Researcher Edwin Black Finds Ford Foundation Indirectly Funding Bodies that Support Arab Anti-Israel Terrorism

Edwin Black has published a long series of books and articles on Modern Jewish history, particularly on how the Ford Foundation has funded NGOs and individuals that have called for boycotting Israel, doing away with Israel or  committing the now mundane violence against Israel and Israelis. For instance, Black wrote a series of articles for the JTA [Jewish Telegraphic Agency] detailing how various NGOs funded directly or indirectly by the Ford had joined together at the Durban "anti-racism" conference in 2001 and called for a boycott of Israel, as if Israel were a racist country and indeed the major racist country in the world.

Joshua Levitt, a reporter for the Algemeiner, originally a weekly Yiddish-language newspaper, now in English on the web, wrote a review and summary of Black's latest book. We are facing the Ford Foundation once again:

EDWIN BLACK’S NEW BOOK CONNECTS NIF TO FORD FOUNDATION ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVISM

by Joshua Levitt

 

"Financing the Flames," a new book by "IBM and the Holocaust" author Edwin Black. 

In Edwin Black's new book, 'Financing the Flames,' the author of 'IBM and the Holocaust' follows the money trail to uncover the powers behind non-profit groups attempting to de-legitimize Israel.

The book focuses on the role played by the New Israel Fund, a non-profit initially funded by the Ford Foundation, that donates to hundreds of smaller non-profits, many of which Black ties to programs attacking Israel or attempting to de-legitimize the Jewish state.

Black's book explores NIF's funding sources and its out-sized influence as a lobbying force in the Knesset and as a destabilizing force for the IDF. He also profiles some of the fringe groups impacting Israel today and makes the case that Americans are indirectly funding a controversial Palestinian Authority program that pays convicted terrorists in Israeli jails.

In an interview with The Algemeiner, Black said the book was written to show U.S. taxpayers and the U.S. Congress how well-meaning intentions have transformed into a force that is threatening the Jewish state from within.

The Algemeiner was granted special permission by the author to cite the book's newsworthy passages extensively.

Black describes the opaque financing routes that have created the situation:

A superhighway of money goes directly from Israel's greatest adversaries into a vast interchange where it co-mingles with dollars, shekels, Euros, and yen from the finest financial nameplates and charitable funds in the world. This merged money courses throughout Israel with exit ramps into some of the most benevolent Arab programs—as well as those that stoke violence and confrontation.

In the case of NIF, the money can be traced back to the Ford Foundation, which Black described in a previous monograph entitled 'Financing Hate,' published by the JTA. . . . .

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For continuation of the above review and more on Black's latest book, go here.

For background on Henry Ford's hatred of Jews and on the Ford Foundation go to the two previous post on Emet m'Tsiyon here and here.

Ford Foundation Founded with the Capital of a Man Who Inspired Hitler

additions 1-22 & 2-23-2014 at bottom

Edsel Ford, Henry Ford's son, founded the Ford Foundation in 1936 with his family's money. Both Edsel and Henry bequeathed valuable, high-yielding [non-voting] stock to the foundation upon their deaths in 1943 and 1947 respectively. This made the foundation "the largest philanthropy in the world . . . a national and international philanthropy dedicated to the advancement of human welfare." Human welfare no less!! Therefore, let's look at Henry Ford's motives for concocting and publishing The International Jew:

When asked in 1921 why he had chosen to publish the series, Ford explained that he was "only trying to awake the Gentile world to an understanding of what is going on. The Jew is a huckster, a trader who doesn't want to produce but to make something out of what somebody else produces." He also blamed them for subversively instigating war behind the scenes for their own profit.  [Alex Grobman, License to Murder: The Enduring Threat of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Noble OK: Balfour  Books 2011), p53]

Ford himself was a producer of course. He produced automobiles, just by the way working his employees to death or near to it. Still, he was a producer. But he was also a huckster. After all, he wanted to sell the cars that his factories produced. And for that purpose, he hired advertising agencies to produce suitably persuasive sales messages and bought space in newspapers and other publications to reach the public. His The International Jew series published in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was also meant to persuade, to persuade people to believe in an ugly, false message.

Ford's readers included "college professors, Christian clergy and the uneducated." His readers "sent him money, praised him for assailing the Jews, and clamored for more information." [Grobman, p 53]

One of Ford's readers was a very special person or shall we say that he was  a unique creature. This was none other than Adolf Hitler.

Adolph Hitler acknowledged that Henry Ford's The International Jew  influenced him in writing Mein Kampf, and had a picture of Ford hung on the wall in his Munich office. "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a reporter for the Detroit News. In 1938, Hitler sent his personal greetings to Ford on the occasion of his 75th birthday, and conferred upon him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honor that could be bestowed on a foreign national. [Grobman, ibid.]

Hitler was not the only Nazi inspired by Ford's The International Jew. Another was

. . . Baldur von Schirach, Reich leader of the Nazi Students' Federation and future leader of the Hitler Youth. After reading Der international jude [German translation of The International Jew] in 1924 at the age of 17, a year prior to hearing Hitler speak for the first time, von Schirach remarked that "The younger generation looked with envy to the symbols of success and prosperity like Henry Ford. And if  Ford said that the Jews were to blame, why, naturally we believed him." [Grobman, p 54]

So Ford's prestige as a leading manufacturer and a very wealthy man helped to persuade people to believe in his ugly message. Von Schirach in turn persuaded young Germans to willingly join Hitler's army and take part in his wars and mass murders.

To be sure, Ford's The International Jew did not meet with universal approval.

"Despite the acclaim garnered by The International Jew . . . and its translation into a number of languages . . .  Prominent periodicals of the time, including Current Opinion, the Outlook, The Century, Harper's Weekly, and the Independent condemned the Protocols, The International Jew, and Ford himself." [Ibid, p 54]

The Nation [much different from the Nation of today] observed the significant increase of anti-Semitism engulfing the world in 1920 and concluded that "the chief responsibility for the survival of this hoary shame among us in America attaches to Henry Ford." Historian Norman Cohn believed that The International Jew  "probably did more than any other work to make the Protocols more famous." On the eve of World War II, the Protocols were more popular than they had been even in 1920 before being exposed as a forgery. [Grobman, ibid.]

Grobman's last sentence reminds us that today, as in the past, big lies like the Protocols are used to make deadly --indeed genocidal-- propaganda against the Jewish people. One of the recent big lies was the Muhammad al-Durah hoax. But that is a story for another time. Let us just bear in mind that the capital of the Ford Foundation was provided by a cruel employer and bigoted anti-Jewish propagandist, Henry Ford.

In the 21st century, nearly 100 years after Ford published his version of the Protocols, the Ford Foundation provides millions to the New Israel Fund which in turn funds many so-called  "non-governmental organizations" in Israel which engage in activities meant to undermine Israel in world public opinion and weaken Israel in the face of Israel's Arab and other enemies.
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ADDED 1-29-2014 Unbeknownst to me when I wrote the above blog post, Edwin Black had published a book that goes into the Ford Foundation's funding of the New Israel Fund as well as a number of Arab anti-Israel NGOs [see review here]

2-23-2014 Scholarly article on Henry Ford's Judeophobia [here]
3-20-2014  Contemporary press report by the JTA on the libel suit against Henry Ford [here]

Where Did the Ford Foundation Get the Money to Get Started with?

The Ford Foundation's first money came from the Ford Family fortune made through the Ford Motor Company. Now the Ford Foundation today likely receives funding from several sources. But how was the family fortune originally made??  Another question: What did Henry Ford do with his money?

One of the ways Ford got rich was to work his factory laborers harder than the other manufacturers in Detroit. It was known there that a job in a Ford factory was more exhausting than jobs in other plants.
Here a Black factory worker up from the South writes about workers' experiences in the Detroit auto plants. His name was Matthew Ward and the following is an excerpt from his book [see below]:
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I never wanted to work for Ford. And I never did work there. Everyone talked about it, they said it was the house of murder. There was a big rumor all over the city [Detroit] that other men had to take care of Ford workers' sexual home affairs. Everybody always asked about a Ford worker's wife, "Who is her boyfriend?" If a man would see a woman and she would say that her husband worked for Ford, he would make a big joke. He would pretend to take a pencil and a pad and ask her for her telephone number. They were all so worked down they couldn't have sexual relations. Mr Gordon's wife had to help him up the steps and feed him in bed. Where he laid on a sheet at night he didn't move from that spot.
Every worker could identify Ford workers on the streetcars going home at night. Every worker who was asleep was working for Ford. You'd see twenty asleep on the cars and everyone would say, "Ford workers." Many times the conductors looked over the car and shook a man to tell him it was his stop. On Sunday Ford workers would sleep on the way to church.
Sometimes some people tried to cover it up. They would say it was working in a foundry that made the men sleep. They said it was the fumes. But everybody knew Ford was a man killing place. That always frightened me. I tried to stay away. But during the Depression, everything closed down once for two or three months. The paper came out asking for men for Ford. The next morning there was a stampede at Ford of two thousand men at five a.m. They were only  hiring fifty or a hundred men. The agent came out and told us they were not hiring but nobody would leave. We thought it was a line to send us away and give jobs to those who remained. We stayed, pushing and shoving. The police rode up on horse and ran at the crowd hitting us with sticks. This didn't disperse the workers. The police called the Fire Department and they hooked up their hoses and shot cold water on us. It was the middle of winter. While we waited for the streetcars our clothes froze on us hard as bricks. That's the first and last time I went  to Ford to look for work.
[Matthew Ward, Indignant Heart (New York: New Books 1952), pp 35-36]
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The Ford plants were cruel places to work, crueler even than the factories of other manufacturers. That's one of the ways in which Henry Ford made his fortune.

Now what were some of the things that Ford did with his money? One thing was to publish an Americanized version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the  notorious plagiarism and forgery.
". . .  the first American edition of the Protocols was published in The Protocols and World Revolution" [in 1920] by one Boris Brasol,  a Russian monarchist exile living in the USA and a leader among his fellow monarchist exiles. This was just three years after the Russian emperor, the Tsar, had been overthrown in March 1917.

It is Brasol who was responsible for convincing Henry Ford of the authenticity of the Protocols, which Ford then published in his International Jew series in the Dearborn Independent. [The Dearborn Independent was a newspaper owned by Ford himself.] [Alex Grobman, License to Murder: The Enduring Threat of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Noble Oklahoma: Balfour Books 2011), p 52]

However, the original Protocols had been worked up to support the Russian imperial government. As a product of the Russian intelligence agencies, it favored the Russian Orthodox Church against the Roman Catholic Church, even making accusations against the Catholic Church. This obviously posed an obstacle to full acceptance of the Protocols in Catholic lands and in the USA which had a large Catholic population. So Ford  made up a new version of the Protocols which was tailored to American tastes. He removed the negative references in the book to the Catholic church and creed which were found in the original Russian version. Along with other deletions and additions and reworkings, this became the International Jew.

. . . the first article in this consecutive series appeared on May 22, 1920, and then sporadically until 1927. [Grobman, p 52]

 The hostile slanderous nature of Ford's anti-Semitic articles is evident in their titles, which included: "The Scope of Jewish Dictatorship in America," "Jewish Gamblers Corrupt American Baseball," "How the Jewish Song Trust Makes You Sing," "Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music" . . . . "The Jewish Associates of Benedict Arnold." [Grobman, Ibid.]
For the information of non-Americans, Benedict Arnold was a notorious traitor in favor of the British during the American revolutionary war. At that time, the Jewish population of the United States was a minuscule percentage.

Ford's fortune was based on the most ruthless exploitation and oppression of labor, even by the standards of the time, worse than other automotive manufacturers. And he used a part of his fortune to propagate notions intended to make people hate Jews. Henry Ford died after the Ford Foundation had already been set up. But given the Foundation's stress on funding actions harmful to Jews and Israel --in the name of peace and human rights to be sure-- we may say that Henry Ford's hatred of Jews is still alive in the Ford Foundation.
The Ford Foundation provides a large subsidy to the New Israel Fund which in turn finances a whole series of supposed human rights and peace NGOs operating in Israel whose ulterior motive is to destabilize Israeli society and favor Arab  claims over Jewish human rights. And favor Arab political claims and demands on Israel.
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More on Ford's endeavors to bring the hatred of Jews to the general American public to come in subsequent posts.

 Scholarly article on Ford's Judeophobia [here]
JTA press report on the libel trial against Henry Ford in 1927 -- from JTA's archives [here]