Victory over Anti-Semitism!

An anti-Israel conference scheduled for an Australian government building was canceled after a several individuals revealed its leader’s anti-Semitic motives. Maqsood Alshams, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh, planned the conference to debate charging Israel with war crimes for its recent actions in Gaza. Alshams has become known Down Under as a “human rights” advocate, his stated context for relentless anti-Israel venom. On December 30, he circulated an email, calling Israel’s defensive war a “crime against humanity” and demanding international intervention to “stop the Israeli carnage.” In an email response, I asked Alshams why he did not call for “international intervention when Palestinians--and Hamas in particular--thanked Israel for leaving Gaza by making it a terrorist base to lob missiles onto civilian populations in Southern Israel?”

Alshams replied, “The simple answer is that you the Jews are real motherf***ing bast*rds.” He claimed the Mossad abused him in Turkey’s “Jewish Consulate” and told me to “keep your dirty mouth shut calling any Bangladeshi a brother, you guys are simply as*h*les….keep your dirty mouth shut…I wonder why God himself (sic) hate the Jews…” Now Alshams did not share these sentiments with the larger group as it would sully his carefully crafted image and reveal his actual motives; so I did.

I also asked Bangladeshi journalist, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, to investigate Alshams’ claims of being a persecuted journalist in need of asylum, which many Australians believed. Choudhury found no one at the National Press Club who knew of Alshams or could verify that he “ever worked with any newspaper here.” He did, however, find a connection between Alshams and the radical Jammat e-Islami. Choudhury, the Bangladeshi Alshams told me not to call brother, was imprisoned and tortured for writing pro-Israel, anti-Islamist articles. While I led the campaign that freed him, Alshams and his ilk did nothing. So when he emerged from the hell of that confinement, it Choudhury who said, “When my own people abandoned me, my Jewish brother protected me, stood with me.”

Anna Berger is a child of Holocaust survivors, outraged by Alshams anti-Jewish tirade and again when he called Israel’s actions worse than the Nazis’. We exposed him to others, including the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. Soon, the Sydney Morning Herald, one of Australia’s largest newspapers, picked up the story. They verified my accusations, and I sent them Alshams’ damning email. The next day, it ran the story exposing Alshams. He first defended the hate-speech as private then claimed “I have many Jewish friends.” When he saw that no one was buying his “some of my best friends” defence, he blamed his tirade on being “intoxicated and angry.” While that might explain Alshams’ bad judgement in revealing his motives, it would not explain away the motives themselves. Conference participants distanced themselves from him, and the conference was cancelled. The revelations spoiled its public façade of being s fair debate engaged of the purest of motives.

Israel’s enemies have successfully—and fallaciously—appropriated the human rights high ground. Talking heads in academia, the media, and government have allowed them to engage in the worst sort of illogic and bigotry by adopting their version of history and morality. No hyperbole is out of bounds for them. They compare Israelis to Nazis and Palestinians to Jewish holocaust victims, though there is no similarity between the two. They have so terribly skewed the ideological playing field that Hamas can use Arab civilians as human shields then accuse Israel of human rights violations when those civilians become casualties of war. This incident exposed the Israel-bashers’ real motivations by stripping away its cynical use of human rights language.

This lesson must not be lost. We were just a group of individuals--no different from so many other people on just about every continent--who encounter the hate-filled and often genocidal words of the Israel-hating crowd. But how often are people silent? More to the point, how often do people take their outrage to lengths that expose the truth of so many in the anti-Israel crowd? And so many of them would do so if the hatred was about any group other than their own. Good for them, but not good for us. Those who engage in honest debate and dialogue are welcome to join verbal battle with us. As my fundamentalist Islamic friend and brother say, we "agree to disagree." And because of that, Bangladeshi Kazi Azizul Haq and I have found many points on which we do agree.

But those who cloak genocidal aims in false human rights language must be exposed for who and what they are and for the danger they represent. The media does not do it, so we must.