Pro-Israel group that attacked University of Pennsylvania’s pro-Palestinian community funded by trustee: Report

HOUSTON, United States

The pro-Israel “blacklist” group, Canary Mission, which seeks to identify pro-Palestinian activists on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus, was funded by a school trustee, according to a report Thursday.

The Intercept publication revealed that a tax document showed the Israel-based Canary Mission received $100,000 in 2023 from the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation, whose treasurer is Jaime Peisach, the husband of Penn trustee Cheryl Peisach.

“It’s profoundly inappropriate for a trustee’s spouse to engage in that sort of activity,” Anne Norton, a political science professor at Penn, told the Intercept.

“I’d ask if someone is doing harm to the university fundraising, to the work of the faculty, to the students — for such a person to do this is reprehensible,” said Norton.

Canary Mission has released several highly-produced online dossiers alleging antisemitism by pro-Palestinian groups since an Oct. 7, 2023, deadly Hamas attack in Israel, which essentially outed those participating in the pro-Palestinian protests into the public domain.

The group’s tactics have been criticized for instigating cyberbullying against students expressing their First Amendment right to free speech in addition to “blacklisting” students from future job prospects and their careers.

Canary Mission’s profiles are reportedly being used by US immigration authorities to target non-citizen, pro-Palestine activists, which works in step with President Donald Trump’s administration to crack down on immigration. The organization said, however, that it only lists its dossiers online.

Those supporting Canary Mission’s objective have taken their rhetoric public, calling for the expulsion, deportation, rape and killing of any pro-Palestinian supporter on the list.

“Canary Mission is an extremist website that declares that its purpose is to document ‘people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews,'” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, wrote in a June 2023 open letter. “I condemn this targeting of particular students because of their speech with the goal of harming their employment opportunities.”

Those targeted by the Canary Mission have few means of recourse because the group is not registered in the US.

Canary Mission maintains an “Ex-Canary” page for formerly listed people who it said have renounced antisemitism, according to the Intercept report.

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