Owen Tilman writes for the Washington Free Beacon about an inconvenient fact for a leading left-of-center philanthropic group.
Shortly after Oct. 7, the president of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, issued a statement on the foundation’s behalf. Walker, who has been lauded by Laurene Powell Jobs as an “optimist,” a “realist,” and a “prophet who speaks truth to our world’s most troubling demons,” announced that the Ford Foundation would bankroll “immediate humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza and the Middle East.”
“Administered by our colleagues in the Middle East and North Africa regional office,” Walker said, “the resources will go to partners in the region to provide life-saving support and other essential needs to the affected Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” The statement referred to “tragic events” that had occurred in Israel and Gaza but made no mention of who was behind them, instead expressing concern for the “anguish, pain, and suffering that countless families are experiencing in Gaza at this moment.”
While the country’s leading universities have been under the microscope since Oct. 7, the nation’s top foundations have largely evaded scrutiny. Both, however, sit atop multibillion-dollar endowments and exert enormous influence on American politics and public policy: The Ford Foundation alone oversees the disbursal of approximately a billion dollars a year.
Where is that money going? A review of grants disbursed by the Ford Foundation’s team overseeing the Middle East and North Africa, led by Cairo-based regional director Saba Almubaslat, shows that several of the foundation’s grants have gone to organizations whose employees, events, and projects celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack and decried the “Zionist entity.” They make little effort to disguise their hostility to Jews and the state of Israel.
The foundation’s support for such organizations stands in stark contrast with Walker’s denunciation of Henry Ford, the foundation’s founder and a notorious anti-Semite.
