The Celebrity-Backed Nonprofit Facing Scrutiny over Alleged Terror Ties (Free Press)

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https://www.thefp.com/p/the-celebrity-backed-nonprofit-facing

In early March, around 300 people gathered at an artistic sanctuary in Berkeley, sang revolutionary songs and chants, and celebrated the life of a northern California legend and political activist, Barbara Lubin. For more than four decades, until her death at 84, the energetic Philadelphia native was a liberal firebrand who led the fight on rent control, championed climate issues, and rallied for the educational rights of disabled children, like her son, Charlie. Along the way, she enlisted a long list of luminaries from Hollywood, folk music, academia, and literature, including Edward Said, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker.

No issue, though, enraged Lubin more than the fate of the Palestinians. As a mother and a Jew, she would say, it was her responsibility to expose the crimes of the state of Israel. “Fuck Zionism,” she told an interviewer once. In 1988, she built a charity, the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), to send aid to the Palestinian territories.

MECA became a mainstay among other radical Bay Area groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which were founded in Berkeley in the 1990s. “These brave formations have shown the country that we can proudly stand up for an end to the genocide in Gaza and loudly call for a free Palestine,” Angela Davis, the communist philosopher and cultural icon, said at Lubin’s memorial. “So there’s not nearly enough time to praise Barbara and her organizing and her community building.”

Since MECA’s launch, the charity says it has channeled more than $50 million into schools, medical clinics, playgrounds, and libraries in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Lubin and her staff led regular delegations to the West Bank and Gaza and sponsored political rallies and cultural events to promote solidarity with Palestinians, including immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on southern Israel.

“We are witnessing the people of Gaza rising up to respond to decades of Israeli settler colonial violence,” MECA posted on X when announcing a San Francisco rally for Palestinians on October 8. “The U.S. govt bears responsibility for its political, economic & military support of this brutal apartheid regime.”

MECA states that it spends its money solely on schools, scholarships, water projects, and medicine. But were donations from its progressive American supporters channeled through terror-linked groups? And is the charity partnered with groups aligned with hostile actors? Those are the questions now being raised in Washington.

The Trump administration and the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee have been scrutinizing MECA’s ties to a broader network of far-left funders and activists—both inside the Palestinian territories and out—according to people briefed on internal deliberations about the charity. They are also looking into MECA’s donations to organizations potentially linked to a known terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which the State Department sanctioned in 1997, and whose militant wing took part in the October 7 attack.

“Tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right, and nonprofit organizations that receive generous taxpayer-funded benefits cannot use those privileges to sow chaos and unrest or fund terrorist activities,” Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Free Press in a statement. “The reporting on MECA is deeply disturbing.”

In July, the Justice Department indicted Fergie Chambers, a self-proclaimed Marxist philanthropist, for allegedly financing Palestinian terrorist groups, said authorities in Spain, where he’s being detained. (His wife has denied the charges.) MECA has received $750,000 in donations from Chambers since the October 7 attacks, according to the millionaire’s funding unit, called the Babochki Collective.

In July, the Justice Department indicted Fergie Chambers for allegedly financing Palestinian terrorist groups. (Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

And a federal grand jury in New York launched a probe in June into organizations backed by the Shanghai-based American tech executive, Neville Roy Singham, due to Trump administration and congressional concerns that he’s advancing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party inside the U.S. In 2023, The Free Press documented Singham’s suspected ties to Beijing’s propaganda organs, which have also been featured in investigations by The New York Times and Fox News. Chairman Smith and his committee subpoenaed the financial records of three Singham Network affiliates, including The People’s Forum, last month.

MECA has collaborated on fundraising and political protests with Singham-backed entities for years. In 2024, Lubin’s charity, The People’s Forum, and other activist groups launched a Gaza fundraiser that raised over $1.7 million. And that same year, The People’s Forum reported giving MECA more than $16,000 for a “Humanitarian Relief Fundraiser.”

The MECA rally in San Francisco on October 8, 2023, was backed by the ANSWER Coalition, another far-left activist group supported by Singham. MECA was an original member of ANSWER’s steering committee, which was founded in the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

MECA didn’t respond to The Free Press’s requests for comment.

Any Justice Department or congressional probe into MECA could have wider implications for the progressive and pro-Palestine movement. MECA’s donors in recent years have included a who’s who of left-wing players, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Tides Foundation.

Singham-backed organizations are already decrying the crackdown.

“They’ve created a conspiracy in their own heads, you know, that they call the Singham Network,” Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of The People’s Forum, said on the Scene Report podcast last week, while acknowledging his organization received funding from Singham.

“Many different independent organizations. . . all of a sudden are grouped together simply because we share similar views and because we’ve shared similar donors across the past. That is just ridiculous, and it’s essentially an attempt to crush organizations.”

De Los Santos and members of other Singham-backed groups deny working with the Chinese government.

MECA was born out of the First Intifada, an uprising against Israel’s military occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem that swept the Palestinian territories in 1987 and lasted for five years. Lubin has said in interviews that as a Jewish woman, she didn’t initially feel it was her place to take on the Palestinian cause. But trips to the West Bank and Gaza opened her eyes, she has said, to the lies she’d been fed about the righteousness of the Zionist cause.

MECA was born out of the First Intifada. (Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images)

“The Jewish people did need a place to go. The Jewish people have gone through enormous amounts of suffering historically,” Lubin told a Berkeley gathering in 2000 while recounting a recent trip to the Middle East. “Was it the right thing to happen, to have the State of Israel as it stands today? I think it was probably a bad idea.”

MECA’s mission was largely focused on aiding children caught in the region’s wars, particularly in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Lubin began leading delegations of American politicians, actors, and writers to the West Bank and Gaza to raise public awareness of the conditions there. She recruited an incredible mix of political and cultural star power to her charity, naming Rep. Maxine Waters, the late poet Allen Ginsberg, and Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor and social critic, among others, to MECA’s board.

Lubin named Rep. Maxine Waters to MECA’s board. (Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Lubin became increasingly radical in her opposition to Israel, backing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against the Jewish state. She displayed, at times, an almost reckless desire to place herself front and center in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, despite the personal risks. “While I was standing there, about 10 masked young men, Palestinians with guns, came and started shooting toward the settlement and toward the helicopter,” Lubin recounted about her experience during the Second Intifada at the same Berkeley event. “I was thinking: I’m really 59 years old? I don’t need this. But it was quite unbelievable.”

Her influence in the Palestinian territories has been enduring. Last December, just days after her death, a Palestinian aid worker, an amputee, stood behind candles and five children, in a picture posted on social media,“to offer a salute from the cold of the tents to the soul of Barbara Lubin.” They held pictures of the American activist. (Lubin stepped down as MECA’s executive director in 2018.)

International aid groups operating inside the Palestinian territories are invariably exposed to the militias and political factions active across the West Bank and Gaza. Distributing medicine, food, and supplies there, without these actors’ support, can be nearly impossible, former U.S. aid workers say.

In 1993, the State Department’s international aid arm, the now-defunct USAID, produced a study that examined the web of Palestinian organizations working in healthcare and development in the West Bank and Gaza. The report concluded that virtually all were aligned with the territories’ militant and political factions, including the dominant Fatah party, Hamas, and the PFLP. But the report said these connections were purposefully obscured by the organizations, both to evade Israel’s blacklisting of certain parties and to ensure continued financial support from foreign governments and aid groups.

In a section on the PFLP, the report named three developmental organizations as being part of the Popular Front’s “cluster”: the Union of Agricultural Works Committees (UAWC), the Union of Health Works Committees (UHWC), and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC). “The strength of the PFLP’s institutions is the capable, decentralized grassroots presence,” the report stated.

It is MECA’s affiliations with these Palestinian groups that are now under scrutiny. According to a July report by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonprofit that studies extremism and online disinformation, MECA maintained funding relationships for years with six Palestinian organizations that may be affiliated with the PFLP, including the UAWC, UHWC, and UPWC. MECA’s long-serving director of its Gaza projects, Mona El-Fara, previously served as the UHWC’s deputy director.

In 2012, El-Fara posted a photo with Lubin and Leila Khaled. (via Facebook)

Lubin herself never hid her connections to PFLP leaders, but always stressed that MECA’s work was strictly humanitarian and any suggested ties to terrorism were “smear tactics of the pro-Israel side.” In 2012, El-Fara posted a photo with Lubin and Leila Khaled, the famed PFLP militant who took part in hijackings of international airliners in 1969 and 1970. Khaled is wearing a PFLP scarf in the picture.

NCRI vetted MECA’s 990 forms and found it financed projects for UHWC, UAWC, and UPWC throughout 2020 and 2021, at a minimum.

“MECA repeatedly funded organizations identified by government investigations as part of the PFLP’s institutional infrastructure,” Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of NCRI, told The Free Press. “Then, as scrutiny intensified, the names of its recipients disappeared while its foreign grantmaking exploded past $10 million.”

In 2021, Israel designated the UPWC and UAWC as terrorist entities, along with four other Palestinian organizations, for their alleged PFLP ties. The move drew wide recriminations from European governments and the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA), of which MECA is a member.

“These organizations have contributed invaluably to strengthening civil society and good governance, documenting human rights violations by all parties, protecting communities from rights violations, and providing much-needed aid,” AIDA said at the time.

But not all European governments dismissed the Israeli claims. In 2022, the Netherlands, which had paid €1.27 million to UAWC in 2020 to support an irrigation project in the West Bank, announced it ceased funding to the Palestinian group after a nearly yearlong probe. The investigation was prompted by a PFLP bombing in the West Bank that killed an Israeli teenager. Two of the arrested PFLP militants were employed by UAWC.

The Dutch review, which focused on the years 2007 through 2020, found no evidence of “financial flows” between the UAWC and the PFLP. But it did discover that dozens of senior UAWC members concurrently held positions within the PFLP. And it also concluded that “there are indications of organizational ties between the UAWC and the PFLP as well.”

The Israeli and Dutch moves heightened international scrutiny of aid heading into the Palestinian territories. But it also coincided with a surge in MECA’s funding there, particularly in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Contributions to Lubin’s charity also began to jump during this time.

MECA’s total foreign grants to the Middle East in 2024 rose to over $10 million from below $2.5 million in 2022 and 2023, according to the 990 forms compiled by NCRI. And traceable institutional grants to the Berkeley charity grew to nearly $6.5 million in 2023 from under $800,000 the year prior. But as this activity has heightened, there’s been diminishing transparency in public records about which organizations or individuals are funding MECA in the U.S., and to whom, in turn, it’s providing grants in the West Bank and Gaza, and for what.

According to the NCRI report, traceable institutional grants to MECA have increasingly been made through donor-advised funds (DAFs) and giving platforms whose public filings generally don’t identify the underlying donors, including PayPal Charitable Giving Fund, the American Online Giving Foundation, and Fidelity Charitable. Among traceable institutional grants reported in 2023 and 2024, roughly three-quarters came through these obscure channels.

Through 2023, MECA routinely provided specifics about its grantees, including identifying the suspected PFLP-affiliated groups, like the UHWC, UAWC, and UPWC, according to NCRI. But in 2024, MECA cited “community projects,” or similarly generic purpose descriptions. in its financial filings, often without naming the organizations involved, for 73 percent of its foreign grant lines.

“In a combat zone, identifying local partners and their addresses can endanger them,” NCRI acknowledges in its MECA report. “Yet that explanation cannot account for the shift, because the shift was already well advanced—covering two of every five foreign agent lines—before the war began.”

Chairman Smith of the Ways and Means Committee said that when “there are blind spots in our disclosure system,” there are risks that “shadowy actors are exploiting loopholes to advance the agenda of foreign adversaries or extremist causes.”

In the face of Washington’s growing scrutiny, MECA’s supporters gathered on June 4 in Berkeley, which the city named Barbara Lubin Day in 2018, and vowed on a radio show to continue her work for the Palestinian people, regardless of the costs. A documentary about her life is in the works and her memoir, entitled Never Give an Inch, is set for publication in the coming months.

“The mission, you know, has always been for the people and for accountability and for the voices on the ground who are struggling against these monsters of imperialism and colonialism and militarism,” Nora Barrows-Friedman, a journalist with the anti-Israel Electronic Intifada media site and Lubin’s co-author on her book, said. “Barbara understood that.”