October 14th, 2007 by NGO Monitor Staff | Category: Ford Foundation

As the New York Sun reported in September, The Ford Foundation, which came under US congressional scrutiny in 2003 “for supporting groups committed to destroying Israel,” again has drawn censure from American elected officials, this time for funding a panel at Columbia University “highlighting a professor who blames Israel and its American supporters for the Iraq War and for Al Qaeda terrorism against America.” Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” with Stephen Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is scheduled to speak October 30 at Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities. The panel (titled “Freedom and the University”) is funded with a $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.

Representative Eliot Engel, a Democrat of the Bronx, made this statement: “It’s disappointing that the Ford Foundation would make Mearsheimer one of the highlights of what they’re funding…If the Ford Foundation is going to say they’ve changed their attitudes, doing something like this only calls into question whether they’ve got the message and changed.”

In response to an inquiry from the NY Sun, Gerald Steinberg, NGO Monitor’s Executive Director, said that “by funding a panel where Mr. Mearsheimer is scheduled to speak, the Ford Foundation risks reneging on that promise by underwriting at Columbia the kind of falsehoods it was funding at Durban.”

NGO Monitor has released a detailed report, Ford Foundation: 2006 Update on Funding for Political NGOs active in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, September 24, 2007, which highlights Ford’s continued support of many problematic NGOs, including major international organizations like Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) as well as Palestinian NGOs such as the DWRC and PHRO, which promote the anti-Israel boycott movement.