Here’s a must-read column by Alyssa A. Lappen on the Ford Foundation’s connections to an Islamist-influenced organization that is proselytizing for Islam in American schools, even promoting the adoption of a constitutional amendment to make blasphemy a crime: Ford Has a Better Idea: One Nation Under Allah.

The Los Angeles-based Constitutional Rights Foundation was established in 1962 to “instill in our nation’s youth a deeper understanding of citizenship” and “values expressed in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.” Its $3 million annual budget creates and distributes teaching materials ostensibly to support the Bill of Rights. However, CRF’s Service Learning Network in 2002 issued online “diversity” teaching units featuring terrorism and Islam sections—plus a whitewashed history of Islamic law and a proposed blasphemy amendment to the U.S. Constitution. CRF created the Islamic Issues segments for the winter 1998 edition of its quarterly newsletter.

Its final Islamic study unit does ask students to consider Islamic views on the Salman Rushdie case—and a proposed blasphemy amendment to the U.S. Constitution stating, “The First Amendment shall not be interpreted to protect blasphemous speech. States shall be free to enact anti-blasphemy laws as long as they prohibit offensive speech against all religions.” Students are asked to define blasphemy, explain the “strong” Islamic reaction to Rushdie’s novel, and assume the role of a U.S. Senator considering the amendment. They are not asked to discuss the Sharia punishment for blasphemy, which traditionally has been death. Such condemnations occur to this day.

On May 6, 1998, Bishop John Joseph of Faisalbad committed suicide to protest the injustice of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Unfortunately, the Bishop’s final act garnered little attention. The global human rights community did little to condemn Pakistan’s consistent institutional violation of Christian dhimmi human rights. “Nobody has forced Christians to live in Pakistan,” remarked the violent, anti-Shi’a Sipah-e-Sahaba leader, Zia-ul-Qasami, following the Bishop’s death. [1] Now the Ford Foundation would like to bring this to the United States.

The same Ford Foundation that funded anti-Semitic NGOs at the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban also finances CRF’s Service Learning Network. The mainstays of CRF’s Islam section are apologetics. The tolerance segment includes a link to the Council on American Islamic Relations, whose communications director Ibrahim Hooper griped to Seattle’s Times on “misuse” of Arabic script—a month after CAIR friends and affiliates attended a terrorist conference in Beirut.[2] The Times missed that news, meetings CAIR had arranged for radical Bassam Alamoush (for whom murdering a Jew is a “good deed” that needs no religious decree)—and CAIR board member Siraj Wahaj’s testimony in favor of convicted terrorist Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman. Since 2002, several CAIR officials have been arrested and linked to al-Qaeda.

UPDATE: Also see Eugene Volokh’s take on the Ford Foundation’s “blasphemy law” exercise.