A Pakistani-American girl, Amna Farooqi, who is a senior at the University of Maryland has been elected as president of the national student board of a pro-Israeli group called J Street U.
The girl was elected as the president during the group’s ‘Summer Leadership Institute’ in Washington. The four-day event was attended by around 120 U student leaders. The group consisits of 4,000 active participants from almost 75 campuses in the United States.
Talking about the Palestine-Israel conflict and how the issue personally affects her, Farooqi during the conference said, “Growing up in a household sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, the Palestine-Israel conflict was always the elephant in the room. 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.”
She also said that she “fell in love with Zionism” while taking up a course in college which dealth with issues in Israel. Further commenting obout Zionism she added, “ecause Zionism became about taking ownership over the story of one’s people. If Zionism is about owning your future, how can I not respect that?”
Amna Farooqi is a local resident of suburban Washington DC and has grown up in a ‘fairly religious Muslim home’ with several Jewish friends.
