U.K.-born Muslim is new B’nai Brith outreach worker

Kasim Hafeez

WINNIPEG — Once upon a time, British-born Pakistani Muslim Kasim Hafeez would have been on the front lines protesting against Israel. Once, he even considered going to Pakistan to train as a terrorist.

Today, Hafeez is B’nai Brith Canada’s new education and community relations officer in Winnipeg. The 31-year-old Hafeez arrived in Winnipeg in March and took up his new position in early June.

On an earlier visit to Winnipeg in 2012, he described his transformation from anti-Israel activist to active Zionist. He was brought to Winnipeg to speak by Shelley Faintuch, community relations director at the Jewish Federation of  Winnipeg and associate director of local partner services at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, after reading an article that Hafeez had written in support of Zionism and Israel. Hafeez was visiting friends in Toronto at the time and was able to arrange to come here.

In that speech, he pulled no punches. Anti-Zionism is code for anti-Semitism, he said. Wahhabism, the Saudi Arabian version of Islam, is little different than Nazism, he said. He also charged that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas should be facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court.

His transformation came about, he said at the time, after he came across a copy of Alan Dershowitz’s book A Case for Israel. “I figured it was just Zionist propaganda,” he said of the book. “I thought I would read it and be able to refute it all.”

Instead, Hafeez found that Dershowitz’s arguments challenged all of the myths about Israel and the Jews that he grew up with. And, he said, he couldn’t find any Muslim sources who could refute Dershowitz’s points. He decided to pursue this new line of research and read books by Martin Gilbert and other pro-Israel authors. Then he went to Israel to see this “apartheid, fascist” and “racist” country for himself.

Not surprisingly – considering where he was coming from ideologically – he was immediately detained after landing at Ben-Gurion Airport. “Although I was held back for eight hours, I was treated with respect,” he recalled. “The guard kept apologizing and offering me coffee and pastries. I understood that he was just doing his job.”

After leaving the airport, he found that people were friendly and helpful. He contrasted his reception in Israel with the religious pilgrimage that he and some members of his family had made to Mecca some years earlier.

“I had never faced such racism before,” he said of his Saudi experience. “Because of our skin colour, we were purposely ignored. At checkpoints, our group was held up in the heat longer than others. My aunt was pushed away from an ATM machine by a Saudi woman who told her that Pakistanis can wait. And if we had had Pakistani passports, our treatment would have been worse.”

In Israel, Hafeez’s epiphany came when he stood at the Western Wall. “I watched Christians, Muslims and Jews peacefully and freely going to their places of worship and I burst into tears. I finally realized what Israel is all about – the only Jewish state in the world. It is about the survival of the Jewish People, their religion, culture and heritage. I fell in love with the place.”

It’s far from easy being a Zionist Muslim in England. Hafeez said he was marginalized by his community, and most of his family won’t talk to him any more (his sister, an aunt and his mother being the exceptions.) For the past eight years, he had been working as a college admissions officer at New College in Nottingham. He said that he spoke frequently in support of Israel in an effort to educate students about the conflict.

He decided to come to Winnipeg, he said, because he was impressed by the reception he received here two years ago. Since he began working at the B’nai Brith office, he has been meeting with rabbis and representatives of other Jewish organizations. He has been interviewed on local radio stations. He helped organize the community’s memorial service for the three Israeli yeshiva students who were murdered earlier this summer. He came up with the Blue and White campaign – encouraging people to dress in blue and white for two days to show support for Israel – a campaign, he said, that was copied in other communities across Canada. He spoke at a Christian Zionist conference in Washington. And he is working with Jewish university students planning campus activities for the fall semester.

He hasn’t reached out yet to Winnipeg’s Muslim community, he said, but it is on his to-do list. While he points out that most Muslims who immigrate to the West are seeking to better their lives and get away from the negativity and poverty that is the norm in most Muslim countries, he warns against the danger posed by Muslim extremists in the West.

 “It’s really bad in Europe,” he said. “People are shutting their eyes to the danger they face from Muslim extremists. Out of a concern for political correctness and not wanting to offend anybody, they are allowing their democratic societies to be undermined. It’s sad, really.”

He says Canadians shouldn’t become complacent. “In Canada, we are just 10 to 15 years behind Europe.”