George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) is laying down $42.5 million over five years in the communities mainstream outlets refer to as Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) and Muslim, Arab and South Asian (MASA).
According to Axios, the funds will be used for nonpartisan purposes and direct activism by organizations focused on engaging those demographics.
Laleh Ispahani, co-director of OSF’s operations in the United States, noted the largeness of the sum, saying “we really do hope others join us.”
“Our investment won’t come close to meeting the needs of this community,” Ispahani said.
OSF was founded by Soros, a billionaire investor and Democrat mega donor, in 1993. He has donated over $32 billion to the foundation.
The OSF grants will be divided between 15 organizations—all part of OSF’s 10-year campaign to build a “multi-racial democracy.”
OSF had already announced earlier this year that they are giving $10 million in grants over five years to American Indian-led organizations.
Axios notes that the “latest AAPI and MASA recipients work on a range of issues — such as increasing civic participation, voter outreach, pushing for policy reforms and combatting discrimination.”
Although the recipient groups may not donate the funds to political campaigns, the combination of (c)(3) and (c)(4) money “allows us to do advocacy on the issues that concern the community without worrying about any restrictions,” said Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of the software company Emgage.
Emgage, one of the grantees, has a mission of “engaging and empowering” American Muslims.
“We can use it to strongly push back against redistricting, encroachment on voter rights, on policies that may harm marginalized communities,” Alzayat added.
For its part, the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund will funnel the OSF investment to its network of local groups.
“If we don’t have strong local groups, we’re not going to have the ability to reach AAPI communities and enable them to participate in this democracy,” said the fund’s director, EunSook Lee.
The Asian and Pacific Islander demographics constitute the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the United States. It nearly doubled between 2000 and 2019. But Asian Americans remain “somewhat peripheral to discussions of American elections and democracy,” OSF’s Ispahani said. And according to a recent report from AAPIP, only 0.2% of grants from U.S. foundations went toward AAPI communities.
The Soros grants are progressives’ attempt to close that gap and win over ethnically Asian Americans, tapping into fears surrounding recent headlines about anti-Asian hate crimes. The murdr of eight asians in March of this year was used as grounds for the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which Joe Biden signed into law.
As The New American has reported, although the violence against Asians has been used to fan the typical anti-white sentiment, the reality is that most of the crimes have been committed by non-whites.
Moreover, the so-called surge in anti-Asian crimes is really a media invention without any statistical basis.
Pradheep J. Shanker at National Review pointed out that the media pounced on research from the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism that analyzed “16 U.S. cities and concluded that Asian Americans reported 150 percent more crimes in the last year than in prior years.” Shanker then expounded:
But the numbers are so small as to be statistically meaningless. San Diego, for example, saw a grand total of one hate crime in 2020, without any in 2019. Large cities such as Chicago, Phoenix, and Houston had similar numbers. In fact, of the 122 total anti-Asian hate crime cases in 2020, 28 came from New York City, 15 from Los Angeles, and 14 from Boston. A credible or honest researcher would consider this more of a problem specific to those large urban centers than a nationwide problem.
Soros has been active recently. He has also put millions of dollars behind a far-left money hub used by activists to push efforts aimed at dismantling the police.za
A search of Soros’ Open Society Foundations’ grant database showed that the Foundation to Promote Open Society, a nonprofit within Soros’ network, gave $3 million to the Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability (CRH) in 2020.
CRH compiles resources for local leftist activists in order to help them make transformative change to the criminal-justice system. That includes materials on abolishing and defunding the police.
