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A fraud complaint regarding COVID-19 relief funds cost an anti-Zionist advocacy group a million bucks

Asaf Elia-Shalev reports for JTA.

One of the most reviled adversaries of the pro-Israel community was just dealt a major blow in a fraud complaint brought by an activist attorney. 

The anti-Zionist advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza and wants the U.S. to end military aid to the country, agreed to pay a penalty of nearly $700,000 (U.S.) to settle an allegation of financial fraud, according to a Wednesday announcement from the U.S. Justice Department.

The resolution of the case, which centres on JVP’s application for COVID-19 relief funds in 2020, puts a significant strain on the group’s financial health—the group’s annual budget has hovered a little below $3 million for the past several years—and gives the group’s many critics a potent new weapon against it. 

But JVP’s legal trouble was not just a lucky gift for its detractors—it was the direct result of one enterprising attorney’s strategy of weaponizing the law against critics of Israel. JVP is the latest in a string of left-wing and pro-Palestinian groups he has succeeded in damaging. 

Daniel Abrams sics prosecutors on his targets using a law that allows private citizens to become whistleblowers when they discover alleged government fraud. The law also lets him collect a portion of the penalty paid to the government. He’s built a one-man business around the enterprise, called the Zionist Advocacy Center or TZAC.

“I’m a passionate Zionist and I’m also an attorney,” Abrams told Politico in an article published last year. “And so it’s natural to say, ‘Well, how can I combine those two things?’ And that’s what I started doing about 10 years ago.”

His earnings in this work as of last year are at least  $1.7 million, according to a tally based on court records by the New York Times. Abrams is one of several attorneys making money by hunting for pandemic fraud, but Abrams is in it for more than just the earnings.

“We’re in America,” Abrams told Politico. “People have an absolute right to attack Israel unfairly, to slander Israel and so on. However, from my perspective, they don’t have the right to take government money to support their work that they’re not entitled to.”

He refers to his solo act as “lawfare” on behalf of Israel. 

Now, a major voice on the right is calling on the incoming Trump administration to make lawfare the central tactic of a national crackdown on antisemitism. The idea appears in Project Esther, a proposal from the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, which urges the federal government to target groups it deems supportive of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, including Jewish Voice for Peace.

In this case, Abrams found that JVP had received $340,000 through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. He believed the group should have been ineligible for funding—money that millions of American companies and nonprofits had also received during the pandemic—due to rules excluding entities “primarily engaged in political or lobbying activities.”

He filed a lawsuit in late 2021 accusing JVP of lying on its application form, citing the group’s stated mission of campaigning to change U.S. policy on Israel. The federal prosecutors who looked at the case agreed with Abrams’ assessment and decided to move forward with it. If the matter had gone to trial and prosecutors had prevailed, JVP would have had to pay back in damages triple the amount it received. 

Instead, a settlement limits the penalty to only double the amount, with no admission of liability by JVP. The group maintains that “any misstatements in this application were inadvertent,” according to the Justice Department. JVP’s leadership did not respond to a request for comment. 

Abrams, who also did not respond to a request for comment, is owed about $68,000, or 10 percent of the penalty, according to a copy of the settlement agreement from the Justice Department. He will also collect about $1,800 from JVP, an amount representing his fees and expenses in filing the initial whistleblower lawsuit. 

The JVP settlement comes several months after the resolution of another Abrams-instigated case against a Jewish group that is critical of Israel. In September, Americans For Peace Now, the U.S. fundraising arm of a progressive Israeli group that advocates for the two-state solution, reached a deal with federal prosecutors to pay $262,000 over an identical allegation. 

The group’s president and CEO, Hadar Susskind, told the New York Times it settled to avoid the cost of litigation but that the group genuinely didn’t consider itself a political organization when it applied for the pandemic relief money.   

Abrams is also behind two earlier pandemic fraud settlements signed by left-leaning Washington think tanks: the Middle East Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies.

Before the pandemic, when Abrams had just started his Zionist Advocacy Center work, he waged lawfare with a focus on humanitarian groups working in Gaza, such as Norwegian People’s Aid, that had received contracts from the American government through USAID. He alleged that his targets had lied when certifying to USAID they had no links to terrorists. Norwegian People’s Aid paid a penalty of $2 million to settle the matter. 

Not all of the cases Abrams brings are successful. In 2020, a judge threw out a case he brought against the New Israel Fund, a group supporting left-wing causes in Israel, in which he alleged the group had abused its tax-exempt status.

And, in 2015 he sued the humanitarian group founded by the late President Jimmy Carter, accusing the Carter Center of support for terrorists over a gathering for Palestinian politicians in which it served them “physical assets of fruits, cookies, bottled water, and presumably other foods and drinks.” Government prosecutors dropped the case.

The post A fraud complaint regarding COVID-19 relief funds cost an anti-Zionist advocacy group a million bucks appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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New Zealand Prime Minister Says Israel’s Netanyahu Has ‘Lost the Plot’

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon attends a press conference with Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (not pictured) at the Australian Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Aug. 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Tracey Nearmy

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said on Wednesday that Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu had “lost the plot” as the country weighs whether to recognize a Palestinian state.

Luxon told reporters that the lack of humanitarian assistance, the forceful displacement of people, and the annexation of Gaza were utterly appalling and that Netanyahu had gone way too far.

“I think he has lost the plot,” added Luxon, who heads the center-right coalition government. “What we are seeing overnight, the attack on Gaza City, is utterly, utterly unacceptable.”

Luxon said earlier this week New Zealand was considering whether to recognize a Palestinian state. Close ally Australia on Monday joined Canada, the UK, and France in announcing it would do so at a UN conference in September.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has reached “unimaginable levels,” Britain, Canada, Australia and several of their European allies said on Tuesday, calling on Israel to allow unrestricted aid into the war-torn Palestinian enclave.

Israel recently increased the flow of humanitarian supplies into Gaza, after imposing a temporary embargo in an effort to keep them out of the hands of Hamas, which often steals the aid for its own use and sells the rest to civilians at inflated prices. While facilitating the entry of thousands of aid trucks into Gaza, Israeli officials have condemned the UN and other international aid agencies for their alleged failure to distribute supplies, noting much of the humanitarian assistance has been stalled at border crossings or stolen. According to UN data, the vast majority of humanitarian aid entering Gaza is intercepted before reaching its intended civilian recipients.

Ahead of Wednesday’s parliamentary session, a small number of protesters gathered outside New Zealand’s parliament buildings, beating pots and pans. Local media organixation Stuff reported protesters chanted “MPs grow a spine, recognize Palestine.”

On Tuesday, Greens parliamentarian Chloe Swarbrick was removed from parliament’s debating chamber after she refused to apologize for a comment insinuating government politicians were spineless for not supporting a bill to “sanction Israel for its war crimes.”

Swarbrick was ordered to leave the debating chamber for a second day on Wednesday after she again refused to apologize. When she refused to leave, the government voted to suspend her.

“Sixty-eight members of this House were accused of being spineless,” House speaker Gerry Brownlee said. “There has never been a time where personal insults like that delivered inside a speech were accepted by this House and I’m not going to start accepting it.”

As Swarbrick left, she called out “free Palestine.”

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Gaza ‘Journalist’ Was a Hamas Terrorist — But the Media Ignores the Evidence

The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon

Outrageous reporting this week enabled terrorism to hide behind the mask of journalism, portraying an Al Jazeera reporter targeted by Israel in Gaza as a heroic figure.

In reality, it was a sea of lies that ignored clear evidence that Anas al-Sharif was, in fact, a member of Hamas.

Almost all foreign media outlets mourned the death of al-Sharif in an IDF strike on Monday, August 12, while doubting or altogether omitting hard evidence presented by the IDF proving that he was a commander of a terrorist cell in a Hamas guided rockets platoon.

The IDF presented an internal Hamas document where al-Sharif was registered as a soldier and team commander, as well as a photo showing him embraced by former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7, 2023, attack against Israel.

The media did not even bother displaying these. Instead, al-Sharif’s photo in a press vest circulated everywhere, and Israel’s claims were either ignored or undermined.

Sky News, for example, lauded al-Sharif as a “crucial reporting voice,” but IDF evidence of his Hamas affiliation was disregarded.

On social media network X, Sky News also posted a story quoting Al Jazeera’s condemnation of Al Sharif’s “assassination.” The network did not respond when Israeli former hostage Shlomi Ziv commented: “I was held by a journalist in captivity and his father was a Doctor!!!!!!!”

Meanwhile, the AP and Reuters — the world’s two leading news agencies — failed to properly report what the IDF was stating.

The AP simply lied, saying that Israel said “without producing evidence that al-Sharif had led a Hamas cell. It was a claim the news organization and al-Sharif had denied” — as if a denial is a clear-cut refutation of hard evidence.

Reuters did the same, saying Israel did not disclose any evidence.

And instead of headlines such as “IDF kills Hamas terror cell leader posing as ‘Al Jazeera’ journalist,” both agencies’ headlines were one-sided.

They took the Palestinian narrative that Israel targets journalists as gospel, even though this narrative is based on the Qatari-funded network that supports Hamas and the denial that its worker has been exposed as a terrorist:

 

The New York Times went as far as eulogizing al-Sharif and the four other journalists who were killed in the strike, displaying Israel’s proven claims as mere accusations.

Nowhere did the Times display al-Sharif’s photo with Sinwar or the documents showing his Hamas affiliation.

This evidence was also omitted from a Washington Post headline and sub-header that made Israel look like it deliberately targets journalists:

Meanwhile, CNN produced hard-hitting videos showing al-Sharif’s Al Jazeera’s dispatches from war-torn Gaza, but without showing any of Israel’s evidence.

Ultimately, this is symptomatic of a wider problem throughout this war — whereby the media treat IDF statements with disdain while treating the claims of a terrorist organization as fact.

All these outlets, of course, failed to mention that al-Sharif conveniently ignored Gazans’ protests against Hamas throughout the war. Courage, apparently, applies only to reporting what Hamas wants the world to hear.

And almost none of them mentioned that al-Sharif was not the first terrorist who posed as a journalist in Gaza, perhaps in an attempt to hide the fact that it is a common phenomenon — from CNN’s Hassan Eslaiah to Al Jazeera’s Ismail Al Ghoul, among others.

Will the media ever doubt the Qatari network’s statements as it doubts the IDF?

Will they ever question what any journalist in Gaza says?

They can’t. Because they project their own conceptions on what it is like to cover a warzone, especially Gaza. They think that any journalist there deserves automatic solidarity and protection, instead of professional scrutiny.

With a pre-existing pro-Palestinian bias –  it means the entire global media sings to Hamas’ tune.

Indeed, it proves Hamas’ evil brilliance of using the term “journalist” as a cover for terrorism. If anyone doubts it, it is an assault on the freedom of the press. Thus, the global media outcry over al-Sharif and his colleagues is a betrayal of real journalism, manipulated to demonize Israel and enable attacks against it. The outcry should have been directed against the exploitation of respected titles to promote terrorist agendas or fire rockets at innocent civilians.

Al Jazeera has already succeeded in promoting its own Hamas-friendly narrative in the aftermath of al-Sharif and his colleagues’ deaths — one where Israel is attempting to “silence voices” from revealing the truth of what is going on inside Gaza. As the IDF gears up for a potential invasion of Gaza City, we can expect to hear more of this narrative, as Al Jazeera and its fellow travelers in Western media falsely claim that Israel is attempting to cover up alleged crimes by deliberately targeting media workers.

The truth is quite the opposite. But it is unlikely to be reported.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Israeli Military Says Chief of Staff Approved ‘Main Concept’ for Attack Plan in Gaza

The new Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, visits the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City, March 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

The Israeli military said on Wednesday that chief of staff Eyal Zamir has approved the “main concept” for an attack plan in the Gaza Strip.

Israel has said it will launch a new offensive and seize control of Gaza City, which it captured shortly after the war’s outbreak in October 2023 before pulling out.

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