DV Journal

(This article first appeared in Broad + Liberty.)

Many locations where organizations linked to George Soros have funded a national wave of anti-Israel protests on college campuses which directly correlate to prosecutors whose elections were also funded by Soros. This week, Philadelphia joined this unfortunate group with encampments appearing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Soros-funded prosecutors have dropped or refused charges against protesters who have been arrested for a myriad of offenses related to the antisemitic occupations on American college campuses. The correlation in funding between groups committing intimidation, harassment, and assaults toward Jews and the elected law enforcement officials refusing to prosecute them raises uncomfortable questions of conflict and corruption.

As noted in a new report from New York Post, the National Students for Justice for Palestine organization is funded by a number of nonprofits that themselves are funded by Soros and others. At three colleges, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), a Soros-funded group, pays “fellows” who start protests on campus. The Post reports that the USCPR pays up to $7,800 to community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for campus-based “fellows” who are expected to spend eight hours per week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations,” and are trained to “rise up, to revolution.”

Since 2017, the USCPR has received at least $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations. The group has also received $355,000 in funds from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019.

Coincidentally, the United States has 70 prosecutors in office whose elections were funded by Soros-established nonprofit groups, down from 82 after twelve left office in 2022. A map from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund shows the prosecutors scattered across the country. This includes Travis County Attorney Delia Garza, who dismissed all 57 cases resulting from arrests at unlawful Anti-Israel protests at the University of Texas at Austin last week. In a Texas Tribune report, Garza said that “law enforcement lacked probable cause in the 57 cases she dismissed.”

“Legal concerns were raised by defense counsel,” Diana Melendez, a spokesperson for the Travis County Attorney’s Office, said in a Thursday statement. “The Court affirmed and ordered the release of those individuals.”

Garza, Austin’s Soros-funded prosecutor’s contention that the 57 arrests brought to her office by Texas State Troopers, Austin, and UT Police officers directly contradicts the evidence broadcasted in multiple videos broadcasted in social and news media outlets. The arrests occurred during a chaotic demonstration at UT-Austin, where more than 500 students walked out of class to demand that the university divest from manufacturers supplying Israel weapons on its strikes on Gaza.

In a statement to KXAN, a UT spokesperson said that 26 of the arrestees were unaffiliated with the university, which would automatically result in trespassing charges once the protesters refused to leave when ordered by UT police.

Former President of the University of Texas Students for Justice in Palestine, Nidaa Lafi, a fellow for the USCPR was spotted at an anti-Israel encampment Wednesday at the University of Texas at Dallas giving a speech and demanding Israel end its war in Gaza. Lafi was detained in January for blocking the road where President Biden’s motorcade was set to travel for the funeral of the late Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, whom she used to work for.

Arrests were also made on the campuses of USC and UCLA in Los Angeles, where Soros-funded George Gascon serves as the District Attorney.

The center of these unlawful protests is at Columbia University, in Manhattan where Soros-funded Alvin Bragg serves as District Attorney. Over 100 arrests have been made by the NYPD resulting from the Columbia protests, but all have since been released. The Columbia encampment was organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Within Our Lifetime. According to an analysis by the Post, all three of the organizations received money from groups Soros is linked to.

Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the same group responsible for setting up and funding Political Action Committees to fund progressive prosecutors, has given in total over $20 million to the progressive nonprofit the Tides Foundation, which has given money to groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace. As Campus Reform has reported, the Open Society Foundation has given $650,000 to Jewish Voice for Peace, which cited “Israeli apartheid and occupation” as “the source of all this violence.”

A spokesperson for the Open Society Foundation told the New York Post: “Open Society has funded a broad spectrum of US groups that have advocated for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis and for peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel and the OPT,” the spokesperson said. “This funding is a matter of public record, disclosed on our website, fully compliant with US laws, and is part of our commitment to continuing open debate that is ultimately the only hope for peace in the region.”

If criminal groups and the prosecutors responsible for charging them share funding sources, does that constitute corruption or a clear conflict of interest?

Furthermore, questions can be raised about a two-tiered criminal justice system, especially in light of the Special Counsel, Arizona, and Georgia election interference cases against President Donald Trump and his associates, where tenuous racketeering and conspiracy charges are levied even many years after  the alleged crimes were committed.

“The conflict issue requires an analysis of the closeness of the relationship,” said former federal prosecutor and Chester County DA Thomas Hogan. “I never recused myself from prosecuting an official from my own political party, having prosecuted the close friend of my own campaign finance director. Of course, since I was prosecuting, not declining to prosecute, the dynamics were different.”

Opining on the apparent absence of an investigation or prosecution at a federal level, Hogan continued, “You might think of it as trying to figure out if the DA should recuse themselves [for example], if the child of a major donor is charged with a crime.”

I just spent two weeks in Italy. Since travel writing is not my forte, I’ll leave it to Rick Steves and Stanley Tucci to cover the culture and history of my ancestral land. And while I had the serendipitous opportunity to observe what happens when a prime minister resigns, you’d be better off reading Politico for the ramifications of the upcoming Italian elections.

But there is something I feel comfortable discussing in this forum as a woman, a lawyer, an American citizen, and someone who has a deep appreciation for justice. It’s the idea that you can live in a large metropolitan city filled with people of different nationalities, ethnicities, and social classes and feel safe.

I am not talking about my hometown Philadelphia. There, you are as likely to see a bullet flying in front of your face as you are to glimpse a butterfly drifting from flower to flower. There is no way of hiding the obvious: The City of Brotherly Love is a cesspool of violence, administrative incompetence, official negligence, a betrayal of civic trust, and a dereliction of duty to those who are trapped within its geographical prison bars. I have spent 60 years in this place, give or take the periods I escaped to Europe, and it has never been as dangerous, as hostile, as bellicose, or as close to the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia as it is today. Enough sugar coating: Philadelphia is dying.

I’ve tried to convince myself that this isn’t the case and that there are still vestiges of the city I have loved for well over a half-century. I walk past the historical markers of my childhood and focus on the profound significance they have for our country, trying desperately to ignore the homeless person defecating in the street near the Liberty Bell, or the strung-out addict gazing at me through his oblivion from the corner of Betsey Ross’ house. And when I take public transportation, which I do rarely these days, I try and huddle in a corner so the feral, rabid kids who ride the rails with their face-covering hoodies don’t assault me, as one did last October.

Being in Italy was a revelation. I saw a city bigger than Philadelphia shine with the glow of three millennia of history, of art, of culture. And I immersed myself in an atmosphere that–while urban–did not make me tremble with the fear that some criminal was lurking in a dark, stone-paved alleyway.

I walked alone, at midnight, along the Tiber and felt no fear. I approached strangers to seek direction, free from the anxiety that grips me in my hometown when I sprint down Broad Street, or Samson, or Market, looking over my shoulder.

So there was particular irony in the fact that one of the first things that I read upon returning from Rome this week was a piece in The Wall Street Journal from George Soros explaining why he will continue to use his money to destroy my city and others. Of course, that’s not the way he put it. His exact words were, “I have supported the election (and more recently the re-election) of prosecutors who support reform. I have done it transparently, and I have no intention of stopping.”

Those “prosecutors who support reform” are people like the recently recalled Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. They are like Alvin Bragg, a shameless provocateur in New York. They are like George Gascon, the arrogant prosecutor in LA. And they are, most importantly for those of us in the Delaware Valley, like Larry Krasner, who has presided over the greatest spike in homicide and violent crime in Philadelphia in over three decades.

I will not quote each of Soros’ lies in this column because his methods and machinations are well known to those of us suffering from the heavy effect of his wealth. He has purchased prosecutors who have brought mayhem and death to cities across the country and has tried to package it as “reform.”

What I will say is that his blatant, unapologetic support for people like Krasner who never met a criminal he didn’t like and who refuses to prosecute gun crimes while blaming Republicans for respecting the Second Amendment is proof positive that we are viewed as puppets in the vanity play written by Soros and his progressive colleagues, something akin to the dark Gotham of Batman lore.

If I could afford to move to Rome, I would. Soros has not yet cast his long shadow over my ancestral home.

But until that moment when I can live in a place where addicts are called addicts and not “patients” and criminals are treated as criminals and not “victims,” I will just have to continue speaking out against the destructive nihilism of a man who thinks he can buy the world, and remake it in his toxic image.

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