Thirty-six thousand dollars. That's what it cost American taxpayers to fund an exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York that blamed the United States for "domicide" in Gaza — a term the exhibit's creator used to describe the destruction of Palestinian homes by American-manufactured weapons.
The money came from the American Women's History Initiative Pool fund. Not the "anti-American propaganda" fund. The women's history fund.
The exhibit, called "Patterns of Life," ran from November 2024 through August 2025 and was created by Mona Chalabi, a far-left Iraqi-British journalist. It featured three white apartment buildings representing "documented homes destroyed by weapons manufactured in the United States during airstrikes in Iraq (2015), Syria (2016), and Palestine (2023)." If you're wondering what any of that has to do with American women's history, you're not alone — 2,600 people filed formal complaints.
WND reported on the findings this week after the Smithsonian's own Office of Inspector General released an investigation identifying "multiple flaws" in the museum's exhibition review process. The OIG didn't mince words. The exhibit bypassed the kind of oversight that's supposed to prevent a federally funded museum from becoming a megaphone for one side of an active geopolitical conflict.
Among those filing complaints was the Shurat HaDin Law Center, which cited the exhibit's lack of balanced perspectives, its overt political activism, and its conspicuous omission of context — like, say, the October 7th massacre that preceded the military operations the exhibit was designed to condemn. The exhibit presented destruction without cause, grief without context, and blame without accountability. Standard propaganda formatting.
The OIG report landed alongside a separate 162-page White House report documenting leftist biases at the Smithsonian American History Museum. Together, they paint a picture of an institution that's been quietly repurposed from preserving American history to editorializing against it — on the taxpayer's dime.
The Smithsonian's defense, such as it was, rested on the idea that design museums explore global themes and that the exhibit fell within curatorial discretion. Which is technically true in the same way that using your company credit card at a casino falls within "business entertainment." The $36,000 was specifically allocated for American women's history programming. Chalabi's exhibit was about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The review process that was supposed to catch that disconnect had, according to the OIG, multiple structural failures.
The Federalist, which documented much of the underlying reporting, noted that the exhibit's framing mirrored language commonly used by Hamas-aligned media — particularly the use of "domicide" and the exclusive focus on U.S. weapon manufacturing as the causal agent of destruction, with no mention of the terrorist infrastructure embedded in residential areas.
What makes this more than a bureaucratic screwup is the pattern. Federal cultural institutions have spent years insisting they're apolitical while steadily drifting toward a very specific political orientation. The 162-page White House report didn't materialize from nothing. It exists because the drift became a current, and the current became obvious enough that even government investigators started documenting it.
A women's history fund paid for a foreign journalist to build a propaganda installation blaming America for wars in three countries. The review board didn't catch it. The inspector general did — after 2,600 Americans complained.
That's not a museum. That's a laundering operation with better lighting.