In Ami Horowitz’s recent short film, he interviews leaders of the radical leftist IfNotNow (INN), exposing the organization as a “hate group that supports terrorists and partners with anti-Semites.”
In the film, he shows how the group lures in young people with a resonant message of fighting against “injustice” against the Palestinians and “distorting reality to fit their warped worldview.” Horowitz exposes its true mission to demonize Israel, moving the Jewish community away from its support of the Jewish state.
The group “weaponizes its Judaism,” he maintains, by disrupting pro-Israel events and organizations with sit-ins and rallies under the guise of a Jewish progressive agenda, and infiltrating Jewish schools, youth groups, universities and even Birthright Israel trips.
“They are a radically anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic, self-hating group that will degrade themselves and their religion,” he told JNS. “I felt an urgency to create this short documentary exposing INN’s radicalism and extremism. The existence and success of this group is astonishing and saddening … it was important to target Jewish youth as an audience for this film as they are susceptible to being drawn in by their fake social-justice message.”
INN’s partners, the film exposes, includes other virulent campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, who help bring in other anti-Israel activists and embed operatives to alter or sever the connection that Jewish education seeks to make by lying about Israel.
Some of its leaders, as the film depicts, have spoken positively about the terrorist group Hamas and have usurped the Jewish Mourner’s Kaddish to grieve the deaths of Palestinian terrorists. The leadership of some of INN’s partners has said even worse, glorifying the Holocaust, inciting violence against Israelis, spreading anti-Semitic tropes and insinuating that being a Jew is a crime deserving of hanging.
In rare interviews with INN leadership, Horowitz’s prodding questions result in interviewees divulging their beliefs in the connection between the Israel Defense Forces and Nazi Germany, and justifying Palestinian terrorism and violent resistance.
It was necessary to hide his identity to expose wrongdoing in these interviews, related Horowitz, as “if they knew Ami Horowitz was asking for an interview, they would never agree, and we couldn’t hear in their own words their hatred for Israel, their hatred for the United States and their support for terrorism.”
In the film, Edwin Black, a human-rights investigative journalist, calls INN one of the most “insidious Jewish organizations” that attacks Jewish communal structures from within.
“IfNotNow approaches kids who are confronted with difficult questions and seeking guidance, misinforming them about the facts and creating a younger generation with a distorted worldview,” he told JNS.
While Black believes that the INN leadership is “completely unaware of how false their narrative is,” he maintained, “the people funding INN are aware” of the goal to undermine the Jewish people from within its inner core.
According to NGO Monitor, a large part of INN’s funding has been sourced from forces outside the Jewish community, including organizations like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Foundation for Middle East Peace—each frequent funders of a host of groups involved in the BDS movement and delegitimization of Israel.
“There is big money involved,” said Black. “It is not just a bunch of reckless misinformed kids, but well-paid and well-placed operatives” who, similar to those in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s, “work against the established interests of the Jewish people, of Israel and Jewish identity with the Land of Israel and Zionism.”
Black commended Horowitz’s film as one of the first to effectively take a critical view of INN with interviews right from the source.