As part of an all-out attack on American freedom and conservative politics, Joe Biden has called for the Justice Department to reinstate a controversial Obama-era “slush fund” for left-wing organizations. A new report from the EU reveals how over $35 million in taxpayer money went to fund George Soros’ Open Society network 2019.
by Richard Abelson
On paper, the European Union is prohibited from funding political campaigns and organizations with taxpayer money. But just like in the case of Biden/Obama’s USAID and the State Department, the EU has secretly created a web of funding for so-called “Non-Governmental Organizations” (NGOs) that push a left-wing agenda focused on illegal migration, “No Borders” and “combating hate speech and propaganda”, which is never leftist “hate speech and propaganda”.
Left-wing filmmaker Oliver Stone documented the collaboration between the Obama/Biden State Department and George Soros during the “Color Revolution” in Ukraine 2014 in the doc “Ukraine on Fire”. The “American Spectator” documented how OSF and USAID brought down the government of Macedonia 2016.
Research by the office of EU Budget Rapporteur Joachim Kuhs reveals that the EU spent at least €30 million ($35 million) on NGOs with close ties to Open Society 2019. “Considering the economic crisis brought about by the COVID pandemic, it is hard to explain to any taxpayer why the EU spends our money on left-wing NGOs that push a radical “No Borders” agenda, pursue “lawfare” campaigns against democratically elected governments and attack conservative leaders like Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orbán,” Kuhs said, who belongs to the Identity & Democracy Group. “This is a misuse of taxpayer money and has to stop immediately.”
Israeli watchdog NGO Monitor has long criticized the fact the EU generously funds left-wing NGOs with close ties to George Soros’ Open Society Foundations in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which support the BDS boycott campaign and hire employees with ties to terrorists. Many of these ostensibly “Israeli” NGOs are largely financed from abroad, as Israeli conservatives criticize.
Any criticism of radical Open Society NGOs is habitually branded as “anti-Semitic” by Soros apologists, even though Benjamin Netanyahu and his son Yair rank among the most vocal Soros critics.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), based on the US Council on Foreign Relations, the first major Soros NGO in the EU, received €29,930 ($36,431) from the EU 2019 for a project on “European Sovereignty”, even though the ECFR and EU routinely undermine the sovereignty of EU countries like Poland and Hungary. The ECFR was co-founded by Open Society Europe spokeswoman Mabel van Oranje 2007 and counts many leading center-left politicians among its members. ECFR plays a key role formulating EU policy, including calling Israel an “occupying power” and an “apartheid state.” So basically, the EU is paying the ECFR to lobby the EU.
In order to get a handle on interference by foreign lobbies in Hungary, the Hungarian Parliament 2017 passed a law modeled on the Israeli NGO law, obligating NGOs to full transparency regarding their finances. In 2020, the European Court of Justice charged that law with “discrimination”. The Hungarian government has vowed to pursue transparency of NGO financing all the same.
The nerve center of left-wing human rights orgs in Hungary is the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union“ (HCLU), which received €17,847 ($21,723) from Brussels 2019, according to the EU Financial Transparency System for a “Voter Mobilization Campaign”. In 2018, the HCLU received $50,000 from Open Society Foundations and $365,500 in 2016.
The HCLU belongs to a network of “human rights” NGOs, the Civil Liberties Union for Europe (LibertiesEU), which is headquartered in Berlin, as is Open Society, and received $2,550,000 from OSF 2017. On March 15, 2018, according to the Jerusalem Post, LibertiesEU director Balázs Dénes commented on the planned Hungarian transparency law: “We work very strongly. I’m having a meeting this week with a think tank, an organization which is influencing the German government and the Foreign Ministry of Germany, and I’m bringing them copies of the law, just translated from Hungarian, and I’m explaining them what they can do against it.”
Many LibertiesEU members NGOs received generous EU funding 2019: Sweden’s Civil Rights Defenders received €81,363 ($99,035), Croatia’s Center for Peace Studies €267,392 ($325,472) Finland’s Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights €38,118 ($46,397) the Netherlands Committee of Jurists for Human Rights €96,617 ($117,603), the Irish Council for Civil Liberties €56,928 ($69,293), Poland’s Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights €38,118 ($46,397), the Estonian Human Rights Center €129,691 ($157,861), the Lithuanian Center for Human Rights €157,493($191,702), and the Slovenian Peace Institute €281.797 ($343,006).
In Italy, the NGOs Associazione Antigone received €172,832 ($210,372) and Coalizione Italiana per le Liberta e Diritii e Civili (CILD) €88,379 ($107,575). Founded 2014, the Italian Coalition for Liberty and Civil Rights CILD is a network of NGOs which advocate for illegal immigration and sue the Italian government for trying to protect their borders. It includes lawfare NGOs Associazione per gli Studi Giuridici sull’Immigrazione (ASGI) and A Buon Diritto, which have filed multiple lawsuits against the Italian government before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to prevent Italy from turning away illegal migrants at the border. Any attempt at turning back illegals is now referred to as “illegal push-backs” by the mainstream media, even though border protection is a fundamental part of the Schengen Treaty, which abolished Europe’s interior borders.
In February 2020, Jay Sekulow’s European Center for Law & Justice (ECLJ) released a report documenting the fact that 22 of 100 ECHR Judges are former leading employees of seven major Open Society NGOs, as Gateway Pundit reported. The CILD network includes the leftist community activist network Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana (ARCI), which is currently trying to get former Italian Secretary of the Interior Matteo Salvini locked up for so-called “kidnapping” for trying to protect Italy’s borders against illegal migrants (GP reported). ARCI and its subsidiaries received €967,298 ($1,177,927) from the EU 2019.
This left-wing Italian NGO network is also funded by Open Society: In 2018, ASGI received $385,715 $, CILD got $575.000 in 2016 and ARCI received $1,700 in 2016, $61,840 in 2017 and $149,760 from Open Society in 2018.
The Open Society-related Helsinki Committees received €987,475 ($1,202,497) in 2019 from the EU from Finland to North Macedonia. The OSF-tied Tides Foundation received €15 million ($18,27 million) 2019 for the project ProtectDefenders.EU. €6,465,412 ($7,873,255) went to “Transparency International”, which is also part of the exceeding non-transparent OSF network.
So in 2019, the EU paid at least €25,243,412 ($30,740,164) for Open Society-related NGOs in the European Union, while at least €4,117,137 ($5,013,643) went to OSF NGOs operating in the Balkans. Far from being “Non-Governmental” Organizations, many of these NGOs have thus become quasi-governmental bodies (“Quangos”) that the EU and governments use to outsource their political agendas and activism at taxpayer expense, while attacking and undermining conservative governments in EU member nations and abroad.
“I don’t know of any examples of the EU funding conservative NGOs like ECLJ, for example, which expose left-wing and Antifa terrorism and the recent dramatic increase in attacks on conservatives politicians and parties in Europe, against state-imposed social media censorship and the deplatforming of alternative media, for politically persecuted Islam critics, for border protection and against illegal migration, or against Islamization and Islamic violence against women, gays, Christians and Jews,“ MEP Joachim Kuhs said. “The EU is required to be politically neutral, and not channel millions of taxpayer Euros to left-wing NGOs.“
This summer, Kuhs and I&D chair Nicolas Bay revealed how the EU funded groups tied to the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood with €36.5 million 2014-2019, as Gateway Pundit reported. Several of these Muslim Brotherhood-tied groups like the European Network against Racism are also related to Open Society.
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