If they were the least bit cognizant of the ties Islamic Relief has to terror groups, they’re culpable…
World Vision, Come Clean – A Rebuttal
SAM WESTROP AND CLIFFORD SMITH
Writing in the Christian Post on November 3, we revealed the full extent of the role played by the international evangelical charity World Vision in a 2015 decision by the Obama administration to approve the transfer of $115,000 of taxpayers’ money to a designated terror financing charity, the Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA). This article itself followed a July 2018 report we wrote in National Review first uncovering the scandal, which was covered by media all around the world.
We had high hopes that, once the facts were out in public, World Vision would apologize, accept the evidence we presented, explain the unfortunate circumstances surrounding these events, and seek to correct course to ensure such things didn’t happen again. That would be an appropriate and laudable response by a taxpayer-funded charity upon finding it had transferred funds to a designated terror-financing organization closely linked with Osama Bin Laden.
World Vision’s July 2018 response to the ISRA scandal was misleading. And now, unfortunately, in their response to our November 3 article, World Vision has doubled down.
World Vision declares it “outrageous” that we made the “false and unfair claim” that it “knowingly supported an organization linked to terrorism.”
The problem with this is that we never made any such claim. Instead, our article demonstrated the steps that World Vision could have taken – employing simple due diligence to identify ISRA’s terrorist status before choosing it as a partner for a taxpayer-funded project. Had World Vision, for example, typed the name of ISRA into the Treasury Department’s Sanctioned List, or conducted a simple Google search, red flags would have been immediately raised.
