On Wednesday, lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives called for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to begin investigating the financial links between China and anti-Israel groups that have been protesting throughout the United States since October 7th.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the request comes from members of the House Ways and Means Committee, who wrote a letter expressing concerns that “foreign adversaries are taking advantage of loopholes to impact American political activity with little-to-no transparency.”
One such example is The People’s Forum, a group that organized anti-Israel protests such as public school walkouts in New York City. The group is bankrolled by Neville Roy Singham, a tech mogul with pro-China sympathies, as documented by the New York Times. The People’s Forum urged students to chant anti-Semitic phrases, including “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which calls for the extermination of all Israelis.
Another example is The Energy Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that focuses primarily on global warming, yet operates mostly out of China and has deep ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This organization has repeatedly advocated for “green” energy policies that would hurt the United States’ energy production, to the benefit of China.
“Not only do these activities raise serious national security concerns, but they also raise questions about whether organizations like this receive foreign funding from America’s adversaries and whether the Internal Revenue Service (‘IRS’) is conducting oversight of entities like these,” said the letter sent by lawmakers to IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel.
The committee members asked if the IRS has “a definition of antisemitism in place within the agency that it considers when evaluating the claimed exempt purpose of a tax-exempt organization,” for the purposes of cracking down on such radical groups. The letter also asked if the IRS would eventually start an investigation into the various financial links between China and various domestic groups.