{"id":1476,"date":"2006-06-20T09:03:17","date_gmt":"2006-06-20T13:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1476"},"modified":"2006-06-20T09:03:17","modified_gmt":"2006-06-20T13:03:17","slug":"the-war-against-diversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1476","title":{"rendered":"The War Against Diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The World Conference Against Racism (WCAR<\/a>) convened in Geneva, in 1978 and 1983, condemned apartheid South Africa and developed strategies to challenge racial discrimination and ethnic violence. When the WCAR met in Durban, in 2001, it did so in a free South Africa, but any remedies<\/a> that participants hoped to generate to address the ravages of apartheid and globalisation were to be sucked into a PR maelstrom whirled by Israel and utilised by the U.S. as an excuse to leave the conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Offensive cartoons distributed by the Arab Lawyers’ Union and real<\/a> and mischaracterised<\/a> Anti-Semitic rhetoric circulating through the NGO forum<\/a> that preceded the conference dominated the news of the day. But it wasn’t until 2003 that all-out war was waged against the Ford Foundation for its support of alleged Anti-Semitic NGOs that attended the WCAR, an attack initiated by a four-part series by Edwin Black, whose penchant for tall tales is evident in his book, War Against the Weak<\/em>, in which he employs fabrication to prove that the U.S. eugenics movement conspired with architects of the Holocaust: <\/p>\n

Here Comes the Master Race<\/em><\/strong>
\nBy DANIEL J. KEVLES
\n5 October 2003<\/a> New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n

Black is the author previously of ”IBM and the Holocaust,” a work strongly suggesting that the company, with its punch-card machines, knowingly assisted Hitler’s brutalities. His ”War Against the Weak,” apparently written with similar intent, is a muckraking book about a subject incontestably awash in muck. In the vein of the genre, it is a stew rich in facts and spiced with half-truths, exaggerations and distortions. The most pungent ingredient is its central thesis: eugenic doctrines and policies favoring ”Nordic superiority” were in fact invented in the United States, were developed in alliance with American wealth and power, and were then exported, inspiring Hitler and achieving their ultimate realization in the Holocaust.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An organisation set-up to monitor NGOs<\/a> continues to find fault with Ford:<\/p>\n

The Ford Foundation’s goals are “to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation and advance human achievement.[1] It gives priority to work in the Palestinian territories, acknowledging that “a just resolution of the Israeli\/Palestinian conflict is of central importance to the region as a whole, as well as to the peoples directly affected.[2] However, contrary to the pledge made by the Ford Foundation following the 2001 Durban Conference not to support “groups that promote or condone bigotry or violence, or that challenge the very existence of legitimate, sovereign states like Israel,”significant funding is still channeled through NGOs such as Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), Miftah, Al-Haq, Al-Mezan, SHAML and EMHRN. Their activities are primarily political, and they exploit human rights rhetoric to delegitimize Israel, while undermining efforts towards a peaceful end to the conflict.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Target Ford<\/em><\/a>“, in the June 5 edition of The Nation<\/em>, is Scott Sherman’s investigation into why the Ford Foundation decided to rewrite the language of its grant letter in 2003, so that it now states (.pdf<\/a>):<\/p>\n

“?By countersigning this grant letter, you agree that your organization will not promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state, nor will it make sub-grants to any entity that engages in these activities.? This prohibition applies to all of the organization’s funds, not just those provided through a grant from Ford.”<\/p>\n

If the language strikes a familiar chord that is because ACLU executive director Anthony Romero advised Ford at the time that it should, “‘just parrot back language in existing federal law’–i.e., the Patriot Act, which the ACLU was then contesting with considerable vigor.” Romero’s role, who Sherman writes, is a former employee of Ford and a protege of president Susan Berresford, came to light when ACLU board members, Wendy Kaminer and Michael Meyers, questioned Romero’s decision to accept a grant from Ford in 2004 as other grantees were protesting the broader implications of the changes.<\/p>\n

The miasma that encircles Ford is familiar as well. Even prior to WCAR ’01, and its grist for the mill in which Ford’s autonomy would be ground to malleable pulp, Israel went to work behind the scenes to ensure that Palestinian rights would not become an official part of the conference. According to<\/a> Marwan Bishara, in Information Brief<\/em> No. 82, 7 September 2001, ” influential friends of Israel lobbied African countries to drop the Palestinian issue in the official and NGO WCAR, offering to help them raise the question of repatriation, hence creating a conflict of interest between the two issues. Certain African states, including the South African government, were enticed by the offer, especially when considering the alternative: torpedoing the conference all together.”<\/p>\n

Israel’s offer was attractive precisely because repatriations were vehemently opposed by the United States. But Israel’s sole objective was to pre-emptively sabotage efforts to declare it an apartheid state<\/a>. <\/p>\n

According to Scott Sherman, Congress was instrumental in bringing the Ford Foundation into line. Threatened by the passage of new laws that would dictate the amount of money to be dispersed each year, the foundation feared repercussions to the foundation community at large if it stood its ground and the law was passed. <\/p>\n

Ford’s anaemic response<\/a> to Sherman’s report is not surprising, since the campaign waged against the foundation was a bloodletting task, one that’s culminated with transfusions of Ford funds into the flush coffers of well-established groups that spearheaded the assault.<\/p>\n

In 2004 Ford gave $361,000 to Abraham Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League for its World of Difference Institute, whose mission is to “combat racism, anti-Semitism and all forms of prejudice and bigotry,” followed by an additional $1.1 million in 2006 for the same project. (ADL’s last Ford grant was in 1967, and Foxman declined to be interviewed.) The American Jewish Committee received $400,000 in 2006, its first grant since 1998. David Harris, head of the AJC, did not return phone calls. In 2004 Ford also gave $625,000 to the Simon Wiesenthal Center–which chaired the delegation of Jewish organizations at Durban–to develop a tolerance and diversity training program for New York’s criminal justice community, the first grant the Wiesenthal Center has received from Ford.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Juan Cole is their latest victim<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) convened in Geneva, in 1978 and 1983, condemned apartheid South Africa and developed strategies to challenge racial discrimination and ethnic violence. When the WCAR met in Durban, in 2001, it did so in a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-nO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}