Melanie Phillips

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is the immensely courageous Muslim editor of the Bangladeshi paper The Weekly Blitz, who condemned the power of radical Islam in his country and sought to provide his readers with unbiased news about the Middle East. He wrote: “Today, I stand before you perhaps as a living contradiction: a Zionist, a defender of Israel, and a devout, practicing Muslim living in a Muslim country. Like you I believe in the justice of the Zionist dream. I also acknowledge this historical reality: that the world has endeavored to crush that dream and, yes, even destroy the viability of the Jewish people.”

For his pains, nearly three years ago he was arrested as he prepared to address the Hebrew Writers’ Conference in Tel Aviv on ‘The Role of Media in Creating a Culture of Peace’ and thrown into jail. His family was threatened and attacked. The government said he was ‘spying for the interests of Israel against the interests of Bangladesh’.

In May 2005, after 17 months in prison he was freed on bail after agitation by a couple of stalwart campaigners. But since then things have taken a turn for the worse. In July, the offices of The Weekly Blitz were attacked by Islamic militants. In September — as Bret Stephens reported in The Wall Street Journal on October 10 —a judge with Islamist ties ordered the case against him to continue, despite the government’s reluctance to prosecute, on the grounds that Choudhury had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by praising Christians and Jews and spoiling the image of Bangladesh world-wide.

The next day the newspaper offices were ransacked and Choudhury was badly beaten by a mob of 40 or so people who broke his ankle and called him an ‘agent of the Jews’. The police then issued an arrest warrant for him. If he is jailed and tried, he faces torture and death by hanging — all for standing up for freedom, truth and justice, and against hatred, violence and bigotry.

His fate is a paradigm of the threat to all who stand in defense of those virtues. But from the governments prosecuting the so-called ‘war on terror’, and who constantly talk about promoting and defending moderate Muslims, there is only a shameful silence, Bret Stephens observed:

“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?”

So much for principle and consistency. The so-called liberal newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic are silent about the fate of Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. So too, as far as I know, have been the so-called human rights NGOs. There is, in short, widespread indifference to the persecution of a decent, truly moderate Muslim by the Islamist fascists who threaten all of us. When push comes to shove, therefore, all the pious talk about supporting Muslim reformers in their heroic stand against Islamic extremists is the purest cant and humbug. For western governments, Choudhury is too marginal, too inconvenient. For so-called western ‘multicultural’ liberals, he can’t be a cause to champion because he does not fit the stereotype — he actually supports Israel and Zionism, for heaven’s sake, and thus puts such ‘anti-racists’ to shame by exposing their own indefensible prejudice against Jewish self-determination.

Above all, how can they condemn Bangladesh and hold it to account? Only western countries can be guilty of terrible deeds, after all; the third world is by definition the blameless victim of western imperialism. So there will be no marches on Bangladesh High Commissions, no boycott calls from humbugging academics, no impassioned leading articles or op-eds in the posh papers in solidarity with one of their own profession who is being persecuted for telling the truth.

Shameful — and short-sighted. For the fate of Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is our own.

Editor’s Update: The trial opened on November 13. Interviewed by The Wall Street Journal several days earlier, Choudhury says the judge aims for a death sentence and is not even allowing him to present witnesses in his own defense. Asked why he did not flee Bangladesh prior to the trial, Choudhury replied ”If I leave I will be proved to be a coward...There is no pride, no honor and no dignity in retreating.”

Congress is finally paying attention: Illinois Republican Mark Kirk and New York Democrat Nita Lowey have introduced a resolution demanding the charges be dropped. Rep. Kirk is one of the “stalwart campaigners” to whom Phillips refers (the other is Chicago based analyst Richard L. Benkin). The Wall Street Journal reports that Kirk demanded a meeting with the Bangladeshi ambassador in 2005 which led to Choudhury’s release after 17 months in jail without trial. The ambassador admitted at the time the charges were false, but while the government promised they would be dropped, they never were: the government feared the reactions of radical Islamists who were coalition partners.

Melanie Philips is author of Londonistan