Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Why Is an Anti-Muslim Hate Group Donating Dark Money to an Organization "Combatting Anti-Semitism"?
May 18, 2021
By Bill Berkowitz
Never again applies to deadly hate against any group. (Max Nathans)
Why is a relatively recently founded organization, aimed at fighting anti-Semitism and “all hate,” receiving money from the avowedly anti-Muslim Clarion Project?
While anti-Semitic hate crimes in this country have increased over the past several years, there has also been a rise in the number of organizations committed to fighting anti-Semitism. One of these entities is the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement, a broad collaboration of groups and individuals. As Arno Rosenfeld reported in a late-April story in The Forward titled, “Dark money, questionable partners behind new group fighting anti-Semitism”: “[T]here is no question among those in the field that antisemitism has become an animating cause for donors, and that they share a conservative outlook on how to fight it.”
According to Abe Foxman, who retired in 2015 as head of the Anti-Defamation League, where he had worked for half a century, “The money [to fight anti-Semitism] was coming in the last couple of years disproportionately from what I would call right-of-center Jews, as compared to what it was for many years.”
One of the groups funding the Combat Anti-Semitism project is the Clarion Project, formerly Clarion Fund Inc.. In all the years I’ve been covering right-wing dark money, I never ran across this outfit until I read Rosenfeld’s story. Rosenfeld’s reporting on the funding sources behind the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement found that the group that claims to be “committed to fighting all hate,” is, in part, supported by the Clarion Project, a group on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “list of anti-Muslim hate groups for three of the last five years.”
According to Rosenfeld, “The Clarion Project is best known for producing and distributing anti-Muslim propaganda films, and also hosts the Fuqra Files [a product of Clarion Intelligence Network] which claim to expose a network of Black Muslim sleeper cells ‘anticipating a nationwide armed uprising,’ according to its website.”
A 2019 report written by Clarion’s Ryan Mauro -- listed as the Director of the Clarion Intelligence Network and a former adjunct professor of counter-terrorism for Liberty and Regent Universities – was titled “Clarion Intel EXCLUSIVE: Nationwide Militant Islamist Network.” The report maintained “An Islamist movement in America composed of terrorist, paramilitary and criminal components is increasingly anticipating a nationwide armed uprising which will be sparked by a confrontation with police and/or white supremacists, according to Clarion Intelligence Network’s sources.”
A report issued a few years back by UC Berkeley’s Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, described the Clarion Project as “nonprofit group that produces and distributes anti-Muslim propaganda films.”
Combat Anti-Semitism “is the only public project of a foundation registered in Moundridge, Kan., (pop. 2,222), and has extensive ties to Adam E. Beren, a Midwest oil magnate and megadonor to both the Republican Party and local and national Jewish causes,” Rosenfeld wrote. “But Combat Anti-Semitism won’t say who is paying for its staff and events, and at least one previous attempt to trace its origins was wiped from the internet.”
Rosenfeld pointed out that Beren “donated $50,000 to the Clarion Project in 2014 through a family foundation called the Beren Sea Foundation, controlled by Adam and his wife, Ellen, according to the foundation’s tax filings.
Rosenfeld reported that “the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement is part of the Combat Hate Foundation, which was created in 2019 and registered to Donna Stucky, chief financial officer of Berexco LLC, an oil and gas exploration and production firm. Berexco is owned by Beren, the third-generation scion of a Kansas oil family, who donated $312,500 to a pro-Trump PAC shortly before the 2016 election, according to Federal Election Commission records, along with $1.1 million to the Republican National Committee.” Beren was appointed by Trump to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 2019.
The group “has not yet had to file the 990 tax form on which nonprofits must publicly disclose their officers and major expenses,” according to Rosenfeld. The group’s website lists a staff of nine based in the United States and Israel, and “Its online productions during the pandemic have been slickly produced, including the a major international summit for mayors last month, in which two freelance TV anchor women virtually hosted more than a dozen mayors in a television studio.”
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