“End the apartheid system and the pervasive inequality at the root of this violence,” the American Friends Service Committee wrote on October 7.
Susan Wild (Facebook)
Democratic Rep. Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, considered one of the most vulnerable candidates in the House, has personally raised money for a “social justice” group that wants to defund the police and abolish immigration enforcement. She has also spoken out in favor of “decriminalizing Hamas.”
And that’s just the beginning of the far-left activism of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The Philadelphia-based group blamed Israel for the “root cause” of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack. In the 2000s, the AFSC organized a series of controversial “dialogue” events with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president who denies the Holocaust. And decades before that, AFSC representatives defended Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, which murdered a million Cambodians in a genocide.
It is a group whose “mission means a lot to me,” Wild wrote in a June 2020 Facebook post that Washington Free Beacon“For my birthday this year, I am asking for donations to the American Friends Service Committee.”
Wild, who was celebrating her 63rd birthday at the time, raised $1,698 for the AFSC, surpassing its goal of $1,000. The AFSC thanked Wild for her “generosity and commitment to peace and social justice.”
Wild’s support for AFSC could prove politically damaging as the Democrat runs for a House seat in 2022, which she narrowly won. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is under fire for raising money in 2020 for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which rescued rioters at the George Floyd protests, some of whom later committed violent crimes. Wild is running against Republican Pennsylvania state Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in a race that the Cook Political Report rates as a “decided.” A Republican poll this month shows Wild leading Mackenzie by 2 points in the race.
Wild, who came under fire in 2022 for interfering in a campaign rally via Zoom while driving, describes herself as “one of the most bipartisan members of Congress.” She has shifted to the center on issues such as immigration and crime in recent years after her district was redrawn to include more Republican voters who Free Beacon reported Monday.
Privately, however, Wild has criticized those voters, saying in 2022 that she “may have to lecture them a little bit.” In February, she denigrated voters for drinking “the Trump Kool-Aid.”
Although Wild describes herself as a “very pro-Israel member of Congress,” her birthday donation went to an organization that has been on the side of Palestinian resistance against the Jewish state for years.
In a statement on October 7, the AFSC accused Israel of provoking the Hamas attack and called for an “end to the apartheid system and pervasive inequality as the root cause of this violence.” Days later, the committee spread false reports that Israel had killed 500 Palestinians in a bombing of the Al-Ahli hospital in the West Bank. The United States later identified the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad as responsible for the bombing.
In September 2019 – about eight months before Wild’s fundraiser – the AFSC published the essay “Decriminalizing Hamas,” in which author Jonathan Kuttab called for “ending the demonization of Hamas, bringing it into the political process, and beginning the long road to peace and freedom.” Hamas slaughtered 1,200 innocent Israelis on October 7 and refuses to release all Israeli hostages captured in the raid. Kuttab is a co-founder of Al-Haq, a West Bank group designated as a terrorist group by Israel.
The AFSC’s domestic policies are no less extreme. Since 2018, the group has repeatedly called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arguing that the agency was “created to tear communities apart and was founded on the belief that mass deportations make our country safer.”
In the 2020 essay “6 Reasons It’s Time to Defund the Police,” she urged cutting police funding. The article said the police system was founded to “perpetuate white supremacy” and that “policing does not keep us safe.”
AFSC has defended some of the country’s most notorious cop killers – Mumia Abu-Jamal and Russell Shoatz – as “political prisoners” who deserve to be released from prison. Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981, while Shoatz, a former Black Liberation Army soldier, murdered Philadelphia police officer Frank Von Colln in 1970.
Although the AFSC was founded in 1917 as a pacifist Quaker organization, it supported communist and totalitarian regimes after World War II.
According to historian Guenter Lewy, AFSC officials defended the Khmer Rouge against accusations of genocide in the 1970s. One AFSC official said the United States invented “bloodbath stories” as part of a “disinformation campaign” against the Khmer Rouge, Lewy said. The AFSC also defended a dinner it hosted with Ahmadinejad in 2008. A spokesman said at the time: “We believe that dialogue is the way to understand and overcome tensions, not threats and aloof behavior.”
It’s not the only time Wild has courted controversial groups. In 2019, she spoke at the annual fundraiser of the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an anti-Israel group that has been linked to Hamas for years. Wild was until recently promoting an endorsement from Emgage PAC, a Muslim civil rights group that blames Israel for a “genocide” and claims the Jewish state provoked the Oct. 7 attacks.
Wild’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
