No Profit in Funding Anti-Israel Hate

August 14, 2008 
The Jewish Exponent
Original source: https://mail.hudsonny.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/16826/ \t _blank http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/16826/

Just days before the Sept. 11 attacks in the fall of 2001, non-governmental organizations gathered in Durban, South Africa, to take part in an orgy of anti-Israel hate. 
The Durban conference was supposed to be a U.N. conclave devoted to combating racism; instead, it was notable for exposing the degree of animus for Jews and the State of Israel that exists among many NGOs. In particular, Durban gave a focus to the malicious drive to falsely brand Israel as an apartheid state. 
In the wake of that conference, attention was drawn to the sources of funding for many groups whose stated purposes sounded laudable, but that were, in practice, noxious propaganda outlets for the drive to destroy the Jewish state. 
One major source was the illustrious Ford Foundation, a nonprofit behemoth that, among other things, has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Middle East-based groups whose stands were virulently anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic. Ford's role in funding the outrages at Durban became known in 2003, after a series of reports on the topic by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that prompted questions from both Congress and the public. 
In response to that justified outcry, the Ford adopted guidelines that were supposed to divorce the philanthropy from the sort of groups that produced the Durban hate-fest. And, indeed, the foundation has announced that it will not participate in funding a new U.N. Durban conference slated to take place in April. 
But a new JTA report has now revealed that the Ford Foundation is still a source of funds for groups that are campaigning to delegitimize Israel via strategies that were hatched at Durban. Thus, despite its safeguards, Ford money is still behind many of those who are spreading the libel that Israel is an apartheid state and treating any measure of self-defense on its part (such as the security barrier that has virtually stopped suicide bombings) as unacceptable. 
Even worse, the same report also details that a Jewish group, which receives the lion's share of its funds from Ford, is itself passing on millions to pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist groups that parrot the same kind of anti-Israel propaganda that characterized the Durban conference. 
The New Israel Fund has grown over the last 20 years into an influential force in Jewish philanthropy, as it attempted to support efforts to make Israel a more just society. 
But, as the JTA story reveals, this has led the liberal group into funding a number of organizations that are clearly hostile to Israel's existence as a Jewish state and which promote the noxious apartheid propaganda. 
It should be stipulated that these are positions with which the NIF says it disagrees. Moreover, the fund claims it is supporting civil-rights and anti-discrimination efforts -- not anti-Israel activity. It says that as long as the groups it funds are not being prosecuted by the State of Israel, their grantees have the right to express their hostility to the Jewish state and should not be censored. 
As is the case with other Ford Foundation recipients, this is not a case of defending free speech. Philanthropies that support groups waging rhetorical war on the legitimacy of Zionism and Israel's right of self-defense cannot pretend to be innocent bystanders when their money pays -- either directly or indirectly -- for such calumnies. 
And that's a fact that should give their American Jewish donors pause. 
Like the Ford Foundation, the New Israel Fund needs to rethink a policy that has essentially underwritten an escalation of vicious attacks on Israel. Until it does, it should expect that many supporters may be unwilling to go on funding them.