The Ford Foundation website says that its mission is to “strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement.”[1] Is this really the true purpose of the Ford Foundation? Given that the Ford Foundation was created by Nazis, one can be skeptical of this claim. And if this skepticism turns out to be justified, then Ford Foundation support for groups in Israel that attack the Israeli state begins to look more than suspicious. This article will take a look at these issues.
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Table of Contents
( hyperlinked < )

<  Introduction

<  The Ford Foundation supports CIA training for US police departments

<  A CIA front organization is rescued by the Ford Foundation in order to continue a pro-Nazi effort in Europe

<  The Ford Foundation is pro-PLO and anti-Israel

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Introduction

To get a sense for the likely original aims of the Ford Foundation, it helps to get a sense for Henry Ford, its founder. Henry Ford is remembered as America’s great automobile industrialist, but he was also an enthusiastic Nazi -- in fact, a father figure of the Nazi movement, given that Adolf Hitler regarded Henry Ford as his inspiration.

[Logos excerpt begins here]

“Henry Ford, who was so impressed by the efficient way meat packers slaughtered and dismantled animals in Chicago, made his own unique contribution to the slaughter of people in Europe. Not only did he develop the assembly-line method that Germans used to kill Jews, but he launched a vicious anti-Semitic campaign that helped make the Holocaust happen.

In the early 1920s Ford’s weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published a series of articles based on the text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic tract that had been circulating in Europe.[2] Ford published a book-length compilation of the articles entitled The International Jew, which was translated into most of the European languages and was widely disseminated by anti-Semites, chief among them the German publisher Theodor Fritsch, an early supporter of Hitler. Thanks to a well-financed publicity campaign and the prestige of the Ford name, The International Jew was hugely successful both domestically and internationally.

The International Jew found its most receptive audience in Germany where it was known as The Eternal Jew. Ford was enormously popular in Germany. When his autobiography went on sale there, it immediately became the country’s number one bestseller. In the early 1920s The Eternal Jew quickly became the bible of the German anti-Semitism, with Fritsch’s publishing house printing six editions between 1920 and 1922.

After Ford’s book came to the attention of Hitler in Munich, he used a shortened version of it in the Nazi propaganda war against the Jews of Germany. In 1923 a Chicago Tribune correspondent in Germany reported that Hitler’s organization in Munich was ‘sending out Mr. Ford’s books by the carload.’ Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth movement and the son of an aristocratic German father and American mother, said at the postwar Nuremberg war crimes trial that he became a convinced anti-Semite at age seventeen after reading The Eternal Jew. ‘You have no idea what a great influence this book had on the thinking of German youth. The younger generation looked with envy to symbols of success and prosperity like Henry Ford, and if he said the Jews were to blame, why naturally we believed him.’

Hitler regarded Ford as a comrade-in-arms and kept a life-sized portrait of him on the wall next to his desk in his office in Munich. In 1923 when Hitler heard that Ford might run for President of the United States, he told an American reporter, ‘I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections. We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America. We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated in millions throughout Germany.’ Hitler praised Ford in Mein Kampf, the only American to be singled out. In 1931, when a Detriot News reporter asked Hitler what Ford’s portrait on the wall meant to him, Hitler said, ‘I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.’”[3]

[Logos excerpt ends here]

Ford publicly praised the Nazi regime, and contributed energetically to the military buildup of the Nazis, for which he accepted in July of 1938 the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle, the highest honored bestowed by the Nazis on foreigners. He was the first American and only the fourth person to receive this award (somebody else who got one is Benito Mussolini). The Grand Cross came “accompanied by a personal congratulatory message from Adolf Hitler.”[4]

Two years before he was to receive this highest Nazi distinction, “Henry Ford, with his son Edsel, founded the Ford Foundation in 1936.”[5] In other words, Henry Ford created the Ford Foundation at the height of his Nazi activities. And despite public apologies that Henry Ford made under pressure shortly after this, it appears that Ford was using slave labor from the Auschwitz death camp during the war.[5a] This past is a very good reason to be suspicious of the Ford Foundation.

Now, one might say, but Henry Ford died in 1947, and this is the year 2005. Moreover, in the year 2005 the Ford Foundation claims that “the Foundation is an independent organization, with its own board, and is entirely separate from the Ford Motor Company.”[6] Perhaps the foundation is no longer antisemitic?

But if it was created by a leading antisemite -- Adolf Hitler’s intellectual father figure! -- to sponsor antisemitism, then it was staffed with antisemites, and the antisemites in the first generation recruited people like themselves -- other antisemites -- to staff the second generation, and so on. Why? Because this is how an institution survives the passage of time: the people already in it recruit new people, ideologically like themselves, to fill their roles. If you start with antisemites, you end up with antisemites. The argument is not subtle (this ain’t rocket science). Therefore, the passage of time from the year 1947 to the year 2005 is not the sort of thing that should lead anybody to expect that the Ford Foundation is no longer run by antisemites for antisemitic purposes.

But if these arguments are reasonable, then it should be easy to find the Ford Foundation misbehaving. And it is. Here follow a few dramatic examples.

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The Ford Foundation supports CIA training for US police departments
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The website for something calling itself the Police Foundation explains:

“On July 22, 1970, Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy held a press conference in New York City to announce the establishment of a Police Development Fund. . . which was immediately renamed the Police Foundation. . . the Police Foundation works to improve American policing and enhance the capacity of the criminal justice system to function effectively.”[7]

And how would the Ford Foundation and its spawn, the Police Foundation, “enhance the capacity of the criminal justice system to function effectively”?

In 1973, the New York City Police Department asked the CIA to provide it with training, which created a bit of an uproar when New York City mayor Ed Koch pointed out that this would violate the law. The CIA quickly said: Look, this was all the Ford Foundation’s idea, you know, through the Police Foundation: they told the NYC Police Department to get our help. The Ford Foundation and the Police Foundation immediately published a denial: No way. We had nothing to do with that.[8] Subsequently, the CIA ‘explained’ that

“. . .the agency’s assertion that the Ford Foundation had been responsible had been based on a misunderstood conversation between a CIA representative and an official of the [NYC] Police Department.”[9]

How curious. What could the NYC Police Department official really have been saying when the CIA representative heard him say “that the Ford Foundation had been responsible” for them getting involved with the CIA? We are not told.

And why would the CIA try to get off the hook by blaming a private organization -- which supposedly cannot give orders to the NYC Police Department -- for the Police Department’s request for illegal CIA training?

Regardless of who suggested any such thing to the NYC Police Department, this department should be familiar with the law, which forbids the CIA from training the domestic police forces. And so should the CIA be familiar with the law! So what happened here is that the NYC Police Department and the CIA were both caught illegally in bed together, and the CIA quickly yelled: “The Ford Foundation made us do it!” Absurd, isn’t it? And yet that’s what happened. Perhaps the Ford Foundation is more powerful than we think.

In any case, after explaining that all that stuff about the Ford Foundation had really just been a “misunderstood conversation between a CIA representative and an official of the [NYC] Police Department,” the CIA “conceded that in the last two years it provided training to about a dozen police departments, including New York’s...” So the CIA had already been breaking the law left and right.

But if the Ford Foundation’s Police Foundation was getting police departments in the US trained by the CIA, what does that suggest about the CIA? Yes, sure enough, the CIA was created after 1945 by absorbing tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals (more on this below).[10] Since the argument (above) concerning the institutional survival of the founding ideology of the Ford Foundation applies equally to the CIA, it makes perfect sense for the Ford Foundation, created by Nazis, to team up with the CIA.

Another example, a bit earlier, is also consistent with this. I turn to this next.

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A CIA front organization is rescued by the Ford Foundation in order to continue a pro-Nazi effort in Europe
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A CIA front organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was exposed in 1967 when it was revealed that practically all of its funds were coming from the CIA. Two interesting things happened. First, when the CIA spigot was turned off, it was the Ford Foundation that subsequently picked up the tab: “Since October, 1966, the organization has been totally financed by a grant from the Ford Foundation. . .” Second, after the executive director of the Congress for Cultural Freedom accepted sole responsibility for the fact that he had been running a CIA front organization, this organization got itself a new executive director from, yes, from the Ford Foundation: “The Congress for Cultural Freedom has selected Shepard Stone, director of internal affairs for the Ford Foundation, to be its executive director.”[11]

This is easily explained by looking at how the Congress for Cultural Freedom came to be: as part of a CIA effort to support Nazis in post-war Europe.

Allen Dulles was one of the creators of the CIA, and he would hold the post of CIA director from 1953 to 1961. Immediately after the World War, the left seemed poised to win big in Italy, but Allen Dulles and the CIA didn’t want that. So, as documented in detail by historian Christopher Simpson,

“Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, James Angleton, William Colby, and a team of other top-ranked US intelligence officials put together a crash program of propaganda, sabotage, and secret funding of Christian Democratic candidates. The CIA was a young organization in those days, and was primarily limited (until June 1948[13a]) to simple information gathering and analysis. Therefore, much of this campaign was handled on an ad hoc basis out of the offices of Allen and John Foster Dulles at the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm in New York... Working in close coordination with the Vatican and with prominent Americans of Italian or Catholic heritage, the CIA found that its effort in Italy succeeded well beyond its expectations.”[14]

Simpson goes on to explain that “Much of the CIA’s $10 million Italian war chest was delivered through clandestine campaign contributions to Christian Democratic candidates.” But, as it turns out, “Christian Democratic” was a euphemism:

“. . .many of the remnants of the Fascists’ wartime ruling apparatus, as well as most of the [fascist] police, had joined Christian Democratic ranks after 1945. The CIA’s ‘black currency’ in Italy. . .[went] to clerics and other leaders who were themselves closely tied to fascist rule.”[15]

This was money, by the way, that the Nazis had stolen from the Jews, and it was now being returned to the genocidal thieves:

“This ‘black currency’ did not come from the American taxpayers. Rather, a substantial part of the funding for clandestine activities in Italy came from captured German assets, including money and gold that the Nazis had looted from the Jews.”[16]

At the close of the war, Allen Dulles had a close relationship with Monsignor Bicchierai at the Vatican, because Bicchierai had mediated the Nazi Walter Rauff’s surrender in Italy with Allen Dulles negotiating on the other side. According to a Simon Wiesenthal study cited by Simpson, “Walter Rauff was a major war criminal. . .[who] took the lives of approximately 250,000 people, most of them Jewish women and children who died in unspeakable filth and agony.” Walter Rauff was not tried and executed, but instead was hid by Vatican authorities, and then “Rauff escaped from Europe in 1948, traveling first to Syria and later to South America.” Simpson clarifies further that “Wiesenthal has repeatedly asked Pope John Paul II to open an investigation into Bicchierai’s role in this affair. So far these requests have been ignored.”[17]

“Walter Rauff was still hiding in the ‘convents of the Holy See,’ as [Wiesenthal] put it, when the CIA provided his sponsor Monsignor Bicchierai with enough money to buy Jeeps, bedding, and guns for an underground squadron of some 300 anti-Communist Italian youths for use during the 1948 elections. The job of this band was beatings of left-wing candidates and activists, breaking up political meetings, and intimidating voters. Bicchierai’s troops became the forerunners of a number of other similar paramilitary grants funded by the CIA in Germany, Greece, Turkey, and several other countries over the next decade.”[18]

Since Italy was the model, and since this model involved backing the fascists clandestinely with money and force, what are we to conclude? Well, that elsewhere in Europe, the CIA -- a US government agency created by absorbing tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals[19] -- was also backing the fascists. And so it was: in Germany, the US was covertly backing the same Nazis it had supposedly fought.[20]

After the Italian operation, Allen Dulles created something called the NCFE as an umbrella for US covert pro-fascist activities in Europe.

“The seed money for the National Committee for a Free Europe [NCFE] was drawn from the same pool of captured German assets that had earlier financed clandestine operations during the Italian election. At least $2 million left over from that affair found its way. . .into the accounts of the NCFE. . . Printing presses, radio transmitters, and other equipment salvaged from the Italian campaign were also transferred. . .to the NCFE.

Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner combined their talents to line up an all star board of directors for the NCFE that served as a cover, in effect, to explain where all the money was coming from. Early corporate notables who served on the board or as members of the NCFE include (to name only a few) J. Peter Grace of W.R. Grace & Company and the National City Bank; H.J. Heinz of the Mellon Bank and Heinz ketchup fame; Texas oilman George C. McGhee; auto magnate Henry Ford II...”[21] [my emphasis]

Simpson goes on to explain that the people who ran the American media cooperated completely in the effort to maintain the activities of the NCFE secret:

“. . .the media falsified their reports to the public concerning the government’s role in Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation for years. . . Writers soon learned that exposés concerning the NCFE and RFE/RL were simply not welcome at mainstream publications.”[22]

It turns out that one of the organizations that the CIA funded under this secret pro-Nazi umbrella was none other than the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as Simpson explains on the following page. Thus, given that Henry Ford II was sitting on the board of directors of the CIA’s NCFE, which covertly funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and given that the Nazi Henry Ford is who created the Ford Foundation, is it any surprise that the Ford Foundation provided this nest of Nazis, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with funding, and also with a replacement executive director, after the Congress was publicly exposed as a CIA front?

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The Ford Foundation is pro-PLO and anti-Israel
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Now, but if the Ford Foundation has been consistently pro-Nazi, like its founder, doesn’t this predict that this foundation will be anti-Israel and therefore pro-PLO? It does, especially given that the PLO is an antisemitic terrorist organization created by a leader of the extermination program against the European Jews (known as the Final Solution), which program was developed by Henry Ford’s admirer and apprentice, Adolf Hitler. The point of creating the PLO, naturally, was to continue the Final Solution in Israel.[23]

In June of 1974, UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim went out of his way to meet with the antisemitic PLO terrorists, something that Israel protested.[24] Did Waldheim’s behavior make sense? Sure it did: Kurt Waldheim had been a major -- in fact, a decorated -- Nazi war criminal, and so it makes perfect sense that he should have worked overtime, as UN Secretary General, to give international respectability to the PLO, an organization spawned by the same Final Solution for which Waldheim had worked so passionately and so prominently.[25] In November of the same year, Waldheim, supported by the Ford Foundation, tried again: the Ford Foundation was arranging for US senators and representatives to meet with UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, and with the PLO, in order to promote the PLO as a political player with supposedly legitimate demands against the Jewish state, once again over the objections of the Israeli government.[26] To put all this in context, consider that only two years earlier, in 1972, the PLO had murdered innocent Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich, shocking the entire world.[27]

Let us now fast forward (almost) to the present. In December 2003, Yossi Beilin, who earlier had a major role in putting together the Oslo Accords (or the Oslo 'Peace' Process), produced something called the Geneva Accord. This newest Beilin brainstorm was pushing for changes that would make it impossible for Israel to defend itself. Some Israelis resisted this sharply, and a number of rabbis made a public declaration against the Geneva Accord:

“In the declaration, Rabbi Ya’acov Yosef declared: ‘An agreement which in effect aims at dismantling the IDF and transferring the responsibility for the country's security to a multi-national force is treachery and those who sign it lack any sense of national responsibility.’

Monday’s statement said that Yossi Beilin’s previous agreement with the Palestinians, the Oslo Accords, had cost thousands of Jewish lives.”[28]

Of course, these rabbis were right. In fact, as the same article explains, “The ceremony in Switzerland itself became a festival of Israel-bashing. ...The harsh criticism of Israel marred an event that was intended to be a celebration of peace.”

Because Yossi Beilin's Geneva Accord, an attack on Israel, was being funded by the Swiss government, explains the same article, some in the Knesset [Israeli Parliament] decided at least to oppose themselves. And so emerged...

“[a] bill, drafted by National Union MK Uri Ariel, ...advanced in a 44-26 vote, amid rising criticism in the Knesset of the Swiss government funding the Geneva Accord.

Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, who presented the government’s position on the bill, said he wanted to know what the Swiss government would say if the Israeli government established a fund to help a Swiss French-speaking canton obtain independence or unite with France.”

Good question. I bet the Swiss government would be violently offended if anything like that happened. And yet,

“Meretz MK Avshalom Vilan said Ariel’s proposal is ‘draconian’ and would halt, for example, donations by the Ford Foundation, to which the US government is a partner, to many groups in Israel.”

Notice, Vilan -- a member of the Israeli parliament -- was worried that Ariel's proposal would halt Ford Foundation/US government grants to groups in Israel, as if this would have been a bad thing.

For a different opinion, let us travel back in time to March of 1992, when Knesset member Elyakim Ha’etzni charged that the US was undermining Israel by funding PLO front organizations and also Israeli groups that attack the Israeli government. What tool was the US government using for this? The Ford Foundation.

“Ha’etzni charged that the US destabilizing program [against Israel] was being conducted by directing the Ford Foundation to give large monetary grants to PLO-oriented organizations in East Jerusalem and the territories, and to Israeli bodies such as B’Tselem, which reports on the Israeli administration’s human rights record in the territories. Ha’etzni quoted the cash amounts from the Ford Foundation’s reports. Ha’etzni also charged that the US Consulate in East Jerusalem was giving Palestinians like Faisal Husseini, Hanan Ashrawi and Sari Nusseibah moral and political backing, which enables them to break the law with impunity.”[29]

Ha’etzni was right, of course. The organizations funded by the Ford Foundation attacked Israel for supposed human rights violations with zero documentation. For example, in 1988, the following was reported:

“A 335-page report released today by the Palestinian human rights group Al Haq/Law in the Service of Man says that the number and scope of human rights violations by the Israeli authorities have increased exponentially since the uprising [First Intifada] began a year ago. It also says measures to quell the disturbances have been out of proportion to acts of defiance by Palestinians living in the occupied territories.

The report is based on affidavits from victims and eyewitnesses of alleged Israeli abuses, on press accounts, and on reports by fieldworkers from Al Haq, which receives funding from several European organizations and the Ford Foundation.”[30]

Affidavits from alleged victims and from alleged eyewitnesses do not constitute ‘evidence.’ Neither do the “reports by fieldworkers from Al Haq” if the reports is all we have. Phony victims, phony eyewitnesses, and phony reports by phony fieldworkers are a dime a dozen in times of war, when you always get a big bang for your propaganda buck by accusing your enemy of being a monster (this is in fact precisely what happened when Israel was accused of committing a massacre in Jenin: there was no massacre, and the eyewitnesses were all phonies[31]). Moreover, given that the First Intifada -- which, contrary to the representation in the press, involved much Arab violence -- had been created and coordinated by the PLO precisely to generate these sorts of accusations against Israel, our stance toward these accusations should be one of extreme suspicion.[32]

Amazingly, Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy’s reply to Ha’etzni was not that Ha’etzni was wrong on the facts (after all, Ha’etzni had the figures from the Ford Foundation, and quoted them). Rather, Levy’s reply was that, since Israel is a slave of the United States, the Jewish state simply has to accept in silence the US’s efforts to destroy it. Israel simply may not criticize the United States, Levy explained:

“‘Israel has no substitute for the United States,’ Foreign Minister David Levy cautioned the Knesset yesterday. ‘That doesn’t mean we have to fold up in the face of an ultimatum and accept policies contrary to our interests. But neither do we have to portray the US as an enemy out to subvert us and weaken our position.’”[33]

Notice that Levy tried to represent Israel -- though forbidden from ever saying anything bad about the US -- as nevertheless capable of saying 'no' if the US was trying to bully Israel into accepting its own destruction. And yet Israel, the year before, had already “fold[ed] up in the face of an ultimatum and accept[ed] policies contrary to [its] interests”: after 8 months of US threats, Israel agreed in 1991 to participate in what became the Oslo ‘peace’ process, which brought the PLO into the heart of the Jewish state, allowing the PLO to murder scores of innocent Israelis.[34] The Ford Foundation had been involved in that too, funding a ‘dialogue’ in Washington for that purpose, and which contributed to producing the so-called Oslo ‘peace’ process.[35]

The same year that Ha'etzni accused the Ford Foundation in the Israeli Knesset, there was a similar eruption in the US House of Representatives. As reported in Forward Magazine on 24 October 2003,

[Quote from Forward begins here]

"A recent investigative report on the Ford Foundation's funding of Palestinian groups is triggering calls for a federal investigation...

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York, and the American Jewish Congress are urging a federal probe into the alleged financial ties between what might be the country's most prestigious foundation and anti-Israel Palestinian groups...

The calls come in reaction to an investigative report published in last week's Forward, alleging that the foundation had backed Palestinian groups accused of fomenting the anti-Israel agitation and blatant antisemitism two years ago at the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa...

...'The Ford Foundation, at best, used poor judgment in its decision to fund Palestinian organizations that promote extremist anti-Israel and antisemitic agendas,' [Representative Henry] Waxman said. 'They may have also violated U.S. law, if these groups are found to have links with Palestinian terrorist organizations. I hope there will be a full investigation...'"[35a]

[Quote from Forward ends here]

But if the Israeli foreign minister, David Levy, had come out to provide cover for the Ford Foundation, we should hardly be surprised to find that prominent leaders in the US who claim a Jewish identity did the same. And such is the case of Abraham Foxman, who leads the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that is supposedly chartered to oppose antisemitism. As reported in the same Forward article,

"Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League told the Forward that it is too soon to call for a congressional investigation: 'This is an institution that's been around for a long time. They've established a credible reputation...'"

The Ford Foundation is indeed "an institution that's been around for a long time," because it dates to the time when Henry Ford founded it as part of his pro-Nazi effort. Is this where its "credible reputation" comes from, according to Abraham Foxman from the ADL? And, really, why should we be surprised? It is easy to find Abraham Foxman apologizing for the PLO, an organization created by a leader of the Final Solution to continue the extermination of the Jewish people.[35b] And Foxman can also be found apologizing for the antisemitisim of the Vatican.[35c] So, naturally, Abraham Foxman apologizes for the Ford Foundation.

So does the Ford Foundation's Nazi past matter? I would say that it does.

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Footnotes and Further Reading
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