The Inspiring Salah Choudhury
by Lee Green
Salah Choudhury is the editor of the Bangladeshi tabloid The Weekly Blitz, the most influential anti-Jihadist newspaper in Bangladesh.
In 2005, the tireless efforts of just a few people helped get Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, a moderate Muslim and brave proponent of peace and dialogue with Jews and Israel, released on bail in Bangladesh, after 16 months of undeserved and inhumane imprisonment. He had been arrested and incarcerated for simply trying to fly to Israel to speak at a conference about how the media can help foster religious tolerance. He is a newspaper editor and has published essays supporting relations with Israel.
According to Bret Stephens of the Online Wall Street Journal (see article below), Mr. Choudhury's newspaper's office was bombed in July of 2006 and this past week, his newspaper's office was ransacked and Mr. Choudhury was badly beaten by an extremist mob. Yet, he is due to go on trial on October 12th on the old charges that had never been dropped: blasphemy, sedition, treason and espionage. Salah Choudhury faces death if convicted.
In the past, intervention by Congressman Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) helped tremendously. Please read the articles below for details. Please do whatever you can to get more of the mainstream media to cover Mr. Choudhury's story and to get your elected officials to put pressure on Bangladesh to drop the unreasonable charges or to find Mr. Choudhury not guilty . Public pressure on Bangladesh can make a difference.
Darkness in Dhaka GLOBAL VIEW
By BRET STEPHENS October 10, 2006
Wall Street Journal Online
Meet Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. As these lines are being written, Mr. Choudhury, a gadfly Bangladeshi journalist, is running for his life. Assuming he survives till Thursday, he will face charges of blasphemy, sedition, treason and espionage in a Dhaka courtroom. His crime is to have tried to attend a writers' conference in Tel Aviv on how the media can foster world peace. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
Welcome to Bangladesh, a country the State Department's Richard Boucher recently portrayed in congressional testimony as "a traditionally moderate and tolerant country" that shares America' s "commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law." That's an interesting way to describe a country that is regularly ranked as the world's most corrupt by Transparency International and whose governing coalition, in addition to the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, includes two fundamentalist Islamic parties that advocate the imposition of Shariah law. There are an estimated 64,000 madrassas (religious schools) in Bangladesh. The Ministry of Industries is in the hands of Motiur Rahman Nizami, a radical Islamist with a reputation of a violent past. In March, the Peace Corps was forced to leave the country for fear of terrorist attacks . Seven other journalists have also been brought up on sedition charges by Ms. Zia's government, most of them for attempting to document Bangladesh's repression of religious minorities.
But few stories better illustrate the Islamist tinderbox that Bangladesh has become than Mr. Choudhury's. "When I began my newspaper [the Weekly Blitz] in 2003 I decided to make an end to the well-orchestrated propaganda campaign against Jews and Christians and especially against Israel," he says in the first of several telephone interviews in recent days. "In Bangladesh and especially during Friday prayers, the clerics propagate jihad and encourage the killing of Jews and Christians. When I was a child my father told me not to believe those words but to look at the world's realities."
With that in mind, Mr. Choudhury, then 38, began publishing articles sympathetic to Israel in the Weekly Blitz while reaching out to Jewish and Israeli writers he encountered on the Web. That led to the invitation by the Hebrew Writers' Association, and to Mr. Choudhury's only crime: By attempting to travel to Israel in November 2003, he violated the Passport Act, which forbids citizens from visiting countries (such as Israel and Taiwan) with which Bangladesh does not maintain diplomatic relations. Violations of the Passport Act are usually punishable by a fine of $8.
But that wasn't the sentence meted to Mr. Choudhury. Following his arrest he was taken into police custody and, as he tells it, blindfolded, beaten and interrogated almost incessantly for 10 days in an attempt to extract a confession that he was spying for Israel. He refused to offer one. He spent the next 16 months in solitary confinement in a Dhaka jail, where he was denied medical treatment for his glaucoma.
By then, Mr Choudhury's case had come to the attention of Congressman Mark Kirk (R., Ill), who intervened with Bangladesh's ambassador to the U.S. to secure Mr. Choudhury's release on bail, though the charges were never formally dropped. Help also came from Richard Benkin, a Chicago-area activist who has taken up Mr. Choudhury's cause, and the American Jewish Committee, which invited Mr. Choudhury to the U.S. in May to receive its Moral Courage Award. But Mr. Choudhury says he decided to forgo the trip after a government minister warned him, "If you go, it will not be good for you."
In July, the offices of the Weekly Blitz were bombed by Islamic militants. In September, a judge with Islamist ties ordered the case continued, despite the government's reluctance to prosecute, on the grounds that Mr. Choudhury had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by praising Christians and Jews and spoiling the image of Bangladesh world-wide. Last week, the police detail that had been posted to the Blitz's offices since the July bombing mysteriously vanished. The next day the offices were ransacked and Mr. Choudhury was badly beaten by a mob of 40 or so people. Over the weekend he lodged a formal complaint with the police, who responded by issuing an arrest warrant for him. Now he's on the run, fearing torture or worse if he's taken into custody.
Much of Mr. Choudhury's current predicament can be traced to Ms. Zia's reluctance to cross her Islamist coalition partners, who are keen on the case of the "Zionist spy" and would like nothing more than to see him hang. It doesn't help that a powerless caretaker government will take charge later this month in preparation for next January's elections. The U.S. Embassy in Dhaka has kept track of Mr. Choudhury and plans to send an observer to his trial. But mainly America' s diplomats seem to have treated him as a nuisance. "Their thinking," says a source familiar with the case, "is that this is the story of one man, and why should the U.S. base its entire relationship with Bangladesh on this one man?"
Here's an answer: Bangladesh does not mean much strategically to the U.S., except for the fact that it is home to some 120 million Muslims, many of them desperately poor and increasingly under the sway of violent religious notions imported from Saudi Arabia. The Bush administration, which every year spends some $64 million on Bangladesh , has made a priority of identifying moderate Muslims and giving them the space and cover they need to spread their ideas. Mr. Choudhury has identified himself, at huge personal risk, as one such Muslim. Now that he is on the run, somewhere in the darkness of Dhaka, will someone in the administration pick up the phone and explain to the Bangladeshis just what America expects of its "moderate and tolerant" friends?
Daily Pennsylvanian
September 27, 2006
Without our help, a beacon of freedom faces death
By Gabe Oppenheim
Our country's most important ally in the war on terror is about to be killed, and most Americans don't even know it.
His name is Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, and he's a Bangladeshi newspaper publisher, editor and writer. On Oct. 12, his government will try him for sedition, which carries a penalty of death. There will be no jury - only a judge, in a case that has been fixed from the very beginning.
You see, Bangladesh is currently a secular democracy of 147 million people (83 percent of whom practice Islam). But several fundamentalist groups within the country want to replace its secular system with sharia, or strict Islamic law.
In order to do so, these groups have turned to terrorism. On Aug. 17, 2005, 430 bombs exploded across the country, killing two and injuring dozens. Three months later, Bangladesh suffered its first suicide bombings when at least three people detonated themselves in front of and inside two court buildings. That caught Osama bin Laden's attention.
At least two arrested terrorists in Bangladesh have admitted to being sent by bin Laden. Saudi Arabia, too, has recognized Bangladesh as a potential tipping point, sending millions of dollars to the 64,000 Bangladeshi madrassas, or religious schools, that preach extremist Islam.
Against this backdrop, Choudhury has published his newspaper, Weekly Blitz. It features a mix of world and local news and strong editorials against violence in the name of religion.
The paper also calls for dialogue between Muslims and Jews as the first step on the road to peace - which upsets extremist clerics, of course.
So in November 2003, those clerics had the government arrest Choudhury as he tried to board a plane in Dhaka, the capital. Choudhury was on his way to Israel to attend a conference in Tel Aviv called "Bridges Through Culture," where he was to lecture on the media's role in promoting peace.
But before he could board the plane, the government charged Choudhury with passport violations. It was a bogus charge, brought by a government whose ruling coalition contains two parties that openly support al Qaeda.
The government then sent Choudhury to a maximum-security prison, where, as I wrote in a previous column, "he was tortured with electric shocks and beaten with field hockey sticks" until his legs broke.
The government also denied him care for his severe glaucoma and refused to let him attend his mother's funeral after she died of a heart attack. Eventually, the government dropped the passport charges in favor of the sedition charges leveled in February 2004.
That's where our University comes into the picture. For before Choudhury was imprisoned, he had sent e-mails to a few freelance journalists whose work he had read online, asking them to contribute to Weekly Blitz.
One of those journalists was Penn alumnus Richard Benkin, who agreed to write for Choudhury's newspaper. When Choudhury was arrested, Benkin took action, lobbying his local congressman for help.
Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) was able to secure Choudhury's release by essentially threatening to withhold $100 million in U.S. aid to Bangladesh.
But the charges were never dropped. And police continued to allow radical muftis to threaten and harass Choudhury, his wife and their two children. In July, two bombs exploded in Choudhury's office, and the police took no action, claiming to have "misplaced" the necessary report.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh repeatedly postponed Choudhury's trial, keeping him in a state of continuous fear. Then, last week, Oct. 12 was set as the trial's start date. Now Choudhury faces death - and we must act.
Americans often use the "war on terror" catchphrase for political gain. But any candidate who's really strong against terror, regardless of party, must help Choudhury.
Obviously, not all Muslims support extremism or violence. But few Muslim leaders have the will to speak out against violence. And it's not so easy to blame them. Choudhury, after all, is facing death, and his office has been bombed.
Now that we've found a man willing to advocate for peace and denounce extremism, we must seize the opportunity. No one else will speak out if we allow those who already have spoken to die.
So please write your representatives. It worked once to save Choudhury's life, and it can again. Because you are not helpless in, or removed from, some distant, guerilla war on terror.
This is the war on terror.
(C) 2006 Daily Pennsylvanian via U-WIRE
The Jerusalem Post
May 20, 2005, Friday
Nightmare in Dhaka
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
HIGHLIGHT:
The First Word. My 17 months in prison for advocating peace and dialogue with Israel. The writer was publisher and editor of the Bangladeshi magazine Weekly Blitz which was ransacked during his imprisonment.
We expect people to be punished for crimes and that immorality will have its consequences. We do not expect people to be arrested tortured and imprisoned for favoring global peace interfaith dialogue and ending religious hatred. But that is precisely what happened to me.
What was my "crime"? Being a living contradiction: a Zionist and a devout Muslim living in Bangladesh the world's second-largest Muslim country.
As a journalist I counteracted the biased "news" that promoted hatred of Israel and Jews; condemned terrorism, promoted the free exchange of ideas and urged Bangladesh to recognize Israel. My colleague Dr. Richard Benkin and I worked together and saw the start of real debate. We were ecstatic and hopeful.
But on November 29 2003, police grabbed me as I was about to board a plane for Tel Aviv at the invitation of Dr. Ada Aharoni to address the Hebrew Writers Association on the media's role in creating cultures of peace.
At the airport, spiritually in Israel though physically still in Dhaka, my heart ached to kiss Israel's holy soil. I presented my passport. The inspector glared at me and raised his eyebrows. Silently he rose and escorted me to a higher official's office.
Clearly they had planned this. The official's cold words crushed me: "You cannot travel on this flight." He motioned and several officers ripped open my luggage and ran through its contents - a few meager belongings and small gifts. They searched my bag and my person seized my passport tickets and $30. I stood silent, shocked, until an officer said Mr. Choudhury, you are under arrest for attempted travel to an enemy country.
I could remain silent no longer. "Enemy country? How is Israel an enemy of Bangladesh? Are we at war?"
"No he said, but Bangladeshi passports are not valid for travel there. We have no diplomatic relations with them."
"Bangladesh has no diplomatic relations with Taiwan either I replied, but we can travel to that country."
"The two situations are quite different he waved a hand. We have no relations with Taiwan only to keep China happy. But Israel offends our religious sentiments."
That was it right there; the reason behind it all. I retorted that it was nonsense to call Israel an enemy of Islam but to no avail. We argued until I was taken to an isolated and dark prison cell.
Late that night guards led me blindfolded and exhausted to a small interrogation room. They accused me of spying for Israel and threatened dire consequences if I did not confess. They badgered me for hours but I denied the charge.
"My mission is peace I said, standing firm. Back in my cell, swarms of mosquitoes gorged on my blood while, famished, I had a mere crust of bread and water from the toilet tap. I was disgusted and sickened, but so hungry that I ate.
The following day I appeared before the metropolitan magistrate, where my lawyer sought bail and the police requested I be remanded for interrogation. The matter was decided before it began.
MANY PEOPLE know my story, my imprisonment beyond legal limits, the sedition charge and denial of due process. Only now can I convey the barbarism to which I was subjected in the name of interrogation - falsely in the name of Islam and Bangladesh.
I was continuously blindfolded, made physically and mentally weak from the ordeal, thrown in a cell for the insane and denied a bath or basic hygiene. Only after international outrage was I placed in Cell 15 which, though reserved for notorious criminals, was a slight improvement for me.
My situation became more precarious with every passing day. My health deteriorated markedly and I was denied much-needed medical care. Only my faith, conviction and supporters prevented me from succumbing to the despair. My fellow prisoners called me "friend of the Jews."
Outside, police ransacked my home and office and seized my property, not even sparing my daughter's personal computer. They mistreated my mother and wife. My family was deprived of a living; our businesses were closed and looted. Their severe economic constraints were made worse by the ongoing legal bills. We sold off assets to survive. Dr. Benkin sent us money while my family tried frantically and in vain to secure bail.
In August my mother died of a massive heart attack. The pain of my imprisonment and the uncertainty of ever seeing me again proved too much.
My worst moments came when the temporary bail that would allow me to attend my mother's funeral was revoked. I cried for hours alone in my prison cell. The prime minister ordered an inquiry into the matter but was ignored. My family was told that government "higher-ups" were the culprits.
In January I was shocked to see the government's charge sheet naming Drs. Benkin and Aharoni as my espionage contacts. How would they react? My brother informed Dr. Benkin who said: "If my brother can take the pain of imprisonment and face trial for achieving our common goal, I can at least be in Bangladesh to say 'I am with you!' " Dr. Benkin led the fight to free me and is no mere friend but my loving brother with whom I am proud to work. His words strengthened me.
In April, US Congressman Mark Kirk took up my case as his own and called a meeting with Dr. Benkin and Washington's Bangladeshi ambassador. His action seemed to awaken the Bangladesh government which released me three weeks later.
A court appearance on May 25 should dispose of the charges and I am confident that Bangladesh is moving in a positive direction. I hope to see our government sponsor interfaith conferences and support a free and open press so that my people will be able to take back our nation and return us to our tradition of tolerance.
Many Muslims believe that they cannot be friends with Jews but I am living proof that such friendship is possible. When my own people turned their backs on me, my Jewish friends stood by me. The only way our two nations will know true peace is through the understanding that contact, commerce and dialogue brings; and I will work tirelessly in that great effort.
Originally Published 10/10/2006 for CAMERA