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#kids#religious#charity#https#money#com#jewish#car#israel#organization

Discussion (46 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Terr_16 minutes ago
Recycling from yesterday's submit (55 points, 19 comments) [0]

_____

'Bout damn time.

Spoilers for The Good Place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFQHHor6mT8

I remember being delighted how the scene skewered an unexpected but very deserving target.

____

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48141771

incompleteabout 3 hours ago
they'll just need to change the jingle to be something like:

one eight hundred cars for kids, for east coast kids to fly to israel on your dime!

also, praise be <diety> that these jingles will soon be off the air.

akatechisabout 2 hours ago
Jokes on us, the "east coast kids" already fly to israel on our dime...
aranchelkabout 2 hours ago
The fact that the organization is Jewish is stated prominently in the article, but I’m not entirely sure why that’s relevant. Many charities in the US have religious affiliations.

The adult matchmaking etc, that deviates substantially from their advertising.

MichaelDickensabout 2 hours ago
It's relevant because the fact that it's religious organization was an important fact in the judge's ruling. From the article:

> If Kars4Kids resumes advertising, [Judge Apkarian] wrote, its ads must contain “an express, audible disclosure of its religious affiliation and the geographic location of its primary beneficiaries and the age of the beneficiaries, specifying whether they aim for children or families, or both.”

aranchelkabout 2 hours ago
Having to audibly name the religion/ethnicity of beneficiaries of charities is a pretty wild requirement for a US charity.

That may have been the judge’s framing, but it seems off from what I typically expect from mainstream US news.

futter9about 1 hour ago
It's not at all wild if the charity presents itself as non-discriminatory (ostensibly to deceive "outsiders" into misguided donations) while specifically benefiting the ethno-religious group of its administration.

It's clearly deceptive and exploitative.

EdwardDiego40 minutes ago
It would depend on what the precise federal/state law regulating charities is - it sounds, to me, (I'm a Kiwi, but heard one of their ads on the radio today in an Uber in SF) like they need to be more specific about what charity they're raising money for - the after just said "for charity".

I'm sure you'd agree that if I was advertising in the name of kids to raise money for a charity, and it happened to be that the particular charity I was raising money for had determines it should give Hamas money to help those kids, that potential donors would prefer to know where exactly their money was going to.

fn-moteabout 2 hours ago
To clarify the last sentence: the article says:

> Kars4Kids primarily funds a New Jersey-based Jewish organization, Oorah, which provides programs, including an adult matchmaking service, trips to Israel for teens and summer camps in New York, the judge wrote. The only program in California that Kars4Kids sponsored was a promotional giveaway of Kars4Kids-branded backpacks, she found.

MBCookabout 2 hours ago
It’s still not relevant.

The charity is giving almost no money to kids. Thats the relevant part.

Doesn’t matter if it Catholic, Jewish, Scientologist, or Zoroastrian.

The law wasn’t faith based. The decision wasn’t faith based.

So why does the faith matter?

Ukvabout 2 hours ago
Both "giving almost no money to kids" and that the recipients (mostly adults) it did benefit were "based on religious affiliation" seem fairly surprising to me. If I donated a car, I would feel mislead by both.
Brian_K_White15 minutes ago
The identity and entity matters. It's not a random group who did a random thing for a random reason, it's a specific group who did a thing for a specific reason.

No one else made them behave in the way that got them called out. There is no religious persecution going on here. It's not a case of "But why does it matter he's black?". The act was specifically performd by a religious group, specifically for the benefit of that religious group only, under false pretenses of being neutral.

The people you are implying are being prejudged, are in fact the ones who commited the prejudice and discrimination.

ande-mnocabout 2 hours ago
> I'm not entirely sure why that's relevant

Because they are funding young people to visit Israel and this gives it context.

MBCookabout 2 hours ago
Why does Israel matter?

All that matters is very little money is going to the stated goal of helping poor kids.

Religious angles of what they’re doing instead doesn’t seem to have mattered in the ruling.

ande-mnoc17 minutes ago
It’s a factual statement on how they misused the funds.

Please just state directly why you find the inclusion objectionable.

booleandilemmaabout 1 hour ago
Because it's not obvious at all from their commercials, and that's how most people come to know about this shady org.

In CharityWatch’s view, the Kars4Kids ads deceive potential donors by failing to inform them that donated cars will benefit a Jewish organization and kids of Jewish faith. Furthermore, the youth programs Kars4Kids supports promote an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, which CharityWatch believes compounds the deception perpetrated by the Kars4Kids ads

https://blog.charitywatch.org/costly-and-continuous-kars4kid...

moateabout 1 hour ago
Let's assume the charity was Catholic and didn't inform people: do you think that wouldn't be mentioned? What about Muslim, Hindu, Satanic?

People have very strong feelings about their money going to religious organizations, especially if the organization doesn't state that they're religious in nature.

Let's do this: What are you implying? Because it seems that you're implying special treatment because this organization is Jewish, and that's not likely the case here in most people's eyes, but explain why you might think that is if that's what you believe.

tptacekabout 3 hours ago
I went back on Archive.org, and it does seem to be the case that they've been up front about their religious affiliation (online) at least since 2013, when I stopped looking.

The pitch K4K has had for most of this time isn't about the good that they do so much as that they're very good at picking up your car conveniently and maximizing the IRS impact of the donation.

(Donating your car is probably not a good deal and you might be better off just having it bought and picked up by a salvager, and then taking the money and donating that.)

dec0dedab0deabout 2 hours ago
People donating things aren't generally looking for a good deal.

I don't really care about the religious aspect, but if you're calling yourself kars4kids, the proceeds really should go to kids. In general, charities should have to be more up front about how their donations are being used. With rules being stricter as they get bigger. That is to say, the local fire department doesn't need to tell me how much of the hoagie sale is going to beer, but once you're buying commercials there should be some transparency.

As far as car donation options the purple heart is still around. I think at one point either the EFF or the FSF used to do it too, but I can't find it anywhere. Does anyone remember that?

bombcar11 minutes ago
Tons of car donation options exist (I just linked https://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/ways-to-give/donate-a-v... elsewhere) - but the big IRS loophole was closed (before the charity could just give you a bullshit receipt for the "value" of the car, anything remotely justifiable, now they have to either claim they put it into service of the charity, or give you the value of what they got for it and almost universally these cars go straight to auctions and fetch not much (and many are bought by junkyards).
tptacekabout 2 hours ago
It does go to kids, it's just a religious charity for kids. That's an extremely normal thing. I'm Catholic, we have them too. And they're not hiding it.

I don't think it's a good donation! I wouldn't use it. Like I said, I'd junk the car and donate the proceeds.

nostrademonsabout 1 hour ago
Did you ever hear the jingle? [1]

The main issue is that it's a bunch of kids (~5-8yo) singing "1-877 cars for kids, K-A-R-S Kars 4 Kids, 1-877-KARS-4-Kids, donate your car today". Given its resemblance to preschool-age kids songs, and that it was a bunch of very young kids singing it, and that it played incessantly over California radio stations, many people thought that it was a charity funding local underprivileged kids of preschool/school age, not gap years for 17-18 year old NYC and NJ residents in Israel. They were always up-front on the website about what it is (presumably how they avoid fraud charges), but how many people are going to check the website when they have the 877 number burned in their brain?

If you look at the lawsuits against them, they almost all fit that pattern: someone (often elderly) who heard the kids singing on the radio, had a junk car, and figured they'd go help some underprivileged kids. Sure, always read the fine print, but the judge listened to the jingle and agreed that it was pretty misleading. So did other judges in Pennsylvania and Oregon.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8UV7SAhvG4&list=RDK8UV7SAhv...

tyreabout 1 hour ago
I think if you polled people donating, over 99.9% wouldn’t guess that it’s going to late-teens in a religious organization flying to Israel. I don’t even know that the 1/1000th person would guess.

You can’t hear the ads + see the billboards, compare it to where the money was going, and say in good faith that people thought that.

pessimizerabout 2 hours ago
Just from personal experience, Catholics are better at this. Other religions often consider religious instruction a charitable function. Catholics just help you, and you're moved into wanting religious instruction.

When I would go to St. Vincent's as a homeless teenager, the only indication that I wasn't receiving services in some government office was the foot-high cross on the back wall. I don't remember a single mention of religion. Plenty of Protestant churches would make you sit through a service before feeding you.

edit: that's what I get for not reading the article before commenting. This is just fraudulent. It's a charity doing Zionist things for Jewish youth. Most non-Jewish people wouldn't donate to a kids' charity that wouldn't do a thing for their children if their children were needy. The only need it's attending to even in Jewish children is the "need" to love Israel and not enter into interfaith relationships.

SoftTalkerabout 2 hours ago
That was back in the days when if you had mortgage interest, it was to your advantage to itemize deductions and include charitable donations. With the much higher standard deductions now, far fewer people file a Schedule A.
dhosekabout 1 hour ago
There’s also the cap on the deductibility of local taxes. The Trump tax “cut” raised my tax rate by roughly 3% (although I’ve tended to have lots of fluctuations in my income and deductions over the last 15 years so it’s hard to make good comparisons from one year to the next).
StanislavPetrovabout 1 hour ago
>and it does seem to be the case that they've been up front about their religious affiliation (online) at least since 2013, when I stopped looking.

If they were only soliciting funds on their website, which made it clear that your donation was being used to send 17 and 18 year olds to Israel, that would be a different story. In reality, the vast majority of their donations come in from people who are totally unaware because they hear the radio jingle, which is sung by little kids, and makes no mention of their religious affiliation or their affiliation with a foreign country. Here in New York I've been hearing these radio ads on a daily basis for literally decades and had no inkling about the true nature of this "charity" until today.

davsti4about 2 hours ago
Thanks for that link.

Its disappointing that when I go to nytimes now, the only HTML delivered is this: <html lang="en"> <head> <title>nytimes.com</title> <style>#cmsg{animation: A 1.5s;}@keyframes A{0%{opacity:0;}99%{opacity:0;}100%{opacity:1;}} </style> </head> <body style="margin:0"> <p id="cmsg">Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker</p> <script data-cfasync="false"> var dd='rt':'i','cid':'AHrlqAAAAAMAYl57GtItBLkAqF0sXA==','hsh':'499AE34129FA4E4FABC31582C3075D','b':2342411,'s':17439,'e':'0dea157ed708067f48ce0d08c7f23713666ae095714e7407aff1749b0c62909cb0558a3d8d1b2427045cad0fda5e06ee','qp':'','host':'geo.captcha-delivery.com','cookie':'hisUIu5NMcItx~Fvd3kG57mGOkaIgUYyUngfRyIhb6XE0N~XjhS58OOHEPPBtFncTBi11h89pGklYInh0kXQiMHeNs5Ck~KD9lhBHxPD6kvHQn5MMeeL7qX_CDvAG2BG'}</script> <script data-cfasync="false" src="https://ct.captcha-delivery.com/i.js"></script> </body> </html>

I wonder what Sir Tim Berners-Lee would have to say about that...

Quarondeauabout 2 hours ago
I'm using a (Greasemonkey) userscript to automatically redirect

https://www.nytimes.com/...

to:

https://archive.li/newest/https://www.nytimes.com/...

diebeforei485about 3 hours ago
Hopefully I never have to hear their annoying song ever again.
tanseydavidabout 3 hours ago
"ok OK! I'll give you my car -- just make that song STOP!"
dhosekabout 1 hour ago
It was used to great effect in one episode of The Good Place.
robotnikmanabout 3 hours ago
I can still hear the old TV commercial in my head... 1 877 kars4kids...
el_benhameenabout 1 hour ago
Still plays on the radio. I can recognize it within the first two bars and have nearly punched a hole in my dashboard trying to turn it off.
saltyoldmanabout 2 hours ago
> The ads with a repetitive jingle encouraging people to donate cars do not disclose that most of the proceeds go to a Jewish organization in New Jersey, the judge ruled.

It reminds me of when they did this giant fundraiser for the palisades fire and all the money went to NGOs that didn't do ANYTHING for the fire victims.

lern_too_spelabout 2 hours ago
Most of the grantees were obviously doing things for fire victims. Some of them were not obviously doing things for fire victims. Those have been described here: https://assets1.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/cms/prod_cms_alt/file/...
ceejayozabout 3 hours ago
I didn't realize this was an actual company; I only know of it from The Good Place.
MBCookabout 2 hours ago
I knew they were real, but only from people bringing them up as an example of a horrible obnoxious commercial.

I guess they were regional and never in the Midwestern areas I’ve lived in.

ChrisArchitectabout 3 hours ago