In early March, roughly 300 people gathered at a Berkeley sanctuary to celebrate the life of Barbara Lubin, the Philadelphia-born activist who spent more than four decades as a liberal firebrand in northern California. Lubin championed rent control, climate causes, and educational rights for disabled children. She also built, in 1988, the Middle East Children's Alliance — known as MECA — to send aid to Palestinian territories.
Lubin died at 84. Her organization did not die with her. And now MECA is at the center of a serious question in Washington.
What the charity says it does
MECA states that it has channeled more than $50 million since its founding into schools, medical clinics, playgrounds, and libraries in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Its public case is straightforward: humanitarian aid, nothing more. Lubin and her staff led regular delegations to the West Bank and Gaza and sponsored political rallies and cultural events in solidarity with Palestinians — including events held immediately after Hamas's October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on southern Israel.
The charity became a fixture among radical Bay Area organizations. Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, both founded in Berkeley in the 1990s, counted MECA as a peer institution. At Lubin's memorial, Angela Davis — described by the reporting as a communist philosopher and cultural icon — praised 'these brave formations' for standing up for 'a free Palestine' and called Lubin's community-building exemplary.
What Washington is now asking
Questions are being raised in Washington over suspected MECA funding to a terrorist organization, according to reporting by Jay Solomon, executive director of investigations at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. The nature and current status of those inquiries have not been fully disclosed in the available sourcing, but the scrutiny is described as active and serious.
MECA has not been charged with any crime in the public record available here. The organization's stated mission — schools, scholarships, water projects, medicine — is the face it presents to donors and to the luminaries who have lent it credibility over the years, a list that has included Edward Said, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker.
The principle at stake
Say it plainly: the question of whether a nonprofit's humanitarian branding conceals material support for terrorism is not a procedural footnote. It is the central accountability question that donors, regulators, and the public deserve answered on the record.
Follow the incentive, not the press release. Charitable status confers tax advantages funded by every American taxpayer. When a government investigation raises the possibility that those advantages underwrote a designated terrorist organization, the burden of transparency falls on the charity — not on the investigators. The celebrity endorsements and the folk songs at the memorial do not resolve that question. The financial records do. Washington, it appears, is finally asking to see them.
