An article which originally appeared on the BBC News website’s ‘US & Canada’ page was also published on its ‘Middle East’ page on March 26th under the headline “The Indian scholar arrested in US over father-in-law’s Hamas link”.
Written by India based BBC World Service journalist Neyaz Farooquee, that report opens with the following presentation of the background to its subject matter:
“It was an invitation from a classmate 15 years ago that changed the life of Badar Khan Suri, an Indian scholar now facing deportation from the US over accusations he is linked to a Hamas member.
On that summer evening, Mr Suri had been sitting outside his department at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university when a classmate announced that an international aid convoy was set to go to Gaza – the Palestinian territory run by the armed Islamist group Hamas and under blockade by Israel.
To students of conflict studies, the caravan – of more than 150 people from several Asian countries – offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness one of the world’s most contentious disputes up close.
Mr Suri happily agreed to participate, a classmate recalled to the BBC.
It was during this trip that he met Mapheze Saleh, a Palestinian and the daughter of a former Hamas adviser, whom he married a few months later.”
Farooquee later quotes one of the organisers of that “international aid convoy”:
“Feroze Mithiborwala, one of the organisers of the caravan, remembered Mr Suri as an intelligent, young man.
“He always took a secular stance in our discussions. He was not some right-wing Islamist type of character,” he said.”
As was documented here in 2012, Mithiborwala was also a member of the ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ international executive committee and the head of the Indian branch of the ‘Free Gaza Movement’.
Farouquee fails to clarify to his readers that – as Mithiborwala himself demonstrates – “a secular stance” by no means precludes collaboration with Islamist terrorists.
“One prominent APSP activist is Feroze Mithilborwala, a human rights and social causes activist from Mumbai, who is also head of the FGM’s Indian branch. He was a leftist and is now active in Muslim causes. In July 2009 he was arrested in Mumbai during a visit of American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He is hostile to Israel and supports Palestinian terrorism. In January 2011, after the Asian convoy entered the Gaza Strip, he was interviewed by Al-Awda, the monthly magazine of the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), a British-based organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. The interview was titled “Israel will fall and the Palestinians will return to their lands.” He made it clear that the convoy’s objective had not been to reach the Gaza Strip but “all Palestine,” and that “Gaza was only the first stop.” He also appealed to the “residents of Palestine” “to continue the resistance [i.e., terrorist attacks], because the path of resistance is spreading around the globe…””
Linking to a previous BBC report about Bader Khan Suri written by Ali Abbas Ahmadi, Farouquee tells his readers that:
“He had been living in Virginia for nearly three years when the police knocked on his door on the evening of 17 March and arrested him.
Three days later, on 20 March, Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted that Mr Suri was being detained for his “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, a senior adviser to Hamas”. He has denied the allegations. […]
His acquaintances describe him as a soft-spoken, shy and hardworking student with a broad knowledge of the world, while his classmates and teachers said they found allegations of him having ties with Hamas “tenuous”. […]
Even then, “by no stretch of imagination can Suri be associated with anything unlawful”, one of his professors from Jamia told the BBC.
“Having a view on the ongoing conflict is not a crime. As a conflict studies scholar, it is well within his professional mandate to share his analysis of the war in Gaza.””
Our CAMERA colleague David Litman supplies the background information on Bader Khan Suri and his wife Mapheze Saleh which BBC World Service journalist Neyaz Farouquee failed to provide to BBC audiences trying to understand this story:
THE MEDIA IS HIDING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GEORGETOWN HAMASNIKS
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