Faith-Based Daily Awareness Post 25 July 2024

These updates are shared to help raise the situational awareness of Faith-Based organizations to best defend against and mitigate the impacts from all-hazards threats including physical security, cybersecurity, and natural disasters.

Oversight Subcommittee Hearing on Fueling Chaos: Tracing the Flow of Tax-Exempt Dollars to Antisemitism

A subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee heard testimony on Tuesday about the foreign and domestic funding of antisemitic protest groups and their exploitation of non-profit tax status and other legal maneuvers intended to avoid public oversight. Witnesses told the Oversight Subcommittee about the vast tax-exempt network of interconnected nonprofits, which have been at the forefront of organizing anti-Israel protests across the country since Oct. 7.

Analyst Comments:

The testimony identified several U.S.-based tax-exempt organizations warranting additional scrutiny due to leadership ties to terrorist groups, suspicious financial patterns, and the spreading of extremist propaganda. Burns expressed particular concern about the normalization of antisemitic rhetoric and support for terrorist organizations on U.S. soil, which she argued poses a significant threat to national security.

“When it becomes acceptable to voice hate against an individual or group because of their ethnicity, race, religion, or gender, and to advocate for violence and death of those people, a threat exists not only to our national security, but to our system of Democracy,” Burns stated in her testimony.

Key recommendations from Burns’ testimony include:

1. Enhanced reporting requirements for tax-exempt organizations with opaque finances and suspicious patterns
2. Increased scrutiny of organizations with disproportionately large, unsubstantiated gifts-in-kind
3. A whole-of-government approach to address this complex issue
4. Collaboration between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies
5. Aggressive use of Treasury Department designations for individuals and entities supporting terrorist organizations