In anticipation of HR 9495 coming to the House for a vote, CEO of the New Israel Fund Daniel Sokatch released the following statement:

This bill is as dangerous as it is extraneous. The United States already has a meticulous process in place to determine whether a group is a providing material support for terrorism. What this would do is strip that system of due process from that law and enable willy nilly terrorist designations.

Should this bill pass, it will give Donald Trump yet another autocratic weapon with which to endanger civil society. Any nonprofit—a reproductive rights, environmental, or pro-immigration group, for example—that makes so much as a statement on the Middle East war could provide Trump Administration flimsy pretext to label that group ‘terrorist-supporting’ and see its nonprofit status stripped.  This bill must not pass, and Jewish groups should not support it.”