Photo Credit: courtesy

{Originally posted to the FrontPage Magazine website}

The release of the memo is very important. But we also need to investigate and expose the various abuses of Obama Inc. And one of those was using the IRS to target political opponents. The most blatant case involved a pro-Israel group named Z Street.




Lori Lowenthal Marcus, a talented journalist whose work regularly appears at the Jewish Press, created Z Street. Now the case has been settled. And the material is damning.

In late July 2010, an IRS agent truthfully responded to our lawyer’s query about why processing was taking so long: Z Street’s application was getting special scrutiny, the agent said, because it was related to Israel. Some applications for tax-exempt status were being sent to a special office in Washington for review of whether the applicants’ policy positions conflicted with those of the Obama administration.

The “honesty” made the Z Street case so crucial. Here was direct evidence of political targeting.

In August 2010, three other Jewish organizations applying for tax-exempt status were asked by the IRS to “explain their religious beliefs about the Land of Israel.”

Remember all the protests by Obama Inc. that we can’t screen refugees by religion? But they can certainly screen non-profit groups that way. As long as they’re pro-Israel.

Within weeks of President Obama’s inauguration, IRS and State Department officials began considering whether they could deny or revoke tax-exempt status for organizations that provided material support to Jews living across the Green Line—the nonborder that delineates pre-1967 Israel from the territories Israel acquired in the Six Day War. The theory was that a Jewish presence in those areas is inconsistent with U.S. policy. The IRS drew up lists of such organizations based on information from anti-Israel websites such as Electronic Intifada and MondoWeiss.

Those are both extreme hate sites. I don’t think I need to say much more about a site with “Intifada” in its name. Mondoweiss, despite its attempts at JVP-like efforts at adopting protective coloration by playing up some figment of Jewishness, is even worse.

One Mondoweiss editor said, “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, but I can understand why some are.” One of its writers has claimed that Israel was behind September 11 and even DailyKos banned Mondoweiss for its recurring anti-semitism. While it has been revealed that the Kansas City shooter used anti-semitic material from Max Blumenthal, who is often promoted on Mondoweiss, a Mondoweiss editor, Annie Robbins, suggested that Israel was behind it all.

Imagine the Trump administration using the IRS to target black groups based on lists drawn up by the KKK and Neo-Nazi groups. That’s what Obama Inc. was doing.

While no formal policy was released barring U.S. tax-exempt entities from supporting Jewish activity over the Green Line, Obama IRS officials tried three times between 2009 and 2012 to create such a policy, and IRS employees made sure the effort wasn’t documented. One emailed her supervisor saying that she would answer his questions about IRS policy relating to Israeli settlements only orally. “Not doing email on this,” she explained.

That alone should merit an investigation. When a government employee insists on discussing a policy in a way that won’t leave records, that’s a blatant abuse.

The memo is important. But the abuses began much earlier. And while the settlement is a good thing, settlements aren’t enough. The only way to make an impact is to make all the information public and hold the perpetrators accountable. If we don’t, the swamp wins.