Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief: Romirowsky, A., Joffe, A.: 9781137378163: Amazon.com: Books

Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief: Romirowsky, A., Joffe, A.: 9781137378163: Amazon.com: Books



Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief 2013th Edition
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This book examines the leading role of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in the United Nations relief program for Palestine Arab refugees in 1948-1950 in the Gaza Strip. It situates the operation within the context of the AFSC's attempts to exercise new influence on the separate issues of pacifism and disarmament at a time marked by US efforts to construct a Cold War security regime in the Middle East and British efforts to retain influence and bases in Arab countries. Using archival data, oral histories, diplomatic documents, and biographical and autobiographical accounts, the authors provide a detailed look at internal decision-making in an early non-governmental organization where beliefs regarding the requirement to provide refugees with skills for self-reliance clashed with intractable political and cultural realities and the realization that only full repatriation or resettlement elsewhere would solve the problem (a lesson that UNRWA and the international community learned only decades later). Faced with impossible solutions, the Quakers withdrew. The story of AFSC involvement in Gaza shows that refugee relief is always political and that humanitarianism can prolong the problems it seeks to solve. (less)

Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief

by Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. Joffe

New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2013. 254 pp. $100.

Reviewed by Susan M. Jellissen

Belmont University, Nashville

Middle East Quarterly

Winter 2015

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Romirowsky and Joffe trace the involvement of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)—a Quaker organization founded long before 1948 to assist civilians caught up in the maelstrom of war—in its pivotal role as relief provider to Arab refugees in Gaza under the auspices of the

United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR). Painstakingly combing through personal memoirs, cables, and diplomatic communiqués, the authors construct a rich history of the immediate post-1948 period. The AFSC was determined that its relief mission be short-lived to thwart any "moral degeneration" that might occur from a continuing refugee status. Its preferred solution was "repatriation" (return to homes in the territory that became Israel) but quickly changed to resettlement in adjacent Arab states, such as Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, as a more judicious option. This approach was also seriously considered by the U.S. government—then and now the principal source of monetary aid to the refugee operation—along with a program of political and economic development in the Middle East directly connected to larger Cold War policies.

But the idea of refugee resettlement in Arab states soon fizzled out. As the authors illustrate, both field personnel and those at the policy-making level within AFSC understood that the refugees were being used as pawns by the Arab governments in their propaganda war against Israel. Once UNRPR's mandate expired in 1950, the United Nations established the U.N. Relief and Work's Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) as its replacement, and from then on, the fix was in. For reasons ranging from bureaucratic inertia to self-interest, but most importantly Arab governments' clear desire to maintain the refugee problem, UNRWA has, for the last sixty-five years, provided "relief" to a population that has increased nearly ten-fold and whose questionable refugee status is handed down to each successive generation as their prized—and lucrative—legacy.

As the authors note, a continuing and permanent refugee status became a necessary condition for the fostering of a "Palestinian" identity. Rather than use its influence among the Arab states to implement a resettlement program, which would have ultimately been to the refugees' advantage, the U.S. government pandered to a set of ideas that would prove inimical to long-term regional stability as well as to Israel's security. This ill-conceived approach continues to this day, sustaining the most powerful weapon in the Arab arsenal against the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

Review: Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief

DEC 15, 2016, 8:02 PM

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“Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief” by Asaf Romirowsky & Alexander Joffe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). ISBN: 1137378166.

On the surface, this impressive scholarly work looks narrow in scope: it examines the brief role played by the Quakers in providing relief for the Arab refugees created after the Arab invasion of the newly established State of Israel, work which lasted only from 1948-50 and focused only on the Gaza Strip. But along the way it contains some important broader lessons, and offers many poignant insights about the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim conflict (my term) in general and the political dimension of the refugee problem in particular.

For some background: Since its creation in late 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has devoted itself to maintaining specifically the Arab refugees above (and their descendants), providing them health, welfare, and education services as well as being a major source of their employment, while all other refugees from all other global conflicts fall under the purview of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Much has been written about the problematic history of UNRWA and its active promotion of the anti-Israel Palestinian narrative, including the infamous “Right of Return” according to which Palestinian Arabs and their generations of descendants are allegedly entitled to return to territory that is now the State of Israel.

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Far less well known is that the international community initially provided relief to the Arab refugees through very different means.

In December 1948, the U.N. asked three organizations, the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Red Cross Societies, to provide relief. The AFSC was assigned to the Gaza Strip. It is the AFSC story that is explored in this book, and it in particular offers important lessons regarding the roads not taken in UNRWA’s later, and now seemingly permanent, relief effort.

Leaving aside the book’s many carefully researched details about AFSC’s work, consider just this single passage, from a March 1949 AFSC document prepared for the U.N. just two months after AFSC had been in the field:

Following a review of the refugee situation in Palestine generally and more particularly in the Gaza Strip, the AFSC wishes to state its position regarding the continuance of the refugee relief program. The AFSC wishes to withdraw from direct refugee relief in the Gaza Strip at the earliest possible moment compatible with the fulfillment of its moral obligation to the refugee population. It is obvious that prolonged direct relief contributes to the moral degeneration of the refugees and that it may also, by its palliative effects, militate against a swift political settlement of the problem. (p. 86)

This remarkable early passage, Romirowsky and Joffe suggest, “is perhaps the single most perceptive statement made with respect to Palestine refugee relief across some six decades” (87). For one thing, the AFSC acknowledges what it sees as a moral obligation to the refugees, one which derives both from their general Quaker outlook as well as from their short time developing personal relationships with the refugee population. Yet at the same time they remain adamant that their commitment was to be limited in duration, for fear of both contributing to the “moral degeneration” of the refugees and to forestalling a “political settlement” of the problem, namely the Arab-Israeli conflict.

How prescient these remarks seem, nearly 68 years later.ADVERTISEMENT

By becoming a perpetual welfare organization, UNRWA has now produced several generations of dependent people who feel absolutely entitled to the aid that the world bestows upon them—a concern that we now learn was fully apparent at the beginning, as ASFC field reports document both the refugees’ “strong feelings” that the U.N. “has the total responsibility to feed, house, clothe” them and the occurrence of refugee “demonstrations” demanding that U.N. “compensate” them and “maintain” them.

More importantly, the AFSC saw immediately that the refugees were being used in the service of political agendas. After its extensive work in global refugee relief after World War Two the AFSC understood the importance of resettlement and rehabilitation: that is, of finding the refugees new, permanent homes and equipping them to make a living. Their efforts to this end in Gaza, however, were repeatedly foiled, as revealed in internal AFSC documents. The Egyptians (for example) had a policy, one staffer notes, of refusing

all requests for refugee transfer out of the Gaza Strip, even for individuals called to a specific employment opportunity … The policy is in fact … a reflection of some obscure notion that “possession” of 200,000 Gaza refuges is some sort of lever in international bargaining. (139)

More generally, he reported, “The Arab Governments do not want the refugee problem solved on its merits, and will willingly accept solution only if their political price is met” (140).ADVERTISEMENT

To this day the Arab world continues to refuse to resettle these refugees—now, via their descendants, numbering in the many millions—in order to use them as “levers” in their ongoing battle against the Jewish state.

In similar ways AFSC communications document the difficulties in formulating definitions of “refugee,” the widespread fraud that was present in the registration of refugees, and the problem that internationally supported schools were being used to brainwash Arab children with hateful anti-Israel propaganda. It was largely because the AFSC objected to such a corrupt, and apparently unending, relief system that it chose to exit from Arab refugee relief in 1950. Meanwhile the organization that inherited the task—UNRWA—has gone on to propagate these problems, exactly as the AFSC feared.

Today, unfortunately, the AFSC leverages its history and past good work in order to contribute to the global battle against Israel. The AFSC’s support for the BDS movement is one element. Another is the way in which anti-Israel radicalism are introduced into Quaker schools through the intellectual leadership provided by the AFSC. The many local Quaker fellowships around the country, although greatly reduced in number from their 20th-century heyday, are important tools for the AFSC to shape local BDS efforts, usually in association with other Christian, pro-Palestinian, and “anti-war” groups. All this is predicated on a distinguished history that the AFSC both leverages and disregards.

Romirowsky and Joffe have done a terrific job shedding light on a previously unilluminated corner of this intractable conflict, in so doing making crystal clear some key lessons that should have been, but were not, learned.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORAndrew Pessin is a philosophy professor, Campus Bureau Editor at The Algemeiner, co-editor of "Anti-Zionism on Campus," and author most recently of the novel, "Nevergreen," an academic satire examining campus cancel culture and the ideological excesses that generate it. For more information, visit www.andrewpessin.com.

Editorial Reviews

Review




Review


'Romirowsky and Joffe trace the involvement of the American Friends ServiceCommittee (AFSC) a Quaker organization founded long before 1948 to assist civilians caught up in the maelstrom of war in its pivotal role as relief provider to Arab refugees in Gaza under the auspices of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR). Painstakingly combing through personal memoirs, cables, and diplomatic communiqués, the authors construct a rich history of the immediate post-1948 period. [ ] As the authors illustrate, both field personnel and those at the policy-making level within [the] AFSC understood that the refugees were being used as pawns by the Arab governments in their propaganda war against Israel. [ ]This ill-conceived approach continues to this day, sustaining the most powerful weapon in the Arab arsenal against the legitimacy of the Jewish state.' -Susan M. Jellissen, Belmont University, USA, Middle East Quarterly



About the Author
Author Asaf Romirowsky: Asaf Romirowsky is a Middle East historian. Author Alexander H. Joffe: Alexander H. Joffe is an archaeologist and historian.
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Palgrave Macmillan; 2013th edition (December 18, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 263 pages

==

Religion, Politics, and the Origin of Palestine Refugee Relief

by Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. Joffe

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2013) 254 pp.

Reviewed by Joseph S. Spoerl, Professor, Philosophy Dept., Saint Anselm College

This book is a carefully researched study of the earliest efforts to provide relief to the Palestinian Arabs who became refugees during the first Arab-Israeli war, or Israel’s War of Independence, in 1948. While other groups, such as the Red Cross, provided emergency aid, this book focuses primarily on the role of the American Quakers (or “Friends”) operating through the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). In addition to surveying all the available literature on the subject, the authors did extensive research in the Quaker archives in Philadelphia.

For about 18 months, the AFSC provided relief to Palestinian Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip. The AFSC built schools and clinics and taught vocational skills. Unlike other organizations, the AFSC actually took the trouble to conduct an accurate census of refugees and thereby reduced the refugee rolls, fought corruption and fraud, and got costs under control.

The Quakers had the quaint idea that it would be morally harmful to the refugees for them to remain on relief for too long. The goal, they thought, must be to help them start new lives and become self-supporting again, if not in Israel then elsewhere. When it became clear to them that the refugees themselves insisted on perpetual relief since repatriation to Israel was not feasible, the Quakers terminated their operations in Gaza, handing the work over to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which began to operate in 1950 and continues today, the population of “registered refugees” having burgeoned in the meantime from 735,000 in 1949 to over 5,250,000 today. (UNRWA, bowing to pressure from the Palestinians, unilaterally decided some years ago to define “Palestinian refugee” status as inheritable by patrilineal descent in perpetuity, thus guaranteeing the exponential growth of the very population that still demands a “right of return” to Israel proper.)

This book shows that key features of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute were set very early. The Quakers noticed the refugees’ pronounced tendency to blame all their troubles on anyone but themselves. It never apparently occurred to any of them that the Palestinian leaders that many of them had presumably supported (e.g. Hajj Amin al-Husseini) bore much responsibility for the disaster of 1948. The Quakers documented the Egyptian government’s refusal to allow any movement of the refugees out of the Gaza Strip (controlled by Egypt until 1967), and they recognized that the Arab governments did not want the refugee problem solved, since they wished to use the refugees as a weapon to continue the struggle against Israel.

The US government, which played by far the largest roll in funding and establishing UNRWA, encountered the same recalcitrance on the issue of resettlement. In the 1950s, the US tried to resettle the refugees in other countries, but the Arab states and the refugees themselves would accept nothing less than repatriation to Israel; barring that, they felt entitled to demand UN-funded welfare in perpetuity. The welfare continues to flow, with the US and even Israel fearing that any cutoff in aid will create instability in the areas populated by the refugees (the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon).

UNRWA answers to no one but the UN General Assembly, which is totally dominated by pro-Palestinian states. The vast majority of UNRWA employees are Palestinian “refugees” who have turned it into a rent-seeking organization that seeks above all else to keep itself in existence and maximize its income. UNRWA leaders publicly insist that Palestinian “refugees” have a “right of return” to Israel proper – a demand that has played a key role in sabotaging peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, since no Israeli government could ever agree to it.

It was the US and British founders of UNRWA who chose to make it autonomous instead of putting it under the General Secretary of the UN, thinking this would make it easier for the US and Britain to control it. Romirowsky and Joffe note wryly that UNRWA’s founders “failed to conceive that the relief organization would survive over sixty years and along the way, fall into the hands of its charges” (p. 117). UNRWA has become a major obstacle to the Israeli-Palestinian peace that successive US governments have been trying to broker now for decades.

Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism: Lewy, Guenter: 9780802836403: Amazon.com: Books

Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism: Lewy, Guenter: 9780802836403: Amazon.com: Books




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Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism Hardcover – April 1, 1988
by Guenter Lewy (Author)


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Looks at how four pacifist organizations, the AFSC, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, have given up the ideals of nonviolence to support leftist dictatorships and liberation fronts

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Charging that American pacifism since the Vietnam War has lost its conscience by abandoning the principle of nonviolence, Lewy, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, critiques four leading pacifist organizations: the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. He contends that these groups are experiencing the same basic conflict between the ideal of nonviolence and that of liberating the oppressed, especially in the Third World. He accuses them of supporting Communist-dominated movements in Vietnam and Central and South America to the exclusion of such struggles as the Afghans' revolt against the Soviet Union. Lewy (America in Vietnam) further warns that the alliance of pacifists with New Left and antiwar groups gives them political and religious clout"peace at any price"that could endanger American interests.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal

Lewy is highly critical of American pacifism from 1965 to the present, arguing that it has lost the philosophical consistency and moral integrity it once possessed. Examining four prominent pacifist groupsthe Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resister League, Women's International League of Peace and Freedom, and American Friends Service Committeehe concludes that they have abandoned their commitment to nonviolence because of hostility to American democracy and infatuation with Third World revolutions. Lewy points up serious moral and political questions about contemporary pacifism, but his prosecutorial tone and hard-line Cold War ideology make this less the sober, penetrating analysis the subject deserves and more a narrowly political polemic. Mel Piehl, Valparaiso Univ., Ind.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; 1st edition (April 1, 1988)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 296 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802836402

Book Review

AFSC: Faith Groups Urge Congress To Cut Pentagon Spending – InsuranceNewsNet

American Friends Service Committee: Faith Groups Urge Congress To Cut Pentagon Spending – InsuranceNewsNet

American Friends Service Committee: Faith Groups Urge Congress to Cut Pentagon Spending

Targeted News Service (Press Releases)

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 -- The American Friends Service Committee issued the following news release:

Over 30 faith-based organizations released an open letter calling on Congress to prioritize essential investments in green energy and sustainable infrastructure, affordable healthcare, and in pandemic relief--and to find the money to make these investments by cutting the bloated Pentagon budget.

The letter reads, "whether Congress is prioritizing creating jobs, addressing climate change, or repairing relationships with other nations, cutting Pentagon spending is part of the solution." It goes on to note that defense spending is notoriously inefficient at job creation, that the Pentagon emits more greenhouse gasses than many countries, and that the United States' endless wars have been devastating communities abroad.

"The Biden administration has promised to 'Build Back Better,' and Congress has the opportunity to help him do this by decreasing the massive and wasteful Pentagon budget, and putting that money into addressing the global problems of our time, including climate change and global health," said Tori Bateman, policy advocacy coordinator with the American Friends Service Committee. "Pouring money into weapons, war, and the pockets of defense contractors doesn't keep us safe--it takes resources away from our communities."

* * *

February 18, 2021

Dear Members of Congress,

As 31 faith-based organizations from across the United States, representing many different faith traditions, we call on you to prioritize a sustainable, peaceful recovery for the country while developing the government's budget for fiscal year 2022. The Administration has signaled a commitment to investing in green energy and sustainable infrastructure /1, in affordable healthcare, and in economic support for people struggling with the effects of the pandemic /2. These are essential investments- and we can find the money we need to make these investments a reality by cutting the bloated Pentagon budget.

We are called by our faith traditions to prioritize caring for people, and to turn away from violence and corruption. The Hebrew Bible calls people "stewards" of the land, urges them to feed the hungry and care for the poor, and prophesies nations forging their "swords into ploughshares."

Whether Congress is prioritizing creating jobs, addressing climate change, or repairing relationships with other nations, cutting Pentagon spending is part of the solution. Defense sector spending is notoriously inefficient at job creation- spending in education or healthcare can create double the number of jobs for the same investment /3. The Pentagon emits more greenhouse gasses than many countries /4, and has been devastating communities abroad in endless and unnecessary wars.

Instead of spending money on weapons and war, we need to be investing in things that address the urgency of climate change and build resilient communities- including clean energy and sustainable infrastructure. Ensuring that low-income and marginalized communities have the infrastructure they need for clean air, water, broadband, and public transportation is key.

Addressing climate change and sustainable infrastructure will put the country on a path to a more equitable future- and create good jobs at the same time.

We also need reductions in the Pentagon budget in order to invest in public health- an especially essential investment in this time of pandemic. Everyone must have access to affordable, quality healthcare. Congress should prioritize funding testing and treatment for COVID, and expansion of Medicaid.

By reducing Pentagon spending, we would also free up funds to invest in foreign assistance, diplomacy, and peacebuilding. Conflict can be solved in nonviolent ways when we address the root causes like global hunger and poverty, and use all of our nonviolent, sustainable foreign policy tools like diplomacy and peacebuilding. Congress must reduce the bloated Pentagon budget, and invest instead in real solutions for communities experiencing conflict.

As the United States works to recover from the economic and public health disaster of COVID-19, it is essential that we invest in clean energy and infrastructure, healthcare, and peacebuilding, instead of giving handouts to defense contractors and pouring taxpayer dollars into endless wars. This year, Congress must pass appropriations bills that cut the topline Pentagon budget, eliminates the unaccountable Overseas Contingencies Operations fund (OCO), and re-invests that money into a sustainable, healthy, and peaceful recovery for our communities.

Sincerely,

Alliance of Baptists

American Friends Service Committee

Bridges Faith Initiative

Center on Conscience & War

Christian Peacemaker Teams

Church World Service

Church of the Brethren, Office of Peacebuilding and Policy

Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach

Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, U.S. Provinces

Disciples Center for Public Witness

Disciples Refugee & Immigration Ministries

Franciscan Action Network

Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)

InterReligious Task Force on Central America

Islamic Society of North America

Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Washington Office

NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice

National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd

National Council of Churches

Pax Christi USA

Pennsylvania Council of Churches

Presbyterian Church Office of Public Witness

Presbyterian Peace Fellowship

Provincial Council Clerics of St. Viator

Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association

Sisters of Mercy of the Americas - Justice Team

Sisters of Mercy of the Americas NH

The United Methodist Church - General Board of Church and Society

Union for Reform Judaism

United Church of Christ, Justice and Witness Ministries

Footnotes:

1/ The Biden Plan to Build a Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure and an Equitable Clean Energy Future. 2020. Joe Biden for President: Official Campaign Website

2/ Build Back Better: Joe Biden's Jobs and Economic Recovery Plan for Working Families. 2020. Joe Biden for President: Official Campaign Website.

3/ Garrett-Peltier, H., War Spending and Lost Opportunities. Brown University

4/ Crawford, N.C., 2020. Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War. Brown University.

[Category: CaptureV]

When Did the Quakers Stop Being Friends? - The Tower - The Tower

When Did the Quakers Stop Being Friends? - The Tower - The Tower
December 2013
The Tower Magazine
When Did the Quakers Stop Being Friends?

Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. Joffe

Co-authors of "Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).click for full bio >>
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When Did the Quakers Stop Being Friends?by Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. Joffe
Dare We Say It? The Mullahs Must Goby Michael Ledeen
Jabotinsky’s Lost Moment: June, 1940by Rick Richman
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The religious group known as the Quakers has sacrificed its founding religious principles at the altar of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
In the summer of 2013 an unusual gathering of students took place in an undisclosed location in upstate New York. Sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) along with Jewish Voice for Peace, the “We Divest Campaign Student Leadership Team Summer Training Institute” offered a five-day program to trains campus activists and organizers in the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement, a loose coalition of anti-Israel groups seeking to cripple the Israeli economy. Promising “fun in a summer-camp like environment” for only a $100 registration fee—the rest is subsidized by the sponsors—AFSC’s program included “extensive campaign development coaching,” “grassroots organizing skill building,” “media and messaging trainings,” “anti-oppression analysis workshops,” “relationship building with activists on campuses nationwide,” “strategy sessions with BDS movement leaders,” and more. Participants represented some of America’s best-known elite universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Brandeis, Loyola, Oberlin and Georgetown.

The conclave did not go unnoticed among critics of BDS concerned at the prospect of teens and young adults being taught the tactics of harming the Jewish state. The Anti-Defamation League stated that such camps would “indoctrinate the next generation of activists with biased messages intended to single out Israel.” Shurat HaDin, an Israeli nonprofit that helps terror victims navigate the legal systems of countries around the world, announced that it was investigating whether the camp violated federal and New York state anti-boycott laws.

But there is a bigger reason to be concerned. The camp’s main sponsor, the Quaker-affiliated and well-funded AFSC, has in recent years propelled itself to the forefront of the BDS campaign. This once-venerable group, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and an influential member of the anti-war, pro-disarmament, and social justice movements, has become a leading proponent of anti-Israel activism. Their chosen method is to “support [BDS] campaigns which aim to end corporate support for Israel’s settlement policy and thereby contribute to ending settlement growth and construction.”


BDS advocates protest the opening of a Max Brenner chocolate store in Parramatta, Australia. Photo: Kate Ausburn / flickr

Yet clearly their aims go beyond stopping settlement construction. In 2008, the AFSC, along with other similarly minded religious groups, hosted a gala dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the guest of honor, despite Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and genocidal threats against the Jewish state. Ahmadinejad, however, is only the most extreme example of the AFSC making dubious friends. The participants in its BDS summer camp were mostly Palestinians or Palestinian-Americans associated with the group Students for Justice in Palestine—an organization notorious not only for its vicious rhetoric against Israel, but for going so far as shouting down pro-Israel speakers on campus and harassing Jewish students.

AFSC’s recent turn is increasingly difficult to reconcile with its longstanding opposition to violence, war, and hatred. Affiliated with the Religious Society of Friends, the pacifist Christian sect commonly known as the Quakers, the AFSC consistently portrays itself as a loving, compassionate, healing organization that seeks only to end suffering and conflict around the world. Indeed, the BDS movement itself has been described by one Quaker group as “the transforming power of love and nonviolence, having faith that enmity can be transformed and that oppression can give way.” Stressing the religious origins of their ideology, they asserted that “seeking God’s guidance,” they are working toward “a just and lasting peace.”

Unfortunately, even a cursory look at the AFSC’s attitudes toward Israel over the past 60 years reveals something very different. Its views on Israel have slowly evolved from a nominally neutral, though not particularly sympathetic, point of view to a violently hostile stance. The group now engages in apologetics for anti-Israel terrorism, accuses the Jewish state of all manner of crimes, and seeks to actively undermine its economy and security.

The AFSC, in short, has adopted a pacifism of hypocrisy. It claims to oppose violence, but in practice engages in apologetics for terrorism. It claims to want peace for both sides, but inevitably advocates only for the Palestinians, often in extremist terms. And it has moved closer and closer to a retrograde, supercessionist theology that has been the basis of Christian anti-Semitism for centuries. The saga of the AFSC’s relationship to Israel is a tragic one, in which a once-noble organization has not only embraced an ignoble cause, but has betrayed its own founding principles in the process.
The American Friends Service Committee has its origins in the Quakers—thus named because they tremble or “quake” before God—a Protestant sect founded in England during the mid-17th century. Embracing an extreme form of Protestant theology, the Quakers rejected all traditional sacraments, such as baptism and the notion of the Bible as inerrant Scripture. Instead, the Quakers seek to bear witness to their belief through “spirituality in action.” Its members attempt to follow the “inner light,” which founding Quaker George Fox described as “spirit, and grace, by which all might know their salvation, and their way to God; even that divine Spirit which would lead them into all Truth.” As part of their beliefs, Quakers oppose violence in all its forms and reject any compulsion in religion. Social justice and pacifism have long been central tenets of Quaker belief and activity.

The American Friends Service Committee was formed on April 30, 1917 in response to America’s entrance into World War I. Challenged by public hostility and government disapproval due to their refusal to be drafted, the Quakers formed the AFSC in order to organize alternative forms of service for its members, such as providing medical aid and other non-violent participation in the war effort.

The AFSC slowly expanded over the years, and by the late 1940s it was an established Christian organization with global experience, recognized by national and international establishments as a major provider of international relief, charity, and aid. It was also a profoundly universalist organization that often supported unpopular political causes, embracing humanitarian and pacifist ideals that were radical in the context of both the U.S. and in the American and Protestant contexts.


George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement. Photo credit: Victuallers / Wikimedia

The dawn of the Cold War, however, proved a turning point in the history of the organization. In April 1947 a faction within the AFSC’s leadership convened a meeting at which the head of the organization, Clarence Pickett, and others argued that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had become so intense, and the threat of atomic war so grave, that that the AFSC should abandon its long-standing tradition of political neutrality. Such a stance, Pickett said, could no longer be an article of faith but a crime. The radical nature of this stance was reflected in the words of another participant, who said, “Evolution is too slow. We need revolution in the Society of Friends.” The organization, Pickett and his supporters felt, should actively spearhead a peace movement that would directly challenge America’s Cold War policies. This began the AFSC’s transformation from a religious group to, as one Quaker scholar later put it, “just one more pressure group within the secular political community.”

The AFSC’s newly radical stance took aim at American policies throughout the 1950s and paid little or no heed to repression and terror in Communist countries. This hit its stride during the Vietnam War. The organization bitterly and actively opposed the war throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. Its attacks on American policy in Vietnam were furious and wide-ranging, opposing everything from the escalation of military operations to all forms of aid to South Vietnam to the conduct of the war itself. In addition, the AFSC directly violated American embargoes and sent medical aid directly to North Vietnam. These actions proved to be extremely controversial. In one case, the AFSC was accused of revealing to the North Vietnamese that a prominent Buddhist activist was a CIA agent, prompting one prominent Quaker to hold a sit-in at AFSC headquarters in protest. The AFSC’s activism placed it unquestionably on the side of the American far-Left, where it remains to this day.


The Quakers’ beliefs in nonviolence have not prevented them from supporting bloody despotic regimes.

More importantly, however, this was the beginning of a process through which the AFSC began to betray its own founding principles. While still voicing support for pacifism, the organization increasingly aligned itself with violent Left-wing governments and movements, some of which used terrorism to advance their goals.

Many rank-and-file Quakers were appalled at the AFSC’s overt support for such regimes and movements, as well as its double standards, according to which it supported oppressive Left-wing regimes while attacking the U.S. for supporting oppressive Right-wing regimes. But their protests proved fruitless. The AFSC rejected all criticism as fundamentally illegitimate “red-baiting and McCarthyism.”

Over the past three decades, the AFSC’s ideology has remained essentially unchanged. It still makes occasional nods toward religion and theology, but essentially, its beliefs and activities are entirely secular and entirely conventional on the far-Left. It opposed U.S. intervention in Somalia and claims today that “economic hardship” rather than “ideology” drives the Somalian civil war pitting Islamist terrorists against the federal government. It partially justified Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait by citing the former’s war debts and opposed the American-led response. In one case, AFSC members even volunteered to act as human shields in the event of an American attack.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was cast in similar terms, as yet another American crime that followed years of murderous sanctions. Saddam Hussein is barely mentioned by the organization, and one simply would not know from their description of the war that he was a tyrant personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, or that his regime had pursued weapons of mass destruction. The AFSC’s policy towards Iran is similar, demanding the removal of sanctions and dismissing concerns about Iranian nuclear weapons.

Today the group operates collective farms in North Korea and supports a network of Syrians who, in their words, “believe in nonviolence as a means of achieving freedom, equality, dignity, and mutual coexistence to be one community of citizens in all its sects and identities.” Saddest of all, the AFSC’s once-formidable relief and aid efforts are now strictly limited, replaced by an absolute faith in the power of rhetoric and protest to alter behavior. And it is these weapons that the AFSC has now turned against the Jewish state.
The AFSC’s strange and often hypocritical combination of ideology and theology, pacifism and support for violent movements, has marked its attitude toward Israel for many years. But the organization was not always actively hostile toward Israel or Zionism, and its relationship to the Israeli-Arab conflict has been a long and complex one.

The Quaker movement itself has a long historical relationship with the land of Israel. Quakers traveled to then-Palestine as early as the 1650s in order to undertake missionary and educational projects, and like many Protestant sects, they were especially active throughout the Middle East during the second half of the 19th century.

Their activities were mainly confined to the Middle East’s Christian communities. As far as the Jews were concerned, the Quakers shared the supersessionist theology of most American Protestant denominations of the time. This theological position deemphasized the Jewish connection to the Holy Land and derided the Jews as a people forsaken by God. As a result of their pacifism, however, the Quakers were generally not hostile toward the Jews. But Zionism represented a direct challenge to supersessionist theology, and many of the Protestant missionary and aid groups opposed the movement and supported Arab nationalism. The Quakers, for the most part, stayed neutral on the subject, although Quaker institutions in Palestine itself and individual Palestinian Quakers became leading advocates of Arab nationalism and fervent anti-Zionists.

By the time of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, the AFSC was at the height of its international prominence. In December 1948, the group joined the International Committee of the Red Cross and the League of Red Cross Societies in order to provide relief to Palestinian refugees. The AFSC’s area of operation was the Gaza Strip, and during almost 18 months in the field it did an exemplary job. The organization provided food, set up schools and clinics, and faced down the Egyptian military. Unlike any other relief organization at the time or since, the AFSC conducted an accurate census and reduced its rolls of Palestinian refugees. It also rooted out fraud and corruption, and kept costs under control. And despite their pacifism, the AFSC learned to be what it described as “hard boiled” with the Egyptians, the refugees, and the international community in general.


The AFSC has been at the forefront of the Palestinian solidarity movement since the beginning.

But by the end of 1949, it was clear to the AFSC leadership that the refugees would accept no solution to their predicament but repatriation to their former homes in what was now Israel. Barring that, they demanded to remain on permanent international relief. Even vocational education was considered suspect. In the minds of the refugees, improved job skills could result in them being resettled elsewhere.

At the same time, it was clear to the AFSC that even if the refugees did accept resettlement, no Arab state would accept them. The only possible solution would be political, not economic. And such a solution did not seem likely in the near future. To its credit, the AFSC could not countenance participating in an open-ended relief program, which it believed would intensify the “moral degeneration” of the refugees and the degradation of their skills, self-reliance, and self-respect.

As a result, the AFSC withdrew from Gaza in early 1950, turning its responsibilities over to the United Nations organization UNRWA. For more than 60 years since, the AFSC’s warnings about the detrimental effects of open-ended relief programs have gone unheeded, whether by UNRWA or by any of its international patrons, including the United States. Today, Palestinians view relief and eventual repatriation (the “right of return”) as absolute rights. And the Arab states, with the exception of Jordan, remain steadfast in their refusal to do anything except warehouse Palestinians in permanent refugee camps.

The refugee program was also, in effect, the last time the AFSC acted with formal neutrality in regard to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Its interests at the time were purely humanitarian, and it did not take an explicit or official political stance in favor of one side or another. This would soon undergo a radical and permanent change.
Throughout the 1960s and especially after the 1967 Six Day War, the AFSC began to take a more explicit and fervent pro-Palestinian stance, applying its growing radicalism and willingness to accommodate the use of violence to the Middle East conflict. As the 1970s saw the rise of Palestinian terrorism as a major source of global violence, the AFSC began to take a disturbingly understanding approach to the issue. A 1972 AFSC pamphlet, Nonviolence: Not First For Export told its readers:
Violence is expressed in the agony of millions of men, women and children who in varying degrees suffer hunger, poverty, ill-health, lack of education, non-acceptance by the fellowmen. It is compounded by the slights and insults of rampant injustice, of exploitation, of police brutality, of a thousand indignities from dawn to dusk and through the night.

In the context of such “structural violence,” the pamphlet continued, “before we deplore terrorism it is essential for us to recognize fully and clearly whose ‘terrorism’ came first, so that we can assess what is cause and what is effect.”

It was clear enough that, in regard to Israel the AFSC had no doubts about whose “terrorism” came first. The pamphlet expressed, for example, deep understanding toward the Palestinian Fedayeen—“those who sacrifice themselves”—terrorists whose main purpose was to infiltrate Israel and kill civilians. Indeed, it came close to regarding terrorism as a legitimate form of “sacrifice.”

Another pamphlet also more or less endorsed the Palestinian “right of return,” which if implemented would result in the effective destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. “That the Arab governments,” it said,
Cannot resettle Palestinian refugees in more or less permanent situations against their will should be obvious. Moreover, both the refugees and the host governments have been constantly haunted by the fear that successful resettlement would help the Israelis and the world to forget the injustice done to the Palestinians and to accept a large-scale fait accompli.

Perhaps making up for lost time, the AFSC’s anti-Israel activities began to intensify. In 1973, the AFSC called for a U.S. embargo on arms and other aid to Israel, and in 1975 adopted “a formal decision to make the Middle East its major issue.” It quickly opened an office in Israel, installed specialized staff members at regional offices in the U.S., and began advocating for the Palestinians in Israeli and international courts. Israeli officials quickly discovered, however, that the new AFSC representative in Jerusalem was attempting to organize on behalf of the PLO. Only the threat of a negative PR campaign from the AFSC leadership prevented the representative—who was not a Quaker—from being expelled.

That the AFSC’s newfound passion for the Palestinian cause was beginning to undermine its commitment to its own ideals was depressingly clear at a 1977 conference that sought to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. Despite supposedly seeking for reconciliation and harmony, the conference in fact became an emotionally manipulative assault on the Israeli participants. One observer noted that
A spokesman for the Arab-American university graduates not only blamed Israel for the Palestinian diaspora but said that by arming the Christians, Israel created a Palestinian Auschwitz at Tal Zaatar. The applause was loud and sustained. The AFSC moderator asked that the usual question-answer period be suspended. He called for one minute of silence so that the audience might “feel” the horrors that were so vividly described.

In another session,
Jewish participants were asked to tolerate some anti-Semitic remarks in order to keep the lines of communication open. It was argued that Palestinians cannot be expected to be understanding or asked to cool their anger until justice was achieved. Instead we must concentrate on erasing stereotypes including the one that associates the PLO with terrorism.

The AFSC organizers later treated the Jewish and Israeli participants to a “social evening predominantly devoted to the singing of Hebrew songs and dancing the hora.”

Such displays of bad faith and emotional blackmail became depressingly commonplace. A participant in a 1975 Quaker mission, for example, recounted how his group had
Visited Yad Vashem and Ramallah Friends Meeting in the same day. Some cried in Yad Vashem while others questioned the psychological validity of preserving this bitter memory. Later we attended the Friends Meeting in occupied Ramallah, joined hands and sang one of the few permitted protest songs—We Shall Overcome. All of us were shaken, some to open weeping, by the experience.

By 1977, the AFSC was careening dangerously close to outright anti-Semitism and “replacement theology”; they now appeared to believe that the Palestinians were the “new Jews.” As one member put it, “Now Israelis are making Jews out of Palestinians. In the Palestinians, I recognize my Jews.”

Such sentiments stem from a religious foundation of Christian anti-Semitism: The idea that the Jews are no longer the “real” Jews, but have been superseded by Christianity, which is “the Israel of the spirit.” This theology has only become more prominent among Quakers in recent years.
The AFSC has moved ever closer to the Palestinian cause since the 1970s. Today, this is expressed through fieldwork, lobbying, and activism, in particular through the BDS movement. The AFSC also helps organize Palestinian groups involved in civil disobedience in the West Bank, and has recently cosponsored a conference in Tel Aviv advocating for the Palestinian “right of return.”

And as it has become more and more extreme, the AFSC has moved further from its original ideas, which it now deploys almost wholly as quasi-religious platitudes. It speaks of the Quaker “spirit of love,” its even-handedness, and its commitment to non-violence. Yet it almost never criticizes the Palestinian Authority or Hamas for their violations of these principles, whether through terrorism, incitement, or an outright refusal to accept a peace agreement with Israel. It has called, for example, for an end to divisions between Hamas and Fatah in order to carry out a united struggle against Israel, even though Hamas is an openly anti-Semitic organization that has yet to recognize Israel’s right to exist in any form. In regard to Hamas’ indiscriminate use of rockets against Israeli civilians, the AFSC simply notes that “it is important to look at the firing of rockets by Palestinian armed groups in context,” since this it is “intertwined” with “ongoing Israeli military actions in Gaza.” Whether or not this is in comportment with the Quaker spirit of love is left unmentioned.

Indeed, it often seems that the AFSC makes every possible effort to deflect attention from Palestinian violence and other abuses, claiming that “acts of physical violence gain attention, but the daily nonviolent resistance by Palestinians against the structural violence of the occupation goes unnoticed”; nor does any of the AFSC’s literature on U.S. aid to Israel and the Palestinian Authority mention the billions of dollars in aid stolen by Palestinian leaders.

The group also discounts any possibility that the Palestinians could have any responsibility for the failure to reach a peace agreement. In a 2012 letter to Congress, the Quaker’s lobbying group, the Friends Committee for National Legislation, claimed that “there have been no meaningful negotiations since at least 2001,” which it blamed on “the U.S.’s failure to hold Israel accountable for its continued expropriation of Palestinian land and natural resources.” That the Palestinians had, in fact, been offered peace in 2000 and turned it down, and then launched a terrorist war, was left completely unmentioned.


BDS advocates from Code Pink, which frequently partners with the AFSC, protest Ahava products outside a store. Photo: Code Pink / flickr

Nor is this hostility confined to the issue of the Palestinians. A lobbyist from the same group wrote in March 2013 that a congressional pledge to back Israel if it found it necessary to attack the Iranian nuclear program was a “Back Door to War with Iran Resolution,” and claimed “thousands of activists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbied every senator’s office in support” of the resolution, which “lays the groundwork for—a U.S./Israel attack on Iran.” In fact, it did nothing of the kind, merely promising American support for Israel in case of an Israeli military strike against Iran. Unsurprisingly, the AFSC is among the most fervent supporters of the international community’s recent accord with Iran, which Israel has strongly opposed.

The AFSC appears to regard its support for the BDS movement as equally righteous. Its advocacy of BDS is “contextualized by Quakers and AFSC’s long support for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions as economic tactics that appeal to human conscience and change behavior.” The group relates this to its opposition to slavery, segregation, apartheid, and other reprehensible phenomena. But it also betrays itself by claiming to support, in accordance with its “principles and history,” all “nonviolent efforts to realize peace and justice in Israel and Palestine,” even though this is demonstrably not the case, and has not been for years, given the organization’s support for Palestinian groups that both advocate and practice extreme forms of violence.

To the extent that it still retains some religious character, the AFSC is fully aligned with the most radically pro-Palestinian Christian denominations. The Quakers are members of the World Council of Churches, which played a major role in issuing “A Moment of Truth,” otherwise known as the Kairos Palestine document. This theological statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict expresses a form of “liberation theology” that casts the Palestinians as the “new Jews.” Palestinians are, in effect a sacred, chosen people and a moral force struggling against oppression. In this case, the oppressor is the Jews, whose covenant is considered obsolete and whose religion is believed to be outdated if not barbaric.

Indeed, the Kairos Palestine document explicitly speaks of Jesus as “casting a new light on the Old Testament, on … themes such as the promises, the election, the people of God, and the land.” This “new light,” of course, constituted the claim that the Jews were no longer “elected,” and that Christians were now “the people of God.” This unreconstructed supersessionism may be one of the reasons the document refers to the creation and existence of Israel as one of the great injustices of history, to be corrected by “ending the occupation and establishing justice,” which will help lead to the “Kingdom of God, a kingdom of justice, peace and dignity.”

This messianic anti-Zionism may be one of the reasons the AFSC has adopted a view on the conflict that, despite protestations otherwise, effectively negates Israel’s right to exist. Indeed, the AFSC’s own manifesto on the conflict, Principles for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Middle East, is described by the organization as supporting the “implementation of refugees’ right of return.” This would result not in justice, peace, or dignity, but rather the end of the Jewish state.
Such beliefs and activities are a tragic betrayal of the AFSC’s own history and religious origins. It may be that a movement like the Quakers, which has seen its numbers dwindle along with other liberal Protestant denominations, sees anti-Zionism as a last resort; a movement with powerful emotional appeal on which it can draw in order to maximize its power. If so, then it has undone a great deal of the good it once did, and substituted hypocrisy and bad faith instead.

Once a byword for humanitarianism and faith, it has now become, in effect, a brand—one on which the AFSC can trade as it exploits the putative neutrality and pacifism it stands for in order to advance hostility toward Israel and, with its promotion of the “right of return,” an end to Israel itself.

In the end, the AFSC’s story reflects the tensions between pacifism and politics, between aid work and political activism, and between neutrality in the Middle East conflict and religious anti-Zionism. It demonstrates that small religious movements are susceptible to hijacking by radicals, and suggests that pacifism may inevitably engender its opposite. The organizations slide has been a long one, and at the moment it shows no sign of or interest in reversing it. Today, only the “inner light” of individual Quakers will bring about change.



Banner Photo: Fellowship of Reconciliation / flickr

When Did the Quakers Stop Being Friends? / Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. Joffe


Ann Morrell of the American Friends Service Committee meets with Iranian schoolgirls during a 2009 trip to that country. Photo: Fellowship of Reconciliation / flickr




BDS advocates protest the opening of a Max Brenner chocolate store in Parramatta, Australia. Photo: Kate Ausburn / flickr




George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement. Photo credit: Victuallers / Wikimedia




BDS advocates from Code Pink, which frequently partners with the AFSC, protest Ahava products outside a store. Photo: Code Pink / flickr




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A Centennial History of the American Friends Service Committee - Friends Journal

A Centennial History of the American Friends Service Committee - Friends Journal

A Centennial History of the American Friends Service Committee


Reviewed by Thomas D. Hamm

April 1, 2017

By Gregory A. Barnes. Friends Press, 2016. 498 pages. $24.95/paperback.
Buy from QuakerBooks

At the Conference of Quaker Historians and Archivists in 1994, Quaker historian J. William Frost argued that the historical significance of Friends in the twentieth century lay primarily in social, political, and humanitarian activism. Of that activism, the best-known manifestation is unquestionably the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). It has been a source of at least mild dismay for many of us that, despite its massive archives, AFSC lacked a comprehensive published history. Now, to mark the centennial of AFSC’s founding in 1917, Gregory A. Barnes has provided one.

Barnes argues that the history of AFSC can be divided into three periods. In the first, from 1917 to 1950, AFSC was “ahead of its time” in its humanitarian interventions, focused largely on feeding programs. Between 1950 and 1990, Barnes notes, AFSC was “catching up with the times,” shifting work out of Europe and increasingly focused on problems of racism, poverty, and injustice in the United States. It was in this period that AFSC became increasingly assertive, and public, in its criticism of U.S. government policies. And it was also in these years, Barnes finds, that AFSC discovered the virtues of diversity. Finally, since 1990, he finds AFSC increasingly “data-driven” in its work, still grounded in Quaker practices and processes but focused as much on reconciliation and building effective communities as relief work.

AFSC was the product of war. When the United States adopted conscription after entering World War I in 1917, Quaker leader Rufus M. Jones of Haverford College proposed the creation of a service group for American Friends who could not conscientiously render military service, perhaps modeled on the Friends Ambulance Unit that British Friends had created. Representatives from Friends General Conference, the Five Years Meeting, and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting agreed to oversee the creation of a “Reconstruction Unit” that would undertake rebuilding of homes and communities in France and relief work in Russia. After the war, the emphasis shifted increasingly toward feeding the hungry, especially in France, Russia, and, more controversially, Germany. In the 1930s, AFSC also developed domestic programs, winning the esteem of Eleanor Roosevelt for its attempts to create communities for displaced Appalachian coal miners. During the Spanish Civil War, relief work was the focus. While shut out of war zones during World War II, AFSC focused on aid to displaced people, including Japanese Americans. It also provided alternative service for conscientious objectors through Civilian Public Service, a subject that deserves more attention, I think, than Barnes gives it. Perhaps the high point of AFSC’s existence came in 1947 when it and the British Friends Service Council received the Nobel Prize for Peace on behalf of Friends everywhere.

After 1950, AFSC continued relief work, but increasingly focused on opposition to war and racial injustice. Perhaps the most provocative expressions of the former impulse came with a call for unilateral disarmament in 1955’s Speak Truth to Power and opposition to the Vietnam War that, in the minds of critics, verged on calls for a communist victory. AFSC adamantly supported civil rights, providing early support to Martin Luther King Jr. In the 1970s, a new emphasis on women’s and gay rights developed, and, in the 1980s, increased attention was given to immigrant rights.

It is impossible to summarize in a few hundred words everything that AFSC has attempted, and accomplished, or the criticisms that it has faced, often from Friends. They have ranged from charges that AFSC was insufficiently Christian in its aims, to worries over what was seen as a steadily declining Quaker presence within the organization. Today, less than one percent of its staff are Friends, and ties with many yearly meetings range from chilly to nonexistent.

Barnes is clearly an AFSC supporter, but he also acknowledges and addresses such criticisms. He has succeeded in providing a readable overview of the most important Quaker organization of the past century. He does, however, leave some important questions unanswered. For me, two are central. It is never clear where power resides within the organization, with the executive secretary, the staff, the board, or the corporation. Thus, when “the AFSC decided” to undertake some program, just what was the process?

The other question—since AFSC consciously decided to try to reflect the diversity of American society in its staff—is about the persistence of accusations of racism, sexism, and other oppressive behaviors. AFSC responses have usually conceded justice in the charges. As late as 2015, the organization was undertaking an examination of “structural and institutional racism.”

Even a work as long as this can provide only limited treatment of many important subjects. It is not the definitive history of AFSC. That will come only after other scholars have mined the archives to explore aspects of AFSC in greater depth. But this is a good start.

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October 9, 2021 Topic: Quakers Region: United States Blog Brand: The Buzz Tags: QuakersAmerican Friends Service CommitteeIraq WarSoviet UnionNationalismVietnam WarProgressive







The Corruption of the American Friends Service Committee

Most Quakers have no idea how the group which acts in their name has eschewed the values for which they stand.
by Michael Rubin

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)—the official non-governmental organization of the Society of Friends or the Quakers—won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. They deserved it. The group, true to Quaker theology, professed non-violence and eschewed any groups perpetrating it. Quakers may have been conscientious objectors during the war, but such views neither demanded political conformity nor translated into support for America’s adversaries or regimes that would employ violence against their own people. They did nothing, for example, to enable Nazis to better their economy or facilitate Soviet purges. “The Goodness of God Is Demonstrated in Brotherly Love,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee declared when awarding the AFSC the prize, citing their work helping post-war reconstruction in France, assisting Jewish refugees, interned Japanese-Americans, and prisoners-of-war.

The award itself, however, marked a pivot point for the AFSC. It cast aside the careful relief operations that characterized the previous three decades of its activities, and set its aspirations on the political and diplomatic. Accepting the Nobel Prize, AFSC Executive Secretary Clarence Pickett, announced that the organization would dedicate the associated money to further Quaker proposals to improve Soviet-American relations.


Perhaps it made sense for a group dedicated to pacifism to seek to facilitate peace between the two rival superpowers but Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had little interest in compromise. The AFSC’s post-Nobel ambitions came less than fifteen years after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin starved to death almost four million Ukrainians in “the Holodomor,” and just a decade after he murdered one million more in “the Great Purge.”

Stalin had no tolerance for dissent and a Manichean view of power. Recognizing the immutability of Stalin’s position, the AFSC’s project effectively demanded the United States make greater accommodations to the Soviet Union’s positions. It abandoned its political neutrality and hired a professional, permanent staff, only a minority of whom were Quaker. Rather than anchor themselves to Quaker principles, the revamped AFSC prioritized politics while wearing the mantle of legitimacy born of a Nobel Peace Prize awarded at a time the group operated under a different value system and code of conduct.


The AFSC’s substitution of Quaker theological principles for subjective progressive politics colored subsequent activism and often put it in the bizarre position of promoting violent and even genocidal groups over their victims.


Many progressives castigate the United States for the Vietnam War, but the reality of the conflict was murkier. Ho Chi Minh may have depicted himself as a nationalist but he often subordinated Vietnamese interests to those of his Russian sponsors and advisors. Nor was the United States the only aggressor: North Vietnam invaded first Laos and then their southern neighbor. South Vietnam might have been corrupt, but so too was North Vietnam. Quakers might oppose U.S. policy but, as Henry Bowden, a Rutgers University professor of religion, explained, prior to the Vietnam War, “The idea was to alleviate the suffering from war, not to find politics in it.”

The overt decision by AFSC leadership to do otherwise led the AFSC down the path of moral perversity. During the 1970s, the AFSC defended Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, even as word emerged that the group had killed one million citizens. In Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism, political scientist Guenter Lewy described how John McAuliff, head of the AFSC's Indo-China division, called reports of massacres a U.S. attempt to discredit “the example of an alternative model of development.” McAuliff was the rule rather than the exception. New England Regional Director Russell Johnson dismissed the “bloodbath stories” as motivated both by “a new wave of anti-communism” and Washington’s desire to punish those countries who sought “to close their boundaries to exploitation by multinational corporations seeking raw materials, markets for surplus, and cheap labor.” In effect, the AFSC and Quakers who embraced it talked of non-violence but provided cover for a group directly responsible for the murder of at least one million Cambodians.

The AFSC has repeated its mistakes with regard to North Korea. The group explains, “AFSC’s concern for the Korean peninsula stems particularly from the suffering caused by the Korean War in which the United States was a major combatant.” While this is true—the United States led a coalition operating under United Nations auspices—China and the Soviet Union were also combatants, though the AFSC’s one-sided narrative does not acknowledge this. Nor does the AFSC mention that the war began with North Korea’s surprise invasion of its southern neighbor.

While the AFSC operates projects to bolster collective farm productivity in the North, it conducts no parallel projects in South Korea. Nor does its literature acknowledge that its collective farms are effectively slave-labor camps. The AFSC might claim the moral high ground, but their actions are akin to a foreign NGO helping modern-day China making child labor more productive.

Next, consider Iraq. The AFSC was in good company in its opposition to the 2003 Iraq War, but it went beyond mere opposition when it made common cause with Saddam Hussein’s regime: It actively bolstered Iraqi propaganda accepting and promoting the calumny that U.S.-supported sanctions killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Neither the AFSC nor its allies mentioned that Saddam’s regime provided those numbers nor did the AFSC correct the record when that claim proved false. The AFSC was silent, however, to the victims of Saddam’s regime who suffered his chemical attacks or ended up in mass graves. As Barham Salih, then a leading Iraqi Kurdish opponent of Saddam and now Iraq’s president, told a January 2003 meeting of the Socialist International, “To those who say ‘No War,’ I say, of course, ‘Yes,’ but we can only have ‘No War,’ if there is ‘No Dictatorship’ and ‘No Genocide.’”

The AFSC is especially active today in the Israel-Palestine conflict, not as a neutral party seeking to alleviate suffering or further dialogue, but rather as a partisan force. Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. Joffe discuss AFSC activities in detail in their book, Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief. The two scholars document how the Quaker group worked with the Palestine Liberation Organization at the height of its terror campaign against Israel and worldwide Jewry and instructed workshop participants to ignore anti-Semitic remarks. Such policy has led the AFSC down a curious moral path. In 2008, for example, the AFSC co-hosted a gala dinner for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s Holocaust-denying president. AFSC Spokesman Mark Graham defended the AFSC’s dalliance with Ahmadinejad. “There are many points where we disagree with Iranian policy [but] we believe dialogue is the way to understanding and moving past tensions rather than threats and standoffish behavior,” he said. Such an explanation, though, only heightens the hypocrisy of the AFSC’s calls to boycott the Jewish state.
The AFSC continues to cite its Nobel Laureate status to bolster its moral authority, but those days are gone. The AFSC has soiled its moral legacy as much as Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi and Ethiopian dictator Abiy Ahmed have. In its letters and pronouncements, it makes common cause with radical groups like Code Pink and the National Iranian American Council, a group whose founder Trita Parsi once defended Female Genital Mutilation. It has become a group that remains silent on the incarceration of Chinese Uighurs, dines with Holocaust deniers, and works with Hamas terrorists who openly call for the murder of homosexuals.

Most Quakers have no idea how the group which acts in their name has eschewed the values for which they stand. That is a failure of oversight and the result of many permanent AFSC employees prioritizing political agendas above theological principles. The tragedy here is not simply that the Society of Friends is increasingly associating itself with those who ridicule its principles, but that the roles that an organization like the pre-1947 AFSC once upheld increasingly go unfilled.

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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  Sharon Fitzpatrick

  Author

  Given the author, with whom I studied 2 years at Abington Friends School, mentions that most Quakers unaware of the information, I am sharing.

  It was sad and shocking for me to read, but given the horrendous treatment of my spirit within this Society of Hypocrites, I am more prone to believe.

  No oversight and non-Quakers or atheists at the helms of organization lets in the darkness.

  The author of article ranked among most intelligent people with whom I have taken classes whose creative mind made AFS more fun for me than any other student. When someone that quick is among a small group of students, the pace of learning can pick up. Perhaps the austere tone can be seen as pace-setting for higher rate Quaker values within actions taken in the name.

  

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  • Jenny Shields

    Sharon Fitzpatrick I don’t think there has ever been a time that a non-Quaker was “at the helm” of the organization, not to mention head of its board. While true AFSC does employ nonQuakers, you must profess to understand, adhere to, and support Quaker values and principles to work there.

    

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Jenny Shields I am

    unsure what you mean to support or suggest with this information, I personally have no objection to Rubin referring to AFSC as Quaker and so it follows that organization acts in observance of the testimonies and the nonviolent or pacifist methods that are considered the manner of Friends.

    Rubin laid out an argument that he bears witness to what he views as contrary to those “values.”

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    • Jenny Shields

      Sharon Fitzpatrick I didn’t suggest. I plainly stated. I’m not aware of non-Quakers ever being at the helm of AFSC, either on staff or board levels. The General Secretary is Quaker as is the board president. In fact being Quaker is a requirement for the general secretary’s position per the job description. That’s the antithesis of your statement that there is “no oversight” and no Quakers “at the helm.” https://www.fgcquaker.org/news/afsc-seeks-general-secretary

      

      FGCQUAKER.ORG

      AFSC Seeks General Secretary

      AFSC Seeks General Secretary

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      Jenny Shields I was referring to atheists as Clerk of Meetings. The sentence of “at the helm” was not specific to AFSC.

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    • Jenny Shields

      Sharon Fitzpatrick we were talking about AFSC. Never in the entire thread was there a discussion about clerks of meetings

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• Charles K. Summers

  It is good to have this information to examine and investigate. Having read it through. I would caution Friends not to assume that it is fully true any more than, as the author cautions, assuming the AFSC continues to follow Quaker tradition and values.

  But do try to keep an open mind and investigate, contemplate, and pray. One thing is certain — we always have farther to go to reach our ideals.

  The sponsoring site, nationalinterest.org, does not have a history of non-partisan outlook.

  

  NATIONALINTEREST.ORG

  The National Interest

  The National Interest

  

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• Heather Brutz

  Calling AFSC the "official non-governmental of the Society of Friends" is inaccurate and seems like a poor start to an article.

  

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Heather Brutz it is an NGO. And it is both in name and in OFFICE associated with this religion.

    How would you describe in a few words AFSC?

    It is a line item on every budget of every Quaker meeting I have seen, 3 or 4.

    I compiled, edited, and published the memoirs of one of those volunteers who received Nobel in 1947. I’ve been maligned and mistreated for my help with Mary Elmendorf’s autobiography as well as many other efforts in the manner of Friends.

    There was NO attempt to conform to faith and practice, let alone Quaker values, in how I was treated as a member and after being expelled from this supposedly religious society.

    I know Friends consider AFSC stalwart and this perspective is important to CONSIDER. You seem to me to jump to “not trusting” this author from the very first ACCURATE identification of AFSC.

    You can consider validity of concerns without agreeing with every point Rubin makes.

    He want to a Quaker school for his entire youth and held a genuine attention to the world around him. He isn’t void of familiarity with this religion; he sat in a Meetinghouse once a week to worship while in school.

    For viewpoints on the political nature of decisions and actions made by AFSC, I consider an alumnus of the longest running Quaker school on land ultimately called US soil who travels the world in diplomatic efforts to be a really good voice to hear and contemplate.

    It seems yo me that you listened with intent to discredit and dismiss.

    

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    • Heather Brutz

      Sharon Fitzpatrick there is no organization that is the "official" NGO representing all North American Quakers. And outside of FGC affiliated meetings, AFSC is less likely to be mentioned. And more likely to be criticised.

      

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    • Heather Brutz

      Sharon Fitzpatrick my primary issue with Rubin is that he has willingly been a tool of American imperialism for years. He was literally part of occupation of Iraq. And he chooses to associate himself with AEI, which has long advocated for an aggressive US military position in the world. I don't care if he attended Quaker meeting as a teenager. So did Nixon.

      

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      Heather Brutz I did not say anything about ALL Quakers. And the first word AFSC uses to describe itself is Quaker.

      Joe Biden is currently in office. The word officially comes from Latin meaning a service, a duty, etc.

      The service part of AFSC’s name shows this.

      It is IN OFFICE or officially THE Quaker NGO working in international affairs.

      Also, you did not answer my direct question of how you would describe on a few words, since you criticized another wording.

      The evasion of my question and continuation of dismissal are not evidence of dealing with conflict.

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  • Heather Brutz

    He has disdain for AFSC but he worked with Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton. He is not a peacemaker.

    

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      Heather Brutz I don’t know where you got the idea that only “peacemakers” may provide an opinion about NGOs operating in regions and realms where they work, but I do not recognize or accept this criterion for the validity of the concerns raised here.

      If a Saudi prince wrote about some difficulties he observed with AFSC operating in his neighboring nations, the information doesn’t become invalid because not written as if he took an AVP workshop.

      

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    • Heather Brutz

      I think it would be fair to question the Saudi prince's motives though in your hypothetical situation. Which is what I'm doing with Michael Rubin. I do not trust his motives.

      

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• Heather Brutz

  And the American Enterprise Institute which the author is associated with is a truly awful organization.

  

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• Heather Brutz

  AEI has long supported climate skeptics. And AEI supports agressive foreign policy measures by the United States that are at odds with Quaker values.

  

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• Heather Brutz

  The author literally worked for the Pentagon in Iraq during the early days of the Iraq War, a war that was based on lies. Why on Earth should we trust him?

  

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• Heather Brutz

  AEI also has a long history of denying that systemic racism or police brutality are real.

  

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• Janaki Spickard-Keeler

  Though there is still "Friends" in the name, AFSC decades ago ceased to operate as a Quaker-led organization, disassociated from Quaker bodies, and to a large extent does not even use Quaker governing process or principles. To say that they are still the "official NGO" of a Religious Society of Friends that is largely fractured over the past century is inaccurate at best. However, I'm all for Quakers giving up the pretense that AFSC is Quaker and that they are doing our peace work for us. It's been a fiction for a long time.

  

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  • Janaki Spickard-Keeler

    (Also, does anyone else find it weird that the author and AEI are writing a hit piece about the Quakers - a miniscule faith - and a small NGO? I wonder about the political motives.)

    

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      Janaki Spickard-Keeler I gathered that it is about Israel and the fact that AFSC has fractured from the religion, but many Friends make assumptions that it continues to operate in accordance with testimonies.

      Since acting in accordance with testimonies is challenging among those who claim to be Quakers among themselves, I think it’s near impossible for these to be tools in international affairs. How do you demonstrate equality when dealing with opposing parties? It CAN be done, but it isn’t easy.

      Using the Nobel Peace as leverage seems to me to be a clear irritant for Rubin and it may be a caution about not awarding organizations as they are subject to change. Humans change, but a dead individual who is no longer peace-oriented can’t still be using leverage from an award.

      

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  • Kath Mc

    Janaki Spickard-Keeler very much so!

    

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  • Jenny Shields

    Janaki Spickard-Keeler Respectfully I disagree. AFSC has and does keep Quaker principles at heart and just as Quakers were attacked for feeding Germans and Jews alike during WWII it still takes the stance that there is that of God in us all. AFSC goes out of its way to emphasize it does not speak for Quakers nor does it pretend to be the voice of Quakers. I say that based on being a past AFSC spokesperson. I note the reference to a “gala” thrown for Ahmadinejad neglects to mention the gathering was part of a historic visit to Iran by religious leaders of many faiths - including Jewish leaders - to engage in dialogue, one that AFSC and the Mennonite church organized at the time.

    

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    • Heather Brutz

      Jenny Shields I like AFSC but the description of it in the article as the "official NGO" representing Quakers is inaccurate.

      

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    • Jenny Shields

      Heather Brutz agreed and AFSC doesn’t describe itself in that manner. Here’s the about us section from AFSC.org.

      The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) promotes a world free of violence, inequality, and oppression.

      Guided by the Quaker belief in the divine light within each person, we nurture the seeds of change and the respect for human life to fundamentally transform our societies and institutions. We work with people and partners worldwide, of all faiths and backgrounds, to meet urgent community needs, challenge injustice, and build peace.

      

      AFSC.ORG

      American Friends Service Committee

      American Friends Service Committee

      

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    • Peter Equals Richman

      Jenny Shields i enjoy ther modesty of this statement's language---deeply :-per

      

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• Jasmine Krotkov

  Both Rubin and defenders of AFSC seem to assume that Quaker organizations are claiming a moral high ground. My experience has been that Quakers often disagree and do things wrong, but stay united in the desire to speak and act on internal truths that are usually not easy to precisely articulate through action. Faith in action has been for me about unity rather than conformity. Rubin may be correct in some of his criticisms. This Quaker claims spiritual progress, not spiritual perfection.

  

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Jasmine Krotkov Thank you for reminding that process is not static. To examine, or query, was the reason I shared.

    It seemed to me that Friends would want to know what one author who has familiarity with Quaker values and opportunity to witness how AFSC is engaging in international affairs has to say about what he sees as a failure.

    I don’t know a ton about some of the specifics he raises, but I disagree on at least one point.

    Of what I am certain from own experience: atrocious contradiction of Quaker values and practices can be disguised as a Quaker organization. And in the case that I have observed, there is no willingness to examine for the congruence of actions and testimonies.

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    • Jasmine Krotkov

      Sharon Fitzpatrick it was an interesting read!

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  • Peter Equals Richman

    Jasmine Krotkov https://youtu.be/ABsslEoL0-c

    

    YOUTUBE.COM

    Society

    Society

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• Kath Mc

  The publication and writer both have plenty of their own biases.  lovely banner ad. I don’t think much of the article.

  

  

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Kath Mc that isn’t an ad that came up when I logged in with link 3x. You realize the ads that pop up on any format selected are catered to the viewer as well as representing the party willing to advertise?

    So this ad popping up for you might indicate that immigrant rights questions are an interesting of yours.

    I am progressive and yet a fellow student in a very expensive program I took as an elective was working as a teacher in public schools, raised on US illegally, paying in to the system, but facing the fact that 2 aging parents in uS undocumented transplanted from Europe were not eligible for benefits.

    Would I like to take this poll to answer about a young woman pursing her doctorate who was raised here undocumented getting SS benefits? Yes. Do I realize that rightwing.org not the place I would like to register my opinion on it? Yes.

    The bias of AFSC is supposed to be peace, simplicity, integrity, truth. No one writes without having biases or manages NGOs. Examining those biases and how they relate to standards set is in the manner of Friends.

    RIGHTWING.ORG

    RightWing | Representing Truth, Justice, and the American way

    RightWing | Representing Truth, Justice, and the American way

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Kath Mc psychics and Biden were both in ads when I visited this site again.

    

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• Marsha Kitamura

  BS

  

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• Muriel Strand

  this looks like trumpian clickbait

  

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Muriel Strand I am not familiar with Quaker manner based on appearances. If you wish to make comments on the substance of the article, then I am willing to engage, but cursory glance at an article title is not enough information to draw a parallel.

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• David Hoffman

  The author cherry-picks and misrepresents many of his factoids. For example he cites the very uncertain claim that Stalin induced famine in the Ukraine causing millions of deaths, as if this were fully agreed upon. And suggests that AFSC was uncritical of Stalin and Stalinism, in its endeavors to encourage peace between the USA and USSR.

  I do remember a travelling AFSC speaker shortly after the US ended its war against Viet Nam, rationalizing the Vietnamese communist regime's political internment camps in ways which I found facile and evasive. I think some AFSC spokespeople made similar naive or dogmatic errors, in failing to denounce the Khmer Rouge. So the author may be factually correct on those points. But what he does with those factoids is misuse them to paint a grossly inaccurate and contemptuous portrait of AFSC overall.

  

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    Author

    David Hoffman the use of word factoid is inappropriate if you are respecting the information a senior fellow who deals with policy or international diplomats and publishes a lot of material on those matters.

    There are more scenarios than Stalin’s Russia and Vietnam listed in Rubin’s list.

    What he does with the information you grant may be valid is add it to more scenarios; this is not misuse. While you may not be willing to recognize a pattern, Rubin is not “misusing” examples of what he sees as a pattern.

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    David Hoffman also Holodomor is recognized by 15 nations plus the US Congress (not executive branch.) The nation whose history Includes this famine, Ukraine, holds Stalin as responsible in part. While it is true that not universally accepted as historically true, it is enough so for Rubin to refer as factual. I had to look up who recognizes the Holodomor, but I did know what was referred and recalled when this recognition was in news.

    Trivializing as “factoid” seems to me in the same vein as treating this reference as of dubious.

    US executive branch didn’t recognize who called for Khashoggi’s gruesome murder, but we aren’t claiming authors who refer to the responsible parties as if there is any doubt.

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• Larry Stanley

  Since Friends’ processes make it excruciatingly slow to speak with one voice on any issue, any writer who attempts to conflate AFSC policy with some nebulous statement that it “acts in the name” of Quakerism has not done their homework.

  This hit piece on the AFSC seems to be one of many “news” articles that have followed from the advocacy, by the AFSC, for the rights of Palestinians and their support for the international disinvestment movement that boycotts products generated, by Israeli and other businesses, in occupied territories.

  

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Larry Stanley I had to reread the article to find where Rubin claims AFSC acts in name of Friends. It is as the end and does not imply that ALL Friends are represented. He doesn’t make the nebulous into a singular as you have interpreted.

    Instead, he correctly stated that AFSC acts in the name of Friends and he speculates that most Friends aren’t aware of the political nature of many efforts and endeavors from AFSC.

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• David Hoffman

  I don't find the article valid or persuasive.

  I see it as fairly formulaic cold-warrior disparagement of any progressive and humane institution.

  I suspect the author's motive goes beyond a generic, shotgun practice of every so often publishing negativity against a different progressive organization, in between bad-mouthing progressive programs and proposals (like student debt forgiveness, or medicare for all).

  I suspect this is more strategic: That he realizes AFSC carries considerable moral authority, and he wants to destroy that moral authority by this vitriolic attack.

  I expect to see his villification parroted by others on the right, to glibly dismiss positions issued by AFSC, out of hand.

  The article and that further strategy remind me of the way GOP operatives villified ACLU as "lobbyists for criminals" and then went on - in phase 2 - to pugnaciously state (as if it were some damning thing) that George Deukmejian was "a card carrying member of the ACLU."

  

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    Author

    David Hoffman “disparagement of any progressive…” is where your comment becomes projection. In the article I shared, AFSC is the NGO discussed. When you claim this scholar has a theme such as disparaging any progressive organization, you diverge from fact. Later, you go on to accuse him of taking up topics that I don’t see on the five titles listed with his name that appear of you click it.

    

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    David Hoffman and here I see some topics other than those you project on to the author of this article about a single Quaker organization operating in the complex 20th and 21st centuries.

    

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    David Hoffman if you have evidence of “so often” publications from Michael Robin disparaging progressive organizations that have informed your comment, please direct us to them.

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  • Linda Lotz

    David Hoffman FYI he published a similar attack article in the 00s. This is a long standing theme for the author.

    

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      Linda Lotz could you provide a link or do you feel that an author returning to a theme that remains a problem in his estimation excludes the possibility that his observations are warranted.

      “Oh gee, author x write about Epstein back in the 00s and is writing about it again after a decade and more accounts accumulating, I guess that means that author is just biased and fixated on someone who isn’t a problem.”

      Writing on the same theme does not invalidate the issue.

      If you’ve joined the conversation with this his information, allowing others the benefit of your research is at the very least a great way to show Integrity.

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  • David Hoffman

    I am not willing to invest further time or energy reviewing past writings and behaviors of Michael Rubin. The Invidious rhetorical distortions In his piece smearing AFSC are clear. Cold warrior punditry is easily recognized. Its slanderous and inflammatory intent and impact are well established.

    If others wish to drill down into Michael Rubin's writings and alignments, that is up to them. As a progressive, and as a one-time struggling welfare parent, I have watched, heard, read and been smeared and abusively scapegoated by such suavely inhumane propagandists for decades.

    [Further note: Thank you to Morgan Murray for providing the kind and quality of background regarding Michael Rubin which I describe above, and which confirms what was self-evident to me from reading Rubin's devious and defamatory misrepresentations against AFSC.]

    Michael Rubins’ calculatedly disinformational hit piece fits seamlessly into the same callous and cruel stream as J. Edgar Hoover, John Foster Dulles, John Mitchell, Ronald Reagan, William F Buckley, Ayn Rand, Dinesh D’Sousa, Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and dozens of companion denizens of the corporate and hard Right.

    I cannot afford to divert time or intellectual resources from constructive efforts to relieve human suffering, into further debate over matters which I consider self evident.

    If anyone is following this thread, please do n’t misinterpret my silence going forward as conceding any point others may raise.

    

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    • David Hoffman

      Reposting this link shared by Morgan Murray (below) and noted in my comment (above):

      https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/michael-rubin/

      

      MILITARIST-MONITOR.ORG

      Michael Rubin

      Michael Rubin

      

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    • Barb Katzenapple Anspach

      David Hoffman thank you for sharing this.

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      David Hoffman I read that whole thing and NOT ONE section on the progressive non-profit organizations he disparages, as you immediately accused.

      Next, this is proof that Rubin is neocon. That was a known when I posted this. There is no us/them of progressive Quakers and neoconservatives. Rubin having a mind that holds viewpoints that you or perhaps no other Quaker in the whole world holds does not mean HOA observations about AFSC, which are being spread in a sector of our society, should not be considered.

      This article is written from a bias against conservatives, but the arguments are not all solid. Here is an example….

      

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      Barb Katzenapple Anspach there is NOTHING in the bio from Militarist Monitor that contradicts the viewpoint on AFSC, nor does it support David Hoffman’s allegation that Rubin disparages “any” progressive NGO, etc.

      Human beings are not hawks. If Rubin was ACTUALLY a hawk, then discarding what he thinks few Quakers know would be fine. But the quick decision by multiple parties to dismiss this opinion as unsound because coming from someone who viewpoints different is not consistent with Equality.

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    • Barb Katzenapple Anspach

      Sharon Fitzpatrick What comes through most clearly in all of this exchange is that YOU feel very strongly about it all. Okay. You've shared the article Rubin wrote, I've read it... do you have suggestions about how you want Friends to respond to it? I'm not clear on what next steps I might do to further explore his contentions.

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Paul Pilar does NOT call Rouhani a moderate. His quote is juxtaposed with Rubin’s as a “different take,” but it isn’t. Rubin had said he was the besf of the options, but not justified to call him a moderate. And then Pilar says the SAME thing—this is the best of the choices we had.

    The article I posted discussed AFSC in its operations regarding international conflicts. Military action is a component of these conflicts. You responded, after some false allegations the author, with a critique of this person’s career. The critique does not support your original reason for not considering the concerns described by Rubin.

    Instead, it tells us this person interacts with foreigners regarding their political affairs as it relates to the US. Why you, or anyone here, would think this DISQUALIFES him from having a perspective on what AFSC does baffles me.

    I know a couple dozen words in Farsi, but I don’t think a n accusation of a mistranslation means that Rubin is not ascertaining when he travels to these places and engages in diplomacy.

    I don’t agree with one point on his article and I also thought he should have disclosed that he has a Quaker educational background in it. Similarly, I think that not disclosing that he had reviewed material Lincoln Group was contracted to produce for Pentagon was not transparent.

    The AFSC volunteer friend insisted that I attend an event with John McDonald, whose multi-track diplomacy was renowned for successes. I was heavily involved in several peace related groups at the time and accepted the offer for a place in the room with this person Mary Elmendorf revered. When he got to Israel, though, it was the only nation with conflicts that he was unable to help. He said it didn’t matter of a Israel/Iran or Israel/Palestine or Israel/Egypt.

    When American Jews heard I was a peace activist, automatically assumed I was anti-Israel. I am not, but I am a fierce critic of the expansion and settlements.

    I am mentioning this because you are doing something similar. You are assuming that someone with a position about Israel is anti-peace. And so you use the military-related career of someone as if it is proof that he is a hawk, and therefore has no accurate observations on the behavior of doves.

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• Jenny Shields

  This piece was written by a neoconservative “think tank” that also opposed the New Deal.

  

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Jenny Shields snd as I have had to mention elsewhere in this thread, your comment is an example of “this is bu one of them, not one of us. The validity is dubious because not one of the people who think like us.”

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      That mentality is not a demonstration of any Quaker testimony.

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    • Jenny Shields

      Sharon Fitzpatrick please don’t put words in my mouth. It’s not about “us” over “them”. It’s about truth over misinformation. The validity is dubious because it’s full of half truths. Challenging deliberate misinformation is an example of speaking truth to power.

      

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      Author

      Jenny Shields except there was not one piece of information on the VERY long bio that makes Hoffman right or the “corruption” of AFSC untrue.

      As I did with this one attempt to discredit Rubin, I could go through this career review and find plenty of bias and unsound criticism such as Pilar not contradicting Rubin, but set up as if does.

      Humans make mistakes, especially in translating, so we have a bio proving Rubin is a neocon human. This does not establish that his criticism are inaccurate.

      The first paragraph of posted article refers to COs, then “neither required political conformity or…”

      The criticism Rubin is trying to make about political not being the same as pacifist is proven repeatedly here when you and others declare that Rubin not fitting the form of progressive means his viewpoint about AFSC is not valid.

      There are negative references to Trump in his articles—read the most recent published and found several—and yet someone characterized the article as Trumpian.

      There has been not a SINGLE attempt to expound on the scenarios Rubin described here. Maybe all are okay with AFSC being a host of a gala honoring Ahmadinejad, so that’s why no one has mentioned that part of the criticism.

      Rubin is NOT the only voice critical of AFSC post WWII, especially on Israel.

      He does have a significant familiarity with Religious Society of Friends and mentioned Quakers not being aware of these scenarios.

      A couple “knew this” and a number of “BS” declarations are not consideration. Neither of those responses indicate that change thought possible. Instead, Friends just write the checks and shield minds with an award given to less than 50 Friends in an era very different from current.

      

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    • Jenny Shields

      Sharon Fitzpatrick no clue what you’re talking about. No one is talking about bios. I’m specifically referring the misinformation in the article. I could care less about anyone’s bio. I already pointed out that the so- called “gala” referenced was actually an event celebrating a historic delegation of religious leaders of many faiths - including Jewish leaders - who traveled to Iran to have dialogue.

      Maybe you missed that.

      

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    Author

    Jenny Shields you claim an article was written by a “tank” in the first comment here. It is written by a person who is a senior fellow for AEI, a think tank. You dismiss it on the basis of neoconservative, aka “them.”

    Rubin wasn’t alive for the New Deal, but you are discrediting his article because published by a think tank that did.

    And untrue that “no one is talking about bios.” You aren’t the only person I have witnessed throwing the “them” card here.

    It was thrown a couple other times and “proof” that his article in bunk was provided with a bio breaking down Rubin’s career through Obama. I didn’t see anything beyond that period places in the description of this “hawkish” author.

    Claiming that a perspective is from a source, as you did by sharing the obvious, has no bearing on the Truth content.

    For example, BDS movement intends economic harm in Israel. This is the POINT of the movement. If Rubin has a perspective that BDS is contrary to the peace goal AFSC is supposed to be reaching, then it isn’t MISinformation. It’s an opinion! Based on the accurate info that BDS intends to harm Israeli economy. There is nothing untrue about that statement. And it isn’t misinformation for him to opine about that truth.

    Same for the gala. It isn’t misinformation in that Ahmadinejad was an honored guest at an event they co-sponsored.

    “Well it was an event on sitar playing and a guest happened to have a history of human rights abuse, but we were there about peace through music, so the guest was there as a musician,” is also an opinion based on the same information.

    Yours is not information and Rubin’s misinformation because he doesn’t accept the rationale AFSC provided about a guest.

    Truth does not lean liberal or conservative. You saw criticism of AFSC and dismissed it as invalid because of a political bias, continuing to claim that it must be misinformation since it came from a source that opposed a domestic policy in the previous century.

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    • Morgan Murray

      Sharon Fitzpatrick That's ridiculous. The point of BDS isn't to harm Israel's economy. The point of BDS is to end the occupation and end the violation of Palestinian human rights through peaceful methods.

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• Mary Montfort Melchior

  I agree with Friends who see this as largely a hit piece published by an organization that has never seen a war or military intervention by the United States they didn't like. I checked their about page and it has a picture of the former president and lauded the warmonger Kissinger. I actually find it complimentary the thin list of "mistakes" the AFSC has made in more than a century, many of them I would actually argue were not mistakes at all. For example, opposing the Vietnam war was absolutely correct consistent with Friends peace testimony. Maybe some of the arguements made for non-Friends were mistaken, but the war was wrong and opposing it was a major effort of many Friends and Friends organizations at the time. I disagree with a number of the other examples. Also the AFSC is a US based Friends organization that should focus more of its criticisms on the policy of that country as US Friends taxes are used to implement. I think this is promoted because the new General Secretary is a Palestinian-American Quaker, former head of Ramallah Friends school and is a strong voice in the BDS movement. Also as our country is no longer in any major wars the military-industrial complex wants to still get its money. As far as the criticism that it isn't Quaker lead or run, that isn't true if you look at their General Secretary or their board, most of whom are Quakers and if you look at their site list their montly meeting. I actually on the other hand think this does have some relevance. Many Quaker institutions struggle to have enough Friends who want to be a part. We all as Friends could do more. Our schools could use more Friends at every level and many other Quaker affiliated organizations could use more of us willing to step up and take part. Has AFSC been perfect? No. Should Quakers welcome reasonable and fair criticism and look to improve? Yes. I don't think this article is fair and has an axe to grind that is in opposition to Friends principles.

  

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  • Mary Montfort Melchior

    Having seen the Bio of Mr. Rubin referenced below from Morgan Murray, this piece makes a great deal of sense as an attack on an organization that has given strength and moral athority to the BDS movement.

    

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• Rachel Hampton

  I would say this is a questionable site.

  

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• Morgan Murray

  That was just a poorly written, poorly argued, polemic, motivated by AFSC's opposition to Israel's 'Palestinian Policies'

  We should consider and reflect on our shortcomings and accept valid criticism. This isn't that.

  Why post that trash? Please do share serious and well written criticisms, but please show some discretion in posting what in essence has all the intellectual value of an alt-right meme.

  Let me clarify. It is of course a valid topic and one worthy of discussion. It would be better served with a better article from a more honest source than the author.

  

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• Morgan Murray

  https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/michael-rubin/

  

  MILITARIST-MONITOR.ORG

  Michael Rubin

  Michael Rubin

  

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  • David Hoffman

    Thank you Morgan Murray. As was self--evident to me from the outset, Michael Rubin is manipulative, incitatory Cold Warrior propagandist, and a colluder in deep, strategically conceived, disinformation projects.

    I'm grateful you brought this forward, and relieved that I did not expend energy I couldn't afford, searching for it.

    

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• William Henry

  What does one expect from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing group dedicated to American Exceptionalism and authoritarian capitalism.

  

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• David Hoffman

  One further question:

  What is Rubin's reason for displaying such a hideous, gory lead graphic for the article -- as if it somehow reflects some supposedly "heinous" aspect of AFSC?

  Is this yet another professional propagandist's manipulative technique, to implant a grisly and traumatizing image in the minds of credulous readers, and to associate that image, and its toxic emotional impact, with AFSC?

  

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  • Muriel Strand

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waving_the_bloody_shirt

    

    EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

    Waving the bloody shirt - Wikipedia

    Waving the bloody shirt - Wikipedia

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• Sharon Fitzpatrick

  Author

  https://www.aei.org/research-products/

  

  AEI.ORG

  Research Products | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

  Research Products | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    AEI is a think tank. It does not describe ITSELF as "right wing" and yet a common response here is to ASSUME no credibility in an article or an author due to the political BIAS of those who are making these assumptions. Churches are not supposed to devolve into or contribute to political partisanship in the US. And Friends are SUPPOSED to be prepared to examine behavior and associations on an on-going basis. (See query for those of you who have a lot of trouble with this examine self/own church part of the religion.) There is no reason to write an article about what is working well. Awards are given when extraordinary work is being done. Spiritual gifts is a term used about individuals within the Religious Society of Friends. I knew the human being who wrote this article for 2 of the 13 years his very bright mind were being educated in the manner of Friends. Being honest, fair, kind, funny, and very smart were all observed by me during those years of having in several classes with this person. His bios reveal that living and working in the Middle East have informed his opinions. He was moved to write (more than once, according to one commenter here) about what seems to him a divergence from Quaker values and diplomatic activity he finds counterproductive. I shared it to generate EXAMINATION of those points. And rather than respond in the manner of Friends, considering the validity of what one holder of Inner Light wrote and thinks, the majority of the responses is an immediate and weak dismissal of any reason for concern. For all of you waving this away with the "right wing nonsense," you are declaring there is no Truth within those who hold political position that differ from your own. I admitted that I do not agree with ALL of the points Rubin makes, plus I don't know a ton about some of this (Khmer Rouge confuses me), but that did not inhibit me from thinking this was a topic that should be raised. It is sad and shocking to see this obtuse of a reaction to what could be valued as viewpoint from someone whose mind was set within the parameters of Friends because someone thought those parameters were worth thousands of dollars in tuition.

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    • Heather Brutz

      Sharon Fitzpatrick Honestly, a lot of people in this thread didn't just question AEI (though doing so is fair and valid.) We pointed out that your friend has consistently chosen to write propaganda justifying US military involvement in the Middle East and we criticized him for those decisions. Some of us (like me), posted his direct articles and made specific points about why we disagreed with him and therefore don't trust him. Others posted third party analyses of his work. We live in an age where a lot of people on the Internet ask us to engage in time sinks arguing back and forth when one person arguing isn't engaging in good faith. I'm not accusing you of that but I will flat out state that a man who chose to ally himself with John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz and work for the US occupying forces of Iraq during the time when atrocities were happening at Abu Ghraib who afterwards consistently hand waved away those atrocities as being the actions of a few bad actors despite the torture memo and the evidence that support for abuses came from the top is not someone whose arguments I need to engage with seriously. I don't trust Michael Rubin's motives. If you want to spend time finding more info about AFSC's activities and ask us what we think about specific decisions they made and why they made them, go ahead. But the fact that people don't want to waste time debating a hit piece written by the think tank that has chosen to be the intellectual mouthpiece for American corporate imperialism is fair.

      

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    • Heather Brutz

      Sharon Fitzpatrick It probably hurts to see people harshly criticise your friend. But we aren't doing it for partisan reasons. Biden voted for the Iraq War. We are criticizing Michael Rubin because his actions to date do not support the idea that human rights are actually his top priority in Middle East policy.

      

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    • Kath Mc

      Sharon Fitzpatrick I’m curious about your commitment to this article. I think there are certainly valid opportunities to discuss/critique afsc, but the history of aei, national interest, and Rubin are easily available; no need for anyone to assume.

      

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    • Morgan Murray

      Ask your friend to come here and engage with us directly. Unfiltered through a friendship with him, all we see are his actions, which pretty much embody everything that Quakers are against: war, torture, murder, stealing, lying, abuse, and the list goes on.

      

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• Sharon Fitzpatrick

  Author

  The person who used the laugh response, who I won’t name because he chose not to comment, has shown that ridicule acceptable among Friends.

  Assume and dismiss have both occurred plenty, though neither are Quakerly, as assumption is not in Integrity (go get the info or no way to claim truth) and dismissing others not Equality.

  That neocon is not the equal of those of you who haven’t lived, worked, and spoken foreign languages in Middle East, because he is less moral than you progressives—that’s what you do when you take a bio as evidence that someone is wrong or not to be heard to determine if wrong.

  The laughing emoji is a worse than assumption and dismissal, though predicated on those unQuakerly manners.

  It assumed the article and context I wrote are both wrong, dismisses them as such, and then places the topic—which includes a number of grave issues—in the realm of amusement.

  I didn’t share this to amuse myself or anyone else. I am confident Rubin didn’t write it because he thinks it is funny or fun.

  The pressure on this planet from conflicting human needs has reached a dire point.

  AFSC was awarded for their work AFTER military conflict. It was 30 years strong at that point and intrinsically linked to the religious values on which founded.

  The volunteers responsible for AFSC’s 1947 recognition worked DIRECTLY with the US military. Mary Elmendorf arranged by serendipity to get them mess cards so they could eat in France and then she arranged for heating for their office by agreeing to publish an invitation to offices in Stars and Stripes; she chatted with a general at an event she was attending for the warmth.

  I mention this because posting a bio about Rubin having a military-based career does not mean that he is opposed to peace. The general who rationed some fuel for Friends might have translated some things inaccurately in his career, too. Imagine: working toward peace with those who make mistakes and have opposing viewpoints.

  It sounds too hard for those of you who seem to think that having peace by excluding those who make mistakes and have opposing viewpoints is actually peace.

  It’s judgement and exclusion.

  Discernment differs from judgement in that the material at hand considered in discernment. Whereas judgement is based on assumptions and projections from the zealous.

  Turning off notifications for this post because the aim of more Quakers knowing about this perspective has been met, while the prospect of a discussion about these specifics or how to better monitor what is associated with Friends clearly not happening.

  FCNL has sent reps to update on its current projects to more than one Meeting I attended regularly. Ideas like AFSC doing the same could have been generated if this perspective was taken seriously. Instead, the response has been to reject it seriously and therefore not have to do anything.

  I can simultaneously support BDS and also think that AFSC should not be supporting it. And I can see why a US born Jew who went to Quaker schools thinks AFSC should not be siding against Israel with BDS.

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  • Heather Brutz

    Sharon Fitzpatrick frankly, you insisted on relying on a weak article instead of actually making your point, such as suggesting that AFSC consider a decision making process more similar to FCNL. Next time, speak for yourself instead of relying on propaganda.

    

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      Heather Brutz no I did not. You suppose I was just waiting for a weak article to pounce on as intro to some idea of change for AFSC that I had not had.

      I am not sitting around making changes in AFSC that I didn’t know were necessary or worth considering.

      Instead, I saw a post from an alumnus of a Quaker school (that saved my life) about AFSC. I know he is a neocon, but I have been enjoying his posts or travels in Middle East, and amazingly there is inner light shining from this neocon as he shares.

      I have cited why I shared it—because it claims “most Quakers don’t know” more than once. So I thought maybe some would like to know about how neocons are viewing AFSC and it’s actions.

      I have also been victim to those in charge of Quaker organizations who behaved without oversight in ways that violate ALL of the testimonies. My personal experience of how far from Quaker practice one Meeting has acted means I cannot automatically doubt that AFSC might not be acting in accordance with testimonies. And as Rubin believes, it might even be causing problems in international affairs.

      AEI cares about how those affairs impact US, which differs from what concerns me in those affairs. Rubin and I probably have contradicting opinions about Obama era drone strikes.

      Yet that doesn’t mean I call his article weak when it was written to be readable and not a single specific can be shown as “untrue” in his article.

      Even the description of AFSC was called inaccurate, but an alternative wording not offered.

      What IS weak: the willingness to bear witness and reflect in Friends.

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    • Heather Brutz

      Sharon Fitzpatrick you never actually bothered to respond to Jenny Shields when she pointed out that his characterization of the event with Achmadinejad was unfair and only half true. You did not respond to my criticism of his defense of the US militar… 

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    • Jenny Shields

      Sharon Fitzpatrick well since I was personally involved with the religious delegation that traveled to Iran I can unequivocally say that claiming AFSC threw a gala to “celebrate Ahmadinejad” is unequivocally false. If they are referring to the dinner at the UN, it was an iftar and more than 140 religious leaders attended, representing ALL the major Christian denominations including the World Council of Churches and Pax Christie. Anyone who wants the real story can watch the PBS special produced about the delegation, Talking to Iran, that is if you can still find it.

      

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  • Morgan Murray

    Sharon Fitzpatrick You are spending quite a bit of mental energy and performing all sorts of gymnastics to try to reconcile something that just can't be reconciled.

    This is really quite simple.

    Your 'friend' is a warmonger, a liar, an architect and supporter of war, genocide, murder, oppression and nationalism.

    We, as Quakers, are against all of that.

    He wrote that piece as an attack on Quakers because they oppose Israel's quite untenable position on Palestinians.

    Instead of insisting that we give up our core faith to adhere to evil, why don't you spend some of that energy trying to convince your friend to be less of a force for evil, pain and suffering in the world?

    I say that knowing it is a complete waste of time. But I would rather that you spend your time trying to convince evil to be less evil, than good to be more evil.

    

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• Sharon Fitzpatrick

  Author

  It was not my intention to alert Michael Rubin to this effort in fewer Quakers not knowing what his perspective on AFSC by sharing it here. However, I wished to inquire about a Persian name of mythical bird and the contemporary cultural awareness of the creature, so I couldn't contact him directly for the first time in 30 years without mentioning the dichotomous disregard generated by the post. His morning of planting dogwood trees was interrupted with learning how he had been labeled a neocon and dismissed as overly bias, so his responses were in the "you can tell them..." vein. Hence, I have a duty to relay some of his earnest expressions. The dynamic of exchange included some of my own questions about what I had seen in the criticism of his character that was placed here in order to discredit him as a valid critic of AFSC. Having to provide defenses for career moves that appear suspicious to an excommunicated Quaker he knew in a Quaker school 30 years ago would not happen if the author did not earnestly believe these actions of AFSC deserve examination. So I am going to provide excerpts:

  

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  • Jenny Shields

    Sharon Fitzpatrick no one questioned anyone’s character. I questioned his lack of basic facts or at the very least lack of presenting the entire picture the the article posted. Whether that was deliberate or just sloppy, who knows. But if you write for… 

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    There is nothing funny about matters as serious as the list of topics raised as "corruption." It isn't funny that Michael Rubin and I both cared about the topic---one by writing about it & the other by posting what had been written. That anyone would c… 

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• Sharon Fitzpatrick

  Author

  "I don't know what they mean by "neocon"-technically, its about support for democracy but often used as jargon for Jews. Regardless, The AFSC shouldn't be motivated by politics--it should be 'progressive' but rather 'pacifist.'" (I don't know if he lef… 

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• Sharon Fitzpatrick

  Author

  "I work with a lot of progressive groups; AFSC least tolerant. Congress investigated Lincoln Group and found I wasn't involved..."

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• Sharon Fitzpatrick

  Author

  "But that's neither her nor there, People attack people rather than ideas when ideas are indefensible. ...None of this explains Pol Pot, North Korea. Or Hamas."

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• Sharon Fitzpatrick

  Author

  I will refrain from spending more of my time with quotes and summarize: a human whose perspective informed by ideals of equality, integrity, simplicity, and peace uses his knowledge of languages and ability to assess situations to interact with NGOs on… 

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  • Jenny Shields

    Sharon Fitzpatrick he discredits himself by not writing the whole truth and by distorting basic facts. You give this person credit but deny the same to AFSC leadership whose perspective is also formed of the same values you say motivate this person, ex… 

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• Michael LaBelle

  I am guessing this post was intended to raise some hackles. So mission accomplished, I guess.

  

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Michael LaBelle guessing is a form of speculation and in this instance I have repeatedly stated my intention. Forgive me the repetition; I posted because there are a number of issues that might be discussed that he raises in the article, plus an overal… 

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    • Michael LaBelle

      Sharon Fitzpatrick I think you misunderstood me. I thought your post was fine. I like lively conversations. As this page skews liberal I think it was obvious that feedback was going to be lively though. That’s all I meant

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Michael LaBelle raising concerns is what I have done. Bearing witness to a post from a brilliant human being that claimed to not usually share his published works on FB, I found that concerns this author described raised some concerns in me. More importantly, I took the exception that he made and the repeated reference to “most Quakers” he speculates not knowing about these activities or how some players view them as a call to correct that possibility.

    A few claimed to be aware, but the number of illogical dismissals and personal attacks (on both the absent author and myself) were exhausting and tangential to discussing the complications listed in article.

    I don’t have to think he is right about each issue to think it is right for more Quakers to know that someone who has been influenced by familiarity with the this religion views AFSC “least tolerant” of the NGOs with whom he works that are also deemed progressive.

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  • Sharon Fitzpatrick

    Author

    Michael LaBelle an illogical dismissal and personal attack example is David Hoffman alleging Rubin writes disparagingly about progressive organizations and thereby lacks credibility. He at first claims a higher authority than having to back up his allegations and then pressured, provides a bio that includes nothing about the author having written about other pacifist organizations he thinks are far too much in the progressive politics operational mode.

    It’s taken as “proof” the author is a “hawk” though no balance is available on the whole list of critiques.

    That Congress reviewed the ethics of him getting $150 to review materials produced by Lincoln Group as no different from a similar fee Amnesty International had paid him for similar services and that he has properly disclosed.

    So it appear here in a bio without that information clearing him, but wasn’t pertinent to the allegation Hoffman made in the first place. “See he looks at materials for the Pentagon” doesn’t discredit him as some anti-pacifist who sours about all organizations.

    If discussing this as Quakers, which is the elusive audience the author invokes, it should not be about politics—whether qualifying or disqualifying the actual concern at hand—whether or not discernment between progressive and pacifist is happening with AFSC in affairs of this world.

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    • Jenny Shields

      Sharon Fitzpatrick AFSC is a 501(c) nonprofit hence doesn’t get involved with politics. You keep repeating falsehoods. Again he lost credibility for me because his very first paragraph wasn’t true.

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    • Sharon Fitzpatrick

      Author

      Jenny Shields and again you have not yet been able to cite anything untrue in the first paragraph. And admitting that a question about credibility in an introductory paragraph does not warrant disregarding the remainder of an article. It is like reading the first sentences of a paper and failing a student because you question the way book described.

      I have repeated what is sound. And though YOU have continued to repeat the same thing, it becomes no more valid. The responses from others that drew parallels to “progressive” as of AFSC is accurately described by this political term is what I refer—and that parallels the point Rubin makes.

      Something as simple as supporting BDS is political.

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    • Jenny Shields

      Sharon Fitzpatrick Actually I have cited several specific examples of half true or in accurate information throughout the article. You keep ignoring them. Pretending they don’t exist doesn’t make them any less valid. You haven’t presented anything more than your opinion - which doesn’t make the actual facts any less relevant. If being labeled “progressive” is political, you could claim that pacifism is political too by that definition. The FBI has infiltrated Quaker grandmas kitting in Florida because the were against the Iraq war. Are they political?

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