Gaza and Charities at War: One Judge Recognizes a Rock and a Hard Place

My advocacy for Civil Society has sometimes garnered accusations of anti-Semitism.  Rarely, but often enough that the accusation might have shut me up if I had no personal experience with racism.  I am biased, alright, but only in favor of civil society and the rights of nonprofits to do what they properly do.  I generally believe that Civil Society is entitled to the Constitutional space in which to advocate even stupid ideas.  I have limits though.  Advocating hatred and violence is neither charitable nor educational.  And if the Service or stakeholders can meet a high, content-neutral test, those organizations should be denied tax exemption even if they have a First Amendment right to engage in stochastic terrorism. But I shouldn't have to pay for their hatred of me or fellow humans through the tax code, and exempting organizations for that sort of advocacy renders the word "charity" absurdly meaningless. If that is really what the National Students for Justice in Palestine or UNRWA are doing, then so be it, revoke them.  

But revoking a passive or just insufficiently responsive bystander's tax exempt status imposes an impossible and dangerous "you are are either for us or against us" standard on Civil Society. Eventually and inevitably, no nonprofit will be entitled to tax exemption or nonprofit charitable status.   

So I was struck by what a sage jurist said this week about the untenable situation in which universities, and indeed other nonprofits, find themselves when war or strife breaks out. When people demand that NGOs take one stand or the other. And nothing in between. The Harrison Ford-look alike pictured above said these words as he dismissed a discrimination complaint against MIT provoked by campus protests last spring:

The court adds some concluding thoughts. The pain and hurt felt by plaintiffs and the Jewish and Israeli students that they seek to represent is genuine and fully understandable. But at bottom, the fault attributed to MIT is its failure to anticipate the bigoted behavior that some demonstrators – however sincere their disagreement with U.S. and Israeli policies – would exhibit as events unfolded. The transgressors were, after all, mostly MIT students whom the school (perhaps naively) thought had internalized the values of tolerance and respect for others – even those with whom one might disagree – that a modern liberal university education seeks to instill. To fault MIT for what proved to be a failure of clairvoyance and a perhaps too measured response to an outburst of ugliness on its campus would send the unhelpful message that anything less than a faultless response in similar circumstances would earn no positive recognition in the eyes of the law. Count I will thus be dismissed.

darryll k. jones