No evidence pro-Palestine protests are being run by outsiders

You hear a lot about the pro-Palestine protests at US and Canadian universities being infiltrated and even instigated by outside actors, agitators and all-round ne'er-do-wells. It's a convenient way to try to de-legitimize the protests, and it comes up at almost all such protests

Frankly, I'd be very surprised if there weren't some of those. Protests and demonstration of every kind attract this kind of professional agitator/anarchist/white supremacist types - look at the Freedom Convoy and the Occupy movement, for example, and further back, the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. But to what extent is this happening with this particular batch of protests?

The right-wing press and some Jewish outlets would have us think that the protests are not being organized and funded by concerned students and a few faculty members at all, but by some shadowy secret organizations with direct links to Hamas (or worse!). Others seem to be believe that George Soros and his Open Society Foundation are behind it all (despite Soros being Jewish and a Holocaust survivor!). The truth, however, as a CBC fact-checking mission concludes, appears to be much more banal.

Food and supplies have been donated in the main by other students, parents and local community members, although some crowdfunding campaigns have also, understandably, been hastily set up by the students. 

One media commentator pointed out that, wait, all those tents look suspiciously similar, and they probably cost $400 each, so some outside organization somewhere must be bankrolling all of this. (That is the level of debate and logic we are talking about here.) In fact, those tents that were bought and not donated probably came from Walmart, which sells that same type of cheap poor-quality tent for $48 each. 

In fact, there is no credible evidence of any outside funding or infiltration of the encampments, in Canada at any rate, and police have not brought any charges to that effect thus far. And the protesters themselves do in fact seem to be, well, students, in the main. That's not to say there are NO outsiders involved, but to say that the encampments are being instigated and directed by outside agitators, as a very pro-Israel friend of mine contends, is firmly in the realm of conspiracy theory.

Similar exaggerated and unfounded allegations are being levelled at the university protests in the USA, mainly as an excuse to bring in police to break them up, as in New York and LA. And, there too, it seems like the truth is that very few "outsiders" are involved, and there is no real evidence of major outside funding or core organization by non-students.