Category World News

A day after his inaugural Mass, Pope Leo XIV had a meeting with US Vice President J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio, the US’s Secretary of State. Veda invited the US-born pontiff to a US visit, whose hardline immigration policy has previously drawn criticism from Leo.

Washington, DC – A measure known as the “nonprofit killer” has been removed from an enormous tax bill being advanced in the United States Congress, according to the bill posted online by the House of Representatives.

The provision, which no longer appeared on the President Donald Trump-backed “One Big, Beautiful Bill” on Monday, would have given the executive branch the authority to strip the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that it deems supportive of “terrorism”.

Advocates have warned that the legislative effort – which failed to pass as a stand-alone bill last year – could be abused to crack down on groups that the administration does not agree with, particularly nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) that support Palestinian rights.

Israel has given little indication that it is relenting after more than 19 months into its war on Gaza. The past week has seen an intensification of violence across the besieged Palestinian territory, which has killed hundreds of people.

The reason for the disappearance of the NGO provision remains unclear, and experts warned it may yet reappear in the bill before the final vote in the House, expected later in the week.

The office of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

With a razor-thin majority in the House, Republicans need every vote to pass the tax bill, which Trump has put at the top of his agenda in Congress.

Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the section may have been removed to avoid putting the must-pass bill at risk, especially because the House parliamentarian, a nonpartisan office that oversees procedures, may have rejected it for violating the rules.

“It’s possible that this is a hiccup that they didn’t want, given that it wasn’t even likely to go through,” Hamadanchy told Al Jazeera.

“I can’t tell you that is the reason for sure. What I can tell you is that we continue to be very vigilant in case it comes back, either later this week or in the future.”

For weeks, Trump has been calling on Congress to pass the bill, which extends his 2017 tax cuts, a key component of his economic plans.

But the proposal has faced some opposition from conservative budget hawks, who have argued it does not cut spending enough and would add to the nation’s $36.2 trillion debt. So Republicans can ill-afford unnecessary issues that could derail the passage of the legislation.

‘Chill free speech’

Rights groups have been rallying against the “nonprofit killer”, saying it violates free speech and the right to due process.

The proposal would have granted the secretary of state power to unilaterally declare an NGO “terrorist supporting” and make it ineligible for tax exemptions.

It also said the government would not have to reveal the reason behind the designation if “disclosure of such description would be inconsistent with national security or law enforcement interests”.

Under the current rules, organisations certified to be nonprofits by the government get breaks on their federal income taxes. The status also makes donations to such groups tax deductible for donors.

While the withdrawn measure would have allowed a targeted NGO to challenge the secretary of state’s decision in court, losing the tax exempt status, even if temporarily, could have proven costly for nonprofits, especially smaller organisations.

Hamadanchy said being accused of supporting terrorism could also have prompted banks to close down the accounts of the groups.

“And then you have legal costs fighting off the designation because even if you might win in court, it’s going to take time to get there, and it’s going to cause a lot of damage to your organisation through that process,” he said.

“And that’s sort of the point because they want to chill speech.”

Hamadanchy noted that existing laws already make material support for a designated “terrorist” group a criminal offence with severe penalties.

The legislative push coincided with the Trump administration’s crackdown on Palestinian rights supporters, especially on college campuses.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has revoked the student visas of several Palestine advocates – who have not been charged with a criminal offence – over allegations of “support for terrorism”.

Some advocacy groups have portrayed the “nonprofit killer” as part of a broader push to muzzle voices critical of Israel.

“This bill is designed to silence dissent, especially from Muslim, Palestinian and civil rights organizations that speak out against injustice and genocide,” the Council on American Islamic Relations said in a statement last week.

“It threatens every nonprofit that engages in advocacy, educates the public, or challenges government policy.”

The apparent setback for the nonprofit provision came nearly two weeks after House leaders cancelled a vote on a bill to restrict boycotts of Israel after a backlash from right-wing legislators who voiced opposition to the measure on free speech grounds.

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said it would be “interesting” to see how Republican leaders would deal with staunchly pro-Israel measures like the “nonprofit killer” going forward.

On October 7, 2024 – exactly one year into the United States-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip that has now killed more than 53, 000 Palestinians – the Washington-based Heritage Foundation unleashed a policy paper titled Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.

The conservative think tank is the same force behind Project 2025, a blueprint for consolidating executive power in the US and forging the best-ever right-wing dystopia. The “national strategy” proposed by Project Esther – which is named for the biblical queen credited with saving the Jews from extermination in ancient Persia – basically consists of criminalising opposition to Israel’s current genocide and exterminating freedoms of speech and thought along with a whole lot of other rights.

The first “key takeaway” listed in the report is that “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘ pro-Palestinian movement ‘ is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)”. Never mind that, in reality, there is no such thing as a “global Hamas Support Network” – just as there is no such thing as the HSN’s alleged “affiliated Hamas Support Organizations (HSOs)” that the Heritage Foundation has also taken the liberty of inventing. Among these alleged HSOs are prominent American Jewish organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace.

The second “key takeaway” of the report is that the so-called HSN is “supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy” – a curious choice of terms, no doubt, from a think tank that is doing its best to eradicate what remains of US democracy as we speak.

The phrase “capitalism and democracy” appears no fewer than five times in the report – although it’s not quite clear what Hamas has to do with capitalism aside from governing a Palestinian territory that has for more than 19 months been on the receiving end of billions upon billions of dollars ‘ worth of US-funded military destruction. From the perspective of the arms industry, at least, genocide is capitalism at its best.

And as per the genocidal logic of Project Esther, protesting the mass slaughter of Palestinians is fundamentally anti-Semitic – hence the need to pursue the prescribed national strategy of “extirpating the influence of the HSN from our society”.

The October publication of the Heritage Foundation report occurred on the watch of President Joe Biden’s administration, which the think tank diagnosed as “decidedly anti-Israel” despite its complete and utter complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The report included many suggestions on how to “combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States … when a willing Administration occupies the White House”.

Fast forward seven months, and a recent New York Times analysis indicates that, since US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, “the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther’s proposals”. These range from threats to withhold gargantuan sums of federal funding for US universities that refuse to silence resistance to systematic slaughter to efforts to deport legal US residents for the crime of expressing solidarity with Palestinians.

In addition to allegedly infiltrating US academia and disseminating “anti-Zionist narratives across universities, high schools, and elementary schools, often under the umbrella or within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology”, Project Esther’s authors contend that “the HSN and HSOs have mastered the use of America’s liberal media environment]and] are quick to gain attention for any and every demonstration, no matter how large or small, from every network across the country”.

And that’s not all: “The HSN and HSOs have made prolific and unchecked use of social media platforms, such as TikTok, across the entire digital ecosystem to spout antisemitic propaganda”.

To all of these ends, the policy paper offers a whole host of recommendations for how to stamp out the domestic pro-Palestine movement as well as humane and ethical attitudes in general: from purging “HSO-supporting faculty and staff” from educational institutions to making “potential demonstrators fear affiliation with HSOs” to banning “antisemitic content” from social media – which in Heritage Foundation jargon of course means anti-genocidal content.

And yet in spite of all of Project Esther’s ruckus over the ostensibly existential anti-Semitic threat posed by the HSN, it turns out that “no major Jewish organizations appear to have participated in drafting the plan, or publicly endorsed it since its release”, according to a December article in the Forward.

A news outlet catering to American Jews, the Forward reported that the Heritage Foundation had “struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups”, and that Project Esther “focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups”.

Meanwhile, in an open letter published this month, influential American Jewish leaders warned that a “range of actors” in the US are currently “using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press”.

If the Trump administration now appears to be promoting Project Esther and running with it, it is more motivated by concern for propagating a white Christian nationalist agenda that uses anti-Semitism and Zionism to its own extremist goals. Unfortunately, this is only the start of a much more complex project.