John J. Miller has some interesting revelations into the inner workings of Freedom House and Farooq Kathwari in National Review (subscription):

...Yet the biggest flap involves the Center for Religious Freedom, which severed its decade-long ties with Freedom House last November. Under the leadership of Nina Shea, the center had operated as a semi-autonomous unit of Freedom House — it raised its own money (entirely from private sources), set its own budget, and determined its own program.

In recent years, Shea has focused much of the center’s attention on Islamic radicalism. A report in 2005 examined Saudi publications in the libraries of American mosques and found them full of extremist literature. One tract encouraged Muslims to think of the United States as the “Abode of the Infidel,” and urged its readers to be “dissociated from the infidels [and to] hate them for their religion.” The cover of this book, found at the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles, offered “Greetings from the Cultural Department” of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C. The documents surveyed by the center, wrote Shea, “instill contempt for America” and “preach a Nazi-like hatred for Jews.”

The report was immediately controversial — both outside of Freedom House, which was expected, as well as within it, which wasn’t. Two weeks after its release, the man who was one of only two Muslims on the Freedom House board resigned in protest. “I am concerned that the growing perception by many Muslims is that this report is biased and will smear the majority of Muslims in the U.S.,” wrote Farooq Kathwari, who is also the CEO of Ethan Allen Interiors, a furniture company that does business in Saudi Arabia. Within a few months, however, Ackerman had persuaded Kathwari to rejoin the board — “with assurances that Center reporting on Saudi Arabia would be vetted through him in the future and the Center would be brought under tight control,” according to Rosenwald.

That opportunity arose early last year, as Shea finalized a report on textbooks used in the public schools of Saudi Arabia — a report that would accuse them of advancing “an ideology of hatred toward Christians and Jews and Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi [i.e., radical] doctrine.” The documents under review included only those that the Saudi government claimed to have survived a review in 2004, following a review that was supposed to remove older books that delivered messages of religious intolerance and incitements to violence. Yet even the new and improved books announced that “every religion other than Islam is false,” taught that the afterlife for non-Muslims is “hellfire,” and described Jewish people as “cursed” by God.

Before the center’s report saw the light of day, Shea once again locked horns with Freedom House’s leadership. “They placed tremendous pressure on me to include only the bare facts and to drop human-rights assessments about the Saudis’ violation of religious freedom,” she says. Windsor agrees that she wanted Shea to avoid excessive commentary: “I felt that the report on mosques a year earlier had exaggerated the case and left Freedom House vulnerable to some legitimate criticism, so we wanted to edit the new report to enhance its credibility.” Trustee P.J. O’Rourke, the writer, backed Windsor. “The Saudi material was so bad, it could stand on its own,” he says. Despite the wrangling, the final product was a big success. The center’s revelations received wide publicity and led directly to an agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia last July in which the Saudis promised, once again, to revise their educational materials.

Yet Shea had found the experience so frustrating that she began to wonder whether the Center for Religious Freedom could continue to operate under the Freedom House umbrella. When Freedom House set about centralizing its operations, it removed more of the autonomy that the center had previously enjoyed. In an e-mail that Freedom House counsel Richard Sauber sent to Shea last September, Shea was informed that everything she wrote, including op-eds and online statements, would have to receive organizational approval. Moreover, Shea was told not to hold meetings with government officials, members of Congress, or representatives of international organizations without first notifying Windsor.

“I could see that with the new priority on avoiding controversy, the space we would have to speak truth to power was going to become very narrow,” says Shea. She informed the Freedom House board of her intention to leave. “Nina Shea’s departure is a real blow,” says a trustee. “Her center was one of the best things about Freedom House.” ...