Rep. Susan Wild (D., Pa.), considered one of the most vulnerable House incumbents running for reelection, personally raised money for a "social justice" group that wants to defund police and abolish immigration agencies. It has also expressed support for "decriminalizing Hamas."
And that's just the beginning of the American Friends Service Committee's (AFSC) far-left activism. The Philadelphia-based group blamed Israel for the "root cause" that it said prompted Hamas's Oct. 7 terrorist attack. In the 2000s, AFSC organized a series of controversial "dialogue" events with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president who has denied the Holocaust. And decades earlier, AFSC officials defended Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime, which murdered 1 million Cambodians in a genocide.
It's a group whose "mission means a lot to me," Wild wrote in a June 2020 Facebook post obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. "For my birthday this year, I'm asking for donations to American Friends Service Committee."
Wild, who was celebrating her 63rd birthday at the time, raised $1,698 for AFSC, surpassing her goal of $1,000. AFSC thanked Wild for her "generosity and commitment to the cause of peace and social justice."
Wild's support for AFSC could prove politically damaging as the Democrat runs for reelection to a House seat she won narrowly in 2022. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has faced scrutiny for raising money in 2020 for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which bailed out rioters from the George Floyd protest, some of whom went on to commit violent crimes. Wild is running against Republican Pennsylvania state representative Ryan Mackenzie in a contest that the Cook Political Report rates a "toss-up." A Republican poll this month shows Wild leading Mackenzie by 2 points in the race.
Wild, who came under fire in 2022 for Zooming into a campaign event while driving a car, calls herself "one of the most bipartisan members of Congress." She has shifted to the center on issues like immigration and crime in recent years after her district was redrawn to include more Republican voters, the Free Beacon reported Monday.
Privately, however, Wild has criticized those voters, saying in 2022 that she "might have to school them … a little bit." In February, she smeared constituents for drinking "the Trump Kool-Aid."
Though Wild has called herself "a very pro-Israel member of Congress," her birthday fundraiser aided an organization that has for years sided with the Palestinian resistance against the Jewish state.
AFSC, in a statement on October 7, blamed Israel for provoking the Hamas attack, calling to "end the apartheid system and pervasive inequality at the root cause of this violence." Days later, the committee pushed false reports that Israel killed 500 Palestinians in a bombing of 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—roughly eight months before Wild's fundraiser—AFSC published the essay "Decriminalizing Hamas," in which author Jonathan Kuttab called "to end the demonization of Hamas, bring it into the political process and begin the long road to peace and freedom." Hamas slaughtered 1,200 innocent Israelis on October 7 and has refused to release all of the Israeli hostages taken in the incursion. Kuttab, meanwhile, is the cofounder of Al-Haq, an Israeli-designated terror group based in the West Bank.
AFSC's domestic policies are no less extreme. Since 2018, the group has repeatedly called to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying the agency was "created to tear apart communities and was founded on the belief that mass deportations make our country safer."
It pushed to defund police, in the 2020 essay "6 Reasons Why It's Time to Defund the Police." The article said that the police system was founded to "maintain white supremacy" and that "policing doesn't 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 release from jail. Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981, while Shoatz, a former soldier in the Black Liberation Army, murdered Philadelphia cop Frank Von Colln in 1970.
While founded as a pacifist Quaker institution in 1917, AFSC embraced communist and totalitarian regimes in the wake of World War II.
According to historian Guenter Lewy, AFSC officials in the 1970s defended the Khmer Rouge against allegations of genocide. An AFSC official said the United States had concocted "bloodbath stories" as part of a "misinformation campaign" against the Khmer Rouge, according to Lewy. AFSC also defended a dinner it hosted in 2008 with Ahmadinejad, with a spokesman saying at the time that "we believe dialogue is the way to understanding and moving past tensions rather than threats and standoffish behavior."
It's not the only time Wild has courted controversial groups. In 2019, she spoke at the annual fundraiser for the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an anti-Israel group that for years has been linked to Hamas. Wild until recently touted an endorsement from Emgage PAC, a Muslim civil rights group that blames Israel for "genocide" and said the Jewish state provoked the Oct. 7 attacks.
Wild's office did not respond to a request for comment.