According to Arutz Sheva, members of the Palestinian ISIS Hamas have admitted to the rape and beheading of Israeli citizens. Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have vowed to crush Gaza’s ISIS Hamas terrorists and have condemned the barbaric 10/7 attacks on Israel. Jihadists, Islamists, and Leftist forces in Bangladesh have openly declared solidarity with these notorious terrorist attacks and have even called for waging jihad to “defeat Zionists” and their Western allies.
According to Dhaka’s leading Bangla daily Prothom Alo, Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) held a protest march in the capital against “Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment, barbaric killings, and inhumane blockade of Gaza”. Leaders of this party said that “the United States and European countries have proven that the words of human rights, democracy, and freedom are nothing but hypocrisy by openly supporting Israeli occupation, genocide, and brutality”.
They called for the establishment of “an independent Palestinian state by expelling the Israelis from the occupied Palestinian land”.
It is worth mentioning that Prothom Alo and The Daily Star are owned by the Transcom Group, which has extensive business ties with American and European companies. The company holds the local franchise of Nestlé S.A, a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. They also hold franchise of Pepsi, KFC, Phillips and many other American and European brands. Both newspapers staunchly support Palestinians and vehemently oppose Israel.
Dhaka’s pro-Islamist and notoriously anti-Semitic tabloid vernacular daily Manabzamin reported, “Muslims protested against Israeli aggression in Gaza, Palestine. The protest was held at the north gate of National Mosque Baitul Mukarram after Friday prayers. Thousands of devout Muslims participated, opposing the Israeli aggression with different slogans. At this time, many participants held the flag of oppressed Palestine”.
Despite the pro-Islamist editorial nature of this vernacular tabloid daily, US Ambassador Peter D. Haas recently visited the office of Manabzamin and spent two hours, as per reports.
Dhaka-based Bangla daily Jugantor, owned by a senior leader of military dictator Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s Jatiya Party, reported, “Youths flocked to the Palestinian embassy in Dhaka on Thursday afternoon to demand an end to Israeli brutality and protection of the rights of oppressed Palestinians. At this time, they expressed solidarity with the Palestinians. Additionally, demonstrations, rallies, and human chains were held in Sylhet, Brahmanbaria, and Jahangirnagar universities to protest Israel’s brutal killings”.
Covering this news, English daily Dhaka Tribune stated, “A large number of Bangladeshis, mostly youths, expressed their solidarity with Palestine by turning up at the embassy in Dhaka Thursday afternoon as Ambassador Yousef SY Ramadan sought the support of all to free Gaza from the Israeli siege. They wore T-shirts inscribed with ‘Free Palestine’ and held placards writing ‘O Allah! Have mercy on the Palestinians; give victory to Palestinian Muslims against the Occupying Israel,’ along with the flags of both Bangladesh and Palestine. One of the organizers claimed that he distributed 750 T-shirts among the crowd. The ambassador said, ‘Today, Gaza is burning. It’s not only under siege from the Israelis but unfortunately also from the Western world. There is no food, no medicine, no electricity, no gas, and no drinking water allowed to go to Gaza'”.
In another report, Dhaka Tribune mentioned, “As the conflict between Israel and Palestine enters its seventh day, Bangladeshi Muslims took to the streets on Friday, voicing their opposition to Israeli attacks on Palestinians, including women and children”.
News about pro-Hamas protests in Bangladesh has also appeared in the Turkish news service Anadolu Agency.
The vernacular daily Naya Diganta, founded by Mir Qashim Ali, a convicted war criminal and leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, provided details of anti-Israel protests in Bangladesh in a report.
India Today, a leading periodical published in India, has published a video report titled ‘Bangladeshis show support for Palestine amid conflict with Israel,’ detailing anti-Israel protests in Bangladesh.
According to a report published by Kaler Kantho, a vernacular daily in Bangladesh and owned by the Bashundhara Group, a massive business conglomerate, leaders of the pro-Caliphate Hefazat-e-Islam (HeI), an organization of madrassa teachers and students, said, “Jews are the worst enemies of Muslims. They are the cause of unrest all over the world. Israel has been brutally oppressing innocent Palestinian Muslims for 70-80 years. Palestinian Muslims launched a war of liberation to protect Al-Aqsa. Israel will flee from Palestine”.
Some Islamist and leftist organizations in Bangladesh even went further by calling for joining “jihad against Israel” and urged Muslim nations to send soldiers to “defend Palestinians”.
Ultra-Islamist and anti-Semite vernacular daily Inqilab, known for its anti-US and pro-jihadist editorial policy, stated in a report, “The world’s Muslim leaders should unite and bring down the world terrorist Israel through Jihad. The arrogance of the Israelis will be shattered, Insha’Allah. 60,000 Israeli citizens fled the country due to the resistance of Hamas”.
Earlier, Inqilab expressed solidarity with Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel, stating, “The Palestinians, fed up with daily Israeli occupation attacks, evictions, and brutal killings, have started resistance”.
It is worth mentioning that the Indian news media The Eastern Herald reported, “In a recent development that has raised eyebrows in security agencies, the Palestinian Ambassador to Bangladesh, Yousef SY Ramadan, has been actively lobbying to garner support for Hamas. Ramadan’s efforts come as part of a larger global initiative by Palestinian ambassadors to legitimize the actions of Hamas. The lobbying is particularly focused on organizing protests across the globe after Jumma prayers on Friday. The objective is to present the attacks by Hamas on Israel as a legitimate response to Israel’s ‘occupation’ of Palestinian territory”.
Later, it was revealed by Blitz reporters that, amidst the condemnation of Hamas-ISIS’s 10/7 terrorist attacks by the entire world, “Palestinian envoy” Yousef SY Ramadan in Bangladesh has started frantic efforts to influence local politicians in extending support to Hamas and Palestinian terrorists. According to a media report, Ramadan met Workers’ Party President Rashed Khan Menon and “discussed the most recent situation of Israeli aggression on the land of Palestine”.
Yousef SY Ramadan said, “It would be inappropriate to compare Hamas’ resistance campaign and Israeli aggression on the same level. Israelis have been killing people, including children, in Palestine for years. They also made illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories, and most recently, they have completely blockaded Gaza, cutting off water, gas, and electricity”.
In response, Rashed Khan Menon said, “Palestinians are being labeled as ‘terrorists’ the way we were labeled as terrorists during the struggle to free our motherland in 1971. The Workers’ Party will play a strong role in supporting Palestine along with other democratic forces”.
Responding to Rashed Khan Menon’s statement, in a special editorial, Blitz editor and internationally acclaimed, multi-award-winning anti-militancy journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, against whom an Islamist coalition government of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) brought sedition, treason, and blasphemy charges for confronting radical Islam and jihad, denouncing anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, and advocating for the normalization of relations between Bangladesh and Israel wrote:
Israel was one of the first countries to recognize the newly born Bangladesh. It actively aided Bangladesh during the 1971 liberation war and even supplied arms and logistics to the Bangladeshi freedom fighters through India.
Meanwhile, Palestinians, particularly Yasser Arafat, termed Bangladeshi freedom fighters as terrorists and supported Pakistan owing to the warm relation between those two countries. The Palestinians termed Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971 as ‘another Israel-Palestine conflict.’ Meaning, Arafat and his cronies in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were projecting Bangladesh as another Israel while Pakistan as Palestine. They even went further by stating the war was between Muslims and Hindus.
However, after the victory of Bangladesh in the 1971 war, the then-Foreign Minister Mushtaque Ahmed, who later became one of the masterminds of the assassination of Bangladesh’s father of the nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, declined Israel’s recognition and refused to reciprocate.
Instead, they supported the Palestinians, despite the Palestinians declining any sort of Bangladeshi help following Bangladesh’s liberation, as the Palestinians did not recognize our country.
It is essential to remind everyone in Bangladesh, who either has forgotten the history or is hiding the truth for their blind affection for Palestinians, that it was Yasser Arafat and his fellow Palestinians who had branded our freedom fighters as terrorists. It was them who had openly collaborated with Pakistani occupation forces. We may forgive those enemies of our liberation war for many reasons, but we must not forget this historic fact.
And of course, there is no reason for any Bangladeshi national to exhibit undue and unexpected romance with ‘Hamas envoy’ Yousef SY Ramadan or any other member of that office, as such actions could be taken very seriously by the US authorities, particularly Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and anyone collaborating with Hamas representatives can be labeled as a terrorist-appeaser and may fall under US designation as a terrorist sympathizer.
Meanwhile, it has been learned from various sources that Palestinian envoys in a number of countries are currently encouraging local Muslims to travel to Palestine and join the war against Israel. Yousef SY Ramadan’s activities in Bangladesh, including meeting various Islamists and leftists and encouraging youths to hold anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protest rallies, demand stricter surveillance by the US Embassy in Dhaka.
It is worth mentioning that, according to a September 1988 US Library of Congress report, the Bangladeshi government reported in 1987 that 8,000 Bangladeshi youths had volunteered to fight for the Palestine Liberation Organization. The announcement came after Yasser Arafat visited the country that year and received a warm welcome from media and political circles and people across the country.
Since the 1980s, under IMET (International Military Education and Training), there has been the development of military ties between the PLO and Bangladesh, with the former attending one-year courses at the Bangladesh Military Academy in Chittagong. Palestine is represented in Bangladesh by the Embassy of the State of Palestine in Dhaka.
