Sigrid Rausing is one of the most important philanthropists in the United Kingdom. The Sigrid Rausing Trust has committed £591 million in grants in its history, and it supports work on a wide range of human rights issues around the world. But, in the wake of October 7, 2023, the trust had to cut grants to some of the organizations it backed because of disturbing material those groups published that condoned Hamas’s violent rampage through Israel. In a piece first published in The Sunday Times that we’re reprinting today, Rausing writes about that decision, what happened afterwards, and how it is that organizations founded to protect human rights came to sympathize with terrorists. —The Editors
I founded a charitable trust in the United Kingdom nearly 30 years ago, working on human rights issues such as torture, conditions of detention, freedom of expression, and sexual violence in conflict.
The Sigrid Rausing Trust funds other causes, too, but human rights is our oldest program, and our area of expertise. We enter into long-term partnerships with our grantees, based on trust and shared values. Language—the only way to gauge those values—has always been important to us: We ask for clarity and brevity in funding applications and reports, and we mistrust inflated mission and vision statements. More importantly, following guidance from the Charity Commission, which regulates England and Wales’s nonprofits, we have strong clauses in our grant contract requiring grantees to abstain from incendiary language that may promote violence.
At times of heightened tension, we check our grantees’ websites and social media accounts. After the October 7, 2023 atrocities, a handful—only five out of some 400—had posted disturbing material: A group working on social and economic rights in Tunisia expressed “pride” (our translation) in the Hamas action. Another called for “support for the guerrilla Palestinian people in their war against the Zionist entity,” which they said “was shaken due to the action of the Palestinian resistance [. . .] invading the occupied lands and Zionist settlements.” A media group in Lebanon described the Hamas action as “resistance” to “colonization,” referred to the murdered civilians as “settlers” and dismissed Israeli information about Hamas’s atrocities as “lies.”
The outlier, if only in terms of geography, was a group in Canada that almost immediately termed Israel’s actions “genocidal,” and described the country as a “settler colonialist white-supremacist state.” The statement ended with an echo of a United Nations resolution; an affirmation of “the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determine their resistance.” It is a phrase which, given the context of the piece, we felt condoned the Hamas atrocities.
