hamed Ghazali, in the late 1980s interviewed prominent jihadists, including Al-Qaeda operatives, where he, among other things, discussed “their hopes for jihadist efforts to expand beyond Afghanistan.”

Houston Quran Academy (HQA) is run by the Muslim American Society (MAS), described by the U.S. Government as being “founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.” Ayman Hammous, executive-director of the Muslim American Society (MAS), in 2019 called for the proliferation of Islam in America, saying that it is “needed at the spiritual level, at the social level, at the political level” at the at the Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA) annual convention in Philadelphia.

Also in 2019, members of Congress called for an investigation into MAS after one of its branches in Philadelphia hosted an event in which children were singing about torturing and beheading Jews.

Since fiscal year 2023, the New York City Council has awarded at least $265,000 in taxpayer funds to MAS’s New York chapter. On October 2025, the Muslim American Society (MAS) Youth Center in Brooklyn, announced the group’s "MAS in Schools" initiative, which aims to create prayer spaces and teach NYC Public School Students ‘How To Organize,’ in partnership with Hamas linked organization SJP.

In January 2026, at a fundraiser event held at the Muslim American Society youth center in Brooklyn, vendors were selling keychains, pins, and stickers in support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The event is now under investigation by New York’s City Council.

While on March 5, 2026, Texas Governor Greg Abbott stated that “terror-linked schools” will not receive public funding, on March 17 a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas granted a temporary restraining order (TRO) in favor of Texas-based Islamic schools and Muslim families, claiming that the Texas Comptroller’s Office “caused immediate and irreparable harm” by refusing to approve Islamic schools for public funding under Texas’ $1 billion Education Freedom Account (TEFA) program.

But the real issue is not just who funds these schools and programs, but that they are allowed to operate in the first place. The United States already has the legal and regulatory tools to shut down institutions that cross into ideological indoctrination, including revocation of tax-exempt status by the IRS, denial or withdrawal of accreditation, and enforcement of state education licensing standards, among others. The question is not whether the mechanisms to shut down these institutions and textbooks exist, but why they are not enforced.

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Saudi Arabia’s rise as the largest venture capital market in the Middle East is real. Between 2023 and 2025, it captured more than half of all VC funding in the MENA region, reaching a record $1.72 billion in total funding, up 145% year-on-year. That’s not a marginal shift. It’s a rapid concentration of capital into a single market.

Most people interpret that as a sign of innovation finally taking off.

But that explanation misses what’s actually happening.

This is not a market that emerged organically. It is a system that has been deliberately built, and just as it rose, it will eventually fall.

The Market didn’t grow naturally, under Saudi Vision 2030, the state has taken an active role in constructing the venture ecosystem. Through institutions like the Public Investment Fund (PIF), Venture Capital Company (SVC), and the Jada Fund of Funds, the government hasn’t just supported venture capital, it has effectively underwritten it.

Money has been injected into venture funds. Downside risk has been softened. Entire sectors, payments, logistics, digital infrastructure, were pre-funded through large state projects.

That’s why companies like Tabby, Tamara, Sary, and Unifonic scale so quickly. They aren’t discovering unmet demand in the traditional market. They are stepping into demand that has already been created by the state.

This distinction is critical, because it changes what investors are actually participating in.

The risk didn’t disappear, it simply moved. In a typical venture market, investors take risks on uncertain ideas. Success comes from identifying what doesn’t yet exist.

In Saudi Arabia, much of that uncertainty has already been reduced. Infrastructure is built ahead of time. Capital is abundant and often subsidized. Markets are shaped before startups even enter them.

At first glance, that sounds safer.

But the risk hasn’t gone away, it simply shifted.

• Policy risk: If the state creates the market, it can also change it. Entire sectors can expand or contract based on government decisions, not based consumer demand.

• Exit risk: Liquidity depends on state-backed buyers or continued alignment with the same system that enabled growth.

• Pricing risk: When capital is plentiful and partially protected, valuations can reflect policy momentum rather than actual business fundamentals

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These are visible risks. But they sit on top of something deeper. The part most Investors don’t see: How the capital actually works

Saudi Arabia’s financial system is heavily tied to sharia compliant Islamic finance, particularly instruments called Sukuk, or “Islamic bonds.”

Islamic finance operates under a different set of rules:

• Interest (called riba) is prohibited

• Investments must be tied to real economic activity and/or physical assets

• Certain industries are off-limits

Instead of traditional bonds, Sukuk give investors a stake in real assets or projects. Returns come from the performance of those assets, not from fixed interest payments. This is not just a technical difference. It changes how capital flows through the system. And in a system controlled by religious doctrines and the state, the return of investment sits totally outside the investors control.

In simplified terms, the flow looks like this:

1. Capital is raised through Islamic instruments like Sukuk

2. That capital funds large state projects, cities, infrastructure, digital systems

3. Those projects create forced demand across the economy

4. Startups grow within that state created demand

5. Venture capital invests at the final stage

In other words, venture capital is not driving the system or a free market. It is distributing capital that has already been structured, directed, and deployed upstream.

But there’s another layer most people overlook. Islamic finance is not self-defining. What qualifies as “Sharia-compliant” is determined by scholars, regulatory boards, and institutions. That means interpretation plays a central role in where capital can go.

Historically, this system was distributed:

• Malaysia built much of the technical architecture

• The United Kingdom provided legal and financial infrastructure

• Gulf countries supplied the capital

That balance has been changing for the last decade. Saudi Arabia is consolidating these roles, building its own regulatory frameworks, expanding domestic financial institutions, and aligning capital deployment with national strategy.

Capital that once flowed through multiple global hubs is increasingly being centralized and routed through Saudi-controlled systems. This is not just growth. It is consolidation of control.

When capital, regulation, and deployment are all concentrated, investors are no longer operating in a traditional market. They are operating inside a managed system. And that system is increasingly connected to global frameworks.

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for example, require trillions in funding. Governments alone cannot meet that need, so alternative capital sources are being integrated as part of countries national debt. Islamic finance and partnerships with Saudi based organizations is one of the largest and most central:

• Sukuk are getting used to fund infrastructure tied to development goals

• Zakat (mandatory charitable giving) is being scaled as a financial source outside of traditional localized and community aid

• Waqf (endowments) are being mobilized as investment vehicles as a source of revenue, including for the United Nations

• Sharia-compliant finance is being integrated into all the global financial frameworks, including the World Bank

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Under this model, the structure becomes clear:

• Islamic finance generates capital

• Saudi Arabia centralizes and deploys it

• Venture capital distributes it into private companies selected by Gulf states

• Organizations like the United Nations set nations priorities and were money should go

This is not a free market in the traditional sense. It is a coordinated financial system that is centralizing control.

Systems like this have historical precedents. During the late stages of the Soviet Union (1970s–1980s), capital allocation was not determined by market signals but by central planning. Investment flowed into politically prioritized sectors, risk appeared artificially low because the state underwrote the system, and output increased rapidly in targeted industries. But the absence of real price discovery created deep distortions. Capital was misallocated, efficiency was overstated, and systemic fragility was hidden beneath reported growth. When external pressures increased and internal constraints tightened, the system could not adjust, it had been optimized for control, not resilience.

Like late-stage Soviet planning, this creates environments where:

• Capital concentration is driven by alignment with overarching policy goals

• Risk perception is moderated by institutional sponsorship or guarantees

• Performance metrics may reflect compliance or alignment rather than underlying efficiency

In the Soviet Union’s case, since the 1930’s the long-term “vision of the future,” often framed through multi-year plans and ideological projections of a future economic order, promised stability, abundance, and strategic dominance. Yet that vision depended on continuous control over inputs, outputs, and information flows.

Similarly, both Agenda 2030 and Saudi Vision 2030 articulate comprehensive future-oriented visions: integrated systems, optimized resource allocation, and large-scale societal transformation. The parallel is not just ideological, it is structural, each represents an attempt to shape long-term economic outcomes through coordinated direction rather than emergent market behavior.

Systems like this can grow very quickly. They can direct capital efficiently and build entire sectors in a short period of time. But that efficiency comes with trade-offs. When capital is directed instead of freely allocated, and when risk is suppressed instead of priced, distortions can build beneath the surface.

Returns are no longer driven only by market success. Growth can look strong while underlying fragility increases. For outside investors, the key point is simple: You are not entering a neutral market. Investor returns are not driven only by company performance. They are shaped by:

• Government policy

• Regulatory decisions

• Interpretation of Islamic financial rules

• Alignment with broader ideologies and global frameworks

While sold as open market and innovation, what they have built is a system of control. That structure has a built-in risk that traditional venture investors are not used to pricing: The rules are not fixed. They are defined by the government and its institutions. In that sense, the late Soviet experience serves as a cautionary reference point: long-term visions can mobilize immense resources and achieve rapid transformation, but durability ultimately depends on whether the system retains the flexibility to adapt when underlying conditions change.

For investors, the question is no longer just where growth is happening. It is whether that growth exists inside a market, or inside a system that decides, in advance, where capital is allowed to go. Because in a system like this, the biggest risk is not failure. It is dependence on rules you do not control.

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Most people assume foreign funding to western institutions is limited to universities, schools, or charitable donations that are influencing the institutions’ ideology and creating foreign soft power. The reality is far broader, and far more concerning. Over the past several years, Qatari, Saudi, and other Gulf-linked governments and foundations have poured billions of dollars into schools, universities, cultural centers, and health initiatives in Western nations. These arrangements are structured under Sharia-compliant financial contracts, which avoid interest by tying financial support directly to physical assets, embedding foreign financial interests into the core infrastructure of Western communities.

Under Islamic law, charging interest (riba) is prohibited. To comply, funders structure support so that instead of earning interest, they take legal ownership or a stake in a physical asset.

State and local governments are participating in Sharia-compliant financing, particularly for infrastructure projects such as schools, hospitals, and transportation facilities. Unlike conventional loans that charge interest, these arrangements use a lease-based model. Funders provide capital to purchase or build the asset, then lease it back to the state or municipality. Payments go toward the use of the asset, not interest on borrowed money, while the foreign funder retains legal ownership or a stake in the property. This structure allows Arab governments and Gulf-linked investors to embed long-term financial claims and influence directly into public infrastructure to be “compliant with Sharia law.

Qatar has emerged as the largest foreign source of funding to U.S. colleges and universities. In 2025 alone, data from the U.S. Department of Education show that American universities received over $1.1 billion from Qatari sources, outpacing all other foreign governments. Saudi Arabia also ranked among the top foreign funders, with roughly $285 million in reported gifts and contracts.

Much of this funding flows through semi-governmental or state-linked entities like the Qatar Foundation and the Qatar National Research Fund, which operate as intermediaries for Doha’s broader soft-power strategy. The Qatar Foundation, funded by the Qatari state and royal family, has established long-term academic partnerships and contracts with elite Western universities.

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But “interests” has a different definition under sharia law and it is not limited loans. Even grants or so-called donations can’t be unconditional under Sharia law. In a conventional system, a grant is simply money given for a specific purpose, for example Harvard receiving $5 million for a study, with no expectation of return. The recipient keeps any results, patents, or publications, and the funder does not retain ownership.

Under Sharia law, however, simply giving cash is problematic. Money itself cannot generate profit on its own. Any “return” must come from ownership of tangible assets or productive activity, not from handing over cash. Pure grants without ownership often prohibited because the recipient “could profit from the funds without the funder sharing in the risk,” something Sharia law treats as a form of prohibited interest (riba).

As a result, Sharia-compliant grants are tied to physical assets. For example:

• A grant to build or expand a medical research center, laboratory, or university wing may legally give the funder partial ownership of that building or its equipment.

• The institution can use the asset to conduct research, but the funder retains ownership or control rights.

These structures embed far more than ideological control, it is embedding foreign ownership deep within the fabric of Western institutions and assets. The result is systemic ownership and influence: foreign governments acquire legal stakes in U.S. institutional and state assets, while programs operate locally under the appearance of normal loans or charitable support. What looks like philanthropy or a loan becomes foreign capital embedded into community schools, universities, and health facilities, with legal and financial ties that extend far beyond a simple financial transaction.

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We deserve transparency and protection. Sharia-compliant or Islamic financing must be banned. Allowing foreign governments to embed ownership stakes in local institutions cedes control over critical infrastructure, undermines community independence, and threatens national security.

Sharia-based financial structures and grants have no place in the West. What looks like a loan or philanthropic support masks foreign investment and legal claims over U.S. community assets. Citizens and policymakers must recognize the difference between true donations and Sharia-structured, asset-backed funding, and act to protect local institutions from hidden foreign influence.

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In 2025, during Ramadan, the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), the largest global agency dedicated to migration and displacement, launched what represents a profound departure from any claim of secular humanitarian neutrality: the Islamic Philanthropy Fund (IPF). Presented as a mechanism to mobilize “Zakat” and “Sadaqah,” the fund embeds Islamic legal doctrine directly into the financial and operational structure of a taxpayer-funded international organization, placing religious law alongside, and in many cases above, universal humanitarian standards.

The IPF is not merely a funding tool; it is a system built on religious authorization, Sharia compliance agreements, and clerical validation through formal Islamic fatwas.

Under classical Islamic jurisprudence, Zakat is conditional, and inherently exclusionary. Eligibility is not determined solely by need, but by religious classification and doctrinal interpretation. This stands in direct conflict with the core principles the United Nations claims to uphold: neutrality, impartiality, and non-discrimination. Under a Sharia-compliant system, aid distribution is no longer needs-based. It introduces a parallel standard in which access is shaped by religious criteria. In practice, this creates the conditions for a two-tier system of assistance, where vulnerability is no longer sufficient to guarantee aid.

As part of legitimizing the Islamic Philanthropy Fund (IPF) within Islamic legal frameworks, IOM’s own materials reference multiple religious endorsements and fatwas affirming its eligibility to collect and distribute Zakat and Sadaqah.

The International Islamic Fiqh Academy (IIFA), a major jurisprudential body linked to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), has issued formal rulings supporting the Fund’s compliance with Sharia. In addition, the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a globally influential network of clerics, provides religious backing and interpretive guidance. All while the fatwa issued by IKTISAD sets out clear principles governing how the IOM Islamic Philanthropy Fund collects and distributes Zakat, Sadaqah, and other Muslim alms. Zakat is required to be disbursed promptly to eligible recipients, in accordance with Qur’anic guidance, while Sadaqah and other alms are distributed in line with donor instructions. And lastly, an advisory board providing oversight and “strategic guidance” to ensure operate according Islamic principles.

Taken together, this is not simply charitable validation but a full integration of religious jurisprudence and financial doctrine into the mechanics of a UN agency. What IOM is doing is:

• Using formal Islamic jurisprudential endorsement by IIFA

• Reinforcing it with Islamic scholarly/religious network legitimacy from IUMS

• Operationalizing it through Islamic advisors and IKTISAD

The implications are not merely theoretical. This introduces a parallel governance structure within the UN system. Decisions about who receives aid, and under what conditions, are no longer exclusively administrative or humanitarian, they are, in large part, theological. The staffing built around the Islamic Philanthropy Fund further exposes how deeply this framework is being institutionalized within IOM.

Job postings for roles such as “Islamic Philanthropy Officer” and “Senior Programme Officer (IPF)” make clear that this is not a peripheral initiative but a dedicated operational track, with personnel explicitly hired to develop Islamic philanthropy strategies, mobilize Zakat and Sadaqah funding, and cultivate relationships with “Zakat houses,” Islamic financial institutions, and religious giving networks.

At the same time, consultancy roles have been tasked with mapping Muslim communities, identifying giving patterns, and building pipelines to channel religious donations into IOM programs, including targeting diaspora populations and high-net-worth donors.

These positions require not only fundraising experience, but “in-depth understanding of Islamic social finance” and established ties to Islamic charitable ecosystems, effectively embedding religiously specialized actors into the core of a UN agency’s funding apparatus.

This is not neutral humanitarian staffing; it is the deliberate construction of a parallel fundraising and influence infrastructure inside the UN system, one that is designed to comply and follow Islamic religious doctrines on who receives the funds, and for what propouse.

Beyond the structural and ideological concerns, this model introduces measurable security risks. In fragile environments where aid dependency is high, religious gatekeeping over resources can reinforce and create incentives for ideological and religious coercion and radicalization. And these risks are compounded by the organizations involved.

Within its first 18 months, publicly available figures states that at least USD 24 million has flowed through the IPF. In July 2025, IOM entered into a USD 1 million Memorandum of Understanding with “Muslim Charity” under the IPF, aimed at “combating human trafficking.”

A subsequent USD 1 million agreement with Human Concern International targeted “at-risk communities and anti-exploitation programming.” However, Muslim Charity and Human Concern International has faced scrutiny in Canada and other jurisdictions over issues related to financial transparency and oversight. Reviews by the Canada Revenue Agency have identified deficiencies in recordkeeping and monitoring of overseas activities, diversion, or reliance on insufficiently vetted local partners, contributing to funds going to terror organizations.

Perhaps one of the most concerning developments is its partnership with Islamic Relief Worldwide. IRW is one of the largest Muslim “humanitarian organizations” globally, with revenue in the hundreds of millions of pounds and operations in over 40 countries. However, the organization has faced significant scrutiny and action from multiple governments, watchdogs, and even its own U.S. branch, Islamic Relief U.S.A, who is suing Islamic Relief Worldwide in the UK for the damages caused to their reputation and fundraising efforts due to their association to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 2014, Israel banned IRW from operating in the West Bank, alleging long‑term ties to Hamas and related funding networks The United Arab Emirates designated IRW a terrorist organization in 2014, calling it linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the early 2010s, several major banks, including UBS and HSBC, closed accounts held by Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) and its affiliates due to "de-risking" strategies regarding counter-terror financing concerns.

A 2016 Swedish government report identified IRW as a “key organization” providing credibility to the Muslim Brotherhood network in Europe. National governments, including Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Anti‑Semitism, have publicly expressed reservations about partnering with IRW due to leadership statements, alleged ideological affiliations, and historical ties to Islamist movements. Even Bangladesh banned IRW from operating in the country for fears of radicalization in the population.

Despite this record, IRW is listed in IOM’s own materials as a strategic partner in its humanitarian operations.

Individually, each of these cases raises serious concerns. Collectively, they reveal a broader pattern: the institutionalization of Islamic funding and operational network within a UN agency, intersecting with actors whose histories raise persistent questions about ideological alignment, financial transparency, and accountability.

To fully understand the implications, it is essential to examine how IOM operates.

The IOM is led by Amy Pope, a former advisor to Presidents Obama and Biden on migration policy. One of its Deputy Directors General, Ugochi Daniels of Nigeria, previously served as the UN’s Resident Representative in Iran and as Chief of Staff at UNRWA.

Unlike UNHCR, which is mandated to protect refugees, IOM functions as a logistics-driven, project-based agency with a far broader scope. It manages migration in all its forms, voluntary, forced, internal, and cross-border, acting as a service provider for governments and other actors. Its programs are funded almost entirely through voluntary, earmarked contributions, giving donors significant influence over priorities, operations, and partnerships.

This funding model means that IOM’s operational direction is shaped not by a fixed humanitarian mandate, but by donor priorities. Programs that attract funding expand rapidly. Others are neglected. Oversight becomes fragmented, and accountability becomes diffuse.

One of the most problematic parts of IOM’s role is how it extends beyond humanitarian assistance into the facilitation of illegal migration flows and human trafficking, in particular countries in Europe and the United States. The most troubling part, those states are paying for their own illegal migration and border crisis. The implications are difficult to ignore. Governments are not funding humanitarian relief; they are financing a systems directly contributing to irregular migration dynamics into their own countries.

This is not refugee resettlement, which involves legal processes, vetting, and coordinated state participation. It is the large-scale financing of migration corridors. Illegal migrants are supported throughout their journey, receiving logistical and financial assistance to illegally move to the very countries paying for the programs. In practice, this creates a system in which taxpayer-funded programs help sustain and accelerate illegal migration flows into their own countries.

In 2024, IOM’s budget reached approximately USD 3.7 billion, up from USD 1 billion in 2022. Nearly all of this funding comes from governments such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, and Canada, alongside institutional donors including the Rockefeller Foundation and Open Society Foundations.

While annual reporting varies by year, the largest contributors to IOM’s voluntary budget consistently includes the U.S. Contributing more than USD 1.4 billion over recent funding cycles. While The European Union collectively and individual European governments contribute more than USD 1 billion annually, roughly one-third of IOM’s total budget..

Some of these funds have flowed into programs that directly facilitated illegal migrations by assisting migrants en-route to the U.S., such as the R4V (Inter-Agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela). Originally intended to help Venezuelan nationals, this program outlines $1.6 billion in aid across 17 countries, including $372 million from taxpayer money in cash and voucher assistance to migrants of all nationalities, including large number of North Africans and Middle Easterners. Illegal migrants were given pre-paid debit cards, received bank transfers, and cash envelopes that facilitate travel through Latin America. Most of that money flowing directly to the human traffickers and drug cartels.

The European Union and individual European governments funding is provided through grants and earmarked projects. The United Kingdom, through the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and other funding instruments, contributes approximately USD 350 million annually, shaping migration programs and influencing operational priorities. Japan provides around USD 300 million per year, Canada contributes roughly USD 150 million, Norway about USD 50 million, and Switzerland approximately USD 40 million.

At the same time, IOM’s operational footprint across Europe and its surrounding regions functions as an enabler of migration flows rather than a responder to displacement. Through programs funded by the European Union and individual European governments, IOM, just like in the case of the U.S. and Latin American, runs cash assistance, “protection,” and transit support operations along key migration corridors stretching from North Africa through the Western Balkans into EU territory.

In countries such as Libya and Niger, IOM provides direct assistance to migrants, including shelter, transportation, and financial support, which, while framed as humanitarian relief, can facilitate continued movement toward Europe. Along the Balkan route, including in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, IOM operates reception centers, distributes assistance, and coordinates services that sustain migrant populations in transit zones immediately outside EU borders, effectively maintaining a pipeline of onward movement.

Even within EU member states such as Italy and Greece, IOM is involved in post-arrival assistance, accommodation support, and integration programs that are normalizing illegal entry by ensuring continuity of services from point of departure to destination.

A particularly illustrative case is Calais Jungle in Calais, the sprawling migrant encampment that became the primary staging ground for attempts to enter the United Kingdom. While officially dismantled in 2016, the cycle has never truly ended, with informal camps repeatedly re-emerging in and around the area. IOM has been active in France through programs offering reception support, and migrant assistance services and infrastructure, including shelters and coordination with other NGOs.

In recent years, French authorities uncovered caches of weapons, including firearms described in some reports as military-grade, within or near migrant encampments in the Calais area, underscoring the security risks. Rather than resolving the situation, this model effectively stabilizes and perpetuates migration bottlenecks, where individuals who entered Europe illegibly are maintained in place with ongoing support to continue onwards, including contributing to weapons trafficking, within and into Europe.

In addition to Western governments, Qatar become a financial partner of IOM, a fact that plays directly into discussions about influence, donor priorities, and how humanitarian agencies are shaped by their backers. In particular when the programs diverge from the mandated UN neutrality and secular nature.

Through the Qatar Fund for Development (QFFD), the State of Qatar has engaged in several formal funding arrangements with IOM: In July 2022, QFFD signed a core contribution agreement with IOM that provided USD 400,000 in unearmarked funding, giving the agency flexibility to allocate money where it “deemed most pressing.” This contribution was explicitly framed as part of Qatar’s larger pledge announced at the 2018 Doha Forum to provide USD 500 million to support United Nations organizations.

Unrestricted contributions like this are rare in IOM’s voluntary funding model, since most donor money is earmarked. In this case, QFFD’s core support meant that IOM could use these funds however “it saw fit.” Beyond direct financial contributions, the Government of Qatar has also signed agreements with IOM to deepen institutional cooperation.

In December 2024, Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and IOM formalized an agreement aimed at enhancing joint cooperation and strengthening IOM’s mission. Additionally, IOM established a permanent mission office in Qatar in 2020, reflecting growing ties between the agency and Doha. The configuration of IOM’s funding base has several implications.

Because IOM depends on voluntary, often earmarked money, donors, effectively steer operational priorities. This includes which programs receive funding, how do they operate, where staff are deployed, and what partnerships are pursued. In short, who pays the IOM matters at least as much as what it does, especially when new initiatives like the Islamic Philanthropy Fund intersect with global politics, religious doctrines, and questions about ideological influence and neutrality in humanitarian assistance.

In short, U.S., UK, and EU taxpayers are not supporting neutral humanitarian operations. Their contributions help sustain complex global migration programs that, in particular, directly facilitate movement toward their own borders. The combination of voluntary, earmarked funding and new financial innovation of the Islamic Philanthropy Fund creates a situation where operational priorities, ideological partnerships, and donor incentives intersect, raising urgent questions about transparency, oversight, and the long-term consequences of IOM’s expanded mandate.

Layered on top of this already complex and controversial operational model now is the Islamic Philanthropy Fund. A secular, taxpayer-funded UN agency, operating as a global illegal migration logistics provider, is now administering religiously governed funds, guided by clerical rulings, and distributed through networks that intersect with politically and ideologically sensitive actors.

No equivalent framework exists within the UN system for integrating other religious legal obligations into agency operations. There is no parallel structure for Christian, Jewish, or other faith-based legal charitable systems being embedded into the operational core of a UN body. The IPF is not just a funding mechanism; it is a precedent-setting transformation.

And it raises fundamental questions.

Why is the UN embedding religious doctrine into its financial architecture? Why are taxpayer funds operating alongside, and potentially intertwined with, religiously governed systems? Why are organizations with documented ties to terrorism being elevated to strategic partnership roles? And why is an agency already deeply involved in facilitating illegal migration flows is still allowed to operate at all?

These are not abstract concerns. Because at a certain point, this stops being about humanitarian assistance. It becomes about the convergence of money, migration, and ideology, operating through systems that are neither neutral nor accountable.

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On October 7th, Hamas didn’t just invade Israel, major news outlets like the Associated Press, used photographers who were embedded with Hamas forces to “report” live from the “scene.” Among the freelancers whose real‑time images were published by AP were Gaza‑based photographers such as Hassan Eslaiah, Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud, and Hatem Ali, all credited by AP for photos taken during the attack.

Plaintiffs in Newman v. The Associated Press alleged that AP continued to pay and publish work from these freelancers despite widely available evidence of their close proximity to and association with Hamas militants, including images of Eslaiah posing with Hamas leaders, such as Yayia Sinwar, years before the attack, which were easily discoverable with a basic internet search and media‑watchdog reports. According to court filings, internal AP communications from as early as 2018 even expressed concerns about Eslaiah’s reliability and affiliations, yet AP continued to work with him up through the October 7 coverage.

In June 2025, victims of the October 7th Hamas attacks filed a lawsuit against the Associated Press, alleging that the news organization knowingly employed photographers embedded with Hamas to produce real-time coverage of the attacks. Plaintiffs argued that these individuals were not neutral journalists but Hamas operatives, and that the AP’s payments, contracts, and editorial coordination constituted material support under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA). By September 2025, the case had been dismissed, and the plaintiffs immediately indicated plans to appeal.

The district court in Florida’s dismissal of Newman v. The Associated Press defies all logic. It essentially says that media organizations could knowingly hire terrorists and still avoid liability under U.S. anti-terrorism statutes, as long as the individual is not a full-time employee. By “full-time,” the court means someone on the permanent payroll as a formal employee—not a freelancer who dedicates all their time to working for that media organization.

This dismissal, like the one in Parizer v. AJP Educational Foundation, Inc., did not hinge on disputed facts. Plaintiffs provided extensive documentation showing that a certain photographer was a confirmed Hamas associate who also participated in the Hamas attack, that they were employed or contracted by AP, and that their work contributed to the operational goals of the organization. Yet the court found the complaint legally insufficient, applying a standard that demands plaintiffs show that payments to journalists directly caused a specific terrorist attack, that the "journalists” was not working a freelance basis for them, and that such “journalists” was working under the direct management of the organization, a standard that Congress never intended.

The Complaint’s Key Allegations

• Specific photographers employed or contracted by AP were identified as Hamas members, confirmed through investigative reporting and prior intelligence.

• AP continued to pay these individuals for years, including for real-time coverage of attacks in October 2023 and October 2024.

• Payments were alleged to directly benefit Hamas, by allowing operatives to embed, document, and disseminate content advancing the organization’s propaganda and recruitment goals, while receiving payment from the Associated Press to do so.

• Plaintiffs cited prior convictions of other U.S.-based Hamas-affiliated networks, demonstrating continuity in organizational operations and methodology.

The complaint did not assert guilt by association. It documented a clear, ongoing relationship between AP and individuals embedded in Hamas operations, a relationship that materially benefited the organization, by an individual who participated in a terrorist attack, all falls squarely within the statutory definition of “material support.” It documented a clear, ongoing relationship between AP and individuals embedded in Hamas operations. The district court’s dismissal, however, treated these well-supported allegations as legally irrelevant.

The court’s reasoning rested on three pillars: lack of “actual knowledge,” the supposed “neutrality of journalistic activity,” and a perceived absence of proximate cause. By requiring proof that AP knew exactly how its payments would be used and that they directly would facilitated a specific terror attack, the court raised the bar for material support beyond statutory text. Under this logic, media organizations could knowingly hire terrorists, pay them for their work, and distribute images or reports that further terrorist goals, all without fear of civil liability. The statutory framework designed to prevent such support has been reinterpreted as a near-immunity shield.

This reinterpretation is particularly dangerous because it ignores organizational context. Just as AMP and AJP were treated as discrete, “clean slate” entities despite ties to previously adjudicated terror-linked networks, media organizations are now positioned to hire known terrorist affiliations without legal accountability.

The court articulated several grounds for dismissal, but the real significance lies in how the court applied legal standards to the allegations, particularly regarding the relationship between AP and the freelance photographer. The court relied on two main rationales:

Actual Knowledge Standard: The court did not dispute that the alleged photographer was a Hamas member, that he participated in the October 7 attack, and even after those facts became know to the AP, the AP continued to pay him. Instead, the court shifted the focus from whether AP knowingly made payments that would benefit a terrorist organization, a requirement clearly met under the ATA, and it raised the bar for liability by requiring that the plaintiff show the “journalist” was acting under AP’s direct control or coordination, and that he was a full-time AP employee, among other unreasonable things.

Material Support and Neutral Journalism: The court reasoned that purchasing photos of a terrorist attacks, even from embedded Hamas operatives, is part of “routine journalism” and cannot constitute material support. By framing the payments as “neutral reporting” activity, the court effectively held that media organizations could fund individuals who are members of terrorist groups, gathered as they were part of a terrorist attack, as long as the work was used for “their own coverage.” The court emphasized First Amendment protections, noting that journalism and newsworthy events are presumptively protected. While First Amendment considerations are relevant, the ruling blurred the line between protected reporting and civil liability for knowingly providing material support to terrorists.

This ruling has alarming implications beyond this case: hundreds of freelancers with clear ties to terrorist organizations have been hired by various media organizations. Currently the court is hearing also a case against the Palestine Chronicle for hiring a Hamas “journalists” keeping three hostages captive in his home. While that case is also re-writing the law in other ways, this ruling would also directly affect that case.

By requiring proof of direct causation to a specific attack, and full-time employment by the journalist, the court effectively insulated not just media organizations from any civil liability for knowingly hiring or paying terrorists. Under this interpretation, as long as the Hamas terrorist is not a full-time employee, all sorts of organizations, not just media, are essentially shielded from knowingly hiring terrorists and funding the group’s activities.

For media organizations it goes even further. Payments to embedded Hamas operatives are shielded as “neutral reporting,” as long as they pay for something used in their own coverage. The court’s new interpretation effectively nullifies Congress’s intent, insulating organizations from accountability for knowingly providing material support.

Under the Anti-Terrorism Act, liability does not require that a recipient be a full-time employee or that their work be directly coordinated to meet the organization’s operational goals. What matters is that payments were made to a terrorist organization, and that those making the payments knew or should have known this fact, both of which were clearly established in the complaint, satisfying plausibility under the pleading standard.

If a case like Newman v. AP, which documents an individual who not only had confirmed links to Hamas but also publicly and actively participated in a terror attack, and where payments spanning years are clearly traced to that individual, cannot proceed, the legal standard has been fundamentally altered.

The Newman v. AP case is now pivotal, not only for the plaintiffs but for every U.S. statute designed to prevent terror financing, the meaning of material support, and the liability of media organizations in general. The court, through procedural and interpretive maneuvers, effectively shielded media and other organizations, such as NGOs, from accountability, even when their conduct knowingly provided material support to terrorists. The appeal will determine whether courts may continue to impose artificially high pleading standards, or whether the law can function as intended: allowing victims to challenge materially supportive conduct and hold networks accountable for the harm they helped fund.

The Newman v. AP ruling makes clear that statutory language alone is no longer enough. Courts can reinterpret material support standards in ways that strip the Anti-Terrorism Act of its force. To restore the law’s original intent, Congress must act decisively. Legislative clarification should explicitly confirm that:

• Liability under the ATA does not require recipients to be full-time employees or formally controlled by the payer. Payments or other forms of support knowingly provided to individuals or entities linked to designated terrorist organizations constitute material support.

• Plaintiffs do not need to show direct causation to a specific terrorist act; it is sufficient that the support materially furthers the organization’s goals.

• Knowledge standards should reflect what Congress intended: that those making payments knew or should have known the recipients were part of a terrorist organization, rather than inventing organizational requirements or “control” tests not found in the statute.

• Courts should allow discovery to proceed where the complaint plausibly alleges material support, rather than dismissing cases at the pleading stage by demanding evidentiary proof that can only come from the defendants themselves.

Without such clarifications, the ATA risks becoming a dead letter, permitting media organizations, nonprofits, and other entities to knowingly provide material support to terrorists under the guise of neutrality, freelancing, or indirect relationships. The Newman v. AP dismissal is more than a setback for a single case, it is a judicial rewriting of the law that threatens to render the ATA toothless.

While the appeal in Newman v. AP is crucial, Even a successful appeal will not be enough. Only legislative action can restore the law to its original purpose, ensure that material support claims are actionable, and reaffirm that organizations cannot outsource terrorism while hiding behind procedural technicalities. Without such action, the precedent set here could embolden not just media organizations, but any entity that profit from and facilitate terrorist operations without accountability.

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She did not fall through the cracks. She moved through the system.

In Spain, a 25-year-old woman named Noelia Castillo spent nearly two years navigating the legal and medical process required to end her life. Her story did not begin with euthanasia. It began years earlier, inside a system that had already taken responsibility for her life.

In her adolescence, following her parents’ separation, she spent part of her youth under state supervision. It was during this period, while she was still a minor, that she was sexually assaulted and gang raped. The event marked a turning point, shaping the psychological trajectory that followed into adulthood.

Years later, in 2022, she attempted to take her own life by jumping from a fifth floor. She survived. The fall left her with severe, irreversible injuries and paralysis, and she continued to suffer from chronic physical pain alongside deep psychological issues.

By 2023, she formally applied for euthanasia under Spain’s 2021 law. This did not trigger a single decision, but a structured, multi layered process embedded within the public healthcare system.

She applied for euthanasia under Spain’s law. Doctors evaluated her. A regional commission approved her. Her father fought to stop it, arguing that her mental state made her incapable of choosing death. Courts reviewed the case. Appeals were filed. Even the European Court of Human Rights was asked to intervene.

Every institution that reviewed her case reached the same conclusion. She qualified. Her death was not rushed. It was delayed, 601 days, because the system paused to examine itself. Then it resumed.

Noelia was whisked away into an operating room where her still beating heart was removed for an organ donor, along with her liver kidneys, lungs, and every other useful part. She totaled a resale value of over 2 million euros. Noelia didn't die of 'euthanasia'. She died after being harvested alive.

This is described as a failure of the system. A system that did not protect. A safeguard that did not hold. But that interpretation assumes the system was designed to produce a different outcome. There is another possibility, one that is harder to confront. The system did not fail, it worked exactly as it was designed to work.

The same system that once assumed responsibility for her protection ultimately assumed authority over the terms of her death, through the coordinated action of its medical bodies, oversight commissions, and courts. The case unfolded entirely within Spain’s legal system, but under a framework already shaped by European human rights law, particularly doctrines around autonomy, dignity, and private life developed through the European Court of Human Rights.

But to understand how we got here, you have to step back, not just years, but more than a century. Because Spain’s euthanasia law did not emerge in isolation. It is the product of a much longer transformation, one that began when the West decided that human life could be managed, evaluated, and ultimately governed through systems.

After the Second World War, one word became unusable: eugenics.

Before World War II, eugenics was not fringe. It was not a Nazi idea. It was embedded in policy, particularly in its liberal and scientific form. Francis Galton, a British scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term “eugenics” in the 1880s. He framed it as a rational, scientific approach to improving human populations through selective reproduction. These ideas quickly gained traction across Britain, the United States, and Europe, where they were embraced by academics, policymakers, and reformers as part of modern social planning.

By the early twentieth century, eugenics was enshrined in law. In the U.S., compulsory sterilization began in 1907 and was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927, influencing programs across Europe.

In Scandinavia, eugenics sought a “master Nordic race,” framed as rational social policy rather than overt racial ideology. Sweden formalized it with the Swedish Society for Eugenics (1909) and the State Institute of Racial Biology (1922), integrating sterilization programs into the welfare state. Tens of thousands were sterilized across Sweden, Norway, and Denmark for genetic, mental, or social “unfitness.”

Figures like Gunnar and Alva Myrdal in Sweden and Karl Evang in Norway promoted population planning and state-led public health, linking welfare, social hygiene, and demographic engineering. Evang’s model later influenced the World Health Organization, embedding Scandinavian eugenics into global health governance.

This logic extended beyond national borders. In Denmark and Greenland from the 1960s to 1970s, thousands of Inuit girls and women were subjected to coerced contraception, reflecting the same belief that populations could be engineered through state intervention.

In Britain, movements like the Fabian Society and the Eugenics Society promoted social engineering through reform and expertise, framing population control as planning rather than coercion.

Before World War II, euthanasia was more than theory. Across Europe and the U.S., medical and legal circles debated mercy killing as an extension of eugenics, weighing social utility, hereditary fitness, and economic burden. Doctors quietly administered lethal doses or withheld care, especially in institutions for the disabled and mentally ill.

In Germany, the Nazi Aktion T4 program (1939) formalized euthanasia as state policy, targeting disabled individuals for murder. What was new was not the idea itself, but its scale: decades-old concepts of eugenics and mercy killing were operationalized with bureaucratic and industrial efficiency, claiming an estimated 250,000 lives.

The shock after the war was not only at what had been done, but at how familiar the logic was. Categories like fitness, burden, and quality of life had existed long before. What changed was their exposure in extremis. The association with Nazi atrocities made the ideas politically and morally radioactive, but the belief that human life could be optimized at scale did not vanish—it was repackaged.

After 1945, the language shifted. The questions remained, but they could no longer be asked openly. Eugenics did not disappear because it was rejected; it disappeared because it became politically unusable. For those who had developed the field, the solution was adaptation, not abandonment.

Julian Huxley exemplified this shift. A leading voice in British eugenics before the war, he did not renounce the goal of improving human populations. In UNESCO’s founding policy papers, Huxley acknowledged that overt eugenic policies were politically impossible, but argued that UNESCO should study the “eugenic problem” and prepare the public to reconsider it.

Declassified UNESCO internal memos from the late 1940s and early 1950s discuss the delicate challenges for preserving research into heredity and population variation and and the need to rebrand it. One 1949 memo notes:

While the repudiation of racial hierarchy is essential, scientific inquiry into ‘population differences’ cannot be abandoned. Careful phrasing must ensure that hereditarian research proceeds under acceptable terminology.

In Huxley’s hands, UNESCO became the vehicle for this “evolutionary humanism,” a sanitized version of eugenics meant to guide humanity, slowly, toward a pre-defined engineered global future. Julian Huxley, in outlining the philosophical foundations of UNESCO, asserted that the organization must prepare humanity for a deeper transformation. He stated that UNESCO

“must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise.” “This political unification in some sort of world government,” he said, “this will be required for the definitive attainment of the aims of UNESCO.”

To that end he stated, UNESCO’s educational mission should not merely inform, but actively shape public consciousness.

“familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.”

What followed was not a break, but continuity through transformation. The same intellectual networks, the same mentors, and often the same individuals moved across institutions, from academia into policy, from national governments into international organizations, and from scientific societies into global governance structures. There was a revolving door of influence in which ideas were refined, renamed, and redeployed across different domains. The people changed titles. The institutions changed names. The underlying framework remained connected.

After 1945, these individuals and ideas moved into new institutions. Julian Huxley, former president of the British Eugenics Society, became the first Director General of UNESCO and explicitly argued that eugenic goals should be preserved under new terminology. In his 1946 founding document for UNESCO, he stated openly that while eugenics had become politically unacceptable, the underlying problem remained. The task, as he described it, was to make what was now unthinkable, thinkable again.

“It will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care… so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”—Julian Huxley, UNESCO founding policy paper, 1946.

Not through force. Through language. Through normalization.

This is the moment where the shift becomes visible.

Eugenics became population health.
Selection became reproductive choice.
Elimination became end of life care.
Control became family planning.
Fitness became quality of life.
The unfit became the vulnerable.
Mercy killing became assisted dying.

The language softened. The structure did not. It had been translated. And once translated, it could scale.

Chisholm, a Canadian military psychiatrist and former deputy health minister during World War II, combined expertise in psychological warfare with a radical vision for society. He did not advocate eugenics, but believed psychological science could reshape populations. He saw traditional morality, especially Judeo-Christian ethics—as a source of repression, mental illness, and war.

For Chisholm, mental health was collective, an issue of “ideological hygiene.” Nationalism, religion, and patriotism were psychological diseases to be cured. He promoted reprogramming children to eliminate these tendencies, asserting that the state, not the family, should shape values. He believed psychotherapy should not only treat mental illness but also reshape how society understands morality, eradicating inherited notions of “right” and “wrong.”

Andrija Štampar, WHO co-founder, argued that medicine should shape society itself, believed that public health should not merely treat disease but improve the “quality” of the population. Operating within the emerging UN system, often on the same committees, they transformed eugenic aims into public health language.

Štampar, born in Croatia, he became Director of Yugoslav Health Service in 1919. He believed that medicine was inseparable from ideology and humans’ purpose was “serving society.” His framework wasn’t about treating disease—it was about instilling habits, values, and loyalties conducive to a well-managed, compliant population.

“We must educate the human being from childhood to be a good social element, physically and mentally developed for the purpose of serving society.”

Štampar believed doctors should act as “architects of society,” molding citizens through public health programs to create ‘better human stock’ that aimed to improve the population’s genetic “quality.”

“It is not enough to cure disease. We must create better people.”

WHO operationalized this vision. In the 1950s and 1960s, it established health demonstration areas where sanitation, reproduction, behavior, and medical care were managed together, turning entire populations into test cases for centralized health systems. These sites laid the foundation for modern social medicine, where healthcare organizes and manages populations at scale.

This was institutional, not accidental. Through WHO, UNESCO, and the UN, a new vocabulary, mental health, quality of life, social well-being, was standardized and exported globally. These terms were functional, justifying intervention while remaining flexible for future adaptation. Once embedded, the language began to normalize the framework.

By the 1950s and 1960s, this framework began to scale, and this is where the European layer becomes critical. People were no longer being told that populations should be improved. They were being told that health systems should optimize outcomes. That societies should manage resources. That individuals should have autonomy over reproduction. The underlying logic remained intact, but it no longer needed to declare itself. The same Scandinavian models that pioneered sterilization and social engineering became the blueprint for European welfare states, and those models were gradually embedded into what would become the European Union.

Elite foundations like Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie didn’t just donate, they steered the agenda. While member states paid for the machinery, these foundations financed the ideas: pilot programs, behavioral experiments, education reform. Their funding came with strings, embedding private ideological goals, quietly turning “health” and “education” into tools for engineered progress.

Figures like Karl Evang bridged national and international systems, while networks tied to the Rockefeller Foundation and Population Council, through figures like John D. Rockefeller III, Frederick Osborn, and Frank Notestein, worked alongside UN bodies to standardize population policy globally. At the same time, early European integration, through institutions that would later evolve into the European Economic Community, began aligning social and health policy frameworks across states.

This is the point where national policy becomes transnational.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the system shifted into bioethics, with Europe as a central laboratory. Joseph Fletcher’s situational ethics reframed moral decision-making, while Daniel Callahan’s Hastings Center institutionalized the debates. In the UK, Mary Warnock translated contested questions about life into regulatory frameworks. These ideas spread to European-level bodies, notably the Council of Europe, which began developing continent-wide bioethical standards.

When euthanasia entered European law, it was not a radical break. It reflected decades of evolving language that treated life as measurable and, in some circumstances, terminable. The 1997 Oviedo Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine codified this principle, enabling supranational governance of medical decision-making. Figures like Javier Solana worked within the same institutional ecosystem merging ethics, law, and policy across borders.

Meanwhile, the European Court of Human Rights shaped jurisprudence on autonomy, dignity, and private life, creating a feedback loop between national and European law that underpins today’s assisted dying debates.

By the 1990s and 2000s, euthanasia and assisted dying entered national law within a shared European framework. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg formalized regulated systems, reflecting a continent-wide normalization of institutional oversight over life-and-death decisions.

By the 2010s and 2020s, the system had matured globally. In Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) expanded rapidly after legalization, with policymakers and ethicists in dialogue with European counterparts. In 2022 alone, more than 13,000 Canadians died under MAID, with nearly 100,000 cumulative deaths since 2016. Eligibility has broadened to include chronic illness, disability, and mental health, sometimes influenced by social factors like poverty or housing

.In the UK, assisted dying remains illegal, but parliamentary proposals and court challenges have normalized the same language of dignity, autonomy, and managed death. In Spain, euthanasia was legalized under Pedro Sanchez in 2021 and integrated into healthcare, adopting a model shaped by decades of European and UN frameworks. The law reflects not only national politics but a broader continental consensus on autonomy, dignity, and state-guided end-of-life care.

What was unthinkable after WWII now is debated, regulated, and codified into law. Step by step, the system made the unthinkable thinkable.

Once thinkable, it became arguable.
Once arguable, it became acceptable.
Once acceptable, it became policy.

This is the system that processed Noelia Castillo. Her case was not an anomaly, it was the endpoint of a structure built across Scandinavia, Britain, the UN, and European institutions. Her suffering, rights, and eligibility were all evaluated through criteria shaped by bioethics and legal doctrine. Nothing about her case fell outside the system.

The language changed at each stage: eugenics became public health, then population policy, then bioethics, then rights, autonomy, and dignity. Each shift made the system appear more humane and lawful, but the structure remained: measuring life, evaluating suffering, and authorizing death under defined conditions.

The question is not whether the system intends good. The question is whether we understand what it is designed to do. Cases like this are not failures, they are outcomes. They are the point.

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The district court did not just dismiss Parizer v. AJP Educational Foundation, Inc. (AMP); it effectively rewrote the law, raising the bar so high that networked support for terrorism could never be challenged in any court.

In May 2024, victims of the October 7th attack filed a lawsuit against AJP Educational Foundation (American Muslims for Palestine, or AMP), National Students for Justice in Palestine, which oversees various SJP campus chapters and its leaders. Plaintiffs alleged they operate as part of a broader ecosystem tied to Hamas, coordinating with foreign terrorist organizations to influence students to serve as foot soldiers for Hamas on campus and beyond, in violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA). By August 2024, the case had been dismissed and now awaits a potential reversal in the court of appeals.

What makes this dismissal hard to ignore is that the underlying network is real, not hypothetical. This was not a case built on speculation; the plaintiffs relied on a well-documented network, tracing specific activities that connected the defendants to terrorist operations.

AMP’s leadership and lineage are well-documented. Investigations and prior litigation tied IAP, CAIR, and the Holy Land Foundation through the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, created to advance Hamas’s objectives in the U.S. Figures like Nihad Awad were identified within that structure. Organizations once operating openly were shut down, prosecuted, or restructured. AMP emerges directly from that lineage. Its founder, Hatem Bazian, did not build something new; he built an entity performing many of the same functions under a different name.

The complaint traced all these entities, individuals, and functions across time, showing continuity between IAP and AMP, overlapping leadership, shared operational goals, and structural links to previously adjudicated terror-financing networks. It detailed AMP’s contemporary operations, training activists, producing coordinated messaging, funding campus infrastructure, and managing financial flows through AJP.

The plaintiffs’ claim is straightforward: the network did not disappear; it rebranded. The case does not treat AMP, AJP, SJP, and related entities as isolated actors. Instead, it situates them within a documented lineage of terror-linked organizations, demonstrating continuity, coordination, and ongoing activity that the court ignored.

The defendants’ strategy was clear: they did not try to dispute the facts themselves; they aimed to render them irrelevant. They did not dispute the network’s existence, its historical ties to the Holy Land Foundation or Hamas, or its continuity. Instead, they reframed the case around jurisdiction, causation, and the narrowing the scope of the ATA (for U.S. nationals) and the Alien Tort Statute (ATS, for non-U.S. nationals). The consequences are profound. They want plaintiffs to no longer merely confront a single organization; but face a legal environment where courts preemptively narrow liability, constrain evidence, and require proof that the statute never demanded. The goal is to shift the law in practice and making enforcement of material support statutes virtually impossible.

On causation, the defendants argued that even if the organizations engaged in advocacy, fundraising, or coordination, the plaintiffs failed to establish a sufficiently direct causal link between those activities and specific terrorist acts. In other words, they shifted the case away from whether there was material support to a terrorist organization and toward whether plaintiffs could prove a direct connection to a particular terror attack, and the court agreed. In making this argument, the defendants relied on Twitter v. Taamneh, misapplying it to require a direct line from U.S.-based conduct to the October 7th attack. While Taamneh also involved the ATA, that case concerned something specific, aiding-and-abetting. By contrast, this case alleges material support to a terrorist organization. Those are different claims, with two different thresholds.

What happened here is not that the plausibility of the claims was rejected. Rather, the court raised the standard for what counts as material support to terrorism under the ATA, treating the allegations themselves as insufficient unless plaintiffs could demonstrate a direct link between the defendants’ U.S.-based conduct and a specific terrorist attack. By accepting the defendants’ framing on causation, the court effectively imposed a requirement that the statute does not contain. That is not just a higher bar. It is a different law.

The Anti-Terrorism Act was not written to require plaintiffs to trace a straight, uninterrupted line from a U.S.-based nonprofit to a specific act of violence, or to finance terrorism. If that were the standard, the statute would be functionally unusable in any case involving networks, intermediaries, and layered organizational structures. Congress understood that terrorism does not operate through clean, linear transactions. It operates through systems, financial, logistical, and ideological, designed to obscure direct links. That is precisely why “material support” is defined at it is. And that is exactly the type of support the statute was written to address.

The court went further, by dismissing claims without considering the continuity and structure of the network, the ruling insulated rebranded entities from scrutiny. Organizations like AMP, AJP, and SJP are part of a lineage of terror-linked networks, including the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and the Holy Land Foundation, previously shut down and convicted for providing material support to Hamas. Ignoring this institutional history allows known networks to evolve and rebrand while remaining effectively immune from legal challenge. The complaint does not ask the court to assume guilt by association. It asks the court to recognize continuity as a basis for inquiry. That distinction matters. Because if continuity is not enough to justify plausibility, then networks like this become functionally immune from scrutiny. Each new entity becomes a clean slate, regardless of who runs it or how closely it mirrors what came before.

The dismissal also redefined jurisdiction for foreign plaintiffs under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). The court held that the non-U.S. plaintiffs could not establish jurisdiction because they did not allege that AMP perpetrated the October 7 attacks or provided support specifically for that attack. In other words, the court required plaintiffs to show a direct link between domestic conduct and a particular overseas terrorist act.

By insisting on proof of support for a specific attack, the court effectively narrows ATS jurisdiction to only those cases where domestic conduct can be tied to a single, identifiable act of violence. This ignores the statute’s purpose: to allow foreign victims to seek redress for serious violations of international norms, including patterns of coordinated violence or support for terror networks, without requiring proof of a direct causal link to one particular attack.

In short, the court elevated the jurisdictional threshold far beyond what the ATS has historically required, dismissing claims that plausibly allege involvement in a broader terror-linked network simply because plaintiffs did not connect every act of domestic support to a single overseas incident.

Finally, the court was also demanding evidence that could only be obtained through discovery, rather than assessing whether the allegations themselves were plausible. At this early stage, plaintiffs are not required to prove their case; the judge’s role is simply to determine whether the claims, if taken as true, are sufficient to proceed. By treating the complaint as inadequate without pre-discovery proof, the court effectively raised the bar for plausibility, requiring plaintiffs to prove their case before it is even heard, and making it essentially impossible to bring any future claims, even when well-supported and credible.

The dispute is not over the existence of the network. It is over whether that network and their actions are enough to justify a case to be heard. By treating the absence of internal records, cords only obtainable through discovery, as a failure of the complaint itself, the court did more than dismiss a case. It shifted the burden in a way that affects every future case.

After the dismissal, plaintiffs had the option to amend their complaint. They didn’t. That decision is not a sign of weakness. In many cases, it signals the opposite. Amending would have meant accepting the court’s framing, that the problem was insufficient evidence rather than an improperly applied legal standard. It would have required adding more facts without access to the discovery needed to obtain them. That is a dead end.

By moving directly to appeal, plaintiffs appear to be forcing the real issue: whether the district court raised the pleading bar beyond what the law allows and hopefully confront that standard directly. This case is not just about whether one nonprofit crossed a legal line. It is about whether plaintiffs are still allowed to test that question in court. That is what must be argued at the appellate courts.

If a complaint that maps out a multi-entity network, ties it to previously adjudicated structures, and alleges coordinated support is not enough to reach discovery, then the threshold has moved. And once that threshold moves, it does not move back on its own. If “material support” can only mean a direct link between the defendants actions and a specific terror attack, then the law was changed. That is why this appeal matters.

The implications of the district court’s dismissal in Parizer v. AJP Educational Foundation, Inc. extend far beyond this single case, and far beyond future cases. The dismissal in Parizer ignores how in an existing case the exact same claim and evidence was considered enough for plausibility. Existing lawsuits risk being dismissed not on the merits already proven, but because they fail to meet a newly created, artificially high threshold that Congress never intended, and other courts never used.

Nearly three decades after David Boim, a 17-year-old American studying in Jerusalem, was shot and killed by Hamas terrorists at a bus stop in 1996, his family continues to pursue justice in U.S. courts. In 2000, the Boims sued several Chicago-area nonprofits, including the Holy Land Foundation and the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), for providing material support to terrorists under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act. While they secured a $156 million judgment, collecting damages has been a persistent challenge. The new litigation also focuses on American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) as an alleged “alter ego” of IAP, which was convicted in 2004. The Boims also claimed that AMP maintains the same leadership, goals, and activities as IAP, continuing to facilitate fundraising for Hamas-linked groups, a claim supported by the 2015 IPT report.

This case is not an isolated anomaly. In related litigation we see the same network and the same tactics emerging: judges and defense lawyers leveraging procedural maneuvers to subtly reshape what counts as material support. Many of the defendants and individuals named in these cases are linked through family, organizational, or professional networks.

Notably, Zarefah Baroud appears as a defendant in this case. Her father, editor-in-chief of the Palestine Chronicle, appears as a defendant in Jan v. People Media Project (Palestine Chronicle), where the court tied a clearly defined statutory claim to unresolved frameworks under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), importing ambiguity where Congress had deliberately provided clarity. By blending legal doctrines, courts are eroding the meaning of a law that was intended to prevent support to designated terrorist organizations before waiting for an act of violence.

Taken together, these maneuvers clearly aim to rewrite statutory definitions, not through Congress, but through incremental judicial reinterpretation. Rulings in one case influence outcomes in others, effectively weakening the enforceability of U.S. anti-terrorism statutes and undermining Congress’s clear intent.

This is why congressional action is critical. Without clarifying that judges and defense attorneys cannot unilaterally rewrite statutory standards, the law as written becomes toothless. Plaintiffs are left unable to test well-supported allegations of networked terror-linked activity in court, allowing organizations with known ties to convicted entities to operate with near-total immunity. Congressional intervention is necessary to ensure that the ATA and ATS function as intended, preserving both the ability to hold networks accountable and the integrity of existing litigation.

Congress must:

1. Reaffirm the statutory standard clearly and explicitly

• Reaffirm the pleading-stage standard: Plaintiffs should not need to prove direct operational linkage before discovery; plausibility is sufficient.

• Define continuity as a valid basis for inference: Networks evolve and reorganize. Continuity in leadership, goals, and operations should justify inquiry.

• Prevent judges from raising the bar beyond statutory language: Courts should not treat the international consequences of U.S.-based activity as a barrier to jurisdiction.

• Reinforce aiding-and-abetting liability: Knowing support for a designated terrorist organization is sufficient, without requiring knowledge or participation of a specific attack.

• Courts are not to import external doctrines that raise the threshold

• Explicitly state that material support statutes are to be interpreted independently of frameworks like aiding-and-abetting liability under the ATS

2. Reinforce the preventative nature of the statute
Congress can clarify that the purpose of the law is to stop support before harm occurs, not after intent is fully proven. That distinction matters. Without it, courts can slowly shift the law into something reactive instead of preventative.

3. Conduct oversight and create a record
Congress can hold hearings examining how courts are applying material support statutes, especially in cases where:

• Discovery is restricted

• Standards appear to shift

• Or external doctrines are being introduced

This creates a record that can guide future legislation and judicial interpretation, including in this case.

Without clarification, the law will not be repealed, but it will cease to function as intended, allowing networked support for terrorism to escape judicial scrutiny.

This case is not about one nonprofit crossing a line, it is not even about the individual network. It is about whether plaintiffs are still allowed to test that question in court. If a complaint mapping a multi-entity network and alleging coordinated support is insufficient to reach discovery, the threshold has shifted, and that shift is unlikely to reverse itself. That is why this appeal matters. It will determine whether these questions can even be asked and whether Congress must act to ensure the statute works as written.

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I was catching up on Jan v. People Media Project (Palestine Chronicle), and what from the surface looks like a routine procedural move is should be treated as something far more consequential, an attempt to redefine what “Material Support to Terrorism” means.

The Palestine Chronicle is as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, meaning American taxpayers are subsidizing an outlet with alleged ties to terrorism. According to the lawsuit, the The Palestine Chronicle provided material support to Hamas by employing an individual who was not only affiliated with a terrorist organization, but was directly involved in holding three hostages captive. The case also alleged that Abdallah Aljamal told the hostages that “Hamas was going to ensure that the United States, as well as Jews and Israelis, are hated everywhere and that Hamas in Gaza was coordinating with its allies, including its allies in the media and on college campuses, to foment hatred against Israel and Jews.”

In January, the court stayed the case pending the Supreme Court’s decision in Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe, a case that deals with a very different legal question: whether a U.S. company can be held liable under the Alien Tort Statute for allegedly aiding and abetting human rights abuses carried out by a foreign government. In Cisco, plaintiffs claim the company helped build surveillance systems used by Chinese authorities to track and repress dissidents, raising unresolved questions about corporate liability, intent, and the scope of U.S. courts over conduct abroad.

On paper, that sounds like judicial caution. In reality, it raises a far more serious concern: the quiet reopening of a legal standard that Congress already defined.

A settled statute, treated like an open question

Cisco deals with aiding-and-abetting liability under the Alien Tort Statute, an area of law the Supreme Court has repeatedly narrowed and questioned. It is unsettled, contested, and still evolving.

But the case against the Palestine Chronicle is not operating in that space. The case at hand does not rely on this unsettled, judge-made framework, but on clearly defined U.S. statutes governing material support to terrorist organizations, making the decision to tie the two cases together far from straightforward.

The Palestine Chronicle case centers on alleged material support to a terrorist organization under 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, a statute Congress wrote with precision and intent. Its meaning is not ambiguous. The Supreme Court already addressed it in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, making clear that liability does not require intent to commit violence, only knowing support to a designated terrorist organization. That clarity is not incidental. It is the entire point.

The danger is not delay, it’s redefinition

By tying the case against the Palestine Chronicle to Cisco, the court risks doing something far more consequential than pausing a case. It risks importing uncertainty from one legal doctrine into another where uncertainty was deliberately removed.

Material support laws were designed to be preventative. Congress made a conscious decision: in the context of terrorism, waiting for intent to become explicit is too late. The law therefore focuses on knowledge, not shared purpose.

But once courts begin to blur that standard, the definition itself starts to shift. And that is the real danger. Redefining “material support” does not require rewriting the statute. It can happen gradually, through interpretation, through comparison, through procedural decisions like this one.

Redefinition doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in steps. “Knowledge” begins to be treated as insufficient. Courts start looking for stronger evidence of intent or alignment. Indirect support becomes harder to classify as actionable. The threshold for liability quietly rises. At that point, the law still exists on paper, but it no longer functions as written. A statute designed to prevent support before violence occurs risks becoming something else entirely: a framework that tolerates ambiguity until it is too late.

The procedural pattern matters

The sequence in this case only deepens the concern.

The court first limited discovery, restricting access to non-public evidence. The case was then dismissed for “lack of evidence.” And in between, and now it is getting tied to a Supreme Court case from an entirely different legal domain.

Before the stay, Jan v. People Media Project had already moved into substantive litigation, where the central issue was whether the defendants knowingly provided support to a Hamas-affiliated individual. Plaintiffs were not relying on speculation, they put forward expert testimony and evidentiary arguments showing that Abdullah Aljamal’s ties to Hamas were widely known and readily discoverable through even basic due diligence. At the same time, defendants sought to exclude those experts, effectively attempting to limit what evidence the court could consider.

In short, this was not a weak or undeveloped case awaiting clarity, it was already testing concrete evidence, credibility, and compliance at the core of the claims.

Each step can be defended in isolation. Together, they form a pattern: narrowing the pathway for claims while simultaneously raising the bar for what qualifies as sufficient proof.

That is not just case management. It shapes outcomes.

Context on the Judge is not irrelevant

Tiffany M. Cartwright was appointed as a U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Washington by President Joe Biden and confirmed in July 2023 at just 38 years old, making her one of the youngest federal judges on the bench. Prior to her appointment, her background was in civil rights litigation, including high-profile lawsuits against law enforcement while working at MacDonald Hoague & Bayless.

Her nomination was strongly backed by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of over 230 organizations that lobbies Congress on issues such as judicial reform, immigration, and voting rights, and has received tens of millions in funding from major foundations including the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and others. She was also supported by the Alliance for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based network backed by similar funding sources, which actively works to promote judicial nominees aligned with progressive legal agendas.

Cartwright’s confirmation passed narrowly in a 50–47 Senate vote, with unified Democratic support. Given her age, relatively limited judicial experience, and the politically active network of organizations behind her nomination, her role in cases with significant national implications raises legitimate concerns about how legal standards may be interpreted and applied.

Her radical leftist views became evident in a previous ruling when she struck down the 30-day residency requirement for voter registration before the last November elections, a requirement embedded in the state constitution.

That context alone does not determine outcomes. But when decisions begin to move in a direction that effectively reopens settled law, it becomes relevant to ask whether this is motivated by inexperience and caution, or something more consequential involving attempts in shaping judicial philosophy and legal interpretation.

Possible Tax Fraud by the Palestine Chronicle

But the case deposition record goes further. Evidence and depositions raises serious questions about how payments were made and documented, pointing to practices that appear to fall well below basic compliance and recordkeeping standards for a U.S.-based 501(c)(3). The use of informal or poorly tracked payment channels does not just go to liability in this case; it raises broader concerns about financial oversight and whether the organization is meeting its legal obligations under U.S. tax law. Regardless of the ultimate outcome here, the state of the financial records alone would seem to warrant closer scrutiny, potentially even an IRS investigation into the organization’s practices.

Since before the case was even filed, there were already serious questions about the Palestine Chronicle‘s in regards to possible tax fraud. Reported by Eitan Fischberger, the People Media Project (the entity behind the Palestine Chronicle) has reportedly filed documents with the IRS not matching the filings with the State of Washington. To the IRS it claim it has gross receipts of under $50,000, allowing it to avoid filing the more detailed Form 990. However, in filings with the State of Washington, the organization reported much higher gross receipts.

This discrepancy raised questions about potential tax fraud. and on July 9, 2024, In a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, GOP lawmakers have urged the U.S. Department of Justice and the IRS to investigate the Palestine Chronicle and its parent organization, People Media Project, for multiple potential legal violations. These potential legal violations include providing material support to Hamas, violating tax laws, and filing false tax returns. The lawmakers called for a full investigation into these serious allegations, urging both the DOJ and the IRS to take immediate action.

On October 29th, 2024, Rep. Jason Smith, Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, called on six state attorneys general to investigate terror-linked nonprofits and consider revoking their charitable status. These nonprofits are alleged to have ties to terrorism, tax fraud, or have been identified as being largely behind organizing the antisemitic protests in universities. One of these nonprofits includes the Palestine Chronicle.

The problem goes even further, Ari Hoffman reported, in an exclusive, that despite requests from Israel’s Consul General in the Pacific Northwest for an investigation into the Palestine Chronicle, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson remained silent and ignored the request and dozens of antisemitic incidents targeting Washington’s Jewish Community since October 7th, 2023.

A copy of the letter, was obtained exclusively by Hoffman. It reads:

“I am writing to you following recent publications according to which Abdallah Aljamal, who was involved in terrorist activity in Gaza, also had ties with the ‘Palestine Chronicle,’ a Washington-based 501C3.”

“As you recall, on October 7, 2023, the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas launched an unprovoked brutal attack against Israel committing countless atrocities including the rape, mutilation, decapitation, and burning of hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians.”

“Hamas also abducted 251 Israelis including babies, children, young girls, and the elderly. 120 of them, including eight Americans, are still being held in Gaza experiencing unimaginable horrors at the hands of their terrorist captors. I call on your office to look into this matter in order to ensure that American public funds do not end up in the hands of individuals involved in terrorist activity and in the hands of those who employ them.”

Where Congress comes in

This is where the issue moves beyond the courtroom. Once courts begin to blur or redefine what “material support to an FTO” means, the responsibility shifts back to Congress, not to create new law, but to reassert the meaning of the law that already exists. Congress has several tools, and at this point, they are not optional, they are necessary:

1. Reaffirm the statutory standard clearly and explicitly
Congress can amend 18 U.S.C. § 2339B to restate, in unmistakable terms, that:

• Knowledge is sufficient

• Intent to further violence is not required

• Courts are not to import external doctrines that raise the threshold

• Explicitly state that material support statutes are to be interpreted independently of frameworks like aiding-and-abetting liability under the ATS

Not because the law is unclear, but because it is being treated as if it were. This would directly address what is happening here: The blending of distinct legal standards into something new.

2. Reinforce the preventative nature of the statute
Congress can clarify that the purpose of the law is to stop support before harm occurs, not after intent is fully proven. That distinction matters. Without it, courts can slowly shift the law into something reactive instead of preventative.

3. Conduct oversight and create a record
Congress can hold hearings examining how courts are applying material support statutes, especially in cases where:

• Discovery is restricted

• Standards appear to shift

• Or external doctrines are being introduced

This creates a record that can guide future legislation and judicial interpretation, including in this case.

Why this cannot be ignored

If this were just one case, it might not matter.

Legal standards do not change only through landmark rulings. They change through accumulation, through small decisions, procedural moves, and subtle reinterpretations that, over time, reshape how laws function in practice.

And Jan v. People Media Project does not exist in isolation. It is part of a broader wave of litigation targeting U.S.-based nonprofits accused of providing material support to Hamas in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. One such case involves American Muslims for Palestine, where overlapping individuals and networks appear across multiple complaints associated to organizations like CAIR and the Holy Land Foundation. Notably, Zarefah Baroud, the daughter of Ramzy Baroud, editor-in-chief of the Palestine Chronicle, is also named as a defendant in separate, but related litigation.

What becomes increasingly relevant is not just the individuals, but the ecosystem surrounding them, including what Zarefah Baroud herself described as a “network of lawyers who make their work possible.” The statement raises a deeper question: who are these legal networks, and how far do they extend? The existence of parallel and coordinated legal support structure.

This is why it matters. These networks have the capacity to shape litigation strategy, influence discovery, and ultimately affect how courts interpret material support statutes across multiple cases. When the same individuals, organizations, and legal infrastructures appear repeatedly across cases, what might seem like isolated procedural decisions begin to take on broader significance. A shift in how one court treats evidence, intent, or liability does not stay confined to a single case, it echoes across a growing body of litigation.

Taken together, these cases are not just about individual organizations. They are collectively testing how U.S. law defines and enforces “material support” in real-world contexts. And that is precisely why incremental shifts, like staying one case based on an unrelated legal doctrine, matter. Because when applied across multiple cases, those shifts don’t stay procedural. They become precedent in practice.

“Material support to an FTO” was never meant to be flexible. It was meant to be clear, enforceable, and preventative. If that clarity is allowed to erode, even indirectly, the consequences extend far beyond this case. They affect how the United States identifies, prosecutes, and ultimately deters support for terrorist organizations.

Congress already defined what material support to terrorism means. The Supreme Court already upheld that definition. The question now is whether that definition will remain intact, or whether Congress will allow for it to be reinterpreted through legal pathways that were never meant to apply.

Once a clear law becomes questionable, it stops being a standard, and becomes a suggestion.

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