The pro-Palestinian lobby group J Street stated that it was “proud” of its role in pushing the controversial Iran nuclear agreement amid reports that it received $576,500 to promote the deal from a group tied to White House efforts to sell the agreement to the public.
J Street’s financing to advocate for the deal came from the Ploughshares Fund, a group that advocates a nuclear-free world and was identified earlier this month by the White House as central in helping to market the Iran nuclear deal to the news media.
On Friday, the Associated Press reported that Ploughshares has also funded National Public Radio since 2005, and has provided financing to U.S.-based foreign policy think tanks.
The Jerusalem Post summarized the extent of the Ploughshares funding to J Street, reportedly to lobby for the deal within the pro-Israel community.
J Street was the single largest beneficiary last year of the Ploughshares Fund, a group that seeks to eliminate the world’s nuclear stockpiles, with over $575,000 in grants that funded advocacy for the Iran nuclear deal.Ploughshares’ annual report, first reported last week by the Associated Press, emphasizes the foundation’s role in helping to bring about support for sanctions relief for the nuclear rollback deal last year. …The amount of funding for J Street underscores the significance deal proponents attached to garnering American Jewish support for the deal. J Street and J Street Education Fund received a total of $576,500, making it by far the largest recipient of funds. One goal of the funding was “to mobilize Jewish support for a final deal.”
The involvement of Ploughshares in selling the Iran agreement to the public was revealed in an extensive New York Times Magazine profile of Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes titled, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” The article contains interviews with Rhodes and scores of top Obama administration officials.
Robert Malley, senior director at the National Security Council, explained the genesis and execution of the marketing plan to sell the Iran deal.
Malley said “experts” were utilized to create an “echo chamber” that disseminated administration claims about Iran to “hundreds of often-clueless reporters” in the news media.
In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
A previous investigation by this reporter showed Ploughshares has partnered with a who’s who of the radical left, including Code Pink, the pro-Palestinian J Street, United for Peace & Justice, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, and Demo, a progressive economic advisory group where President Obama’s controversial former green jobs czar, Van Jones, has served on the board.
Ploughshares is in turn financed by Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Buffett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Another Ploughshares donor is the Tides Foundation, which is one of the largest funders of the radical left. Tides is funded by Soros.
Ploughshares has donated to the Institute for Policy Studies, which calls for massive slashes in the U.S. defense budget.
It has also financed the International Crisis Group, a small organization that boasts Soros on its board.
In what has become a growing scandal surrounding the Obama administration’s self-serving promotion of a questionable nuclear deal with Iran, figures have been released showing left-wing Jewish group J-Street was paid over half a million dollars to support the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), several media outlets have reported.
Earlier this month, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes made waves when he bragged that the administration had used the media and outside groups to create an “echo chamber” and mislead the public into accepting the deal brokered by the P5+1 powers with Iran, even when official White House statements and positions did not support the facts. One such outside group, the Ploughshares Fund, recently released its 2015 figures, detailing its contributions to various outlets in order to push the Iran deal.
Citing the Associated Press, Israel National News noted that many organizations benefited from Ploughshares contributions, but chief among them was J-Street, a liberal Jewish organization which bills itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace” while consistently taking political positions which undermine Israeli security and prosperity. J-Street, seen as President Barack Obama’s mouthpiece to the American Jewish public, received a total of $576,500 to promote the deal, despite many, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, advising against it. Netanyahu even jeopardized his standing with the White House in order to denounce the burgeoning deal in Congress last year.
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