by Asaf Romirowsky
The once-noble American Friends Service Committee has embraced an ignoble cause.
Originally published under the title "The Nature of Quaker Education."
The Quakers have evolved over the years from opposing war to opposing Israel's existence.
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Unwittingly,
Friends' Central School in Wynnewood, PA, a well-regarded Quaker
establishment, has once again come under fire for its ties to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement supported by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).
The
school operates in accordance with the Quaker philosophy of
"simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality and stewardship.
Underlying all facets of School life is the belief that 'there is that
of God in everyone.' Meeting for Worship is central, providing time for
connections among members of the community and between individuals and
their spiritual sources. Peaceful resolution of conflicts, seeking truth
and collaboration are key aspects of a Friends' Central education."
The
Quakers have cultivated their image as peaceful and supremely benign.
Few suspect, much less know, that one of their central missions is
promoting the BDS movement that opposes Israel's existence.
The
Quaker experience in the Middle East was unique; they provided relief
to Palestinian refugees in 1949-1950 but withdrew after the United
Nations took over. The Friends also spearheaded religious diplomacy
about the fate of Jerusalem, which was besieged and divided during the
war of 1948. Though the mission was unsuccessful, and Jerusalem would
remain divided until 1967, their efforts were characterized by the
scrupulous evenhandedness and appeals to the religious sensibilities of
Christians, Muslims and Jews.
The Quakers play a leading role supporting BDS on university campuses.
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Building
on this and a long history of opposing Israel, it is no surprise that
the AFSC is one of the leading organizations supporting BDS on
university campuses and through support to various groups like Students
for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which spearhead the
movement.
Enter
Sa'ed Atshan, an assistant professor of peace and conflict studies at
Swarthmore College who is also, not surprisingly, a well-known advocate
for BDS. Atshan had been set to appear at Friends' Central but his talk
was canceled after his BDS ties were exposed to the administration by
parents who found the scheduled presentation to be biased and one-sided.
Atshan
has also been active with SJP, whose parent organization, American
Muslims for Palestine, was recently shown to be connected to the same
American Muslim Brotherhood supporters who funded Hamas through the Holy
Land Foundation, and which has trained its activists in "Countering
Normalization of Israeli Oppression on Campus."
Atshan
is a poster child for Quaker education, an alum of the Quaker school in
Ramallah who now teaches for the same Quaker school he attended as an
undergraduate. In many regards, he represents the Quaker echo chamber
regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that ensures that only the
Palestinian narrative will be voiced.
Friends' Central canceled an appearance by Swarthmore College professor Sa'ed Atshan, a staunch BDS advocate, in February.
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Predictably,
once Atshan's appearance was canceled, students protested; some
expressed their "disappointment and dismay" while others walked out of
the meeting after the announcement. Jewish students and parents will
thus bear the blame for the cancellation. But the fact is that they fell
into a not very clever trap: Either shut up and accept a biased
speaker, or protest and take the heat, whether the talk was canceled or
not. This is one of the basic tricks of the BDS movement.
In
turn, this incident will undoubtedly transform into a conversation on
free speech and academic freedom but pedagogically, the bigger concern
is that pro-BDS individuals who use hate and racist speech will use and
abuse academic freedom, whether it is academic or not.
This
freedom to critique is, predictably, directed mostly at the twin
Satans, Israel and America, although efforts to curtail speech that
academics find unpleasant and unacceptable have been longstanding in the
form of "speech codes" and restrictions on "hate speech." Clearly
academic freedom is a one-way street; only those having the correct
opinions may claim it.
Historically,
the AFSC has adopted a hypocritical form of pacifism. 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, supersessionist theology that has been the
basis of Christian anti-Semitism for centuries.
The once-noble American Friends Service Committee has embraced an ignoble cause.
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The
AFSC's relationship to Israel is tragic; a once-noble organization has
not only embraced an ignoble cause, but has betrayed its own founding
principles in the process.
The
AFSC appears to regard its support for the BDS movement as righteous.
As it puts it, 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," relating
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 its support for Palestinian
groups that both advocate and practice extreme forms of violence.
Many
Jewish parents send their children to Quaker schools seeking to instill
values they find analogous to those represented by Judaism, especially
since the Quakers and their schools have substituted "social justice"
for traditional liturgy. But Jewish parents should be encouraged to do
more research on the Quaker approach and then decide whether Jewish
values and Quaker values, as they exist today, are the same.
Asaf Romirowsky is the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Source: http://www.meforum.org/6566/from-noble-to-ignoble-quaker-relations-with-israel
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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