Israel Matzav

ICYMI this says it all: J Street elects Muslim of Pakistani descent as President

At its “Summer Leadership Institute” in Washington this week, J Street U elected Amna Farooqi, a senior at the University of Maryland who is of Pakistani descent, Haaretz reported. Farooqi co-wrote a blog post for the Times of Israel in March on Hillel President Eric Fingerhut’s decision to withdraw from a commitment to speak a the J Street National Conference.

Approximately 120 J Street U student leaders attended the four-day gathering, according to Haaretz, and J Street U says it has 4,000 active participants on 75 college campuses in the United States.

A native of suburban Washington, D.C., Farooqi grew up in a “fairly religious Muslim home” with “a lot of Jewish friends,” Haaretz reported.

But “growing up in a household sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, the Palestine-Israel conflict was always the elephant in the room,” she said in a video filmed at the J Street conference last March. “This conflict evoked a level of anger and emotion in me, and I needed to learn more. Everything I was learning about the conflict made me not want to be pro-Israel. … As someone who wanted to contribute to ending this conflict I knew I needed to understand all sides.”

Labels: J Street U, Muslims, Pakistan, pro-Israel pro-peace

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:47 PM