The reports gathered from the Jewish community in Germany by Quakers were of influence when Quakers accompanied the Jewish delegation who went to see Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare to plead the case for allowing immigration of children into Britain without the usual visa restrictions. They swayed the government and this planned immigration of German and Austrian Jewish children became known as the Kindertransport. Around 10,000 children were evacuated from Germany and Austria to Britain between 1938 and 1939.

What I find most fascinating is the detail that the Friends library in London doesnt have a lot of records of this work. It was so much in line with other refugee assistance Friends were doing in Europe that they evidently considered it just another day on the job, so to speak. I shared a piece on the related Quakerspeisungen a few days ago.

Kristallnacht, Kindertransport, and help for refugees

It’s hogwash top to bottom, thinly connected dots meant to look like an evil plot. Apparently some people who were involved in Casa de los Amigos in Mexico City later donated to Democratic campaigns and Casa later rented office space to a migrant rights organization in 2012 and… well, that’s pretty much it. Proof that the “international Quaker movement” is the organizers of the refugee caravans aimed at the “destruction of U.S. borders.”

The language is florid in the manner of rightwing conspiracies. They specifically call out Brigid Moix, a former Casa de los Amigos director and well-respected Quaker peace advocate who Friends Journal published just last month. She was at Casa the same time as some guy who wrote something rather obvious about immigration that sounds like something rather obvious other people have since wrote about immigration. Oh and the one guy is now a Mexican ambassador to Greece. And someone was on a conference call. And there’s a group in San Diego. Seriously, there’s not even an attempt to draw a coherent thread. It’s just one non sequitur after another bridging together randomly Googled trivia, all carelessly run together because the author obviously assumes Daily Caller readers don’t read past the headline.

This would all be laughably obtuse in its overreach except that these conspiracies are getting less and less funny every day. The AFSC regularly gets conspiracy webs spun around its work in Palestine but I haven’t seen much trying to tie Friends to the biannual conspiracies around immigration. Hopefully it will fade away and Kassam will find some other bogeyman. The only stitch of truth can be found in the comments. There, buried near the bottom of all the knee-jerk crap you’d expect, is this, left un-ironically I suspect:

Friends are seeking ways to respond to the current refugee crisis. One example is a minute of concern recently approved by Santa Monica Meeting. Other Friends are taking action by visiting detainees in the Adelanto Detention Center. Some are accompanying refugees in the courts. Quaker organizations like FCNL and AFSC are calling for comprehensive immigration reform and an end to ICE. I am including this letter in hopes of stimulating more discussion among Friends (and others) about what we can do to respond to this latest moral crisis.

https://laquaker.blogspot.com/2018/07/reunite-refugee-families-separated-at.html

I’m not quite sure how we got here, in this “Christian” nation of ours. Christ says to welcome the stranger. These folks are not even strangers to many of us – they are woven into the fabric of our shared communities, their families, their work and service in the world, and their blessings.

In 1995, I worked on one of my last books for New Society Publishers,

In this book, Paul Kivel is taking on a lot. He’s speaking to white people as a fellow white person about a hush-hush subject: racism. He’s speaking with an honesty that allows for confusion and for admission of his own inner prejudices. In an era when many whites express pride of the advancement of the civil rights movement, he asks why so much of our world is still racially proscribed.

Our society has been built upon a foundation of racism for so long that it’s become part of the landscape: always there, seldom acknowledged. In this book, Kivel acknowledges and he questions. He asks us where we came from, he asks us what we know. He’s resisted the temptation to make this a manual of political correctness, and has instead allowed us to share our own prejudices with him as we read.

Kivel challenges us to look at our place in society. Just because we’ve begun to unlearn racism doesn’t mean the person washing the dishes of a favorite restaurant isn’t still African American. Or that the editor of a favorite magazine isn’t still a white person. Or that the taxi driver we hail isn’t still classified an illegal alien by a government restricting immigration from darker-skinned regions of the world.

Paul Kivel doesn’t give us pat answers to these dilemmas. He knows there will be no point at which we can sit back and consider our job completed. We must continue to wrestle with these questions, and in the confusion find moments of connection and clarity.

Uprooting racism is of course a large task, much larger than any one of us. But by working in our communities, and by engaging with our neighbors, workmates, and friends, we can make a difference. May this book inspire and confuse you!

Martin Kelley, for the New Society Publishers

June 2016: Found in the Pendle Hill library: