ANT KATZ

In a recent TV interview, Osama Hamdan, top Hamas representative in Lebanon and a member of the Hamas political bureau, said: “We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos.” The interview aired on the Lebanese Al-Quds TV channel in July 2014.

“We all remember how the Jews slaughtered the Christians,” Hamdan told Al-Quds.

RIGHT: ‘I have Jewish friends’ Hamdan says

As recently as August 2014, Hamdan told Politico.com’s Sarah Smith: ‘I have Jewish friends’ as he defended the TV interview of him repeating the “blood libel” slur — that Jews killed Christians and baked their blood into matzah — by saying that he had no problem with Jews as a people and even had Jewish friends.

“You cut the words — not you, the Israelis. They cut the facts and start this propaganda to say they are innocent,” Hamdan, later told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “I have Jewish friends supporting the Palestinian cause.”

Would not distance himself

Hamdan, however, did not unequivocally distance himself from the video, even after Blitzer pressed him multiple times. Instead, he said that he had no problems with the Jews as a religion. It was just the occupation, he said, that was the problem, and would be a problem no matter the occupier’s religion.

“I was hoping for a flat denial that you’d utter such ridiculous words that Jews would kill Christians in order to bake matza,” Blitzer said on his third and final attempt at an answer.

Smith writes that Hamdan demurred. “Wolf, Wolf, Wolf, you have to be fair,” he said, explaining that he was just repeating what had been said before.

In the above interview, which aired on the Lebanese Al-Quds TV channel on July 28, 2014, Hamdan stated that “killing children… is engraved in the historical Zionist and Jewish mentality.” Commenting on the accusation of Blood Libel against Jews, Hamdan stated “we all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos.

“This is not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film,” says Hamdan. It is a fact, acknowledged by their https://www.sajr.co.za/images/default-source/test/9-coovadia.jpg” class=”sfImageWrapper”>

RIGHT: Ismail Coovadia, previous SA ambassador to Israel, unwittingly became the biggest donor of trees through JNF in 2013

Ismail Coovadia, who was SA’s ambassador to Israel at the time, told the M&G he had been in contact with the Israeli foreign ministry until the point when Israel deported Jeenah, but the ministry had told him there was nothing it could do.

After his “UNCOUTH REJECTION” of a gift of 18 trees, ex-Ambassador Coovadia
unwittingly became the top tree donor to Israel through the JNF in 2013 as
SA friends of Israel rallied to planted a whopping 3,542 trees in his name.
The local Bedouin community thanked him too. READ THIS GREAT STORY!

Coovadia said he was going to “take this up” and planned to meet officials from the Israeli foreign ministry. “I will complain about this treatment,” he said. It is unclear whether he ever did.

“This is not the first time high-profile visitors to Israel have been deported for ‘security reasons’,” wrote the M&G, UN human rights investigator Richard Falk had been deported in 2008 and writer Professor Noam Chomsky was deported in 2010. “Archbishop Desmond Tutu was denied entry to the West Bank in 2008,” added the M&G story, as had members of COSATU, the SA Municipal Workers’ Union and the SA Council of Churches.

Hamdan said in a TV interview in 2011 that “politically, the two-state solution is over” and that “we are entering the phase of the liberation of Palestine… the notion of Return: the return of the refugees to their homeland, and the return of the Israelis to the countries from which they came.”

STORY CONTINUES AFTER ILLUSTRATION

Hamdan, left, and Jeenah superimposed on the AMEC header

Who is Osama Hamdan?

According to Wikipedia, Hamas leader Osama Hamdan is the top representative of Hamas in Lebanon and a member of the organisation’s politburo.

Osama Hamdan, LEFT,  was born 1965. He is the top representative of Hamas in Lebanon and is a member of the organization’s politburo. He is a member of the Arab National Congress and of the Arab Islamic Conference of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Institute in Lebanon.

Hamdan was born in the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian refugee family that fled the village of al-Batani al-Sharqi during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He attended high school in Kuwait, graduating in 1982. He then enrolled at the Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan where he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry in 1986. While he was at the university, Hamdan became an activist with the Islamic Student Movement. He returned to Kuwait after graduating and worked in the industrial sector until the Gulf War in 1990.

After leaving Kuwait, Hamdan worked at the Hamas office in Tehran as assistant to then Hamas representative Imad Alami from 1992 to 1993. He became Hamas’ official representative in Iran in 1994, serving in that post until 1998.https://www.sajr.co.za/images/default-source/events/general/hamdan—na-39-eem-jeenah.jpg” class=”sfImageWrapper”>After school, Jeenah, LEFT, entered the highly-politicized University of Natal Black Section, the medical school (only for Black students) that was attached to the White University of Natal. Through his activities with the Muslim Students Association of SA and the Muslim Youth Movement of SA, he was thrust into the political limelight as these organizations became increasingly involved in the anti-Apartheid struggle. His activism, however, was mostly inspired by Islam and was prosecuted through Muslim organizations.

After spending two years at the Medical School and a year at the University of Durban-Westville, Jeenah dropped out of university to find a job and get married. He married Shamima Shaikh, whom he met for the first time when the couple was arrested during a consumer boycott campaign. Shaikh became one of SA’s most well-known Islamic feminists. She died in January 1998, leaving Jeenah with two sons.

Jeenah rose in the ranks of the Muslim Youth Movement of SA to become its national General Secretary and, later, its president. He was also, for a period, the editor of the Movement’s mouthpiece newspaper, Al-Qalam. During the 1980s Jeenah helped his organisation and the Muslim community in SA to get involved in inter-faith activities – particularly through the SA chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace. Working with the latter, he was also a member of the drafting committee of a landmark document produced during SA’s constitution-drafting period called the Declaration on Religious Rights and Responsibilities.

Jeenah and Shaikh undertook the hajj pilgrimage in 1997, while Shaikh was already suffering from the effects of breast cancer, which had affected her severely. On the couple’s return they authored a book about their pilgrimage called Journey of Discovery: A South African Hajj. Soon after, they founded the Johannesburg-based Muslim community radio station called The Voice, which exposed radical and progressive Muslim voices to the Muslim community and became a flagship for women’s rights, inter-religious tolerance and anti-imperialist rhetoric. It also gave a voice to refugee communities and social movements.

Shaikh died just four months after the station went on air.

Jeenah’s career has been a chequered one, spanning the NGO sector, academia, religious organisations and journalism. But it is as a progressive Muslim activist and an international solidarity activist that he has made his mark.

Jeenah currently holds the position of Director: Operations at the Freedom of Expression Institute. He is also the Coordinator of a progressive Johannesburg mosque, Masjidul Islam, a steering committee member of an inter-religious organisation focusing on women’s issues called The Other Voices.

He is also a spokesman for SA’s Palestine Solidarity Committee and Anti-War Coalition and is a member of the International Coordinating Network for Palestine.

He is often interviewed as an expert by various media on issues related to Islam or the Muslim world, Muslims in SA, the Middle East, Islamic Feminisms, political Islam, freedom of expression and various other issues. An experienced journalist, he writes for a number of publications and reports for a network of radio stations in the US. He is also a monthly columnist for the South African newspaper Al-Qalam.

In June 2005, Jeenah married Melissa Hoole. They now have a daughter.

Jeenah was named in December 2000 on the Mail & Guardian’s “Hot Shit 100 List” of people “Making their mark in the new millennium” and, in 2006, he was included on that newspaper’s “100 young people you must take out to lunch”.

What is AMEC’s conference: Political Islam?

The Afro-Middle East Centre’s website describes their conference a follows:

After the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa region, Political Islam took centre stage in many respects, as numerous actors in the region claimed their Islam as the inspiration or basis of their political activity. This manifested during various elections, coups, and civil wars. Perhaps the most recent of these has been the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, which seeks to undo the post-Ottoman Sykes-Picot architecture of the MENA region.

These developments over the past four years have resulted in the MENA region, and the Muslim world more generally, experiencing a profound conceptual rethinking, including a re-evaluation of notions of global ethics, citizenship and democracy, capitalism and economic development, imperialism, and liberation.

Developments over the past four years have resulted in the MENA region, and the Muslim world more generally, experiencing a profound conceptual rethinking, including a re-evaluation of notions of global ethics, citizenship and democracy, capitalism and economic development, imperialism, and liberation.

At the heart of much of this rethinking (and attempts to prevent rethinking) have been various models of political Islam. The phenomenon has also been central to the continuing unfolding of events in the region and despite setbacks in certain respects – such as the coup in Egypt, Political Islam will continue to be influential in any reshaping of the MENA region, affecting developments not only in those countries and among those actors that blatantly experienced or participated in the 2011 uprisings, but also others, such as the those involved in the Palestinian struggle.

The next conference of the Afro-Middle East Centre (AMEC) – from 19 to 21 January in Pretoria – will harness the contributions of a diverse group of scholars to deliberate and debate some of these profound changes, with Political Islam as the central focus. Speakers include: Abdulkader Tayob, Abdullahi Gallab, Ashur Shamis, Azzam Tamimi, David Commins, Farid Esack, Hamid Bobboyi, Husnul Amin, Jocelyn Cesari, Joseph Alagha, Khaled Hroub, Larbi Sadiki, Nura Hossainzadeh, Salman Sayyid, Stig Hansen, Stephane Lacroix, Usamah Hamdan.

Departing from the usual tendency of conceptualising ‘Political Islam’ as a phenomenon that describes Islamic ideological groups that are social movements or political opposition groups, the conference will discuss Political Islam as various forms of Islamic legitimation of state power or political action. It will discuss not only Muslim political actors such as the Muslim Brotherhood, but also the ways in which ruling regimes – in Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere – or proto-regimes such as the Islamic State group, mobilise Islam for their political thought and action. The conference will examine how various Muslim political actors understand their relationship to the issue of political power, and how they use Islam to legitimate this relationship.

Date: Evening of 19 January, full days 20 and 21 January 2015

Venue: Sheraton Pretoria Hotel