I wrote an obituary for a former friend while she was still alive. I figured that writing an obituary would be easily found for her name in a google search. It was. She had a terrible time getting foundation grants after the obit was posted and she begged me to take it down.
After a very poor mediation where she didn’t concede any ground, I still modified the obit to give her a little less opprobrium.
The problem that led to my writing this harsh material about Finley and putting it on the Internet was that she was a Jew hater and a very internationally effective organizer. Had she been a Jew hater who led a trivial life, I wouldn’t have bothered.
What bothered me then and bothered me until I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal was my internal question ‘what made her this way?’
I had known her for decades and we had worked closely together. I never saw this deep mental illness until it burst on the scene when she attended a Jew hate conference in South Africa.
Finley was a member and devotee of the Quaker activist group AFSC (American Friends Service Committee). What I didn’t know until the Wall Street Journal article was that in the late 1970’s the AFSC had become a Jew hate organization. So how did this account for Finley’s state of mind?
Ironically I learned why years earlier from Finely herself. She had a rule which I accepted:’no one can be in a group unless they accept 80% of the group values’. Put another way ‘no one can have values that differ from more than 20% of their group values.’ So Finley had to conform to the values of her primary AFSC affinity.
I never noticed Finley’s Jew hate until it was written in an article in one of her newsletters. I had two earlier glimpses that I missed. One was that she had been allowed to accompany Israeli troops when they invaded South Lebanon in 1978.
The Israeli troops always announced by leaflet and loudspeaker that all non-combatants should leave a village they were approaching. This of course puts Israeli soldiers lives at risk, but Israelis are the only army in the world to do this. Finley still expressed hatred for the Israeli army, in her ignorance of other armies and battle tactics.
Second, she was a vocal opponent of the circumcision of a mutual friend’s son. Which I can only now understand as Jew hate, having listened to all the absurd arguments against circumcision.
It all fits together now.