This conference call is part of a much larger One Jerusalem campaign to bring the cause of Bangladeshi publisher Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury to public attention. On October 12, Mr. Choudhury will be tried for sedition. The potential penalty is death. There will be one judge, and to save time he’ll also serve as the jury. The rest of the officers of the court are also particularly unsavory characters – suffice to say that they do not provide particularly productive resources for our public diplomacy efforts. More problematically, they all seem to have problems with things like “talking to Jews”. Which makes it easier to understand why Mr. Choudhury is on trial – he tried to board a plane to Tel Aviv to attend a conference on utilizing the media to promote intercultural peace efforts.
It’s a small thing, but you can get a sense for how serious Allen Roth and David Goder are taking the potential of Mr. Choudhury’s execution by noting that they started giving background and pushing this call before it happened. They also contacted bloggers like Michelle Malkin – who has been writing about this and other outrages – to generate buzz about this call specifically and Mr. Choudhury’s plight more generally. The guest expert was Yehudit Barsky, the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Division on Middle East and International Terrorism and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Middle East Council. On the call was Allen Roth (One Jerusalem), Rick Richman (Jewish Current Issues), Jerry Gordon (IsraPundit), and some other folks that we were too slow to catch. By now we’ve all gone through enough of these to know that audio will be up later today on the One Jerusalem frontpage – but this time you really have to make sure that you check again and again until their post comes up, because it will have contact information for the Bangladeshi ambassador to the United States.
Here is your assignment: write, call, smoke-signal, send a telegram – do whatever you need to do to contact the Bangladeshi ambassador and let him know that this kangaroo court is unacceptable. Back when Mr. Choudhury was arrested and imprisoned, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) was able to secure his release by threatening to withhold US aid to Bangladesh. The charges were never dismissed, and now the affair has reached a crisis point. This is a potential human rights outrage of literally totalitarian proportions – a journalist attempting to use both his expertise and his pen in the cause of peace. Everything about international progressivism in its best senses – freedom of the press, committed cosmopolitanism, democratic deliberation, dialogue between nations – is represented in this, the most fundamental of human rights causes: a journalist being persecuted and prosecuted for his journalism. Mr. Choudhury’s only “crime” is trying to create a bridge between people of different cultures at a time of unprecedented global tension.
But it’s not a coincidence that this kind of issue would emerge in Bangladesh at precisely this time. This is a country that is hanging in the balance. Tip one way, and it begins to undertake in earnest the incredibly complication negotiation between secularism and Islam that Muslim countries must face sooner or later. Tip the other way, and it becomes a first domino in the fall to sharia of secular Muslim-majority nations. The situation is becoming increasingly dire: the governing coalition has several extremist member parties, popular support for terrorism is constantly increasing, and our friends the Saudis are pouring millions of dollars into the country to create a network Wahabbist madrassas. Whether Bangladeshi sharia actually becomes the domino that knocks over other teetering secular states is of course up for debate – but it’s also to a certain extent academic anyway. People on the call were talking about how Bangladesh alone has the potential to become the next Taliban-controlled Afghanistan – the next stable training ground and planning base for global terrorism. In the face of this stands Mr. Choudhury and his Weekly Blitz newspaper.
These individual cases, one by one and man by man, will be one of a variety of tests that the West will face in coming years. Mr. Choudhury IS the moderate Muslim that the Bush administration swears is the true face of Islam. He’s the vocal dissident that every single right of center blog swears they’re desperate to hear from and ally with. Now our unilaterally-declared ally (declared by us) is fighting for his life against representatives of the most pathological and vicious strains of a religious ideology that is bringing the planet to the abyss of nuclear conflict. We try to avoid hysteria or hand-wringing on this blog, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that Bangladesh’s fate as a secular democracy hangs in the balance. How it tips will be based largely on the amount of pressure that the West brings to bear to ensure Mr. Choudhury’s human rights. We’ve all been saying for years that we’ll support moderate Muslims when they stand up to Islamofascist thugs. The world will be watching to see how much that support is worth.
UPDATE (10:35 PST): This post has been updated stylistically. No content has been changed. We had to run to a presentation right after the call, and had wanted to make sure that we had something posted. This is the final copy.
UPDATE 2 (11:15 PST): The other person on the call that asked questions was Judith Klinghoffer from the History News Network.
