Washington Free Beacon

Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas issued a Monday decree ostensibly ending his embattled government’s terrorist payment program, known as “pay for slay.” But regional analysts are skeptical that Abbas’s reform will stop the cash from flowing to so-called martyrs in Gaza and the West Bank.

Abbas, according to a statement published by PA state media, transferred the program from Ramallah’s Social Development Ministry to the Palestinian National Institution for Economic Empowerment, an agency Abbas controls. The new structure will allow families of terrorists who received “pay for slay” payments to continue benefiting, but only if they qualify for “standards applied without discrimination to all families benefiting from protection and social welfare programs,” Abbas’s decree states. In other words, a family would qualify for the money based solely on financial need, rather than the number of years their relatives have been imprisoned in Israel for terrorism.

The change comes as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear a case deciding whether American victims of Palestinian terrorism can sue the PA for damages due to the authority’s support for terror attacks through “pay for slay.” It also comes as Abbas angles to take control of the Gaza Strip from Hamas once the terror group’s ceasefire deal with Israel is complete. The “pay for slay” program has long been a flashpoint between U.S. leaders and the Palestinian government, with PA officials telling Axios that they “hope Abbas’ decision will improve relations with the Trump administration and with Congress and lead to the resumption of U.S. financial aid to the Palestinian Authority.”

Middle East experts, however, are skeptical that the changes will truly end “pay for slay.”

Jonathan Schanzer, a veteran Middle East analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, questioned the timing of Abbas’s announcement, noting that the PA head wants a “takeover of the Gaza Strip” and that ending “pay for slay” would be “crucial for any legitimacy to consider taking over” the territory. International Legal Forum CEO Arsen Ostrovsky, meanwhile, said Abbas’s decree “fails to state that the PA will no longer pay, reward, or incentivize terror attacks against Israel.”

“All that the PA are essentially doing,” he told the Washington Free Beacon, “is rebranding the pay-for-slay payments under a different department and oversight mechanism run by Abbas himself.”

“We would call on President Trump and the United States to see through this blatant ploy by the PA and continue demanding that they unequivocally revoke payments of any kind to Palestinian terrorists,” Ostrovsky went on.

Former White House National Security Council member Richard Goldberg expressed similar concerns.

“Statements don’t always match reality in Ramallah,” he told the Free Beacon. “If this is just calling a terror payment by another name—in this case, a low-income subsidy—nothing has changed.”

Abbas has long promised to end “pay for slay” without doing so. The Biden administration was reportedly on the cusp of securing a promise to end the program prior to October 7, but talks broke down once Hamas carried out its terror attack, which nearly three in four Palestinians supported in the following weeks. The payments for terrorists, then, help Abbas save face with Palestinian residents.

Congress passed a 2018 law, the Taylor Force Act, that froze U.S. aid to the Palestinian government until it ended the terrorist payment program, but the Biden administration repeatedly sidestepped it.

Elliott Abrams, the former U.S.-Iran envoy during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, said Abbas should have reformed the PA’s welfare system years ago but “refused and his statements about refusing are emphatic.”

“The ‘prisoners lobby’ is powerful and will have full Hamas and [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] support,” Abrams said. “So I am suspicious that there will finally be a change.”

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Donald Trump made history on Sunday as the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl. The NFL celebrated Trump’s appearance by removing the phrase “End Racism” from the end zones for the first time since 2021, an acknowledgment of the president’s successful efforts to eradicate bigotry. It wasn’t the only thing missing from this year’s contest. In another promising development attributable to Trump’s leadership since taking office, there wasn’t a single Super Bowl ad touting electric cars as the vehicles of the future.

By contrast, seven different ads for electric vehicles ran during the Super Bowl in 2022, several months after President Joe Biden signed an executive order compelling U.S. automakers to ensure that by 2030 roughly half of all cars sold in the country would have fully electric or plug-in hybrid engines. General Motors, for example, ran an ad promising 30 new electric vehicle models by 2025, which turned out about as well as Biden’s promise to cure cancer. Six more electric-focused car commercials aired during the Super Bowl in subsequent years, including “Premature Electrification,” a Ram Trucks ad narrated by former Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones that compared being skeptical about electric vehicles to suffering from erectile dysfunction.

“How interesting,” said Larry Behrens, communications director of Power the Future. “Things have changed.” They certainly have. One of Trump’s first acts as president was repealing Biden’s executive order on electric vehicles. “With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal, and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers,” Trump said last month during his Inaugural Address. “In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice.”

On Sunday, only two automakers—Jeep and Ram—aired ads during the Super Bowl, and while both featured electric vehicles alongside gas-powered ones, they also channeled Trump’s remarks by emphasizing the importance of choice. They also evoked the familiar themes—masculine patriotism and patriotic masculinity—commonly found in car commercials before American corporations went woke. “I think I saw Glen Powell punch a dragon, which is pretty much the antithesis of ‘EV,'” marketing executive Brian Dangers told Bloomberg.

Indeed, Ram’s ad for pickup trucks featured the Hollywood star Powell as Goldilocks reimagined as “a rugged woodsy dude” who punches (and eats) a dragon while testing out three different models, including the all-electric Ramcharger, which he uses to power a chainsaw. The tagline—”Drive your own story”— encouraged consumers to choose what’s best for them, as did the Jeep ad starring Harrison Ford, in which the actor delivers a sermon on “freedom” over images of American flags and U.S. troops during World War II. “Freedom is the roar of one man’s engine, and the silence of another’s,” Ford says. “Choose what makes you happy.”

Just last week, Ford (the company, not the actor) announced that its electric vehicle business lost more than $5 billion in 2024.

Related: American Commercials Used to Be Great. Then Woke Stepped In.

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The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) was slapped with a lawsuit on Monday over a slew of race-based hiring programs that discriminate against white scholars, the latest sign that faculty hiring could become a target for litigants seeking to challenge racial preferences under the Trump administration.

The plaintiff, Stephen Kleinschmit, a former professor of public administration and data science, alleges that he was fired for raising concerns about the programs. The initiatives include “racial equity” plans that call on departments to “hire three [people of color]” and a separate program run by UIC’s diversity office that funds the recruitment of “underrepresented” scholars.

To apply for those funds, departments must describe their DEI goals and what’s been done to achieve them. The result is a long paper trail of applications—first reported by the Washington Free Beacon—in which departments openly pledge to discriminate based on race, outlining quotas for “minoritized” scholars and indicating that white people should be barred from teaching certain subjects.

“[T]he curricular offerings on conventionally marginalized fields such as the arts of African, African-American, African diaspora and Black-Indigenous communities by overwhelmingly white scholars have become ethically problematic,” UIC’s art history department wrote in a 2020 application for the program. Hiring a “Person of Color […]  will be a major step towards reconciling these conflicts.”

Such statements form the backbone of Kleinschmit’s complaint, which argues his firing was both a form of retaliation and race discrimination. Though UIC claimed he was being fired due to budget cuts—which did not result in any other layoffs—those cuts came as his department was seeking to hire a scholar “from a community of color,” according to the applications reported by the Free Beacon. 

“Professor Kleinschmit was targeted … because he spoke up about racially discriminatory hiring programs,” the complaint alleges. “UIC substantially shifted resources away from the support of academic units to meet its unconstitutional race-based hiring goals, instead directing funds and a substantial portion of its hiring to racially discriminatory and noncompetitive hiring programs.”

UIC did not respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit is the latest example of a public university facing blowback for its discriminatory employment practices. The University of Colorado Boulder paused a “critical needs” hiring program last month after documents surfaced showing that the school had targeted “BIPOC” candidates in violation of federal law. Similar documents have been unearthed at the University of Washington, Ohio State, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. At the University of New Mexico, one professor wrote in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”

College admissions have also been the subject of discrimination complaints, most notably in the lawsuit against Harvard that outlawed affirmative action in 2023. Such cases can be difficult to win, however, because student privacy laws shield admissions files from public disclosure, forcing plaintiffs to rely on statistical evidence that is not always open and shut.

“Admissions decisions are an opaque morass at their best,” said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. “Proving discrimination requires intensive econometric analysis by experts and only 2-3 law firms have ever successfully litigated that discrimination.”

The faculty hiring process, on the other hand, tends to produce a paper trail that is accessible through litigation and, at public universities, subject to public records requests. That could make programs like UIC’s easy pickings for private litigants and federal agencies amid the legal siege promised by the Trump administration, which has issued a series of executive orders targeting universities and DEI.

“Plaintiffs should have a much easier time proving universities are violating Title VII in their hiring policies than they would have proving Title VI violations in admissions,” Morenoff said, referring to the civil rights laws that cover employers and federally funded institutions. “The evidence will not be hard to find.”

At UIC, all departments are required to submit “advancing racial equity” plans to the school’s DEI office, which in 2020 released a set of templates for what those plans should look like. The templates instruct departments to set hard racial quotas—”hire at least 3 new tenure-track faculty of color,” for example—and to submit progress reports on the steps being taken to meet them.

In one such report, dated October 2023, UIC’s College of Applied Health Sciences wrote that it had hired “2 more faculty and 1 staff of color” over the previous year. “By the fall of 2024 we will have two additional faculty of color in the department (e.g., AA/PI, NA/AI, Black, and/or Latinx),” the report said.

In another report, UIC’s Global Asian Studies program pledged to hire “at least three new additional faculty … who represent diverse identities.”

The university has also incentivized race-based hiring through its Bridge to Faculty program, which provides money to departments to hire “underrepresented” scholars. Because that money comes out of UIC’s central budget—not each department’s own coffers—the program is the only way for some departments to afford new hires, according to the lawsuit, forcing them to double down on DEI if they wish to remain competitive.

In nearly 40 applications for the program reviewed by the Free Beacon, departments disparaged “White Masculinity,” called for “additional BIPOC/female/nonbinary faculty,” and claimed it would be “immoral” to recruit “underrepresented graduate students” without first hiring professors who “look like them.”

Several also stated that they would target faculty with a focus on activist scholarship. The math department said it wanted a scholar of “race and power in undergraduate mathematics education,” for example. And the biomedical engineering department, which received funding through the program, said that its ideal candidate would “train the next generation of Biomedical Engineers in DEI principles.”

These initiatives had an extraordinary effect on the racial makeup of UIC’s faculty. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of black and Hispanic tenure track professors rose by over 25 percent, according to data from the school’s Office of Institutional Research, while the number of white tenure-track professors declined by 4 percent.

Soon enough, Kleinschmit began hearing from his colleagues that some of the new hires were not up to snuff. It was “demoralizing,” he told the Free Beacon, to see unqualified scholars fast-tracked for tenure because of their race.

In the fall of 2022, Kleinschmit began airing these concerns to top university officials, including UIC provost Karen Colley and the dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, Stacey Swearingen-White. By February 2023, he had been informed of his impending layoff.

Swearingen-White told him in a meeting that his contract would not be renewed because of budget cuts. But at the same time that those cuts were allegedly being made, the college found the money to hire a series of new administrators, according to the lawsuit, and received funding through the Bridge to Faculty program to recruit a minority scholar. Kleinschmit was the only member of the college who was ultimately let go.

“The Plaintiff repeatedly and thoroughly highlighted the discriminatory nature of the university’s conduct, making him a target of retaliation,” the lawsuit reads. “If Professor Kleinschmit were a member of one of the preferred racial groups, the administration would have quickly found the resources to support his continued employment.”

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When doctors reached out to the dean of Brown University Medical School regarding a Washington Free Beacon report published earlier this month, they received a reply from medical school dean Mukesh Jain.

“What has been reported about criteria for faculty promotion at The Warren Alpert Medical School is an egregious mischaracterization,” Jain wrote. He was referring to a piece on promotion guidelines that give DEI more weight than “clinical skills” for many roles within the medical school, which declined to comment on the piece before publication.

Now, Brown is scrambling to correct the record, claiming that the story withheld crucial context in order to malign Brown unfairly. What it’s saying, however, is not true.

The Free Beacon reported last Tuesday that Brown’s Department of Medicine gives a “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” more weight than “excellent clinical skills” in its promotion criteria for faculty, adding that those weights only apply to research and teaching roles. “For doctors who train students in clinical settings,” the report said, DEI “gets the same weight as ‘patient care.’” The Free Beacon also uploaded the criteria for readers to look over themselves.

After the report was published, Brian Clark, the university’s vice president for “news and strategic campus communications,” told the Free Beacon that Brown planned to tell those who contacted the university about the report that it was a “blatant effort to mischaracterize Brown’s rigorous assessment in considering appointments and promotions for medical faculty.”

He asked for no factual corrections to the story and declined to respond to further questions.

Since then, the Free Beacon has obtained correspondence between Jain and a concerned physician regarding the report.

Jain’s response contains several false statements, including that “the reporting entirely omits” the criteria for faculty “with a focus in the clinical arena”—information included in the report. Jain also implied that the Free Beacon had conflated the Department of Medicine with the entire medical school. In fact, the report states that the DEI criteria “apply only to the Department of Medicine … not to the medical school as a whole.”

The correspondence underscores Brown’s efforts to stem the fallout from the Free Beacon story, which gained traction on social media and is now drawing the attention of federal civil rights agencies. It is not illegal for private universities to screen faculty for a commitment to DEI. But Andrea Lucas, the acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), said that such practices “can be legally suspect” and facilitate discrimination.

“Criteria (whether for promotion or hiring) that screen candidates based on ‘diverse backgrounds,’ ‘diverse perspectives,’ or ‘commitment to diversity’ can be legally suspect, if the employer is using these criteria as pretext or a proxy for racial preferences,” she told the Free Beacon.

Those criteria are especially risky when they encourage faculty to disclose their race. “The EEOC has long taken the position that soliciting any pre-employment information that tends to disclose an applicant’s race creates a presumption that the employer unlawfully will use race as a basis for making selection decisions,” Lucas said. She added that the agency could not comment on the specific criteria used by Brown.

Pressed on the inaccuracies in Jain’s statement, Clark, the university spokesman, again said that the report had used “selective extracts to mischaracterize the qualifications for a single department.” He did not address the factual errors flagged by the Free Beacon.

“Our ongoing intent,” Clark added, “is to provide the Free Beacon with information to support accuracy in the original coverage and any follow-up reporting.”

In other crisis communications situations, Clark has taken up the pen to assure students that the university provides enough subscriptions to local media outlets.

“The University values the critical role that news organizations play both locally and globally in informing citizens, promoting understanding of key issues and unearthing stories that need to be told,” Clark told Brown’s student paper in 2018. “The University has long offered access to many news publications, but there are many ways in which the University supports first-rate journalism beyond the subscriptions that we purchase.”

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As President Donald Trump moves forward with his plan to “own” Gaza and relocate its inhabitants, some citizens of the war-torn strip are expressing an eagerness to leave, citing a desolate living situation and an eagerness to live in “a country where you can hold your head up high.”

The remarks stem from interviews conducted by the Center for Peace Communications, a New York-based nonprofit known for producing on-the-ground videos in Gaza, Syria, and other Iran-dominated areas in the Middle East. The group conducted those interviews in the 36 hours that followed Trump’s Feb. 4 joint press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

One interviewee, a young man in a backward cap, says he wants to leave “because there’s no life left here; life here is gone.” The man makes a direct plea to Trump, saying, “I’m asking Trump himself to relocate us as he suggested, and I’ll be the first one to go.”

“I mean, just look around you—we simply can’t live here,” the man says.

Others featured in the video call on Arab nations like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia to “open the crossings” and take in fleeing Gazans. One man says that Gazans will ultimately agree to move to those countries if given the opportunity “because they want to live.”

“In the end, people will accept reality,” the man says. “They’ll emigrate because they want to live. They want to live in a country that protects and supports them, meaning a country where you can hold your head up high.”

“If our country isn’t looking out for us, where should we go?”

The interviews stand in stark contrast to remarks aired by mainstream media networks in the wake of Trump’s press conference. ABC News, for example, aired remarks from residents of so-called refugee camps in the strip under the headline, “Inside Gaza, Palestinians say they will not leave.” One older interviewee said, “We will not leave even if we die here. This is our country.”

Many younger Gazans, however, expressed a desire to leave the strip before Oct. 7 and the subsequent war between Hamas and Israel. A Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll taken just before Hamas’s terror attack found that 44 percent of Gazans between the ages of 18 and 29 were considering emigrating. Nearly a third of all Gazans agreed, according to the poll.

Joseph Braude, president of the Center for Peace Communications, said the numbers shown in the poll have “undoubtedly” increased in the wake of Oct. 7.

“The numbers were in the 40s among younger Gazans, and that’s before Oct. 7, when there was a semblance of continuity in daily life,” he told the Washington Free Beacon. “That proportion has increased dramatically over the course of the war, and it grew even further over the weeks of this recent ceasefire when Gazans had a chance to tour the north and see what had happened to their homes.”

“So we’re undoubtedly at a moment in which the majority of the population would emigrate if safe haven were offered to them.”

Trump first floated his call to resettle and rebuild Gaza in late January, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that he had asked King Abdullah II of Jordan to “take people” from the strip. He suggested that mass emigration from Gaza could help resolve “centuries” of conflict.

Trump expanded on those remarks one week later, outlining an ambitious plan to resettle Gaza’s population, clear out “unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site,” and spearhead “economic development,” actions that Trump said could make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, which have long rejected calls to accept Gazan residents into their countries, responded by dismissing Trump’s plans. Gazans interviewed in the Center for Peace Communications video urged the nations’ leaders to reconsider.

“To our brotherly Egyptian and Jordanian people and King Abdullah: We hope they open the crossings for the youth who are leaving, for the wounded, for the sick, and the elderly who need treatment,” one man says in the video.

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President Donald Trump promised to strengthen America’s military by ensuring that service members will no longer be “subjected to radical political theories and social experiments while on duty,” and that’s exactly what he’s done. Last month, Trump signed an executive order abolishing the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, implemented under former president Joe Biden, and another banning transgender personnel from serving in the military. On Monday, he dismissed the advisory boards at all four U.S. military academies in an effort to stifle the influence of “Woke Leftist Ideologues.”

On Trump’s watch, the Army has released a series of new recruitment videos focused on strength and fighting, with taglines such as “Stronger people are harder to kill.” These new ads stand in stark contrast to the Army’s recruitment efforts under Biden, which portrayed military service as a fun opportunity to make “friends from everywhere” and shoot pool together in the break room. Another Army ad from Biden’s presidency was an anime-style cartoon featuring an inclusive group of young people looking for “adventures” and singing about wanting to be soldiers.

Good riddance to woke nonsense.

Related: American Commercials Used To Be Great. Then Woke Stepped In.

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Hamas announced on Monday that it would not move forward with the next scheduled release of Israeli hostages, citing the Jewish state’s purported “violations” of a tenuous ceasefire deal that is on the cusp of unraveling. The announcement comes after Hamas paraded several gaunt Israeli hostages across a stage in Gaza this weekend, drawing shocked reactions from the Israeli public and President Donald Trump.

A spokesman for Hamas’s military wing, Abu Obeida, accused Israel of failing to stick to the terms set forth under a three-tiered ceasefire agreement, which is approaching the end of its first phase. Hamas claims that Israel is not allowing displaced Gazans to return home and that it is still conducting military operations in the territory. The terrorist outfit did not provide evidence.

The move threatens to upend a ceasefire deal that was already fraying due to Hamas’s brutal treatment of the hostages it has already released. It also comes a week after Trump unveiled ambitious plans to take control of the Gaza Strip and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The hostages remain Hamas’s only bargaining chip, and without their return, Israel could restart full-fledged military operations in Gaza.

Defense Minister Israel Katz did not say he would do so when he responded to Hamas’s announcement on Monday, though he did say he directed Israel’s military “to prepare on highest alert for every possible scenario in Gaza.”

Seventeen Israeli hostages are still scheduled to be released during the deal’s first phase, but Hamas said it would not move forward until Israel’s “ongoing violations” end. The announcement came just days after Hamas gunmen forced three malnourished Israeli captives—Ohad Ben Ami, 56; Eli Sharabi, 52; and Or Levy, 34; to make a speech before a crowd of Gazans in a stage-managed ceremony conducted alongside officials from the Red Cross aid group.

The scenes from that propaganda display—one of several Hamas has held before allowing hostages to go home—sent shockwaves across the Israeli public and drew an angry response from Trump, who said the hostages “looked like Holocaust survivors.”

“I don’t know how much longer we can take that,” Trump told reporters on Sunday, casting doubt on the ceasefire’s durability. “People that were healthy people a reasonably short number of years ago, and you look at them today, they look like they’ve aged 25 years. They literally look like the old pictures of Holocaust survivors, the same thing.”

“Who could take that?” the president added. “At some point, we are going to lose our patience. They look like they haven’t eaten for months. There is no reason for this.”

Hamas’s threat to further delay the release of hostages could provide Israel with the opening it needs to restart large-scale military operations in the Gaza Strip. Israeli leadership is already fuming with the terror group’s choreographed hostage release ceremonies, and Trump’s remarks on the matter reinforce the perception that the ceasefire is doomed to collapse.

Hamas, in a Saturday statement issued after it ushered the three malnourished Israelis across Gaza, said, “Our people and their resistance have the upper hand,” signaling that the terror group retains an iron grip on the war-torn strip after more than a year of brutal fighting.

Those who have returned to Israel detailed abuse and starvation at Hamas’s hands.

“They’re raping them, they’re shocking them with cables,” Eli Shtivi, whose son was killed on Oct. 7, told Haaretz. “We must say these things, people are looking at me here, wide-eyed, not getting it.”

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President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed the advisory boards at all four U.S. military academies, saying they’ve been dominated by “Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years.”

“I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

Boards of Visitors serve as advisory panels at military academies, providing academy officials with guidance on curriculum, discipline, fiscal affairs, and overall operations. Board members typically serve three-year terms and are appointed by the president, the vice president, and congressional leaders.

The move is part of Trump’s broader push to overhaul the military since his return to the White House. Trump has signed executive orders abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the military and barring transgender personnel from the armed forces. The president also reinstated soldiers who had been dismissed for not taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

In 2021, then-president Joe Biden fired all military academy board members who had been appointed by Trump, drawing widespread backlash from conservatives. Biden’s purge, one board member said, “shows that the administration is hellbent on the woke mob controlling or having input into military education.”

Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth has vowed to remove “woke” civilian professors from the academies and replace them with military personnel.

“We need more uniformed members going back into West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy as a tour to teach with their wisdom of what they’ve learned in uniform instead of just more civilian professors that came from the same left-wing, woke universities that they left and then try to push that into service academies,” Hegseth said at his confirmation hearing.

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The anti-Semitic U.N. official Francesca Albanese says Donald Trump’s plan to make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East” is “worse than ethnic cleansing.” We’ve heard a lot of that sort of rhetoric in the wake of Trump’s announcement, so we asked the eminent historian Andrew Roberts to weigh in. Nations and peoples that start and lose wars of aggression typically don’t retain sovereignty of their territory.

No, throughout history, Roberts writes, “peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbors and are then defeated—as the Gazans have been on any conceivable metric—lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both.” It’s not Trump’s plan to “own” Gaza, then, that’s strange. “It would be strange were Hamas somehow to buck this historical trend,” according to Roberts.

Mass population transfers have been common after wars. The classic example are those of the late 1940s, when there were no fewer than 20 different groups—including the Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus of the Punjab, the Crimean Tartars, the Japanese and Korean Kuril and Sakhalin Islanders, the Soviet Chechen, Ingush, and Balkars, even the Italians of Istria—who were moved to different regions. At the time of the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, over 800,000 Jews from Arab lands were forced out of lands that they had lived in for centuries.

All of those peoples mentioned chose to try to make the best of their new environs except one, and most eventually succeeded. The sole exception has been the Palestinians, because Hamas and its predecessors have always unquestioningly chosen the destruction of Israel and the opportunity to massacre Jews over the best interests of their own people.

If each of the 22 Arab states undertook to receive 100,000 Gazans, the Strip could be the home to the remaining 100,000, living and working on Trump’s “Riviera.” The reason that can never in fact happen is the Arab states’ and the United Nations’ wholly cynical and self-interested policy since 1948 to use Palestinian refugees as a continual destabilizing force against Israel (as well as a well-grounded fear and hatred of easily the most violent population in Arabia).

As the international community yelps with indignation at Donald Trump’s remarks and their implications regarding Gazans’ sovereignty and Hamas’s right to govern there, history is on the president’s side.

Read the full piece here.

Over the past two weeks, the American public has become increasingly familiar with “woke” USAID funding for DEI initiatives abroad. But under Joe Biden’s USAID chief Samantha Power, the agency didn’t just fund efforts to advance equity and inclusion in Serbia. It also spearheaded a more insidious effort to undermine Israel—and dodged federal oversight efforts along the way, the Free Beacon‘s Adam Kredo reports.

A recent Middle East Forum report, for example, found that USAID awarded “millions of federal dollars” to “organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas,” including one that oversaw a U.S.-funded “educational and community center” in the strip. The think tank’s report, however, only includes spending we know about. USAID routinely fails to report its subgrantees, according to a January memo from the agency’s inspector general, thus impeding efforts to vet “fraud allegations.”

Agency staffers also pushed back on the modestly pro-Israel policies coming out of the State Department and White House. Power, for example, once refused to meet with Israel’s ambassador unless the Jewish state reached a ceasefire with Hamas, even though the White House National Security Council had signed off on the meeting. Her agency later called on the Biden State Department to end military aid to Israel, accusing the Jewish state of deliberately blocking Gazan aid deliveries.

The anti-Israel crusade “caused internal friction across multiple administrations,” current and former U.S. officials, including some who worked with USAID during Power’s reign, told Kredo. The rogue nature of USAID’s career staffers, meanwhile, helps explain the Trump administration’s push to dismantle the agency.

“More and more money flowed to groups and organizations whose work is contrary to the interests of the United States,” one official said. “How bad it got is finally coming to light and there is finally transparency.”

The Aspen Institute and Atlantic Council are two of the nation’s largest liberal think tanks. They’re also the recipients of tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts.

That’s according to federal spending disclosures reviewed by our Chuck Ross, which show that the State Department, USAID, and Department of Defense have funneled nearly $50 million to the two think tanks since 2021. A $6 million State Department contract with the Aspen Institute, for example, funds an online exchange program teaching “civic engagement” and “climate change and sustainability” to students in North Africa and the Middle East. In 2021, USAID “struck a five-year, $9 million agreement with the Aspen Institute to ‘promote investment in Guatemalan entrepreneurs and innovators,'” Ross reports.

The think tanks don’t exactly need the money. The Atlantic Council received 12 donations of at least $1 million each from Meta, Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the United Arab Emirates in 2023, its donor list shows. That same year, the Aspen Institute disclosed donations of at least $1 million from 38 sources, including Walmart, Google, and the Ford Foundation.

“Taxpayer support for two deep-pocketed institutions could draw fresh scrutiny as the Trump administration—largely through the Department of Government Efficiency, the government unit led by Elon Musk—is scouring the federal government’s books for signs of fraud and wasteful spending,” writes Ross. “Like many Beltway think tanks, the Aspen Institute and Atlantic Council have been highly critical of Trump’s policies, both domestic and foreign.”

Away from the Beacon:

• Delaware’s Chris Coons defended the federal government’s funding of the Iraq version of Sesame Street, saying it “helps push values like collaboration, peacefulness, cooperation in a society where the alternative is ISIS extremism and terrorism.” How’s that going?
• On Friday, Illinois’s Wheaton College issued a statement congratulating alumnus Russ Vought for his confirmation as the head of the Office of Management and Budget. By Saturday, it had retracted that statement, saying the “political situation surrounding the appointment led to a significant concern expressed online.” That’s the sort of backbone and principle we expect from academics!
• Fifty-three percent of voters approve of Donald Trump’s performance as president, 70 percent of them say Trump is doing “what he promised” on the campaign trail, and 59 percent approve his deportation plans, according to a new CBS poll that is sure to discourage Democrats.

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Federal agencies have awarded nearly $50 million over the past four years to the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic Council—well-funded liberal think tanks which between them boast 50 donors who have given them at least $1 million—for projects that include a $6 million program to provide “virtual exchanges” for students in the Middle East, and $300,000 to host a conference to empower women in Saudi Arabia.

The grants are but two examples of the taxpayer funds that flow to the country’s biggest think tanks. The State Department, USAID, and Department of Defense have awarded $15.3 million in grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts to the Atlantic Council since 2021, and $32.6 million to the Aspen Institute over the same span, according to federal spending records.

Taxpayer support for two deep-pocketed institutions could draw fresh scrutiny as the Trump administration—largely through the Department of Government Efficiency, the government unit led by Elon Musk—is scouring the federal government’s books for signs of fraud and wasteful spending. Trump this week moved to shut down USAID, an independent agency that has long worked with the State Department, over its funding for foreign aid programs deemed to be wasteful and nonessential.

The Aspen Institute and the Atlantic Council, among the largest think tank recipients of taxpayer funding, have received tens of millions of dollars in donations from an impressive roster of corporations, tech billionaires, philanthropies, foreign companies, and governments. In 2023 alone, the Atlantic Council received 12 donations of at least $1 million each from Meta, Goldman Sachs, the government of the United Arab Emirates, and the Rockefeller Foundation, according to its donor list.

The Aspen Institute disclosed that 38 donors gave at least $1 million in 2023, including Walmart, Google, the Ford Foundation, and the philanthropies of billionaires Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg.

Both organizations could present ripe targets for the administration’s cost-cutting measures, for not just their sizable warchests, but also their hostilities towards President Donald Trump.

Like many Beltway think tanks, the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic Council have been highly critical of Trump’s policies, both domestic and foreign.

Aspen Institute president Dan Porterfield said Trump “fomented” the “deadly insurrection” at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Katie Couric, the former TV journalist and co-chair of Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, has called Trump a “fascist” and compared a Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden last year to a “Nazi event.”

Republicans have criticized both think tanks over their central roles in what’s been dubbed the “censorship-industrial complex,” a network of university and think tank researchers that worked closely with federal agencies to censor content on social media.

In September 2020, the Aspen Institute organized a “tabletop” exercise with journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post, and executives from Facebook and Twitter to draft a plan for how to respond to a hypothetical scenario in which Russia leaked documents stolen from Hunter Biden, according to documents uncovered by reporter Michael Shellenberger. Many of the participants—most notably Twitter—censored an accurate New York Post story about Biden’s laptop in Oct. 2020.

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab is led by Graham Brookie, who served on the National Security Council in the Obama administration. In October 2020, Brookie claimed Trump’s “entire strategy” in the campaign that year was “based on process disinformation in this election.” Days later, Brookie dismissed reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as “unverified misinfo.” He cheered Twitter’s ban of Trump’s account and “influencers of the far right” after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots as a “welcome” decision.

The State Department awarded the DFRLab a $64,000 grant in September to host two workshops at the U.S. embassy in Vienna on “countering foreign information manipulation and interference,” and $250,000 the same month for a project to counter disinformation in Moldova, according to spending records.

Other grants to the think tanks could land in the cost-cutters’ crosshairs.

On Jan. 1, the State Department gave the Atlantic Council $500,000 for a project slated to run through Oct. 2026, to “promote responsible trade” in the western Balkans—a region that includes Serbia and Albania—in order to “support the region’s alignment with a Euro-Atlantic path.”

The State Department’s $6 million contract with the Aspen Institute in September will help fund an online exchange program with students and young people in North Africa and the Middle East, to teach them about “civic engagement,” “climate change and sustainability,” and other topics. The program involves the use of recorded messages exchanged between students in different countries.

In 2021, USAID struck a five-year, $9 million agreement with the Aspen Institute to “promote investment in Guatemalan entrepreneurs and innovators.” Aspen selected one program participant that will help “rural communities increase investment capability and access new markets for specialty mushroom, honey, and coffee products.”

In many cases, American taxpayers are funding programs that involve the think tanks’ major foreign donors.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—where the Atlantic Council held State Department-funded women’s empowerment conferences—are some of the think tank’s biggest donors. The Saudi-owned Aramco Americas and King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center donated $400,000 to the Atlantic Council in 2023, and the Emirates gave $1.85 million the same year.

The State Department gave $40,000 to the Atlantic Council last year for a study and presentation on the threats posed by Russia’s “shadow fleet” to Denmark. The Danish embassy donated at least $100,000 to the Atlantic Council in 2023.

The Atlantic Council and the Aspen Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

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