Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury a notorious journalist facing sedition, treason, and blasphemy charges in Bangladesh and the trial already began in January 2008. Choudhury was previously arrested on July 17, 1999 on charges of sending threatening emails to then Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina and her family. Dr. Richard Benkin registered[14] as a foreign agent with the United States Department of Justice, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).[15] According to the document filed with the US government, Dr. Benkin registered as a foreign agent with Lutfuzzaman Babar, former State Minister for Home Affairs of Bangladesh, as his principal, for a sum of $5000 per month to prepare and disseminate informational materials via radio or TV broadcasts, magazines or newspaper articles, letters or telegrams, press releases and the internet. He was hired to disseminate this information to public officials, civic groups or associations, legislators, newspapers and editors. These two plotters and the local broker Mr. Mujtoba Ahmed Murshed, Press and Political advisor of German Embassy, Dhaka are propagating false news against prominent journalist and human rights defender. The local brokers called Mr. Akash and threaten him and cursed him. The broker asked Mr.Akash in the name of Honorable German Ambassador of Dhaka about his personal mail to the plotter Dr. Richard Benkin. Mr. Akash sends a mail to him: To Mr. Mujtoba Ahmed Murshed, Press and Political Advisor, German Embassy, Dhaka. Ref: Your call referring on 20th January 2009 from the cell: +8801713019527(10:12 BDST) to My Cell: +8801720084944 referring the German Ambassador Dhaka regarding my Email to Dr. Richard Benkin. Dear Sir, I am mailing you based on your query on your phone referring the honorable German ambassador, Dhaka. I do fell very sorry as you asked me about my personal email. I was also shocked at that rude and unfair behavior. But I will answer you as you referred the honorable German ambassador Dhaka. I am always thankful to the German Embassy, Dhaka and the German people as they stand by my side in my tough time of life. I do also stand with the views of Independent Jewish Voices (Click This Link) I highly appreciate the work of Dr.Tony Klug. Dr Tony Klug is an international relations specialist who has been writing about the Middle East for many years. His PhD thesis was on Israel's rule over the West Bank. He has traveled extensively in the Palestinian territories and in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. In a Fabian pamphlet in early 1973 he called for a two-state solution. In a second Fabian pamphlet four years later he advocated a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. Tony has been a member of the editorial board of New Outlook, a trustee of the International Centre for Peace in the Middle East, co-founder and co-chair of the Council for Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue in the UK and he has served as head of international development at Amnesty International. I highly oppose any kind of racial discrimination and human rights violations. I also highly oppose on the work of Dr.Richard Benkin. He should stand by the side of all people in trouble not only by the side of Israel supporters. I believe war is not the solution of any conflicts. Love and the rule of law is the solution indeed. My views point about the Israel issue are followed : Viewpoints/PeaceWatch April 24, 2002 If you were born where they were born Dr Tony Klug There is an old adage, attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that goes something like this: "If you were born where they were born and you were taught what they were taught, you'd believe what they believe". I dare say this simple dictum provides more insight into the tragic, convoluted conflict between Israelis and Palestinians than an entire conference of Middle East experts. While falling short of a complete general theory, it goes some way, I would suggest, to explain not just what we believe but why we believe it. Why we take up certain positions and hold them so fervently. Why Jews, generally speaking, have historically supported Israel and seen the Palestinians as an irritant or worse. Why Arabs and Muslims, as a rule, have supported the Palestinian cause and seen Israel as an interloper or worse. And why both sides have been equally certain they were right. What would we believe - each of us - if we hailed from the other side of the track or river or mountain? What 'facts' would we then be predisposed to accept as self-evident truths and which ones, by contrast, would we be inclined summarily to dismiss as propaganda lies? And what of the dedicated fanatics among us? Would their support of the opposing cause be any less partisan or extreme or self-righteous if they happened to be born on the other side of the mirror? None of this is to suggest that facts are merely subjective. Nor that there are not genuine questions of historical interpretation, justice, legality or human rights. Of course there are. What is suggested, though, is that if progress is ever to be made on resolving this conflict, there is a vital need to think outside of our boxes. We are trapped in and by our own narratives and we devote enormous resources to justifying and reinforcing our own perspectives and simultaneously to belittling or ridiculing the other's. This is not the prerogative of any one side. All sides do it. Self-appointed experts churn out - and their followers dutifully cite - reams of supposedly scholarly research that 'prove' the non-authenticity of the people-hood of the other and the non-validity of their cherished claims. Fired by the negative motive to demonstrate as non-existent phenomena that are regarded as undesirable, these commonplace writings are completely without value. They add nothing to the sum-total of human knowledge, wisdom or understanding. Worse, they perpetuate stereotypes, demonize a whole people, falsify its history and ridicule its aspirations. Their solutions - however they are dressed up - invariably involve the capitulation or subordination of the adversary. They offer no real solutions. They merely condemn us all to endless conflict. Indeed, there is a serious risk of this. But such a future is not pre-destined. It is not as if there is a fundamental ideological or religious dispute between these two small peoples or an endemic historical enmity. Israelis and Palestinians have clashed - bitterly - because they have simultaneously aspired to the same piece of territory on which to exercise their self-determination. This is the root of the conflict. Everything else has been superimposed on top of it. If the physical circumstances had been different, it would not have been so hard to imagine the relationship between these two long-suffering peoples as one of alliance and mutual support. In many respects, they have much in common. All sorts of conspiracy theories and malevolent intent have been heaped onto the Zionist movement by its detractors, some of it giving off a familiar anti-Semitic whiff, not so different from that which played the decisive role in winning so many Jews to the Zionist cause in the first place. Conceptually, Zionism was a distressed people's proud, if defiant, response to centuries of contempt, humiliation, discrimination and periodic bouts of murderous oppression, of which the Nazi holocaust was but the most recent and extreme. The Israeli state was the would-be phoenix to rise from the Jewish embers still smoldering in the blood-soaked earth of another continent. The motive was the positive one of achieving justice for one tormented people, not the negative one of doing damage to another people - although, in effect, this is precisely what it did do, and at some point Israelis and their supporters around the world are going to have to come fully and openly to terms with this. For their part, for all that they have suffered, and for all that they have been pilloried, the original felony of the Palestinians was no more than that of 'being there'- of being in the way of another people's grand enterprise. They likewise did not set out to damage anyone else. They merely wanted for themselves what they felt - with considerable justification - was rightfully theirs. While their Arab brethren were achieving independence in neighboring countries, the Palestinians were paying a heavy price for losing out in the geographical lottery. Almost everything that has followed is a consequence of this. At an intellectual level, it is not so hard to grasp any of this. Psychologically, it is often a lot more difficult to accept - we have to contend with our demons. But to the extent that we can persuade ourselves, even momentarily, to take that enormous short step into the other box, we should be able then to see what they see and understand why they act as they do. The ultimate failure of the negotiations of recent years - from Oslo through Camp David to Taba - owes a lot to the remarkably low levels of empathy on the parts of the chief negotiators, and indeed of the people in whose name they purported to speak, towards the history, needs and aspirations of the other people. I do not propose, in this presentation, to deal with the detail of who offered precisely what to whom and when. I have offered my own analysis of these matters previously in an article entitled 'The Infernal Scapegoat', published in the Palestine-Israel Journal. Rather, I shall focus here on what I would suggest were two principal flaws that seriously handicapped the negotiating process from start to finish and probably pre-destined the final outcome. The first of these was the neglect of the stronger party to compensate for the grossly unequal power relationship between the two sides. By failing to accommodate the Palestinian's basic needs in tabling its take-it-or-leave-it proposals at Camp David, the Israeli negotiators, with the heavily partisan support of the mighty US, heightened the prospects of the Palestinian negotiators resorting to the weapon of the weak by simply refusing to play ball, and thereby appearing to sabotage the negotiations. To be fair, it is quite likely that the Israeli negotiators, locked firmly in their own box, had no real notion of what the vital Palestinian sticking points were. But this is not to their credit. The second serious flaw was the absence of a safety net to limit the potential harm of a possible failure of negotiations. Negotiations between parties in conflict do, after all, break down from time to time, but then they are often picked up again at a later stage with little serious damage done in the meantime. In this case, the spiral downwards to chaos has been virtually unconstrained - which is why the question of who was to blame for the breakdown has created so much heated controversy. Both these major flaws stem from the same basic cause, namely the fundamental structural inequality between the two peoples, whereby not only does one side enjoy independent statehood while the other does not, but the first side also controls the territory and dominates the lives of the second. In this circumstance, the intrinsically more powerful party can easily delude itself into thinking that the big question is how magnanimous - in its terms - it should be, rather than to assess what is truly necessary to meet the minimum wants and aspirations of the weaker party. Thus the whole debate as to how 'generous' or otherwise the Barak offer was, really misses the point. That it should ever have been phrased in these terms at all is a symptom of a mentality - an essentially colonial mentality - that has inevitably resulted from more than three decades of one people subjugating another. The primary aim of any peace process should have been the swift creation of a viable, independent Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. Its realization would have freed the governments of two neighboring states to get on with the business of settling their outstanding differences at a steady pace in the knowledge that temporary setbacks would not be calamitous or endanger the entire peace edifice. It is self-evident that there would have been no uprising against the occupation had the occupation been withdrawn. The cardinal problem with Oslo was that it reversed this logic by making the end of occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state hostage to the prior resolution of all other matters, irrespective of their coefficients of difficulty, thus locking into the process the seeds of its own undoing. So, what of the future? Merely to parrot the demand that both sides should cease the violence and start talking again is banal. For one thing, what would this Israeli government have to discuss with the Palestinians except their effective capitulation? For another, after 35 suffocating years, the Palestinians have finally lost all patience and are engaged in a determined war of liberation - something which, in the light of their history, it should not be so difficult for Israelis of all people to identify with - against an increasingly brutal occupation regime which continues relentlessly to encroach on their land. An Israeli leadership that truly wanted to bring the violence to an end would seize the initiative by declaring its readiness in principle to end the occupation and to negotiate in good faith the modalities of its withdrawal. A simple public statement of such intent could profoundly affect the mood between the two sides and create a new momentum. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of this while Israel is led by a government that is in hock to the settlers and still clings to the illusion that it can enjoy both the spoils of war and the fruits of peace. Therefore, what is vitally required now is a surge of complementary international moves that would deliver an independent state to the Palestinians while meeting Israeli fears about their existence and security and their country's future in the region. First and foremost, there is an urgent need for an international buffer force to be put in place to protect ordinary people on both sides from the mounting slaughter. This should have been done months ago. It is a matter of political will. Secondly, a more responsible US presidency would stop hiding behind a succession of aimless and toothless envoys and - preferably in partnership with the EU and if possible other international actors - would briskly prevail upon the two parties to accept the underlying principles rehearsed at the Taba talks in January 2001 as the basis of a future agreement. This should be accompanied by a warning to the Israeli government that it would face severe sanctions in the event of a mass flight of Palestinians or a concerted attempt to re-capture their territories or to overthrow the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, two beacons of light shine through, each with the potential to feed off and enrich the other. The timely Saudi initiative should be pitched not just at the Israeli government but, more importantly, over its head direct to the Israeli people, just as the Sadat initiative was in the late 1970's with such striking effect. At the right moment, an appeal by leading Arab statesmen delivered on Israeli soil, and separately on Palestinian soil, may be particularly effective - psychologically and politically. The initiative should include a complete halt to official rhetoric and propaganda hostile to Jews as a people, to Judaism as a religion and to Israel per se. This plan, which may be summarized simply as full peace and normalization for full withdrawal, should not be viewed as just another menu of proposals from which different parties may pick and choose, but as an all-embracing vision for the full solution to the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. It is the end-game. It should be backed by a new UN Security Council Resolution specifically affirming a two-state solution. The other beacon of light is the eruption of movements of resistance within Israel to the continuing occupation - my own recent research has pointed to between 70 and 80 groups now active broadly in this area - coupled with the emergence of ad hoc Palestinian-Israeli alliances on the ground. The further growth of Palestinian-Jewish, Arab-Jewish and other solidarity groups in countries around the world should be fostered and their weight should be added to a fair and achievable solution. Civil society in Arab states should reassess whether shunning all contact with Israeli civil society is the most productive way of delivering support for the Palestinian cause. Left to themselves, it is highly unlikely that the two peoples - now profoundly mistrustful of each other - will ever be able to resurrect meaningful bilateral negotiations, let alone agree terms. Decisive outside intervention to bring the broader Arab-Israeli conflict to a belated but final conclusion is now imperative and urgent and would almost certainly be welcomed, overtly or covertly, by the traumatized mass of Israelis and Palestinians locked in a deadly embrace. Will the real Israeli-Palestinian conflict please stand up? Adapted from a presentation by Tony Klug, 12 June 2005, to the London conference of the Interreligious & International Federation for World Peace ('Initiatives for Peace Making in the Middle East' and the role of dialogue) I don't know whether you have had a similar experience, but one of the problems I find in discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with people is that often we're talking about quite different things. Broadly, there are at least three distinct conversations going on at present, almost in isolation of one another. One is about an oppressive military occupation that suffocates Palestinian rights, confiscates their land, restricts their movement and incarcerates them behind a grotesque wall. A version of this narrative accuses the Israeli government, through international proxies, of controlling the world media and the US government, and holds that the only solution is to isolate Israel and eliminate Zionism. A second conversation is about an upsurge in anti-Semitism, spearheaded by an autocratic and sometimes fanatical Muslim world and spreading from there back into Europe, where it has always been a light sleeper. This, it is held, explains the hatred of Israel as a Jewish state and the attacks on Jewish targets. The solution is to stop the incitement, democratise Arab and Muslim countries and dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism. The third conversation, a lot more optimistic than the other two, is about the proposed Gaza disengagement by a "transformed" Sharon, the democratic election of the "moderate" Abbas, the mutual ceasefire, the Palestinian reforms, the prisoner releases and the renewed public commitments to the road map by the Israeli, Palestinian and US leaderships. "Never have I been so hopeful", exclaimed one commentator recently. So which of these versions is the right one? Well, I suppose that depends partly on where you're standing. There's an old adage, attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that goes something like this: "If you were born where they were born and you were taught what they were taught, you'd believe what they believe". While falling short of a complete general theory, this adage goes some way to explain not just what we believe but why we believe it. Why we take up certain positions and hold them so fervently. But if we are to be more than just the products of our respective backgrounds, we need to be able to think and comprehend beyond our boxes. This is where dialogue can play a critical role. The first dialogue encounter in Britain in which I was involved was initiated in a London pub in 1984, when a small number of us, Palestinians and Jews, took the first cautious steps to start a conversation across the hostile gulf that had divided our two communities for decades. We soon found that we shared, apart from a ploughmans lunch, the opinion that it was time to stop shunning each other, or worse - spitting venom at each other - and to start talking to each other. We ended our lunch by agreeing to meet again and to try to pull in a few others. This might not seem such a big deal today but, at the time, such an idea was considered very radical, even courageous, and some of those involved feared for their reputations within their own communities. So it was agreed that the meetings would be confidential. And so it remained for some eight years, with many ups and downs, until in 1992, following the high-level Madrid conference, we decided to come out of the closet and went public in the form of the Council for Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue. The group's monthly meetings were not academic seminars between dispassionate analysts searching for supposedly objective truths. They were more of the fiery encounter type between activists who felt personally involved in the enduring conflict between Arab and Jew, Israeli and Palestinian. We found we all had a great deal to say. The more difficult part was the listening. That took a little longer. And it's probably fair to say we never really became truly expert at it. But most participants were genuinely keen to acquire an understanding of the others' fears and hopes, perceptions and aspirations. As anyone who has engaged seriously in dialogue would know, it can be profoundly discomfiting – especially at first – in that it requires participants to reconsider deeply held convictions, both about themselves and their putative enemies or interlocutors. But it is also a deeply humanizing process. It is, after all, easier to despise, humiliate and destroy an imagined stereotype than a fellow human being with feelings, frailties and hopes not so different from one's own. The main achievement, I would say, was the common recognition that there are not one but two historical perspectives - even if one's own is inevitably the more valid! - and that it was important to understand them both. We came to appreciate that the case for one side was not the antithesis of the case for the other; that a severe setback for one side was not necessarily a powerful gain for the other; and that rejoicing at each other's grief ultimately leads nowhere. We discovered that dialogue is not about giving up one's own identity or abandoning one's own views, beliefs or values. But it does involve self-examination, maybe self-criticism, certainly a preparedness to modify one's own perceptions. You know it's working if it leads to mutual respect, trust, fresh insights, different ways of looking at issues, a spirit of creativity, and maybe even new ideas for resolving conflicts. My first experience of dialogue, however, was not in Britain, but in Jerusalem in 1978 when I sat in on a two-day Israeli-Palestinian roundtable at the renowned American Colony Hotel. The encounter exemplified for me both the potential and the limitations of dialogue. By the second day, after a very stilted start on the first, there was evidence of genuine communication. Some of the Israelis shifted from their starting perception of the PLO as an unrepresentative terror group to acknowledging it as the legitimate leadership of an authentic national movement. The Palestinians, on their part, surprised even themselves in coming round to realise that the Israelis genuinely feared for their security and that proclaiming this fear was not just a cynical pretext to hold onto captured Arab land. But the limitations of dialogue were also in evidence. My role at the encounter was to observe and analyse, and in an article written subsequently for New Outlook, the Israeli peace magazine that hosted the event, I included the following passage: "Time and again Israelis interrupted fellow Israelis to defend or explain one or another Palestinian position, despite the fact that Palestinians were present and well able to speak up for themselves. The tendency to patronise by even well-meaning Israelis is an unhealthy symptom of an occupation which has lasted too long [this was 27 years ago, by the way], and which has had an insidious influence even on those unsuspecting members of the ruling society who probably consider themselves immune to its effects." This brings me to some of the conclusions I have drawn from my involvement in these and other events over the years, which I would like to share with you. First, owing to the fundamental structural imbalance, and despite certain parallels in perception and aspiration, there is an inherent and growing asymmetry in the position of the two societies. This is not only detrimental to present and future relations but also inimical to constructive negotiations and is one reason for the urgency of a Palestinian state. Secondly, while important, dialogue is not enough. It needs to be supplemented by practical solidarity with the Palestinians' plight and with groups in Israel that support their struggle for freedom, independence and human rights. Thirdly, however well-intentioned, actions of third parties that are perceived by either Palestinians or Israelis as antagonistic to their basic aspirations, or hostile to them as a people, are likely to reinforce their respective worldviews of being misunderstood and of standing alone and thereby to complicate the prospects of resolving the conflict peacefully, to mutual benefit. Fourthly, it is a self-evident truth that the two peoples are fated to live alongside each other, one way or another. Neither is going away. If the Palestinians fail to gain their place in the sun, the Israelis will never be left in peace to enjoy theirs. Conversely, the Palestinians will never win their freedom if the Israelis are convinced it will be at their expense. Each holds the key to the other's destiny. Thus, for its own sake - but even more importantly for the sake of future generations - it is vital that the vilification by and of either people is brought firmly to a halt. This is something we can and should all be vigilant about. Finally, the indefinite continuation of this tragic conflict is not inevitable. It is not as if there is a fundamental ideological or religious dispute between these two small, long-suffering peoples or an endemic historical enmity. Israelis and Palestinians have clashed – bitterly – because they have simultaneously aspired to the same piece of territory on which to exercise their self-determination. This is the root of the conflict. Everything else has been artificially superimposed on top. If the geographical circumstances had been different, it would not be so hard to imagine their relationship as more of one of alliance and mutual support. And it could still be. In many respects, they have much in common. On the one side, all sorts of conspiracy theories and malevolent intent have been heaped onto the Zionist movement by its detractors, some of it giving off a familiar anti-Semitic whiff, not so different from that which played the decisive role in winning so many Jews to the Zionist cause in the first place. Conceptually, Zionism was a distressed people's proud, if defiant, response to centuries of contempt, humiliation, discrimination and periodic bouts of murderous oppression, of which the Nazi holocaust was but the most recent and extreme. The Israeli state was the would-be phoenix to rise from the Jewish embers still smouldering in the blood-soaked earth of another continent. The motive was the positive one of achieving justice and safety for one tormented people, not the negative one of doing damage to another people. Yet, in effect, this is precisely what it did do, and at some point Israelis and their supporters around the world are going to have to come fully and openly to terms with this. On the other side, the Palestinians, likewise, did not set out to damage anyone. They merely wanted for themselves what – with considerable justification - they felt was their entitlement. While their Arab brethren were achieving independence in neighbouring countries, the Palestinians were paying a heavy price for losing out in the geo-political lottery. Dispossessed, degraded and derided, their original felony was simply to be in the way of another anguished people's grand enterprise. Almost everything that has happened since then is in some way a consequence of this. In conclusion, I would make the following observation. With notable exceptions, it is common for people directly involved in a conflict to feel passionately about their own cause and to see little or no justice or morality on the side of their adversary or to contemplate any solution other than the full satisfaction of their own demands. The challenge for the rest of us is do we merely line up with and echo the mantras of the side with which we instinctively feel an affinity, or is there something more useful we can do? My feeling, if we are to avoid the nightmare of endless conflict, is that we have an important role to play together in fostering understanding and helping both sides deal with the realities of today in a way that is conducive to a peaceful and fair solution that accommodates the reasonable aspirations of both peoples. ________________________________________ Dr Tony Klug is a veteran Middle East analyst, formerly co-chair of the Council for Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue and currently a vice-chair of the Arab-Jewish Forum. I am free man and free thinker, I have mailed what I have shred in the mail in by firm believe. I have started a human rights organization named "Justice Foundation ". We are working to equip human rights activities. To know more visit our web site: http://www.humanrightstoday.info. After the broker called up and threaten Mr.Akash over cell phone. This broker has used by the vested quarters as an informa of the vested quarter inside of German Embassy Dhaka. The broker had used communal word against Mr.Akash and said him that he is a fundamentalist Muslim and he knows the entire journalist community and he will teach Mr. Akash a good lesson. After that this broker of Mr. Chowdhury and Benkin shout to teach Mr. Akash a good lesson. We demand to honorable Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to investigate the works of this dubious vested quarter and take action against these people. The Intelligence should take proper steps before allowing this broker Benkin to come to Bangladesh. We work for the humanity but not for Israel or Palestine. The believe that human rights should be universal.