YNET NEWS: At Jerusalem conference, British-born Muslim compares KKK rallies in US to anti-Israel protests in London. 'During my visit I saw Israel wasn't some apartheid state,' he says
A small, but increasingly vocal number of Muslims are rejecting radical hate speech and combating anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. In the recent Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism held this week in Jerusalem, Palestinian Media Watch director, Itamar Marcus and Dr. Boaz Ganor organized a panel discussion with Muslim activists actively rejecting hate rhetoric.
Two of the panel speakers included Kasim Hafeez, a British Muslim who runs The Israel Campaign and Rev. Majed El Shafie, a human rights advocate originally from Egypt. Ahmad Mansour, a Palestinian living in Berlin, who is a policy advisor for the European Foundation for Democracy, was also scheduled to speak but was unable to attend.
"When people say that anti-Semitism exists in the Muslim world because of Israel, that is simply an excuse," says Kasim Hafeez, born in Britain to a Pakistani Muslim family.
"People here (in Israel) get Islamic anti-Semitism. In Europe, we deny it," Hafeez expounded.
"As a university student, I would attend radical anti-Israel rallies in Trafalgar Square. Here I am standing in London in the middle of a European capital - chanting 'death to Israel' and nothing was ever done."
He compares those rallies with the Ku Klux Klan. "An Al-Quds Day rally in London is equivalent to a KKK rally in the US," he stressed. Hafeez told Tazpit News Agency that he began to change his thinking when he read A Case for Israel, by Alan Dershowitz.
Hafeez explains that he read the book in order to learn how to further deconstruct Zionist propaganda. "But I began to see that I could no longer support my convictions because I had no answers to the arguments that were made for Israel," he explains.
"I found that the radical Islamic doctrine that I grew up with and my own belief in violent jihad could no longer support the truth I once believed in." » | Anav Silverman, Tazpit | Thursday, May 30, 2013
