The American Friends of the Middle East was a pro-Arabist organization often critical of U.S. support for Israel that was formed in 1951 by columnist Dorothy Thompson, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., and 24 further American educators, theologians, and writers. Virginia Gildersleeve, Roosevelt, Fosdick and others had founded a similarly oriented Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land in 1948, which was subsumed into the new organization. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a Jewish news agency, noted that the organization "does not include a single Jew among its charter members, but has among them numerous outspoken Anti-Zionists," and reported on a full page ad taken by the new organization in "the New York press" on June 27, 1951, reiterating its advertised purposes as follows: While at the time of the JTA's reporting it was accurate in that no one identifying as Jewish was part of the AFME, the Reform rabbiElmer Berger joined its national council in 1952; before this, the AFME was associated, via some of its charter members' associations, with other Arabist/anti-Zionist organizations with notable Jewish membership such as the American Council for Judaism and the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land. Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. served as executive secretary of the AFME group of intellectuals and spokespersons for a time. In appealing for funds form American supporters “free from political pressure and racial and religious discrimination,” the AFME is reported to have stated that “most Americans… never had an accurate picture of Middle East.” Historians R.M. Miller, Hugh Wilford, and others have argued that from its early years, AFME was a part of an Arabist propaganda effort within the US "secretly funded and to some extent managed" by the CIA, with further funding from the oil consortium Aramco. Anecdotal and first-hand accounts referenced by historians, in the absence of declassified intelligence documentation, have suggested that the Americanintelligence community used the AFME partially as a vehicle for establishing its intelligence network in the Middle East after World War II.
