The government is proposing a bill. It's a simple bill.
Israeli NGOs will be required to report how much funding they receive from foreign governments, or from sources that are primarily funded by foreign governments.
It won't stop them from receiving the money. Just expose it.
The bill is a response to the Goldstone incident, where foreign interests and foreign governments (who do not have Israel's best interest at heart) helped fund Israeli Leftwing NGO's reports and research against Israel.
The NIF and other leftist groups are fighting this tooth and nail. Radical leftist groups are calling this bill "McCarthyist".
It just doesn't sit well with me.
On one hand here we have the NIF running a campaign call "We won't shut our mouths", saying they won't be shut up. They say they are all for transparency.
But when it comes to actually putting their money where their mouth is, suddenly they don't want to sing.
And they've got it all wrong anyway.
Im Tirtzu and concerned citizens of Israel DON'T want the NIF to shut up. We don't want the NIF to be quiet.
We want them to, quite loudly, tell the country about all their activities, all the activities they are funding, and who is giving them the money to run those activities.
For years, the NIF slipped under the wire of public consciousness.
But when the public became aware of the NIF and many of the activities they are running and funding the public became outraged.
So NIF, please don't shut your mouth.
The greatest threat to the activities of the NIF is public exposure of those activities and funding sources.
Sing freely.
Wherever I am, my blog turns towards Eretz Yisrael טובה הארץ מאד מאד
5 comments:
Joe, you left out some important points. While they're crying McCarthyism, they forget that other democracies already have this law on the books. The US requires NGOs that receive funding from foreign governments to report it. No one is crying McCarthy in the world's most democratic country. Furthermore, I think it's a safety measure to prevent foreign governments from illegally setting up operations inside the country to influence and overthrow the government - but that may be a little bit extreme on my part.
Why is criticism of the NIF illegitimate and anti-democratic? It seems that Naomi Chazan's lawsuit against the Jerusalem Post was meant to shut more mouths than Im Tirtzus.
recently at Yaacov Lozowick's blog a NIF-representative claimed that they had total transparency, upon being asked about the collaboration with German state financed Heinrich-Böll-Foundation she responded to the effect that she couldn't know everything.
http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/2010/06/nif-supports-israels-enemies.html
Silke
All of you are a little ignorant. The stipulations within this law are already part of Israeli law. The previous version was shot down. This is a populist bill with no point except for some legislators to look "tough" on an issue they can't win.
What's interesting is these so-called Far Leftist "good citizen" groups don't want the same standards of accountability they demand be imposed on others, applied to them.
What possibly could they be afraid of? That the Israeli public would learn who was really financing their anti-Israel activism at home? I'm sure that would lower their undeserved reputation in Israel immeasurably. And its about high time and long overdue.
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