The New York Sun has been running front page articles by Edwin Black of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on its investigation of the Ford Foundation's funding of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic outfits worldwide. Ford, the articles report, was a multi-million dollar funder of the NGOs that turned the supposed "anti-racism" UN conference at Durban into an anti-Semitic hatefest. That's only the tip of the iceberg. Since the 1950s, Ford's Beirut and Cairo offices alone have awarded more than $193 million to Arab, Islamic, and Palestinian organizations. It is the chief funder, for example, of PNGO (the Palestinian NGO network) and of LAW (the Palestinian Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment), both of them death-to-Israel operations. "Ford has made it possible for us to do much of our work," said a LAW official. "We get very little money from the Arabs...Ford is our biggest funder," said PNGO's program coordinator.
The 90 Palestinian NGOs making up the Ford funded network have organized boycotts against Israel and against American companies doing business in Israel, organized efforts to try Israeli officials as war criminals abroad, and kept up a steady barrage of propaganda labeling Israel racist and illegitimate. PNGO has set up a Web site portraying Israel as an apartheid state guilty of repeated massacres, which in turn links to websites of groups even the U.S. State Department has listed as terrorist, including Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the Islamic Resistance Movement.
The JTA sent over two dozen requests to Ford for information and interviews, which the foundation arrogantly ignored. Finally, after the investigation was complete, Ford sent a six page statement declaring (in what surely deserves first prize for chutzpah this year): "We have seen no indication that our grantees in Durban or elsewhere engaged in anti-Semitic speech or activities."
The only weakness in the JTA's report is that it precedes its discussion of Ford's donations to Jewish groups by saying "To be sure, Ford has also granted several million dollars to American Jewish and Israeli peace groups." This suggests that Ford is engaged in some balancing act when in fact these donations further Israel's destruction -- as Ford is well aware -- even more effectively than those to non-Jewish groups. The money goes to what Ford euphemistically calls "peace and justice groups" (i.e. we have found the enemy and it is us) with much of it funneled through the New Israel Fund, which was the subject of an AFSI pamphlet back in 1990, appropriately entitled The New Israel Fund: A New Fund for Israel's Enemies.
These are the Jewish groupies who identify with Israel's enemies. When Ariel Sharon, on October 18, said it was not feasible to deport Arafat (despite the cabinet's vote to do so), he cited as a major reason "because he would be surrounded by a human chain of Israelis." That human chain would have been made up of the Ford Foundation's Jewish grantees for "peace and justice."
The Ford Foundation's questionable largesse is not confined to anti-Israel and outrightly anti-Semitic outfits. In The Coercive Utopians (co-authored with my husband Erich Isaac), published in 1980, we reported that the Ford Foundation had been the major source of funding for a host of radical institutes and enterprises that identified the U.S. as the chief enemy of world peace while praising leaders like Castro as the hope of humanity. (Even then its beneficiaries included the far-out MERIP, the Middle East Research and Information Project, whose journal supported Middle East Arab terror groups well before it became "fashionable" to champion the Palestinian Arab cause.)
In 1977, Henry Ford II resigned from the Board of the Ford Foundation in protest at its funding programs. In a letter addressed to my husband (January 28, 1977), Ford said he hoped his resignation would "lead to some basic rethinking of staff policies and programs." In fact, of course, the Fund's policies have grown ever more egregious.
But the ironies run deeper than the profits of a huge beneficiary of the American free enterprise system being devoted to destroying that system. While the funding of anti-U.S. and more broadly anti-Western organizations would scarcely have been welcomed by the man who created the Ford Motor Co., Henry Ford, a notorious purveyor of antisemitism, would probably have applauded the Foundation for one aspect of its current activities -- the fostering of anti-Jewish hatred.
Much has been written about the anti-semitic speech by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad (by no means his first foray into this territory) at the Is-
Outpost - 2 - November 2003