On Nov. 8, 2026, on the eve of the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the progressive group Philly Bike on Left organized a bike ride in Philadelphia’s Center City and Rittenhouse Square to point out Jewish and Israeli-American-owned businesses, demanding a boycott and their closure. To their credit, many Philadelphians responded with outrage; counterprotesters outnumbered Philly Bike on the Left.
To their shame, the Quakers’ public face was not among them.
Philadelphia’s Quaker heritage is palpable. The statue of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania and prominent Quaker, sits atop City Hall. While Washington, D.C., brags Sidwell Friends School — an elite private school where the children of multiple presidents have attended — the Greater Philadelphia area brags more than two dozen, most of which run K-12. Full disclosure: Between 1977 and 1990, I attended Abington Friends, which, founded in 1697, is today the second oldest Quaker school in the country. Old Quaker meeting houses dot the region.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) often cites its 1947 Nobel Peace Prize as evidence of its moral clarity and virtue. The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited the group’s “work in the international peace movement and compassionate effort to relieve human suffering, thereby promoting the fraternity between nations.” Famously, during World War II, the AFSC assisted prisoners of war held by both sides, providing books, letter-writing materials, cards, and other small comforts without regard to politics.
In the decades after, though, something changed within the AFSC. It began confusing politics with pacifism and went down a rabbit hole of conspiracy and denial. Hence, when the Khmer Rouge rose up and began systematically killing the educated and multilingual in Cambodia, AFSC’s regional director dismissed reports of atrocities as “bloodbath stories” motivated by both American “anti-communism” and a desire to punish countries that resisted “exploitation by multinational corporations seeking raw materials, markets for surplus, and cheap labor.” One million Cambodians died, but the AFSC never apologized. Today, the group repeats history. It remains silent on China’s industrial-scale effort to erase Uyghur culture. More damning, it brags about its assistance to North Korean collective farms, never mentioning the slave labor the Kim Jong-un regime uses. Nowhere, however, has the AFSC gone as morally askew as in the Middle East.
The head of the AFSC is Joyce Ajlouny, a Palestinian-American and third-generation Quaker raised in Ramallah and, for 13 years, the director of the Ramallah Friends School.
The AFSC always had a blind spot toward Palestinian violence as its members demonized Israel, but its apologia toward terror increased exponentially after the Oct. 7, 2023 massacres. Its initial statement put the death toll in Israel at only 90. It condemned not the terrorists, but the “deaths that occurred.” Two days later, the AFSC appeared to justify the terrorism. “People who are oppressed will continue to find ways to resist their oppression,” it opined when noting 900 deaths and 100 hostages taken. Subsequent AFSC statements failed to mention “terrorism” or “massacre.” Nor did many local meetings. On Oct. 19, 2023, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting called on “the soldiers and governments in Israel and Palestine to stop violence now,” but did not mention Hamas or hostages.
Meanwhile, the AFSC and other Quaker groups regularly partner with extremist organizations that apologize for terrorism and anti-Semitism such as CodePink, the Communist Party of the United States, the National Iranian American Council, and the Council on American Islamic Relations. It has worked repeatedly with Philly Democratic Socialists of America, which Philly Bike on the Left listed as its “collaborator” in its anti-Jewish intimidation campaign.
THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN. BUT WHAT DID THEY SAY?
The AFSC’s silence in the face of blatant antisemitism suggests it rejects its founding principles.
At various meetings, Quaker schools — including Sidwell in Washington, D.C. — and other Quaker organizations remain silent in the face of a protest modeled after the Nazis’ antisemitic boycotts, which suggests something is very wrong in a network patronized by DC elites. How hard should it be for the AFSC, Quaker schools, and pacifist organizations to speak out without apologia against antisemitic violence and abuse?
Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum, a distinguished fellow at India’s Usanas Foundation, and a contributor to Beltway Confidential.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
