Students under siege defend anti-BDS Canary Mission

The controversial Canary Mission — an anonymous watchdog group that exposes organizations, academics and activists who demonize Israel on campuses — recently came under fire when the San Francisco Jewish Federation indicated it would no longer facilitate private-donor funding of the group.

The Forward blasted the organization as “shadowy” for refusing to identify its leadership and sources of funding.

Yet for pro-Israel students who are fighting bigotry at universities throughout North America, Canary Mission is useful.

Ezra Katz, a senior at Kent State University in Ohio, wholeheartedly agrees.

“The number of anti-Semites on campus is rather alarming, and their actions even more so,” he said. “Exposing institutionalized and tolerated anti-Semitism isn’t done often enough, and as someone who has seen such rampant anti-Semitism on campus, I think it’s more than appropriate to have a supporting site.”

People need “to take a step back,” he added. “Why are they mad at a site for exposing anti-Semitism, and ignoring the students and faculty who call Zionists ‘pigs and dirty colonists’?”

Meyer Grunberg, a senior at Florida International University in Miami, echoed Katz.

“I support Canary’s Mission because there is a need to call out folks who claim to stand for ‘justice for all … except Zionists and those who support them’,” he said. “That sort of double-standard is rarely accepted in any scenario, yet seems to be tolerated when it comes to Israel.”

“The people [listed] there are there for a reason,” Grunberg said. “Why should we simply sit back and allow the hate to fester, when no other country in the world deals with such a level of double-standards and revisionist history?”

Pro-Israel students’ difficult battle

Canary Mission claims to aggregate publicly available information, exposing participants in “anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry on the far-right, far-left and among the array of organizations which constitute the BDS movement.”

According to its website, “If you’re racist, the world should know.”

In D.C., George Washington University’s Shep Gerszberg suggests that profiling students can have unintended consequences.

“Organizations like Canary Mission can help Jewish students know which professors to avoid,” he said. “But when they go after students that are anti-Israel/pro-Palestine, it just contributes to their ability to portray themselves as victims.”

Katherine Dolgenos, former president of the Israel Alliance at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., said that “the default viewpoint on many campuses, especially liberal-arts schools, is that Israel is an illegitimate apartheid state.”

Many students, she said, attend Palestinian solidarity events without fully understanding the conflict. Some arrive at Students for Justice in Palestine meetings without knowing what the organization stands for, and may then find themselves targeted.

She complained that Canary Mission sometimes “publishes personal information about students with dubious anti-Zionist connections — for example, some students on the website have merely attended Students for Justice in Palestine meetings and are not necessarily members.”

Brooke Goldstein, executive director of the Lawfare Project, says everyone is fair game. “Why do we have to be afraid to publicly expose those who are rabidly anti-Semitic? Have we learned nothing from our tragic past?”

“Insinuating that we should somehow be embarrassed of a website that merely states the facts is ludicrous,” she said. “The only people who should be embarrassed are those featured on the website for their racism.”

According to Noah Pollak, executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, “Canary Mission is highly effective against the BDS movement, and it is also hated by some Jewish progressives. I believe these two facts are not unrelated.”

Controversy over funding

Canary Mission keeps its funding sources anonymous.

According to media reports, the Los Angeles Federation transacted $250,000 by an anonymous donor to Megamot Shalom, which allegedly operates Canary Mission. In 2016, San Francisco Federation transacted a $100,000 grant by Helen Diller Family Foundation, a major philanthropic group in the Bay Area, through the Central Fund of Israel, earmarked to support Canary Mission. Both indicated that they will not continue funding.

Kerry Philp, San Francisco Federation’s senior director for strategic marketing and communications, told JNS that the “Federation seeks to support the philanthropic needs of our donors and the broad range of views that they represent.

“A one-time grant was made in 2016 by the Helen Diller Family Foundation, a supporting foundation of the Federation, to the Central Fund of Israel and earmarked to support the work of the Canary Mission,” she explained. “In 2017, we strengthened the implementation of our review process and determined that the Central Fund of Israel is not in compliance with our guidelines.”

The national umbrella organization Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) said that the decisions were made at the local level and were not part of a national directive.

“We very much support the right of our Federations to make grant decisions. Each Federation is independent and diverse,” said a JFNA spokesperson.

JFNA notes funds were not given from Federation budgets, but from external philanthropists who rely on Federation recommendations.

Commenting on The Forward and Haaretz articles, Pollak notes that “these critics have never been able to show that Canary’s profiles are inaccurate, so instead they pound the table and use words like ‘blacklist’ to delegitimize a watchdog that compiles examples of BDS activists celebrating Hitler and Hamas on social media.”

“Canary Mission is indispensable in the fight against BDS, and I am grateful for it.”