USAID has given millions to charities with ties to terrorist organisations

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Middle East Forum (“MEF”) is an American conservative 501(c)(3) think tank founded in 1990 by Daniel Pipes, who serves as its president.  It is based in Philadelphia and focuses on promoting American interests in the Middle East and defending Western values from Islamist threats.  One of the organisation’s publications is Focus on Western Islamism (“FWI”) which offers counter-Islamist investigative journalism, opinions and news.

At the beginning of the month, FWI published a report on its multi-year study into the US Department of State’s (“DoS’s”) Office of Palestinian Affairs and the US Agency for International Development (“USAID”) funding to designated terrorist groups.  The amount of federal funding that ends up in the pockets of Islamist organisations, both domestic and foreign, makes the US government one of the leading financiers of global Islamism.

The report notes that there are problems with the reliability of government spending data and that they have analysed approved grant sums as the actual amounts paid out are unknown.  Our article is paraphrased from FWI’s report.  The report contains hyperlinks to the authors’ sources which we have not included.  We have instead added our own hyperlinks to provide more context on the groups being highlighted.  You can read the full report HERE.  In conjunction with this report, readers may be interested in browsing NGO Monitor’s mapping of the anti-Israel NGO network in the US.  NGO Monitor has identified 157 groups that are part of this network.

FWI has uncovered $164 million of approved grants from the DoS and USAID to radical organisations.  Included in that amount is at least $122 million to groups aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters.

DoS money has been handed to radical domestic groups such as the Tides Foundation, which members of Congress have accused of funding pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish violence in college campuses across America.

Major aid organisations such as World Vision and Catholic Relief Services, as well as advocacy organisations such as InterAction, serve as important vehicles, sometimes knowingly, for terror-tied Islamists, both in the United States and abroad. These charities depend on federal funding, receiving billions of taxpayers’ dollars, FWI’s report said.

Federal funding subsidises efforts by domestic Islamists involved with Hamas, Jamaat-e-Islami and the Turkish regime, to abrogate rules and scrutiny in the United States intended to tackle the threat of terror finance.  Records of federal funding, particularly through USAID, are obfuscated by deficient disclosure practices, deleted data and deliberate attempts to evade transparency, with millions of dollars given to anonymous beneficiaries in terrorism-stricken areas of the globe.

USAID and Hamas-Linked Charities

“Israel will exist and  will  continue  to  exist  until  Islam  will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”—The Covenant of the Hamas (1988)

“Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”—Hamas Document of General Principles and Policies (2017)

Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, is an organisation which calls for the establishment of an Islamic Palestinian state under Sharia law and has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. It has long been involved in significant terrorist violence.  The organisation, or its military wing the Al-Qassam Brigades, is designated as a terrorist organisation in the USA, as it is by several countries including Canada, the UK, the European Union, Argentina, New Zealand, Japan, Australia, Israel, and Paraguay.  The Organisation of American States, a group of 34 Caribbean and Latin American countries plus Canada, designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation in May 2021. Additionally, Hamas’s activities had been banned in Jordan and Germany.

When speaking of Islamic organisations such as Hamas it’s important to bear in mind that Islamists are not the same as Muslims.   As the Washington Institute of Near East Policy states, “Islamism is not a form of the Muslim faith or an expression of Muslim piety; it is, rather, a political ideology that strives to derive legitimacy from Islam.”

USAID has given millions of dollars to organisations in Gaza that are controlled by Hamas. USAID beneficiaries have called for their lands to be “cleansed” from the “impurity of the Jews,” among dozens of other chilling statements, the FWI report said.

USAID staff attend the offices of charities which seemingly operate on behalf of senior Hamas leaders, while the staff of multiple multi-million dollar USAID beneficiary charities openly praise and encourage violence against Jews.

Bayader Association for Environment and Development (“Bayader”)

Founded in 2007, shortly after Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, Bayader operates in close cooperation with the Hamas regime. USAID officials have praised Bayader’s work on social media, and even visited Bayader’s offices.

Since 2016, USAID as given Bayader $901, 203. The most recent USAID grant to Bayader was issued on 1 October 2023, just six days before Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October.

American Near East Refugee Aid (“ANERA”)

ANERA is an organisation that provides humanitarian and development aid to the Middle East, specifically the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Jordan. For decades, ANERA has been accused of supporting extremists tied to Hamas.  USAID is one of ANERA’s biggest contributors, approving transfers to the organisation of tens of millions of dollars over the past few decades, including a $12.5 million grant in 2024.  In total, the FWI report has calculated that over $109 million has been given to ANERA.

ANERA is a long-standing partner of Hamas-linked charity, Bayader (see above). The organisation has also used USAID monies to fund projects of the Unlimited Friends Association (see below) which MEF has in a previous study determined to be a Hamas proxy organisation.

In 2000, an ANERA report appears to disclose a partnership with the Ihsan Society, which, in 2005, the US government designated as a front for Hamas.

In 2017, a report from the Israel Law Centre alleged that money sent through ANERA to the Palestinian territories was “used to support Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) kindergartens that actively indoctrinate children in hatred and killing of Israeli civilians, as well as other PIJ and Hamas organisations, thus enabling them to finance terrorist activity, which is forbidden by U.S. law.”

In 2014, Mousa Shawwa, ANERA’s “logistics coordinator,” endorsed a call on social media for God to “erase the Jews.”

Unlimited Friends Association (“UFA”)

UFA is involved with senior Hamas leaders and promotes violently anti-Semitic rhetoric across its social media pages.

The charity hosts events to provide financial support to the “the families of martyrs and prisoners” and carries out its work in open collaboration with Hamas. UFA has organised events and invited to its offices prominent Hamas figures such as Mustafa Sawwaf, who calls “Israel’s disappearance … a necessity [according to] the Koran.”